Romantic Catholics: France's Postrevolutionary Generation in Search of a Modern Faith 9780801470592

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 ROMANTIC CATHOLICS

ROMANTIC CATHOLICS

F R A NCE’ S P OSTR E VO LUT I O N A R Y GENE R AT I O N I N SE A R C H O F A M O D E R N FA I T H

Carol E. Harrison

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2014 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2014 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Harrison, Carol E., author. Romantic Catholics : France’s postrevolutionary generation in search of a modern faith / Carol E. Harrison. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8014-5245-1 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Catholics—France—History—19th century. 2. Catholic Church—France—History—19th century. 3. France— Religious life and customs. I. Title. BX1530.H28 2014 282'.4409034—dc23 2013033359 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing

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For Tom

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Acknowledgments

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List of Abbreviations

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Introduction: Romantic Catholics and the Two Frances

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1. First Communion: The Most Beautiful Day in the Lives and Deaths of Little Girls

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2. The Education of Maurice de Guérin

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3. The Dilemma of Obedience: Charles de Montalembert, Catholic Citizen

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4. Pauline Craven’s Holy Family: Writing the Modern Saint

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5. Frédéric and Amélie Ozanam: Charity, Marriage, and the Catholic Social

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6. A Free Church in a Free State: The Roman Question

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Epilogue: The Devout Woman of the Third Republic and the Eclipse of Catholic Fraternity Bibliography Index

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 Ack nowledgments

In the course of writing this book, I have met and learned from librarians and archivists across France and in the United States, and it is a great pleasure to look back over many years of research and thank them all. In particular, I am fortunate to have conducted much of the research for this book in contemporary Catholic institutions that, although they maintain historical records, are primarily active in the fields of charity and education. Many people interrupted their work to welcome me, give me access to documents, and find desk space for me in their offices. They have been my guides through Catholic France of the nineteenth century and today. I owe an especially large debt to the late Raphaëlle Chevalier-Montariol, who made the Laporte-Ozanam papers available to me before her family donated them to the Bibliothèque nationale. Her admiration for Amélie Ozanam inspired chapter 5 of this book. Now that Amélie’s correspondence is in the BnF, Michèle Le Pavec helped me verify citations and showed me the velvet binding in which Amélie and Frédéric kept their courtship correspondence. In Rome, Father Jean-Paul Perrier-Muzet opened the Bailly family papers in the archives of the Assumptionist order to me. In Paris, the late Dr. Georges and Monique Sauvé, Violette Potylo, and Yves and Huguette Mongrolle welcomed me to the Collège Stanislas. The staff at the Conseil général international of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul made the minutes of their organization’s earliest meetings available. Guillaume Boyer and the staff at the Bibliothèque de Fels of the Institut Catholique de Paris facilitated my access to Pauline Craven’s enormous archive. Marie-Laurence Marco at the Musée Victor Hugo showed me Léopoldine Hugo’s catechism notebooks and the Hugo family mementos of her short life. I never met the late Louis Le Guillou, but this book would not have been possible without his tremendous editorial labor in the Lamennais and Montalembert papers. In the United States, Andrea Immel of Princeton University Libraries introduced me to the marvelous holdings of the Cotsen Children’s Library. Interlibrary loan staffs at the University of South Carolina and at Kent State University

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have been wonderfully cooperative and on more than one occasion worked miracles in finding materials. Institutional support has been key to the completion of this book, and I have enjoyed generous grants from the Friends of the Princeton University Libraries, the Vincentian Studies Institute at De Paul University, the Office of Research and Graduate Studies at Kent State University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Romantic Catholics took shape at Rice University’s Humanities Research Center, whose director, Caroline Levander, welcomed me as a visiting fellow. A sabbatical leave from the University of South Carolina allowed me to complete the project. Several chapters of Romantic Catholics have benefited from the generous criticism of workshop audiences. Bruno Dumons and Pascale Barthélemy invited me to speak to their working group on women, gender, and Catholicism in Lyon. Christine Haynes, Patricia Tilburg, and the Charlotte Area French Studies Workshop were the first to read about first communion, and the Center for Historical Studies at the University of Maryland was the initial venue for my thoughts on children’s literature. The history faculty at the University of Melbourne participated in a discussion of Michelet, religion, and anticlericalism; Edward Udovic invited me to discuss Frédéric Ozanam at the Vincentian Studies Institute at DePaul University; and J. P. Daughton arranged for the Stanford French Culture Workshop to read my early work on the Roman Question. Many friends and colleagues have generously read portions of the manuscript and variously offered insightful critique, suggestions for sources, stories of their own first communions, and timely letters of recommendation. I thank Christine Adams, Sarah Curtis, Denise Davidson, Suzanne Desan, Dena Goodman, Tom Kselman, Tom Lekan, Bob Nye, and Rebecca Stern for their generous assistance. I have especially relied on Maria LaMonaca Wisdom’s expertise on Catholic women’s writing as well as her friendship. Early versions of some of the material in this book appeared first in other publications, and I am grateful to them for the early exposure and for permission to reprint. Sections of the introduction and chapter 1 first appeared as “Putting Faith in the Middle Class: Bourgeoisie, Catholicism, and Postrevolutionary France” in The Making of the Middle Class: Toward a Transnational History, ed. Barbara Weinstein and Abel Ricardo Lopez, 315–34 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), and portions of chapter 7 were originally published as “Zouave Stories: Gender, Catholic Spirituality and French Responses to the Roman Question” Journal of Modern History 79, no. 2 (2007): 274–305. My thoughts on Pauline Craven first appeared as “La Sainte Famille de Pauline Craven: Subjectivité et sainteté feminine

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dans Le Récit d’une sœur” in “Femmes, genre et catholicisme,” a special issue of Chrétiens et sociétés 17 (2012), ed. Bruno Dumons and Anne Cova, and “Without Nation or Home: Pauline Craven’s Risorgimento” in At a Fair Distance: International Perspectives on the Risorgimento, ed. Dario Martinelli and Lina Navickaite˙-Martinelli (Helsinki: Umweb, 2011). For shepherding my manuscript through the publication process into its current form, I thank John Ackerman, Mike Morris, Ange Romeo-Hall, and Jamie Fuller at Cornell University Press. As much as it is an outcome of my travels abroad in Catholic France, this book is also the product of home and family. My parents, Kay and Doug Harrison, offered years of love and encouragement, an inexhaustible well of confidence that I continue to draw from heavily. While writing this book, I formed a new family with my husband, Tom Brown, and that happiness has informed my understanding of romantic Catholics’ aspirations for love, friendship, marriage, and parenthood. I share Tom’s pride in watching his daughter, Veronica, grow up, and I am grateful to his parents, Helen and Lou Brown, for welcoming me into their Catholic family. Tom himself found Léopoldine Hugo for me, read the whole manuscript more than once, and applied his remarkable historical judgment and intuition to it. It is a different and better book because of his efforts, and I offer it to him both in thanks and in anticipation of many years of happy partnership.

 A bbrevi ati ons

AA ACS AHAP CG

CM Condamnation

CR

FL FO HL ICP Journal

Lettres

Lettres de FO

Assumptionist Archives Archives du Collège Stanislas Archives historiques de l’archevêché de Paris Félicité de Lamennais, Correspondance générale, ed. Louis Le Guillou, 9 vols. (Paris: Armand Colin, 1971–91). Charles de Montalembert La Condamnation de Lamennais, ed. M. J. Le Guillou and Louis Le Guillou (Paris: Beauchesne, 1982). Henri Lacordaire, Correspondance répertoire, vol. 1, 1816–1839, ed. Guy Bedouelle and Christoph-Alois Martin (Paris: Cerf, 2001). Félicité de Lamennais Frédéric Ozanam Henri Lacordaire Institut Catholique de Paris Charles de Montalembert, Journal intime inédit, ed. Louis Le Guillou and Nicole Roger-Taillard, 8 vols. (Paris: CNRS, 1990–2008). Lettres de Montalembert à La Mennais, ed. Georges Goyau and P. de Lallemand (Paris: Desclée, de Brouwer, et Cie., 1932). Lettres de Frédéric Ozanam, vol. 1, Lettres de jeunesse (1819–1840), ed. Léonce Celier, Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, and Didier Ozanam (Paris: Blond et Gay, 1960); vol. 2, Premières années à la Sorbonne (1841–1844), ed. Jeanne Caron (Paris: CELSE, 1971); vol. 3, L’Engagement (1845–1849), ed. Didier Ozanam (Paris: CELSE, 1978).

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L-M C PC SSVP

A B B R E V I AT I O N S

Lacordaire-Montalembert Correspondance inédite, 1830–1861, ed. Louis Le Guillou (Paris: Cerf, 1989). Pauline Craven Archives of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul

 ROMANTIC CATHOLICS

Introduction Romantic Catholics and the Two Frances

France’s romantic Catholics were members of a generation that the writer Alfred de Musset (born 1810) characterized as enfants du siècle in his 1836 autobiographical novel. The children of the nineteenth century, Musset wrote, came of age without firsthand memories of the Revolution; they were “an ardent, pale, and fretful generation . . . [c]onceived between battles [and] reared amid the noises of war” who reached adolescence in the midst of a “world in ruins.” Ill at ease in this world, Musset’s contemporaries suffered, he claimed, because they could see no path from the revolutionary past to the future they desired. Their present—defined by what Musset famously described as mal de siècle—was “vague and floating, a troubled sea filled with wreckage . . . where one cannot know whether at each step, one treads on living matter or dead refuse.”1 The women and men who became romantic Catholics shared the generational identity and the anxieties of Musset’s enfants du siècle. They were dismayed by the legacy of their parents’ revolution, although some—like Stendhal’s Julien Sorel, hero of The Red and the Black—were equally discontented that they had been born too late to participate in the world-historical event of their era. The romantic Catholics were, like Musset, born around 1. Alfred de Musset, Confession of Child of a Century (New York, 1977), 2, 4, 7, with my modifications to the translation. 1

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INTRODUCTION

1810. Some belonged to families that had benefited from the upheaval of the 1790s, with fathers who had served in revolutionary armies. Others were born to counterrevolutionary families and émigré fathers who remembered the Revolution as a catastrophe. Accordingly, some inherited their Catholicism as an important family tradition while others adopted their faith of their own volition. In both instances, however, the romantic Catholicism of these children of the century was self-consciously different from the religion of their elders.2 Many children of the nineteenth century turned to Catholicism to resolve the dilemma that Musset identified: separating the “wreckage” of the Old Regime and the Revolution from the “living matter” out of which they might construct their own lives. Feeling detached from their surroundings, alienated from their parents’ ambitions, and chafing at the uncertainty and caution that characterized their postrevolutionary surroundings, some young romantics looked to Catholicism in an effort to make a world of their own. They determined to set aside the battles of their parents’ generation with philosophes, de-Christianizers, and revolutionaries on one side and Jesuits, Jansenists, and royal censors on the other. Their goal was to find a Catholicism that would be expansive, dynamic, and glorious instead of the nostalgic, bitter, and fearful faith that was the stereotype of the Restoration years. The Catholic men and women of this book shared with Musset a generational sensibility that they directed to the project of reimagining their religious faith. The men—Maurice de Guérin, Charles de Montalembert (both born in 1810), and Frédéric Ozanam (1813)—were public figures whose names are known, at least in passing, to those familiar with nineteenthcentury history or literary studies. Two of the women—Pauline Craven, née de la Ferronnays (born 1808) and Victorine Monniot (born 1824)—were best-selling authors of the second half of the nineteenth century whose names have all but disappeared today. Even more than most popular female authors, Catholic women writers disappeared from the literary canon, and, unlike their republican counterparts such as George Sand, they have not been recuperated as part of a process of feminist canon revision.3 The archival traces of the experiences of Léopoldine Hugo (born in 1824) and Amélie

2. Alan Spitzer, The French Generation of 1820 (Princeton, 1987) focuses on a slightly older group of subjects, mostly born around the turn of the century, and I am indebted to his discussion of generations in history. 3. On women writers in the republican tradition, see Whitney Walton, Eve’s Proud Descendants: Four Women Writers and Republican Politics in Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford, 2000). On the neglect of Catholic writers, see Maria LaMonaca, Masked Atheism: Catholicism and the Secular Victorian Home (Columbus, OH, 2008), 26–27, 207–12.

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Soulacroix Ozanam (1821) survive largely because of their family relationships: Léopoldine was the daughter of Victor Hugo (himself born 1802), and Amélie married Frédéric Ozanam, whose memory she dedicated herself to preserving after his early death. Like Musset, these men and women were aware that they had inherited a society that had emerged from revolutionary upheaval of unprecedented proportions. They were conscious of their responsibility to rebuild, and they turned to Catholicism for that task, not in the resentful vein of conservatives longing for the Old Regime but in a hopeful, forward-looking mood.

Liberalism, Socialism, and Romantic Catholics Scholars most commonly refer to the individuals featured in these chapters as “liberal Catholics,” a term that I have rejected in favor of “romantic Catholics.”4 By the 1860s Charles de Montalembert and his Catholic colleagues who refused to cooperate with the Second Empire referred to themselves as a liberal Catholic opposition. For much of the nineteenth century, however, devout, progressive Catholics utterly rejected the “liberal” label. Indeed, they abhorred liberalism in all its forms. Their critique of the French Revolution was not simply that it had targeted their church, confiscating its wealth and persecuting its clergy. The faults of the Revolution went much deeper: the elevation of the rights-bearing individual man to the apex of the political community was the Revolution’s original sin. The autonomous male citizen was a pernicious fiction, romantic Catholics claimed, because human beings do not pass through the world as individual units. Revolutionaries had willfully denied that the ties between individuals mattered more than the individuals themselves. Relationships and the sentiments of affection and respect out of which they grew were the true elements of the social fabric. According to romantic Catholics, de-Christianization was the revolutionaries’ response to the challenge that the church posed to their ideology of liberal individualism.5 Revolutionaries took on Catholicism not merely because they considered its institutions and personnel corrupt or because they were tempted by its wealth. Rather, they recognized that Catholic teaching revealed the autonomous revolutionary citizen as a sham.

4. See the classic Georges Weill, Histoire du catholicisme libéral en France, 1828–1908 (Paris, 1909), and, more recently, Lucien Jaume, L’Individu éffacé ou le paradoxe du libéralisme français (Paris, 1997). 5. Paul Bénichou, Le Temps des prophètes. Doctrines de l’âge romantique (Paris, 1977); Frank Paul Bowman, French Romanticism: Intertextual and Interdisciplinary Readings (Baltimore, 1990); Georges Gusdorf, Le Romantisme, vol. 1, Le Savoir romantique (Paris, 1993), chaps. 6–8.

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In their critique of liberalism, romantic Catholics had much in common with their contemporaries, the romantic socialists. Central to both Catholic and socialist interpretations of the Revolution was, as Michael Behrent has argued, “the question of whether the political emancipation of the individual was compatible with a cohesive social order.”6 Like devout Catholics, followers of Henri de Saint-Simon or Charles Fourier concluded that no aggregation of autonomous individuals could ever constitute a society. Without an awareness of the transcendent, such an assembly would have no meaning beyond the sum of its parts. Religious sentiment made the individual aware of his fellows and created the bonds of obligation and affection that gave society density and significance.7 The competition between romantic Catholics and socialists was particularly intense because both groups claimed to have identified the religious grounding of the ideal society. The socialist impulse in the early nineteenth century was to create a religion to perform the function of sacramentalizing society. Saint-Simon’s Nouveau christianisme and his followers’ quest for the new messiah are the best-known examples of this solution. The romantic Catholics, however, saw no need to guarantee society’s organic strength by contriving a new religion when they already had a faith that had stood the test of time. Beliefs and practices that enabled individuals to recognize transcendent truth and to connect to one another in that recognition could not be invented on the spur of the moment, romantic Catholics believed. Nor could they be human institutions, built in response to humans’ (mis)perceptions of their own needs. According to Catholics, the egotism of the era necessarily infected these unnatural attempts to invent a new faith for the nineteenth century. Young men in student circles of the 1820s and ’30s like Maurice de Guérin, Charles de Montalembert, and Frédéric Ozanam were particularly aware of the affinities between romantic Catholics and socialists. Catholics and socialists joined the same student organizations and debating clubs, jousting with one another over their claims to reestablish society, in the image of either the old Christ or the new Saint-Simonian messiah.8 The young 6. Michael C. Behrent, “The Mystical Body of Society: Religion and Association in NineteenthCentury Political Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas 69, no. 2 (2008): 219–43, 225. See also Lynn Sharp, “Metempsychosis and Social Reform: The Individual and the Collective in Romantic Socialism,” French Historical Studies 27, no. 2 (2004): 349–79. 7. In a large literature, see especially Mary Pickering, “Auguste Comte and the Saint-Simonians,” French Historical Studies 18, no. 1 (1993): 211–36, and Pamela Pilbeam, “Dream Worlds? Religion and the Early Socialists in France,” Historical Journal 43, no. 2 (2000): 499–515. 8. Frédéric Ozanam to Ernest Falconet, Mar. 19, 1833, in Frédéric Ozanam, Lettres de Frédéric Ozanam, vol. 1, Lettres de jeunesse (1819–1840), ed. Léonce Celier, Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, and Didier Ozanam (Paris, 1960), 95.

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Ozanam’s first published work—which appeared in 1831 when he was only eighteen—was an essay on Saint-Simonianism, in which he condemned its claim to be a new Christianity but also cited it as evidence that there was no trend toward disbelief in the nineteenth century.9 Catholic students like Ozanam and his friends took particular pride in the conversion of socialists who, like Philippe Buchez, concluded that the common purpose that brought individuals together in society was not a newly discovered doctrine but rather ancient Christian teaching.10 Catholics asserted that there was no need to invent a new faith to guide men and women away from liberal egotism and toward awareness of the society in which they lived: Catholicism remained fully capable of accomplishing that goal. In the words of Prosper Guéranger (born 1805), who reestablished the Benedictine order in France in 1832, the Catholic liturgy was nothing if not “an instrument in the destruction of individualism” and the Eucharist was “the means for being incorporated into a human community, the church.”11 Guéranger proposed the monastic community as the ideal that a Christian society should follow, but the lay Catholics of this book believed that Christians living in the world could establish a similarly robust sense of obligation to one another. Competing with socialists to claim the mantle of defenders of society against liberal individualism was largely an affair for the young men of this book. Women were often a point of discord between the romantic Catholics and the socialists of the student world. Ironically, both groups tended to idealize “woman” in the allegorical abstract as uniquely capable of overcoming individual egotism and forming social bonds.12 Saint-Simonians rejected Catholic teaching on chastity and marriage, however, and imagined a society in which a liberated sexual love, no longer restricted by clerical scruple, could effectively bind together the threads of a densely woven social fabric. As feminist scholarship on the Saint-Simonians has revealed, the men of the movement, mostly bourgeois students, found their sexual partners among women of the working class. The result of these women’s experimentation

9. A. F. Ozanam, Réflexions sur la doctrine de Saint Simon (Lyon, 1831), reprinted in Frédéric Ozanam, Œuvres complètes, vol. 7, Mélanges (Paris, 1855), 273–357. 10. Michael Reardon, “The Reconciliation of Christianity with Progress: Philippe Buchez,” Review of Politics 33, no. 4 (1971): 512–37. 11. Quoted by R. W. Franklin, Nineteenth-Century Churches: The History of a New Catholicism in Württemberg, England, and France (New York, 1987), 16. 12. Naomi J. Andrews, Socialism’s Muse: Gender in the Intellectual Landscape of French Romantic Socialism (Lanham, MD, 2006).

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with socialism was not equal participation in a revived social order but often the outcast experience of unwed motherhood.13 In contrast, romantic Catholics—both men and women—continued to believe that marriage and family remained not only relevant but the most significant relationship possible and the model for any subsequent social tie. Women like Pauline de la Ferronnays, Amélie Soulacroix, and Victorine Monniot had no firsthand contact with Catholicism’s socialist rivals. Young women of the aristocracy or the bourgeoisie did not participate in the sociability of university students, who were often sowing their wild oats with women of the working class, whether acting out their Saint-Simonian convictions or not. Resisting that temptation was a common theme in the youthful letters of men like Ozanam. Restraint and self-discipline, not sensual indulgence, made possible the bonds of society. This self-control came naturally to women, but Christian men had to strive to emulate female integrity, Ozanam and his friends believed. Young Catholic men self-consciously recognized that their desire to preserve their sexual purity in order to highlight the significance of the marriage bond set them apart from others of their generation. The emphasis on marital affection as the basis of society reflected romantic Catholics’ conviction that the laity should play an important role in reestablishing the church in the postrevolutionary period. The church needed the wisdom of people who lived in the world—individuals who chose marriage partners and raised children, recognized their duties as citizens, and faced the challenge of the modern economy.14 The experience of the Revolution had raised the profile of the laity; where Catholic worship held on most successfully, it was usually thanks to the leadership of laywomen in particular.15 Romantic Catholics’ positive assessment of the role of the laity was another way in which they were open to the possibility that the Revolution might have offered useful lessons to the church. Several of the figures in this book contemplated a clerical vocation but ultimately concluded that their calling

13. Clare Goldberg Moses and Leslie Wahl Rabine, Feminism, Socialism, and French Romanticism (Bloomington, IN, 1993). 14. Cardinal Newman’s “On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine,” published in The Rambler in 1859, was the most prominent exposition of a position with which lay romantic Catholics found themselves in agreement. John Cornwell, Newman’s Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (New York, 2010), 143–46. 15. Suzanne Desan, Reclaiming the Sacred: Lay Religion and Popular Politics in Revolutionary France (Ithaca, NY, 1990); Olwen Hufton, Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution (Toronto, 1992); Geneviève Gadbois, “Vous êtes presque la seule consolation de l’Eglise: La foi des femmes face à la déchristianisation de 1789 à 1880,” in La Religion de ma mère: Les femmes et la transmission de la foi, ed. Jean Delumeau, 301–25 (Paris, 1992).

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was to the ordinary obligations of marriage and family life. Men like Charles de Montalembert and Frédéric Ozanam, had they acted on their youthful sense of vocation, would probably have risen to positions of influence in the church. Although a woman like Pauline Craven could not count on such influence, she could, if she had she chosen a life of vocation, have played a significant role in the expansion of women’s congregations that invented new forms of communal life and gave many women positions of responsibility and even global influence.16 Victorine Monniot, who never married, certainly considered a religious vocation, as did Maurice de Guérin’s sister Eugénie. All three women, however, remained in the world and embraced a lay vocation of writing and caring for family members. Although Romantic Catholics focuses on the laity, clerics who befriended and guided the book’s main characters play key supporting roles. Most important was Félicité de Lamennais, who inspired romantic Catholics and acted as a father figure to both Maurice de Guérin and Charles de Montalembert. Born in 1782, Lamennais chose the religious life during the Napoleonic era and was one of the first of a new generation of postrevolutionary priests to seek ordination. In the 1820s he caused a sensation with his call to Catholic revival: he asserted that the ancient church would be the dynamic force in modern society, and he broke with Catholics who could see no better future for the church than the Old Regime. Priests whose early career was shaped by mennaisian teaching formed friendships with lay Catholics and championed the role of the laity within the church. Henri Dominique Lacordaire, who reestablished the Dominican order in France, was close to many of the key figures of this book, in particular Charles de Montalembert. Philippe Gerbet, a collaborator of Lamennais and later bishop of Perpignan, became an intimate friend of Pauline Craven’s family, and Henri Maret, who discovered Lamennais as a seminarian, joined Ozanam and Lacordaire in creating a Catholic republican newspaper in 1848. In all these relationships, the priests in question occupied an ambiguous position; bearing the power of ordination, they maintained a certain authority over people who were friends and collaborators and therefore equals in other senses.

Romanticism: History, the Nation, and the Sacred Romantic Catholicism of the early nineteenth century shared an aesthetic sensibility with the movement that literary and artistic scholars refer to as 16. Sarah A. Curtis, Civilizing Habits: Women Missionaries and the Revival of French Empire (New York, 2010).

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romanticism. Their common central concern was the relationship between individuals and society, and they returned repeatedly to the question of how a fully integrated society could nonetheless leave room for individual expression and autonomy. They were extremely conscious of their own ruptured relationship to the past, which they experienced in generational terms. Most of the central figures in Romantic Catholics were writers, and some of them, like Craven and Montalembert, carried their romantic aesthetic well into the second half of the nineteenth century. The publishing success that Catholics enjoyed indicates that their attachment to their faith was a significant thread within romantic literature and that it resonated widely in French society. Craven and Monniot were authors of some of the nineteenth century’s best sellers: Craven’s memoir of her youth, Le Récit d’une sœur (1866), and Monniot’s girls’ novel, Le Journal de Marguerite (1858), went through dozens of editions between their initial appearance and the First World War. Montalembert’s Histoire de Sainte Elisabeth de Hongrie is a classic of devotional literature, and it has been in print almost consistently from its initial publication in 1836 to the most recent edition in 2005. Maurice de Guérin’s popularity as a poet was entirely posthumous, but his—and especially his sister Eugénie’s—books of verse sold well when they were published in the 1850s. Ozanam wrote primarily for a scholarly audience, but his works, too, were well received, and he enjoyed a successful career at the Sorbonne, an institution not noted for Catholic piety. Romantic Catholicism in a variety of genres appealed to French readers in the nineteenth century, even though most of them were probably not as devout as the authors they selected. The stereotypical romantic hero—the solitary, introspective, misunderstood male genius—was not central to romantic Catholic writing, however. Catholic romanticism—male and female—tended to resemble the work of the women writers whom Chantal Bertrand-Jennings has analyzed. This feminine romanticism valued the social, and its protagonists wanted nothing more than to live according to the strictures of a compassionate society. Their inability to do so derived not from their genius but rather from concrete or embodied circumstances: their sex, race, disability, or poverty.17 The plots of these novels opened necessarily onto social questions, much as Catholic romanticism did, although Catholic writers often drew very different conclusions about how the individual should be integrated into society.

17. Chantal Bertrand-Jennings, Un autre mal de siècle: Le romantisme des romancières, 1800–1846 (Toulouse, 2005).

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The truth of romantic religious faith rested in a profound but intangible sense of its reality seated in believers’ hearts. The romantic Catholics were wary of rational polemic and of a Christianity that attempted to prove the tenets of the faith to doubters. No one who approached the question of religion with ill will or malice would ever experience the confidence of a genuine faith, and no rational proof could substitute for it. Romantic Catholics turned their back on Enlightenment debates about evidence for and against the existence of God because they saw little point in arguing with individuals whose hearts were closed to Christian teaching. Theological writing of the eighteenth century struck them as arid and uninspiring; it was too often a fruitless contest with malicious Enlightenment philosophie.18 Eighteenth-century ideas about natural religion, in which God incontrovertibly manifested his existence through the wonders of the natural world, seemed almost as pointless. As God’s creation, nature was certainly grandiose and awe-inspiring, but its sublimity rather than its rational order was the starting point for an individual’s search for God. Only the observer who had already recognized God’s imprint on his or her own heart would be prepared to recognize it in creation. The scholarship that the romantic Catholics produced demonstrated clearly their inclination to trust emotions as the foundation for rational argument. Montalembert, Craven, and Ozanam all published historical works: the two men wrote extensively about medieval art, literature, and history, while Craven wrote biography and several historical novels.19 Intimate acquaintance with their subjects was fundamental to their method, and each writer deliberately sought out experiences that would encourage an emotional connection with the past. Craven’s work as a biographer focused on friends and relied on the cooperation of subjects’ families. She worked from her own love for her subjects and from their intimate correspondence with which she was entrusted; her histories intersected with her own life. Both Montalembert and Ozanam traveled extensively to visit the places their research subjects had lived. Ozanam followed Dante and the Franciscan poets through Italy, while Montalembert traced the life of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary through central Europe and visited distant and inaccessible monasteries for his magnum opus on Western monasticism. Both men visited archives and libraries, but their research emphasized the emotional context that brought

18. Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (New York, 2001). 19. See Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (Cambridge, MA, 2000), chap. 2 on romanticism and history writing.

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their historical documents to life. Following in the footsteps of Dante or Saint Elizabeth created the affective bond between historian and subject that all three writers agreed was necessary for a true understanding of the past. Romantic Catholics’ turn to the medieval was not accidental; the Middle Ages was an imaginative touchstone from which they could evoke both tradition and modernity. The Gothic revival often marks Catholics’ only appearance in histories of romanticism, which are frequently more concerned to locate the movement in the revolutionary tradition.20 Assuming that the politics of the neo-Gothic were necessarily reactionary, scholars tend to pass quickly over examples of Catholic romanticism.21 For many young Catholics, however, fascination with the medieval world was a way of skipping over the sterile debates of the Enlightenment and locating their ideals further back in history. Between the paganism of the ancient world and the neopaganism of the Renaissance, the Middle Ages had produced a perfect Christian art, Catholic scholars believed. Mystical and naturalist tendencies found an equilibrium that reflected both the divinity and the humanity of Christ.22 The tone of Catholic medievalism was nostalgic, but it was a nostalgia that resonated very differently from a conservative desire to return to the Old Regime. The medieval world was definitively past, beyond revival in any literal sense. Romantic Catholics borrowed its presumed virtues—its social harmony and common attachment to a single Christian faith—and asserted that the postrevolutionary world should adopt these standards. The Middle Ages was thus an imaginative space to which romantic Catholics could appeal—less a blueprint than a reservoir of Christian thought. Catholic calls to return to the society and the politics of the Old Regime, in contrast, reflected an actual political agenda, which romantics rejected. The attraction of the medieval reflects romantic Catholicism’s cosmopolitanism because medieval primitivism and the concept of Christendom appealed to young Catholics all over western Europe. As Montalembert pursued his research on Saint Elizabeth in central Europe, he met German painters of the Nazarene school who were drawing on medieval painting in order to develop new vocabularies for representing the sacred in the modern

20. Colin Jager, The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era (Philadelphia, 2007), 27–36. 21. E.g., Michael Marrinan, Romantic Paris: Histories of a Cultural Landscape, 1800–1850 (Stanford, 2009), 90–91. 22. Michael Paul Driskel, Representing Belief: Religion, Art, and Society in Nineteenth-Century France (University Park, PA, 1992); Juliette Rolland, Art catholique et politique: France, XIXe–XXe siècles (Paris, 2007); Cordula Grewe, Painting the Sacred in the Age of Romanticism (Burlington, VT, 2009).

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world. Montalembert’s close friend and traveling companion François Rio introduced the French art world to the Nazarenes in his De la poésie chrétienne (1836), which championed their conviction that artists should not embrace a doctrine of progress. Rather, they should always be prepared to look backward and to consider that the present might represent a retreat from an earlier perfection. Rio spent much of his adulthood in Great Britain, where he married a Welsh woman and moved in the Anglo-Catholic circles of the Oxford Movement. Individuals like the architect Augustus Pugin and the novelist Kenelm Digby, inspired by their acquaintance with the Nazarenes and their French commentators, were confident that the restoration of Catholicism in the British Isles would temper and humanize industrial society.23 The French romantic Catholics of this book shared the cosmopolitanism of the art world. Most were multilingual and maintained extensive international correspondence networks. They traveled widely, and most of them lived abroad for long stretches of time. Maurice de Guérin and Léopoldine Hugo, whose short lives never took them very far from home, are the exceptions here. Craven, Montalembert, and Ozanam were all born abroad to parents displaced by the Revolution, and Craven, married to an English diplomat, never really established a permanent home in France at all. Victorine Monniot, whose life was also unsettled by the Revolution and its aftermath, traveled as far abroad as the Indian Ocean colony of Bourbon (now Réunion), and her heroine, Marguerite, followed her there in fiction. In what is often described as the age of the nation-state, romantic Catholics were deeply aware of their affinities to other Catholics across national boundaries. As scholars, Montalembert and Ozanam explicitly broke with the nineteenth-century mainstream, writing comparative, transnational studies whose goal was not primarily to locate the origins of the national community.24 Ozanam dedicated himself to teaching comparative literature and to restoring the literature of southern Europe, especially Italy, to the position of prominence it had occupied before the Enlightenment directed attention toward northern countries. Montalembert shared a similar commitment to medieval Christendom as a world in which national identity was secondary. Craven’s work as a biographer focused almost entirely on foreign subjects who reflected her life and her friendships that stretched from Britain to 23. Mary Camille Bowe, François Rio, sa place dans le renouveau Catholique en Europe, 1797–1874 (Paris, 1938); Rosemary Hill, God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (New Haven, 2009), esp. chap. 16. See also Franklin, Nineteenth-Century Churches, for Catholic cosmopolitanism. 24. Charles de Montalembert, The Monks of the West, from St. Benedict to St. Bernard, 7 vols. (London, 1861–1879); Frédéric Ozanam, Les Poètes franciscains en Italie au treizième siècle and Dante et la philosophie catholique au XIIIe siècle, vols. 5 and 6 of Œuvres complètes (Paris, 1855).

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Russia. None of them ever renounced their French citizenship or denied the significance of their French culture, but none of them wanted to conceive of French identity as separate from or prior to Catholic faith. Committed membership in the Catholic Church expanded the individual’s horizons: issues like Catholic emancipation in Britain and Ireland, the status of Poles within the Russian Empire, the Catholic movement in the Low Countries that led to the formation of Belgium, and the religious affiliation of Prussian children born into mixed marriages were all matters of intimate concern to devout Catholics. Romantic Catholics did not see these events through the lens of French foreign policy—they were not “foreign” at all because they concerned fellow believers. Catholic missions in the colonies, too, had special significance to Catholics who understood “civilizing” as a process that necessarily began with Christianizing.25 In many ways, missions exemplified the dynamic and modernizing potential of the church as they adopted new goals and methods in response to changing circumstances. The Catholic press regularly printed stories of Catholics abroad, in both Europe and the wider world, and invited readers to identify with the struggles of their coreligionists. The boundaries of the nation-state could not fully circumscribe Catholic identity, which extended globally to encompass believers everywhere. This Catholic cosmopolitanism may have been particularly important to women, whose national horizons were limited. The nineteenth-century nation-state offered women relatively little; it might ask them to demonstrate the same loyalty and readiness to sacrifice that it asked of men, but it promised them a paltry return. Women could expect little more in exchange for their allegiance to nation than an incomplete citizenship, clearly inferior to that offered to men. The Catholic Church certainly did not treat male and female believers alike, but it never espoused equality as a governing principle for its activity on earth. The expansion of women’s congregations in the nineteenth century created more opportunities for women religious to participate in the mission of the church as teachers and nurses, both in France and in the colonial world. Laywomen, also, had a missionary role: they could convert their husbands, a common Catholic literary trope, and protect the faith of their sons. Their lives, too, opened out to the world even if they never left France, because the church invited them to pray for believers everywhere and to support international Catholic efforts. 25. Troy Feay, “Mission to Moralize: Slaves, Africans, and Missionaries in the French Colonies” (PhD diss., University of Notre Dame, 2003); J. P. Daughton, An Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880–1914 (New York, 2006).

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The Catholicism of the romantic era centered on papal Rome, not Paris. Young French Catholics associated the eighteenth-century church’s Gallicanism with its vulnerability to revolutionary de-Christianization. The lesson of the Revolution, they believed, was that a church that relied on the support of the state would always be susceptible to political disruption. Félicité de Lamennais, the key theologian of their era, shaped the romantic generation with his conviction that Catholics needed to look to the eternal city and to rely on the papacy as the solid foundation of their faith. The Gallicanism of an earlier generation continued to manifest itself in the French hierarchy’s support for the Restoration monarchy, and younger Catholics inspired by Lamennais feared that this strategy risked subjecting the church to a repetition of the French Revolution’s anticlerical fervor.26 Historians, thinking primarily of the late nineteenth century, often associate ultramontanism— a Catholicism centered “over the mountains” in Rome—with reactionary politics.27 For the romantic generation, however, ultramontanism was the way to embrace elements of the Revolution without abandoning the church—it allowed young romantics to square the circle of an ancient church drawing on tradition to produce a modern, forward-looking faith. Ultramontanism in the early nineteenth century represented a fresh start, a chance to leave behind the mistakes that had set the church at odds with progress.28

Secularization and Romantic Anti-Catholicism: Jules Michelet The romantic Catholic view of France’s postrevolutionary path disrupts the narrative of “two Frances” that ordinarily structures discussions of religion in modern France. According to this schema, Catholicism divided France into two opposing camps that formed in the Revolution and lasted into the twentieth century.29 The two Frances are implicitly characters in a story

26. For an accessible treatment of Gallicanism and mennaisian ultramontanism, see Austin Gough, Paris and Rome: The Gallican Church and the Ultramontane Campaign, 1848–1853 (New York, 1986), chaps. 2–4. 27. See Vincent Viaene’s helpful discussion of “transigence” and intransigence in Belgium and the Holy See from Gregory XVI to Pius IX (1831–1859): Catholic Revival, Society, and Politics in NineteenthCentury Europe (Leuven, Belg., 2001); J. M. Mayeur, “Catholicisme intransigeant, catholicisme social, démocratie chrétienne,” Annales. Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 27, no. 2 (1972): 483–99. 28. On liberal and reactionary ultramontanism see Emile Perreau-Saussine, Catholicism and Democracy: An Essay in the History of Political Thought, trans. Richard Rex (Princeton, 2012). 29. Claude Langlois, “Catholics and Seculars,” in Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, vol. 2, Conflicts and Divisions, ed. Pierre Nora and trans. Arthur Goldhammer, 109–43 (New York, 1996); Emile Poulat, Liberté, laïcité. La guerre des deux France et le principe de la modernité (Paris, 1987).

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about secularization: Catholic France holds on determinedly, but history tends toward the secular, and republican, anticlerical France wins out in the end. Hostilities between the two cease when Catholic France can no longer muster enough partisans for combat. More recent scholarship calls this narrative of secularization into question, however.30 Historicizing secularization itself—examining its origins, its arguments, and its strategies—has been a key way to dismantle the claims that it determined the course of modern history. The tradition of the two Frances had its own romantic phase, particularly associated with Jules Michelet, whose account of French Catholicism—and especially of women’s roles within it—has decisively shaped the historiography of modern France. Romantic anti-Catholicism, in contrast to its more devout contemporary, is quite familiar to historians—it represents the legacy of the Revolution, the tradition that linked 1789 to the Second and Third Republics and that insisted that the Old Regime offered nothing to the modern world. Michelet’s history of France celebrated the Revolution and the sovereign people and firmly identified the Catholic Church as their principal and perpetual antagonist. His account of the role of religion in the development of modern France has ultimately been far more influential among scholars than the aspirations of his Catholic contemporaries. In particular, Michelet’s identification of Catholicism with women has shaped historians’ views of gender, religion, and republicanism in modern France. Born in 1798 and forging his literary career in the postrevolutionary world, Jules Michelet in many ways resembled the devout men and women at the center of this book. Like them, he rejected a liberal view of human society that elevated nothing higher than the individual, although he located transcendence in the French people rather than in a divinely ordained social order. His historical writing glorified the sovereign people and celebrated the nation over the individual. Like many of his contemporaries, Michelet found the medieval world fascinating, but his Middle Ages was not fundamentally Christian. Coalescing amid the tightly woven ties of feudal society, his French nation entered into history in the medieval era, but Catholicism alienated 30. In an extensive literature, see especially David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton, 2008); Jonathan Sheehan, “Enlightenment, Religion, and the Enigma of Secularization,” American Historical Review 108, no. 4 (2003): 1061–80; Olivier Roy, “Sécularisation et mutation du religieux,” Esprit 338, no. 10 (2008): 7–16; Rodney Stark, “Secularization R. I. P.,” Sociology of Religion 60, no. 3 (1999): 249–73; and the forum in Church History 75, no. 1 (2006), which includes Jeffrey Cox, “Provincializing Christendom: The Case of Great Britain”; Thomas A. Kselman, “Challenging De-christianization: The Historiography of Religion in Modern France”; George S. Williamson, “A Religious Sonderweg? Reflections on the Sacred and the Secular in Modern Germany”; and Thomas Albert Howard, “A ‘Religious Turn’ in Modern European Historiography?”

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rather than constituted the people. Catholic doctrine rejected the particularity of French national genius, encouraging instead the imitation of Christ as a universal practice.31 In order to find their apotheosis in the Revolution of 1789, the French people had to reject this false path of Catholic dogma. By the end of his career, Michelet, like his socialist contemporaries, was rewriting Christianity, and his 1864 Bible de l’humanité argued that true ethical wisdom was the product of national genius, not religious institutions.32 Veneration for “woman” as a symbolic abstraction dominated Michelet’s historical writing, but his female contemporaries—Frenchwomen of the nineteenth century—failed to live up to his ideals. In Michelet’s epic histories, woman was nature, and she reminded men, who live in historical time, of their connection to the timeless and the cyclical. History was the product of the maternal and beneficent qualities of the people encountering the masculine principles of justice and law.33 Roland Barthes has observed, however, that in spite of Michelet’s veneration for woman in general, particular women who “belonged” to a specific nation or group were “excluded from Michelet’s paradise.”34 Rather than incarnating abstract virtues, actual women, Michelet believed, slavishly followed the dictates of the Catholic Church. Michelet’s polemical Du prêtre, de la femme, de la famille (1845) warned his fellow Frenchmen of women’s fatal tendency toward a sentimental piety and of priests’ willingness to encourage them. In an image that both titillated and frightened readers, Michelet cautioned husbands to beware of wives who, in the marital bed, whispered “a lesson learned . . . from another man.”35 The foolishly devout woman and her slippery priest were stock characters of Michelet’s imagination.36 There was no mistaking the pious, pliant Frenchwomen of the nineteenth century for heroines like Joan of Arc who incarnated the French people. If the French nation was a synthesis of masculine justice and feminine devotion,

31. Gisèle Séginger, “Pensées du temps (Bible de l’humanité )” in Michelet, rythme de la prose, rythme de l’histoire, ed. Paule Petitier, 201–10 (Villeneuve d’Ascq, 2010). 32. Gisèle Séginger, “Fiction et histoire. La Sorcière de Jules Michelet,” Romatic Review 100, no. 4 (2009): 527–44, 541. See also Arthur Mitzman, Michelet, Historian: Rebirth and Romanticism in NineteenthCentury France (New Haven, 1990), 44–45, 217, and Charles Rearick, “Symbol, Legend, and History: Michelet as Folklorist-Historian,” French Historical Studies 7, no. 1 (1971): 72–92. 33. Jeanne Calo, La Création de la femme chez Michelet (Paris, 1975). 34. Roland Barthes, Michelet (Paris, 1988), 114. 35. Jules Michelet, Du prêtre, de la femme, de la famille, 4th ed. (Paris, 1845), 51. 36. On anticlericals’ manipulation of the language of gender inversion, see Barbara Vinken, “Wounds of Love: Modern Devotion According to Michelet,” Clio 36, no. 2 (2007): 155–75, and Thomas A. Kselman, “The Perraud Affair: Clergy, Church, and Sexual Politics in Fin-de-Siècle France,” Journal of Modern History 70, no. 3 (1998): 602–3.

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no such harmony characterized the world that Michelet claimed to observe around him. Michelet’s history of French republicanism—like so many histories of the modern world—featured a narrative of secularization, with republican men in the lead. Michelet described God as having changed sex: the process had begun in the twelfth century with the castration of Abelard and with the proliferation of the Virgin on church altars—vapid female sentimentality defeating austere male reason.37 It culminated in the nineteenth century with the emancipation of male citizens from the authority of both kings and priests and the concomitant strengthening of priests’ empire over women and girls. Feminine susceptibility to clerical manipulation was the dangerous counternarrative to the history of the French nation. Far from being the tranquil sphere over which men ruled and from which they derived the autonomy that allowed them to participate in the public sphere as citizens, domesticity, for Michelet, represented a worrying challenge to men’s patriarchal and political authority. His dire warnings of female vulnerability to Catholicism were the corollary of his celebration of male autonomy and republican citizenship. Du prêtre, which quickly went through multiple editions and translations, explicitly addressed a male audience; it warned its readers against “our adversaries,” the priests who seek to control “our wives” and “our daughters.”38 Michelet made no attempt to address women, to convince them of the error of their ways, or to induce them to choose their husbands over their confessors. The remedy lay entirely in the hands of laymen. Following Michelet, the French republican tradition has maintained that female religiosity was an atavistic phenomenon by which many, perhaps even most, women resolutely turned their backs on modernity. Republicans assumed that women had to give up their attachment to their church before they could expect to enjoy full participation in the modern world—for instance, by exercising the rights of citizens. Famously, political elites denied suffrage to Frenchwomen until after the Second World War because they maintained that votes for women would deliver the republic into the hands of its clerical enemies. Michelet’s depiction of credulous women obeying their priests’ bidding survived into the twentieth century, ensuring that the nation that pioneered universal manhood suffrage would fail to extend the vote to women until the postwar period. Michelet’s view of a feminized Catholicism, although stripped of its overt misogyny, has lasted even longer in historical scholarship. The association between women and the church remains central to the history of the

37. Jules Michelet, Histoire de France, vol. 1 (Paris, 1833), 293. 38. Michelet, Du prêtre, 44.

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post-Enlightenment world. Scholarship on domesticity and the analytical concept of “separate spheres” relied on the notion that women remained attached to their traditional faith as men marched off toward the secular future.39 In the influential work A History of Women in the West, edited by Geneviève Fraisse and Michelle Perrot, Italian historian Michela de Giorgio maintained that “[t]he nineteenth century’s estrangement from the Church, its militant or passive anticlericalism, were exclusively masculine phenomena. . . . Catholicism of the nineteenth century was expressed in the feminine gender.”40 The domestic sphere, undergirded by female religiosity and compensating for male disbelief, is a trope of the nineteenth-century home that crosses both national and confessional boundaries.41 The “feminization of religion” scholarship in France has a disturbing tendency to echo Michelet. This research had its origins in the tradition of religious sociology; women in the nineteenth century increasingly outnumbered men among communicants, and Claude Langlois’s classic work

39. Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18, no. 2, pt. 1 (1966): 151–74. See also Tracy Fessenden, “Gendering Religion” (in a forum dedicated to a discussion of Welter’s article), Journal of Women’s History 14, no. 1 (2002): 163–69. Lynn Abrams, The Making of Modern Woman: Europe, 1789–1918 (New York, 2002), esp. 34–40. For France, see esp. Bonnie G. Smith, Ladies of the Leisure Class: The Bourgeoises of Northern France in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1981). Scholarship on the feminization of French Catholicism includes Sarah Curtis, “Charitable Ladies: Gender, Class and Religion in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Paris,” Past and Present 177, no. 1 (2002): 121–56; Hazel Mills, “Saintes sœurs and femmes fortes: Alternative Accounts of the Route to Womanly Civic Virtue and the History of French Feminism,” in Wollstonecraft’s Daughters: Womanhood in England and France, 1780–1920, ed. Clarissa Campbell Orr, 135–50 (Manchester, UK, 1996); Caroline Ford, Divided Houses: Religion and Gender in Modern France (Ithaca, NY, 2005), chap. 1; and Etienne Fouilloux, “Femmes et catholicisme dans la France contemporaine,” Clio: Histoire, femmes, et sociétés 2 (1995), http://clio.revues.org/498, DOI: 10.4000/clio.498. 40. Michela de Giorgio, “The Catholic Model,” trans. Joan Bond Sax, in A History of Women in the West, vol. 4, Emerging Feminism from Revolution to the Great War, ed. Geneviève Fraisse and Michelle Perrot, 166–97, 169 (Cambridge, MA, 1993). 41. Marlène Albert-Llorca, “Les Femmes dans les apparitions mariales de l’époque contemporaine,” Clio 15 (2002): 123–34; Marina Caffiero, “Dall’esplosione mistica tardo-barocca all’apostolato sociale (1650–1850),” in Donne e fede: santità e vita religiosa in Italia, ed. Lucetta Scaraffia and Gabriella Zarri, 327–73 (Bari, It., 1994); Catherine Maurer, “Le Catholicisme au féminin: L’expansion des congrégations dans l’Allemagne du XIXe siècle,” Histoire, économie, et société 21, no. 1 (2002): 17–28; Marion Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York, 1991). For critiques, see Patrick Pasture, “Beyond the Feminization Thesis: Gendering the History of Christianity in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” in Beyond the Feminization Thesis: Gender and Christianity in Modern Europe, ed. Patrick Pasture et al., 7–33 (Leuven, Belg., 2012); Michael P. Carroll, “Give Me That Ol’ Time Hormonal Religion,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 43, no. 2 (2004): 275–78; Anthony J. Steinhoff, “A Feminized Church? The Campaign for Women’s Suffrage in Alsace-Lorraine’s Protestant Churches, 1907–1914,” Central European History 38, no. 2 (2005): 218–49; James F. McMillan, “Religion and Gender in Modern France: Some Reflections,” in Religion, Society, and Politics in France since 1789, ed. Frank Tallet and Nicholas Atkin, 55–66 (London, 1991).

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on female religious orders investigated the proliferation of vocations among women that resulted in female religious significantly outnumbering male by the end of the century.42 From an argument about numbers, however, historians have slipped with undue ease to an argument about culture, and the feminization of religion has become, according to Langlois, a sort of “linguistic tic” whose meaning is increasingly diffuse.43 A “feminized Catholicism” in France by the nineteenth century was not only a religion characterized by large numbers of women in pews and in convents but also one marked by sentimental forms of devotion that rational and autonomous bourgeois men presumably found repellent. Obsession with the Virgin Mary and a host of adolescent girl-saints and visionaries, worship of an androgynous Christ, the cultivation of tears, and a fascination with victimhood, the whole package represented by artists trained in the pretty but utterly unchallenging style of mass-produced religious imagery—this was a church that offered only a profoundly feminized piety.44 The slippage from numbers to culture in the scholarship of the feminization of religion tends to maintain Michelet’s history, only purged of its overt misogyny. It raises a whole series of questions that historians have only begun to pose. Was the connection between female numbers and devotional culture really that close? Did men need a muscular Christ, and were only women drawn to worship the Virgin and child?45 How much can we properly conclude about male de-Christianization from patterns of attendance at Mass?46 The historians’ feminized Catholicism relies on Michelet’s trope

42. Fernand Boulard et al., Matériaux pour l’histoire religieuse du peuple français, 4 vols. (Paris, 1982–2011); Ralph Gibson, A Social History of French Catholicism (New York, 1989), esp. chap. 6; and Claude Langlois, Le Catholicisme au féminin: Les Congrégations françaises à supérieure générale au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1984). 43. Claude Langlois, “Le Catholicisme au féminin revisité” in Femmes dans la cité, 1815–1871, ed. Alain Corbin et al., 139–49, 141 (Paris, 1997). 44. Ford, Divided Houses, chap. 4; Richard D. E. Burton, Holy Tears, Holy Blood: Women, Catholicism, and the Culture of Suffering in France, 1840–1870 (Ithaca, NY, 2004); and Rudolph Bell and Cristina Mazzoni, The Voices of Gemma Galgani: The Life and Afterlife of a Modern Saint (Chicago, 2003). 45. Carol E. Harrison, “Zouave Stories: Gender, Catholic Spirituality and French Responses to the Roman Question,” Journal of Modern History 79, no. 2 (2007): 274–305; Paul Seeley, “O Sainte Mère: Liberalism and the Socialization of Catholic Men in Nineteenth-Century France,” Journal of Modern History 70, no. 4 (1998): 862–91; and Raymond A. Jonas, France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart: An Epic Tale for Modern Times (Berkeley, 2000). 46. Gibson, Social History, 185–86, cautions against interpreting declining numbers at Mass as de-Christianization. Low levels of practice in the late eighteenth century, he argues, reflected a rural rejection of the austerities of urban-focused Tridentine Catholicism, while male nonattendance in the nineteenth century reflected distaste for clerical association of family limitation with male sin. See also Martine Sevegrand, Les Enfants du bon Dieu: Les catholiques français et la procréation au XXe siècle (Paris, 1995), chap. 1.

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of a God that has changed sex and on the highly questionable assumption that nineteenth-century men and women both looked for self, rather than other, when they turned to God. Michelet and the historians agree that Catholicism really was feminized, both in its numbers and in its forms of expression, and that women did persist in their religiosity in defiance of an increasingly secular world. Michelet’s explicit contempt for female devotion is missing from contemporary scholarship, but these researchers often understand themselves to be analyzing nineteenth-century women from the same postreligious vantage point that Michelet claimed for republican men. Adopting Michelet’s notion of a feminized Catholicism fails to account for the fact that republican anticlericals of the nineteenth century wrote political polemic, not sociological description. A feminized religion served a political purpose for Michelet and for later French anticlerical politicians: it protected the masculinity of politics and especially of the republican tradition, and it justified the exclusion of women from full citizenship.47 Michelet and many of his contemporaries responded to the disturbing persistence of religious devotion in the modern world by feminizing it, a move that contained, if it did not eliminate, the threat. The association between bourgeois women’s domesticity and religion in the nineteenth century was not simply descriptive. Rather, it was an argument intended to disenfranchise precisely those women of the educated, property-owning classes who but for their sex might easily have fit into liberal notions of citizenship. That Michelet did not call on women to emancipate themselves from their priests was neither accidental nor coincidental because his purpose was not to create autonomous women but rather to protect and celebrate the autonomy of men.

Tracing the Romantic Catholics Turning our attention away from the masculine, republican tradition and toward romantic Catholics reveals possibilities that Michelet did not wish to explore. First, and most obviously, the romantic Catholics included men who saw no conflict between their gender and their faith and who were not persistently apologizing or compensating for their membership in a “feminine” church. Romantic Catholics thought profoundly about how their gender inflected their religious duty and how their faith transformed their lives as men and women. They assumed, however, that Catholic faith united men

47. Charles Sowerwine, “The Sexual Contract(s) of the Third Republic,” French History and Civilization: Papers from the George Rudé Seminar 1 (2005): 245–53.

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and women. They also rejected the notion that religion belonged exclusively in a private sphere of family and home: Catholicism, they maintained, was not a faith that one could leave at home before entering the realm of politics or the market. Attending to romantic Catholicism, then, suggests paths not taken in the development of church and state relations in modern France. Broadly speaking, the chapters of Romantic Catholics follow a Catholic life course: chapters 1 and 2 examine childhood, chapters 3 and 4 focus on issues of adult autonomy, and chapters 5 and 6 consider the individual’s political and social obligations to others. Taken together, these accounts of Catholics growing up, learning independence, and assuming the responsibilities of adulthood also trace the disappointment of a generation of progressive Catholics. Their hope for a synthesis between faith and modernity—a Catholicism that could make its peace with the modern political order and a French state that would welcome the participation of Catholics—ended in frustration. By the end of the nineteenth century, members of this Catholic generation who had denied that two Frances were the unavoidable legacy of the Revolution witnessed both Catholics and republicans adopting the rhetoric of these two camps. Romantic Catholics opens with an examination of Catholic children in a pair of chapters on girls and boys growing up to become members of the faith. As Robert Orsi has observed in his work on the formation of modern American Catholic identity, in the age of the Virgin Mary, children were central to the Catholic community because they anchored a family’s faith.48 As the future of the church, children were also its peril—they might easily fail in their duty to become devout adults and transmit the faith to future generations. The French Revolution, which in many areas suspended Catholic teaching and worship for a decade, made that danger quite clear to devout Catholics. They entered the nineteenth century with a pressing sense of mission that focused particularly on children; the rising generation had to recoup the losses of a decade without baptisms, catechisms, or communions. Catholic childhoods were thus fraught with significance for the future of the church. Children had to learn the tenets of their religion, and that education required adults to articulate their beliefs and their expectations for the future of the church. Chapter 1 explores first communion, the rite of the church that marked children’s arrival at the age of reason and welcomed them as full members

48. Robert Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton, 2005), 77.

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into the community of Christ’s church. Observance of first communion remained at remarkably high levels across the nineteenth century—even as French men and women opted out of other sacraments such as marriage or last rites, they nonetheless continued to mark their children’s development by sending them to catechism and dressing them in white gowns or black suits to receive the Eucharist. Although communion rates were high for both boys and girls, the sacrament became increasingly prominent in the life stories of girls. The Eucharist was the fulcrum on which girls’ lives turned and the point from which their futures were determined. The communion experiences of Léopoldine Hugo, daughter of the famous novelist, and Marguerite Guyon, heroine of a best-selling girls’ novel, Le Journal de Marguerite, are at the center of this chapter. Léopoldine and Marguerite represent the two poles around which stories of girls’ communions circulated. For both girls, first communion was, as the cliché went, the most beautiful day of their lives. Receiving the Eucharist for the first time in 1836 was the highlight of Léopoldine Hugo’s life in part because it was to be so short; she died just a few days after her nineteenth birthday. Remembering twelve-year-old Léopoldine in her long communion dress and veil as she appeared in a painting made to commemorate the event was a comfort to her grieving parents. Dressed in white and prepared to receive the body of Christ, she represented purity itself and an assurance of heaven for the intimate circle of her family. Le Journal de Marguerite, Victorine Monniot’s 1858 novel that was a staple of French girlhood until the First World War, presented first communion in a very different light. Marguerite prepared her catechism as her family traveled the world, and she received the sacrament on the island of Réunion. Her entry into Christian adulthood emphasized that the family of Catholics was a global one, and first communion opened Marguerite’s life to issues facing Catholics around the world. Where the Eucharist prepared Léopoldine for an early death, it invited Marguerite into a world of adventure. Unlike Léopoldine or Marguerite, Maurice de Guérin spent most of his childhood in school, and the next chapter follows him through his years as a boarding pupil at the Catholic Collège Stanislas in Paris. Maurice received his first communion at school, but because boys’ education was more formal and extensive than girls’, school-related milestones rather than sacraments increasingly defined boys’ entry into the adult world. Maurice was the son of an impoverished legitimist nobleman from the south of France who sent his son to an elite Catholic boarding school in the hope of setting him up for a successful clerical career. Maurice ultimately disappointed his father, abandoning his vocation during his teen years and turning to poetry instead of the

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priesthood. During his years in school, however, Maurice absorbed Stanislas’s ethos, which, in spite of its headmaster’s reactionary politics, emphasized fraternal affection among pupils rather than patriarchal authority. Maurice was so steeped in the importance of a family of schoolboy brothers that he sought out similar social arrangements in the uncertain years following his graduation. Instead of striking out as an independent adult man to establish his own career and eventually found his own family, he joined the scholarly and quasi-monastic community that surrounded Félicité de Lamennais. Lamennais’s Breton estate at La Chênaie was home to an assembly of young men who wanted to participate in the project of creating a dynamic Catholic theology for the modern world. They were dedicated to the belief that Catholicism did not need to recover its Old Regime alliance with the monarchy—Catholics should instead look to their faith’s nineteenth-century future. Maurice’s Catholic education prepared him for this enterprise, and he was eager to place brotherhood at the center of his life while postponing career, marriage, and fatherhood. Chapters 3 and 4 consider Catholic adulthood and questions of autonomy; they examine the situation of Catholic men and women who sought to exert independent judgment while remaining obedient to their church. Catholic enfants du siècle reached adulthood in the aftermath of their own 1830 revolution, which challenged their confidence that they could move beyond conservative fears of a repetition of the de-Christianization of the 1790s to integrate their faith into the modern world. For many Catholics, particularly of the generation with firsthand memories of the Revolution of 1789, the anticlericalism of July 1830 was evidence—if further evidence were necessary!—of the dangers that political innovation posed to religious faith. For youthful, optimistic, and romantic Catholics, however, 1830 demonstrated the risks of looking backward: if Catholics insisted that their faith needed the protections of the Old Regime, then they would be forever vulnerable to revolution. The July revolution therefore made the task of creating a modern Catholicism all the more urgent. The challenge for men and women reaching adulthood in the years around 1830 was to define their independence and maturity in terms of their loyalty and deference to a church that they sought to influence but that they did not control. Chapter 3 picks up the story of Félicité de Lamennais’s influence on French Catholics as it follows the passage to adulthood of Charles de Montalembert. Like Maurice de Guérin, Montalembert was the son of a legitimist aristocratic family—in fact he had been born in London during the emigration. Montalambert also joined Lamennais, although instead of moving to Brittany with Guérin, he joined the staff of Lamennais’s newspaper, L’Avenir,

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which began printing shortly after the July revolution of 1830. Montalembert was swept away by the prospect of shaping a new postrevolutionary Catholicism—barely twenty, he was already a public figure and a prominent defender of the interests of the church. He used the platform of L’Avenir to argue that Catholicism should embrace liberty: because the church had truth on its side, it did not need the protection of temporal kings. Montalembert was devastated when Pope Gregory XVI condemned Lamennais’s teaching, first in 1832 and then, more definitively, in 1834. Gregory’s encyclicals provoked a major crisis in Montalembert’s life. Should he maintain the autonomous political judgment that he had so recently won and of which he was so proud? Or should he set aside his reason and his convictions and embrace obedience? Montalembert’s efforts to combine the citizen’s independent judgment with the Catholic’s humble submission to authority encapsulated the difficulties of Catholicism for many postrevolutionary men. Pauline Craven similarly found herself torn between obligation and independence, and her best-selling memoir, Le Récit d’une sœur, is the subject of chapter 4. Craven, née de la Ferronnays, was a close friend of Montalembert, who appears in her memoir, but her quandary was different from his because the factor limiting her autonomy was the expectation that self-abnegation should characterize Catholic women. Embracing a writing career and delivering the women of her own family, especially her sisters and her sister-inlaw, to the reading public was hardly consonant with this self-effacing ideal. Even members of her beloved family opposed her publishing career. Craven resolved this impasse by presenting her sisters as modern saints whose lives needed to be rescued from their own modesty in order to fulfill their exemplary potential. In the pages of Craven’s memoir, the La Ferronnays women appeared as Catholics whose faith was fully integrated into a modern subjectivity. Their religion was introspective and it constituted the foundation of their sense of self. Their sanctity had nothing to do with miracle working or the supernatural. Their achievement, rather, was to live as Christian women in the modern world, fully engaged both with their surroundings and with their God. The chapter on Pauline Craven shifts between the 1830s and ’40s, when she and her siblings reached adulthood, and the 1860s, when Le Récit d’une sœur appeared in print. Readers identified with her heroines and wrote movingly to Craven of their own efforts to develop an autonomous self while abandoning agency to God. They also suggested that Craven shared her sisters’ sanctity and that she, too, needed rescuing from her own self-effacement. Chapters 5 and 6 address the relationship between the believing Catholic and the wider community, focusing on the postrevolutionary generation’s arrival at maturity. The individuals at the center of these chapters find

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themselves established in marriages, families, and careers, and their personal responsibilities encouraged their broader interest in their Christian obligation to others. The revolution of 1848 set the tone for this stage of romantic Catholic development. The revival of democratic political demands alongside a new articulation of the role of social class led Catholics to consider the question of faith in the modern world as a collective issue, not merely as a problem for individuals faced with church authority. The “social question” and the “Roman Question”—the two issues that dominated Catholic thought in the following decades—both emerged out of 1848, and they led both women and men to reconsider the appropriate relationship between faithful Catholics and the communities in which they lived. Frédéric Ozanam, the focus of chapter 5 and the founder of the lay Catholic charitable Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, was a prominent Catholic republican in 1848 when he articulated a Christian response to the social question. In his youth Ozanam enjoyed the same mennaisian-influenced Catholic fraternity as Maurice de Guérin and Charles de Montalembert, and the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul grew out of his desire to remain connected to that world of bachelor male friends. Marriage to Amélie Soulacroix transformed Ozanam’s sense of his obligations, however, and led him to reconsider his rapport with the society in which he lived. In 1848 Ozanam was a husband and a new father, and he had just returned from an extended family trip to Rome, where he and Amélie had been inspired by the newly elected pope, Pius IX. He welcomed the 1848 revolution, confident that the absence of anticlerical violence marked a turning point in the relationship between France’s republican tradition and the Catholic Church. Catholics, he believed, could participate in the work of the new republic by directing it toward a social mission that drew on charitable traditions infused with a modern sense of justice and democracy. Although his optimism that 1848 might resolve the social question proved misguided, Ozanam’s confidence that attention to social justice could inject the church with a new energy and dynamism made him a crucial forerunner of fin de siècle social Catholicism. Chapter 6 focuses on the demise of the Papal States and the problem of a Catholic polity. The Roman Question—the Italian Risorgimento’s threat to the territorial sovereignty of the papacy in the 1850s and ’60s—posed a quandary to Catholics worldwide: Were the Papal States an archaic remnant of the Catholic Old Regime, or were they the necessary center of a resurgent faith? This chapter reconnects with the lives and the friendship of Pauline Craven and Charles de Montalembert, now entering old age. Craven, who lived primarily in Italy in the 1860s, experienced the Roman Question as a source of intense suffering. She declared herself an Italian nationalist as well

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as a devout Catholic, and she believed that a truly forward-looking church would find a way to champion the nationalist ambitions of its flock and embrace the emerging Italian nation-state. She felt betrayed by Montalembert, who, in contrast, asserted that Italians should be content with harboring the throne of Saint Peter and should not demand citizenship in a modern, secular state. Pius IX’s growing intransigence restored the harmony between the two friends and forced them both to reassess their relationship to the Roman leadership of their church. Pius’s 1864 Syllabus of Errors rejected any form of compromise with the modern world, and it laid the groundwork for the proclamation of papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council in 1870, which both Craven and Montalembert opposed. The church’s last-ditch efforts to hold on to a Catholic polity led both these aging romantics to question their place in the world of the Catholic faithful. The romantic image of a re-Christianized, forward-looking and outwardly directed France never materialized, and romantic efforts to reinvent their church in cooperation with Rome were ultimately disappointed. The romantic Catholic idea was squeezed from both sides: after midcentury, the church and the French state both became increasingly committed to alienating each other. The final two chapters of Romantic Catholics speak to this disappointment. Ozanam’s effort in 1848 to open the church to the lower classes and to incorporate a new concept of social justice into Catholic identity foundered on the bourgeois fears of the June Days. The Roman Question definitively demonstrated the entrenched antagonism between church and state in the post-1848 period. Craven and Montalembert, who, in different ways, hoped for a resolution of tensions between the modern nation-state and the Roman church, found themselves part of an increasingly small minority. Between anticlerical Italian national sentiment and a church moving in the direction of papal infallibility, the two surviving romantic Catholics felt friendless, as if the optimism of their youth had dissolved as they aged. The combined intransigence of church and state produced a flattened, simplified image of Catholic devotion that was widely disseminated in Third Republic France: the Catholic woman, stubbornly holding on to her atavistic faith. Conservative Catholics appreciated the image of the pious woman who represented the weakness of the church and the constant threat of victimization; casting the believer as a woman satisfied many Catholics that the church was like the constant wife, suffering unjust abuse at the hands of men. Republican anticlericals similarly invoked the female believer; she represented the irrationality and the intractable foolishness of women’s affections. The romantic era’s focus on Catholic fraternity and on a faith lived as an integral part of modern life by men, women, and children had disappeared.

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In its place stood the devout woman who threatened the republic with her stubborn attachment to the archaic tenets of faith and her loyalty to her priests. The republican desire to protect secular, masculine politics and the conservative Catholic rejection of postrevolutionary modernity converged to produce this stock character of the Third Republic. Romantic Catholics concludes with a brief epilogue on the origins of this imaginary Catholic woman of the Third Republic. It presents the empress Eugénie and Sister Marie Elisabeth, heroine of Victorine Monniot’s sequel to Le Journal de Marguerite, as exemplars of the narrowing of options for Catholics that characterized the Third Republic. Republican accounts of the Second Empire blamed the empress, whose Catholicism was allegedly as Spanish as she was, for French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. The republicans’ Eugénie, superstitiously concerned with divine judgment and ignorant of political reality, demanded that French troops support the pope’s temporal sovereignty in Rome, and her nagging left France disarmed in the face of Prussian ambition. Sister Marie Elisabeth emerged from Monniot’s Catholic imagination, but she also represented the irrationality of devout women. Sister Marie Elisabeth was, in fact, Marguerite, the little girl who received her first communion in the novel that is the focus of chapter 1. Monniot wrote Marguerite’s sequel in the midst of the Roman Question, and her anger at France’s betrayal of the pope fueled the story. Although the first novel clearly set up a marriage plot for its heroine, in the sequel Monniot sabotaged her own story line. The little girl who had charmed readers with her embrace of the world and all its possibilities enters adulthood by retreating to a convent and renouncing that youthful enthusiasm. Not surprisingly, the sequel never enjoyed the popularity of the first novel. Nonetheless, Sister Marie Elisabeth was always lurking behind Marguerite, just as Eugénie “the Catholic” was the power behind Napoleon III’s throne. Romantic Catholics hoped for a church in which devout women and men could share their loyalty between Rome and France without conflict. They wanted to be active participants in their church, using their experience as laymen and women to guide its relationship to modern states and the industrial economy. They also wanted to mediate between their church and France’s revolutionary tradition and to convince their fellow citizens that the modern state would benefit by acknowledging that religion created bonds between people that formed society and made the social fabric more than a mere aggregation of liberal individuals. The society that romantics imagined would have been modeled on human ties that ordinary laity enjoyed: fraternal friendship and affectionate families would have provided the patterns for Christian community. The sacramental ties that sanctified the love, respect,

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and obedience that bound together husband and wife or parents and children would have tied French citizens together in a common purpose as well. Their hope for a synthesis between faith and modernity—a Catholicism that could make its peace with the modern political order and a French state that would welcome the participation of Catholics—ended in frustration. The aspirations of this romantic generation remind us, however, that between the Revolution’s de-Christianizing policies and the official anticlericalism of the Third Republic, other possibilities for church and state as well as for believers and citizens existed. That there would be two Frances, confronting one another in a sullen hostility that shaped family and political life across the nineteenth century, was by no means inevitable.

 Ch ap ter 1 First Communion The Most Beautiful Day in the Lives and Deaths of Little Girls

In August 1835, Léopoldine Hugo, eldest child of the writer Victor Hugo and his wife Adèle, sat for her father’s friend, the painter Auguste de Châtillon, to have her portrait made. Léopoldine was eleven and preparing for her first communion; the portrait shows a serious young girl looking up from her study of a medieval book of hours. Her dark hair, smoothed back from a central part, contrasts with her red dress, which looks like a pinafore, worn over a white blouse with full sleeves and a lace collar. She is the studious child of a bourgeois family, ensconced in a comfortably upholstered armchair and intent on her book until interrupted by the artist. However, the bright red flower that holds back her hair and the earring dangling against her neck both suggest that Léopoldine is on the verge of womanhood, and she appears distinctly older than in drawings her mother made during the same period. Her book opens to an image of the Dormition of the Virgin, a reminder that as a catechumen, Léopoldine was learning the appropriate models of Christian life, especially the Virgin. A few months later Châtillon produced an accompanying portrait of her mother, which featured Adèle Hugo in a similar pose with her dark hair also highlighted by a flower.1 The two portraits together display what should 1. Léopoldine’s portrait is at the Musée Victor Hugo, Paris, and Adèle’s is at the Musée Victor Hugo in Villequier and is reproduced in Elisabeth Chirol, Le Musée Victor Hugo de Villequier 28

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have been Léopoldine’s future; poised on the edge of womanhood, she looks toward her mother and the Virgin, exemplars of marriage, maternity, and a peaceful death, all in the arms of the church. In fact, Léopoldine Hugo died young, drowned in a boating accident in September 1843, just a few months after her marriage. Her grieving mother

Figure 1.1. Auguste de Châtillon, Léopoldine au livre d’heures (1835), Maison de Victor Hugo, Paris. Photographer: Roger-Viollet. The Image Works. Reproduced with permission.

(Villequier, Fr., 1982). Pierre Georgel, Léopoldine Hugo, une jeune fille romantique, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1968), pl. XV, 112–14, 118. For Adèle Hugo’s contemporary drawing of Léopoldine, see pl. XI.

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saved a scrap from the red dress Léopoldine wore for her portrait and framed it with her own drawing of Léopldine at twelve, made during the summer when her daughter received her first communion.2 Léopoldine joined a line of tragic girls who died young and whose first communion ceremony became the focus of the cult of memory that surrounded them. The little girl in her communion dress, kneeling to receive the sacrament, was an intensely charged symbol of the role of the sacred in daily life; waiting to enter into womanhood, the child in her white gown might never leave the innocence of youth.3 First communion remained a relevant ceremony throughout the nineteenth century, with most children receiving it even as observance of other sacraments declined. As the century progressed, however, representations of first communion increasingly featured girls rather than boys. A little girl, hesitating at a fork in the road that might lead her either to Christian womanhood or to a saintly and early death, resonated with Catholic audiences. The Eucharist reminded girls of the limits of their existence, particularly of the need to prepare for their deaths. Entering adulthood, girls accepted the heavy responsibility for their own souls and for the souls of their loved ones, especially of their future families; receiving Christ in the Eucharist, they also prepared themselves to stand before God after death. To assume responsibility for the state of one’s soul and to minister to others was not necessarily restrictive, however, because it might be the prelude to an active Christian life rather than a tragic early death. First communion also opened the world to girls, promising them lives of Christian adventure. First communion was a central episode in children’s fiction, where it often represented the moment when a child achieved the maturity to recognize himself or herself as a member of a community. Stories of the early nineteenth century focused on overcoming childish willfulness, and the boys and girls of these stories were received at the communion altar only when they had acknowledged their obligations to others and demonstrated that they were ready to live in Christian society. The little girl as the heroine of firstcommunion stories emerged after midcentury, especially in the best-selling girls’ novel Le Journal de Marguerite. The story presents its heroine with both possible outcomes of her first communion—a saintly death and a Christian life—and Marguerite chooses the latter. Le Journal de Marguerite sets its

2. The picture, with the scrap of fabric and a line from Victor Hugo’s Contemplations, is in the collection of the Musée Victor Hugo, Paris. 3. See Laura Kreyder, La Passion des petites filles: Histoire de l’enfance féminine de la Terreur à Lolita (Arras, Fr., 2003) on the nineteenth-century fascination with dead and dying girls.

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heroine up for a life of Christian engagement with the world; Marguerite’s piety does not doom her to a cloistered future. The juxtaposition of communion stories like Marguerite’s with the experiences of Catholic girls like Léopoldine Hugo reveals the family as a sacred institution in the romantic imagination. Little girls kneeling at the communion rail became their families’ link to heaven.

Léopoldine and Her Contemporaries The Hugo family in the 1830s was conventionally Catholic, at least where its children were concerned. In the 1820s, Victor Hugo had burst onto the literary scene as an enormously talented young royalist, and although Catholicism typically accompanied support for the Bourbons, Hugo’s relationship to the church and its sacraments had never been particularly orthodox. Followers of Félicité de Lamennais imagined Hugo leading the literary wing of Catholic revival, and Lamennais himself helped Hugo overcome certain stumbling blocks to his Catholic marriage to Adèle Foucher in 1822. The poet, born in 1802 and never baptized, needed a confession certificate, which Lamennais offered him without (according to Adèle’s memoirs) hearing his confession.4 Like other young romantics, Hugo felt as if he “had been born on top of the still-warm graves of the Revolution,” and his generation’s task was to restore the aesthetic necessity of the sacred.5 Literature that aspired to be modern had to reject cold Enlightenment rationalism and address religious themes. Ultimately, however, Hugo was not willing to enlist poetry in the service of any other cause, and by the 1830s he had begun to distance himself from his earlier embrace of the church. Hugo’s own growing alienation from the church did not change his daughter’s religious obligations at all. It was one thing for the great poet to adopt a negligent attitude toward the sacraments, but it was an entirely different matter for his daughter. Léopoldine began preparations for her first communion a year in advance, going to weekly catechism classes in Paris. In the summer of 1836, Madame Hugo and the four children moved to Fourqueux, a village just outside Paris, for the holidays. The location was convenient for Victor Hugo, who was dividing his time between his family and his mistress, Juliette Drouet, and the Hugo children enjoyed having the

4. Jean-Marc Hovasse, Victor Hugo, vol. 1, Avant l’exil (1802–1851) (Paris, 2001), 234–37; Louis Le Guillou, “Victor Hugo, Lamennais et Montalembert jusqu’aux Paroles d’un croyant,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 6 (1986): 988–98. 5. Emanuel Godo, Victor Hugo et Dieu: Bibliographie d’une âme (Paris, 2001), 16, 27.

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run of the forest of Marly. Pierre Foucher, Léopoldine’s devout maternal grandfather, was there, and he arranged for the parish priest to visit regularly and instruct his granddaughter; “we are stewing in devotion,” Adèle Hugo wrote. Léopoldine was supposed to receive communion in August along with the village children, but the event was postponed. Although the reasons for the delay are not clear, Louise Bertin, a family friend whom the Hugo children adored, approved of the arrangement. Léopoldine seemed “very young for such a serious act”; the child’s hastily scribbled and poorly spelled letters suggested that she was not yet ready for Holy Communion. Bertin advised Léopoldine to look to her grandfather’s pious example and to be more attentive to her grammar.6 Léopoldine’s first communion, which finally took place in September 1836, was a grand affair. Auguste de Châtillon attended and painted the scene. In his painting, the Gothic architecture overwhelms the participants and observers in the service, whom the viewer sees from behind as they all face the altar. Châtillon has omitted most of the family and friends who came to see Léopoldine receive the sacrament—Théophile Gautier was there, and perhaps also Alexandre Dumas as well as various cousins, but only Victor Hugo is really identifiable, seated in profile on the right of the canvas. Léopoldine, wearing a full-skirted white dress and a long, diaphanous veil, kneels before the priest. Receiving first communion alone, rather than in a procession of other children, was unusual, and Châtillon composed his painting so as to emphasize Léopoldine’s solitary presence at the altar. After the ceremony, the family and their guests returned home for a celebratory dinner where Léopoldine sat next to the priest and maintained her solemn demeanor. The celebration cost nearly two hundred francs and left her mother cross and tired of entertaining. As soon as Châtillon could finish his painting of the grand day, Adèle wrote, she was closing her home to all guests.7 Victor Hugo had already invoked his daughter’s faith in a long poem, “La Prière pour tous,” published in Les Feuilles d’automne in 1831. Hugo conjures his daughter’s prayer, confident that no one is better able to pray for the wicked of the world, beginning with her father, who has sacrificed innocence for experience and needs her prayer to relieve his burden of knowledge

6. Louise Bertin to Léopoldine Hugo, July 11, 1836, in Correspondance de Léopoldine Hugo, ed. Pierre Georgel (Paris, 1976), 121. On catechism, see Paul Broutin, “Le mouvement catéchistique en France au XIXe siècle,” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 82, nos. 5, 6, 7 (May–June 1960): 494–512, 607–32, 699–715. 7. Alfred Asseline, Victor Hugo intime: Mémoires, correspondances, documents inédits (Paris, 1885), chap. 4, and Georgel, Léopoldine Hugo, 160–63.

Figure 1.2. Auguste de Châtillon, Léopoldine Hugo’s first communion (1836), Maison de Victor Hugo, Paris. Photographer: Roger-Viollet. The Image Works. Reproduced with permission.

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and sin. Beyond the Hugo household, Léopoldine’s communion prayer embraces suffering strangers: the wretched blasphemer, the prostitute, and the dead buried below the surface of the earth. Hugo ends by addressing his daughter’s guardian angel, asking that Léopoldine’s innocence be protected even as she enters womanhood. Wrapped in the angel’s “azure wings,” his daughter can be spared “false desires, false joy / Lies and passion.” The Léopoldine invoked in Hugo’s poem epitomizes romanticism’s fascination with the redemptive potential of the innocent child: “If anyone today can pray for the wicked earth, it’s you. . . . Your innocent prayer, my child, can nurture others.”8 As Hugo shifted his concept of the sacred away from the church and toward “the people,” children emerged as the wellspring of the sacred, and his own child’s prayer sanctified the daily life of his household.9 The poem’s image of the child’s prayer redeeming adult sins had specific resonance in Léopoldine’s communion ceremony, since the celebration did not erase even temporarily the strains in the Hugo marriage. Indeed, Léopoldine carried the signs of her parents’ marital failures with her to the communion rail. Madame Hugo gave her daughter a gold chain to wear for the event; it had been a gift from her lover, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, a literary colleague of her husband. She added a crucifix to the chain and wrote Sainte-Beuve that the ornament was “a reminder of the two of us.” According to a persistent legend, Léopoldine’s white dress had been made from the fabric of a gown that had belonged to her father’s lover, Juliette Drouet. Hugo’s biographer, Jean-Marc Hovasse, notes that the “mystic marriage of Victor Hugo and Juliette” and “the religious union of Sainte-Beuve and Adèle” shadowed Léopoldine’s reception into the church.10 Châtillon’s image of Léopoldine kneeling alone at the altar as her parents watch from opposite sides of the church seems particularly poignant in light of Hugo’s poem and her parents’ infidelities. Instead of receiving communion with a host of other girls, Léopoldine alone bears the weight of uniting the divided family. Léopoldine Hugo’s conventional religious education and communion ceremony sustained the Hugo family’s ties to the church and to the thousands of other Catholic families who sent their children to the altar each year. Even as her parents strained their most intimate ties to the breaking point, they nonetheless valued their identity as a Catholic family, bound by sacramental

8. Victor Hugo, “La Prière pour tous” in Les Feuilles d’automne, 3rd ed., vol. 2 (Paris, 1832), 143–82, my translation. 9. Godo, Victor Hugo et Dieu, 56–62. 10. Hovasse, Victor Hugo, 677.

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ties. Léopoldine’s reception of the Eucharist, represented in paint and poetry, referred to other sacraments that created family—her parents’ marriage, her own future marriage—as well as to other, shadow, relationships, unconfessed and without sacramental blessing, that threatened family unity. An innocent daughter, kneeling in prayer, could redeem the household. “Go pray, my daughter,” is the refrain of Hugo’s poem; Léopoldine’s prayers spoke to God on behalf of her parents and other sinners. Thousands of little girls and boys received first communion every year in nineteenth-century France, and in some ways Léopoldine Hugo’s experience was atypical. Her father’s celebrity meant that his daughter’s communion was more elaborate than that of her peers; most girls did not have their reception of the sacrament commemorated by famous painters and poets. Léopoldine, however, was “Mademoiselle Victor Hugo,” and so she approached the altar for the first time on her own and with greater fanfare than the other children who also made their first communion in 1836. Nonetheless, admission to Holy Communion was a universal sacrament of the Roman Catholic Church, and the church’s intentions and expectations shaped Léopoldine’s experience just like that of any twelve-year-old. Léopoldine Hugo prepared for and embarked upon her life as a faithful Catholic in ways that were recognizable to thousands of French families. First communion was an obvious and nearly universal example of the church’s relevance and adaptation to the modern world, and practically all French children received the sacrament during the nineteenth century. Even as Easter communion figures dropped, families continued to send their children to catechism, and Léopoldine Hugo was hardly the only child whose family lavished attention on the event in spite of not being particularly devout. The ceremony was immensely popular in postrevolutionary France: after the initial reestablishment of Catholic worship in 1795, Parisian parishes each Sunday between Easter and Pentecost routinely offered the sacrament to thousands of communicants who had missed the occasion during the de-Christianizing years.11 This pent-up demand for first communion produced long lines and overwhelmed parishes. Revolutionaries had attempted to replace other Catholic sacraments, creating new rituals for marriage and death, for instance, but there was no revolutionary equivalent for first communion.12 Demand for it remained high across the nineteenth century; in

11. Jean Delumeau, introduction to La Première Communion: Quatre siècles d’histoire, ed. Jean Delumeau, 11–12 (Paris, 1987). 12. Although the catechism was mobilized for political purposes. Adrian Velicu, Civic Catechisms and Reason during the French Revolution (Burlington, VT, 2010).

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1890, 85 percent of children in the Paris suburbs, an area of low levels of religious practice, received their first communion.13 Anticlerical republicans generally had little to say about first communion; they apparently recognized that there was nothing to be gained by attacking a ceremony to which many of their constituents remained attached. A year after Léopoldine, Jules Michelet’s daughter Adèle also approached the altar, and her father recorded his tender pride in his journal: “Marvelous celebration. The veil: she seems like a woman. The girls sang by themselves. Sweetness and power of such a pure and emotional group.”14 Michelet famously mistrusted priests’ influence over women, but the sight of his daughter kneeling at the altar produced none of the misgivings about irrational female Catholicism that he would record in his 1845 Du prêtre, de la femme, et de la famille. Toward the end of the century, the socialist leader Jean Jaurès justified permitting his daughter to make her first communion: women, he explained, could not yet imagine a foundation for “a moral life” outside Christianity, and even socialists should allow them to pursue their devotions rather than threaten the ethical foundation of the family. As late as the 1930s, Maurice Thorez, head of the French Communist Party, attended first-communion celebrations in working-class Paris suburbs.15 Masonic coming-of-age ceremonies, proposed as alternatives under the Third Republic, never came close to fulfilling the initiatory function of first communion.16 The processions of local youths in their grown-up suits and white dresses being received as full participants in the rites of the Catholic Church continued to meet this need to acknowledge the end of childhood and acceptance of the sacred obligations of membership in society. Neither anticlericalism nor religious indifference dramatically affected the prevalence of first communion across France. A combination of public education and Eucharistic reform eventually pushed first communion aside in the twentieth century, challenging its status as a near-universal marker of growing up. Pope Pius X’s Eucharist-centered devotion, expressed in the encyclical Quam singulari (1910), lowered the age for first communion to seven. In contrast, Léopoldine, like most girls of her era, had received the sacrament at twelve, and fourteen was not uncommon,

13. Ralph Gibson, A Social History of French Catholicism (New York, 1989), 165–66. 14. Quoted by Alain Cabantous, “Unanimité et controverse vers 1760–1910,” in Delumeau, La Première Communion, 298. 15. Jean Mellot, “Rite de passage et fête familiale. Rapprochements,” in Delumeau, La Première Communion, 189. 16. Ibid., 212.

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especially for boys.17 Pius’s intention was to integrate children more firmly into the life of the church by introducing them early to the practice of frequent communion, but a key effect of the reform was to break the connection between first communion and the end of childhood. Quam singulari was very unpopular in France, where many parishes instituted the ritual of a “communion solennelle” in the early teens to supplement the first communion.18 Confirmation, which had been a relatively minor event in the early nineteenth century, grew in importance and partially replaced first communion as a signal of incipient adulthood.19 In spite of this effort by the church to recognize the end of childhood, graduation from school increasingly replaced religious observance. Whereas during the nineteenth century a communion certificate was necessary for a child to enter the labor market, the schoolleaving certificate became the more important document in the twentieth century.20 As seven-year-old communion became a celebration of childish innocence, progress through school provided the key markers of growing up. When Léopoldine Hugo first approached the altar at age twelve, she was leaving childhood behind and entering into a new phase of life in which she bore the heavy burden of responsibility for the state of her soul. The gravity of the event shaped her preparation; catechism required children to demonstrate a mature understanding of the sacraments of the church. The French model for catechism, elaborated in the eighteenth century, was firmly in place by the first decades of the nineteenth; it emphasized the catechumen’s understanding of doctrine and deliberately set the bar for receiving communion high.21 Léopoldine and her classmates filled notebooks with carefully copied and corrected essays on subjects like the existence of God and the immortality of souls.22 In addition to their regular catechism classes, pupils also attended

17. Louis Andrieux, La Première Communion: Histoire et discipline, textes et documents, des origines au XXe siècle (Paris, 1911); Pierre Caspard, “Examen de soi-même, examen public, examen d’état: De l’admission à la Sainte-Cène aux certificats de fin d’études,” Histoire de l’Education 94 (2002): 17–74; Raymond Brodeur, “De l’Eucharistie à la première communion: Du rite cultuel à l’acte culturel,” in Rites et ritualités: Actes du congrès de théologie pratique de Strasbourg (Paris, 2000), 91–98. 18. Laurence Hérault, La Grande Communion: Transformations et actualité d’une cérémonie catholique en Vendée (Paris, 1996), chap. 1. 19. Léopoldine Hugo received confirmation a few days after her first communion; according to a letter Adèle Hugo wrote her husband, there was no need for her father to be present. Georgel, Léopoldine Hugo, 163. 20. Caspard, “Examen de soi-même,” 34–37; Mellot, “Rite de passage,” 202. 21. Andrieux, La Première Communion, 248–60; Isabelle Saint-Martin, Voir, Savoir, Croire: Catéchismes et pédagogie par l’image au XIXe siècle (Paris, 2003), 227–32. 22. Léopoldine Hugo’s “Cahiers de retraite” are at the Musée Victor Hugo de Paris (ms-2010.0.2). She wrote the early lessons carefully, but her handwriting deteriorated as catechism lessons wore on.

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a retreat immediately before the ceremony where a priest would examine his catechumens and hear confessions. For instance, boys at the Collège Stanislas, a Parisian boarding school, participated in perpetual adoration of the Holy Sacrament in place of all games and profane reading during their preparatory retreat.23 There might also be a rehearsal—sometimes in public, so as to serve as a good example to the congregation—in which those due to receive the sacrament would practice carrying their candles and placing their hands under the altar cloth. They might receive unconsecrated hosts so that they could practice consuming them completely and respectfully without chewing on them. Children preparing for communion had to learn both doctrine and gesture in order to make their bodies suitable vessels for the body of Christ. First communion was a celebration, but it was also potentially an act of sacrilege for the child who approached the altar with a conscience weighed down with sin. Making a “good” communion was not a foregone conclusion. In spite of rigorous preparation, failure was always a possibility, and the ease with which a child might make a sacrilegious communion weighed heavily on discussions of the sacrament.24 The letters that the headmaster at the Collège Stanislas wrote to parents commented on their sons’ progress toward the sacrament; he was frank in his assessment that “bad company,” “useless friendships,” and misspent vacations might make some boys unworthy of the sacrament. On the other hand, the prospect of first communion produced “a positive change of heart” in other pupils.25 Children in their catechism classes were often ranked, as in schools, with prizes for the top pupils, who would also lead the procession of their classmates into church.26 Those on the lower rungs might find their communion postponed, since it was better to delay than to approach the altar inadequately prepared. Waiting too long, however, suggested something amiss; one of the reasons that Bernadette Soubirous of Lourdes seemed like an unreliable visionary in 1858 was that at age fourteen she still had not received communion.27 A particularly promising child might be advanced a year in order to produce an even number of communicants for the procession so that no one would suffer the misfortune of

23. Retreat instructions (n.d.), Archives du Collège Stanislas (hereafter ACS), 102 ter II-2–2, “Divers exercices religieux.” 24. Peter McGrail, First Communion: Ritual, Church, and Popular Religious Identity (Burlington, VT, 2007), 15–24. 25. See Liautard’s minute book for 1809, ACS, 166: to Mme de la Rochefoucauld (p. 136, letter 948); to M d’Ayguesvives [?] (p. 88, letter 574); and to Mme Bidault (p. 135, letter 944). 26. Caspard, “Examen de soi-même,” 55–56; Andrieux, La Première Communion, 310–12; Hérault, La Grande Communion, 45–49. 27. Ruth Harris, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (New York, 1999), 50.

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approaching the altar alone.28 The stakes for getting the sacrament right were high because a “bad” communion had lasting consequences—it was like another crucifixion, in which violence was committed against the Eucharistic body of Christ.29 Punishment for a sacrilegious communion might even include demonic possession.30 Children in the postrevolutionary period had good reason to fear as well as anticipate their first communion. The second half of the nineteenth century saw a relaxation of this rigorist approach to first communion, culminating in the encyclical Quam singulari. This Eucharistic movement proposed not only to offer the sacrament to younger children but also to encourage frequent communion so that Catholics perceived the Eucharist “not [as] a reward for holiness that has been acquired, [but as] . . . a means to arrive at that holiness.”31 Priests increasingly integrated the Mass and the Eucharist so that congregations participated more fully in both the celebration and the reception of the host; communion, which previously might have occurred at any point during or even after the Mass, became the centerpiece of the Mass. Promoters of Eucharistic piety—notably Gaston de Ségur, son of the children’s writer Sophie de Ségur—recommended frequent communion in place of what they saw as the overly forbidding “Jansenist” emphasis on annual Easter communion. Monseigneur de Ségur’s book La Très Sainte Communion (1860), which sold 180,000 copies in France in its first six years, argued that priests should make it possible for Catholics to receive communion daily by lifting the requirement that the individual confess before each communion. Supporters of frequent communion like Ségur argued that constant contemplation of the Eucharist ought to guide all Catholic lives and not merely those of “elite souls”; the Eucharist was “not a reward for having achieved saintliness, but a means of maintaining oneself in grace.”32

28. Mellot, “Rite de passage,” 176–78. 29. McGrail, First Communion, 23–24. 30. In the 1790s, Sophie Barat, later the superior general of the Society of the Sacred Heart, witnessed an exorcism of a girl said to have made a bad first communion. Phil Kilroy, Madeleine Sophie Barat, 1779–1865: A Life (New York, 2000), 16. See also Delumeau, introduction, 10–11. 31. Peter J. A. Nissen, “Mobilizing the Catholic Masses through the Eucharist: The Practice of Communion from the Mid-19th Century to the Second Vatican Council,” in Bread of Heaven: Customs and Practices Surrounding First Communion, ed. Charles Caspers, Gerard Lukken, and Gerard Rouwhorts, 145–64, 147 (Kampen, Neth., 1995). According to Nissen, evidence from the Low Countries suggests that Catholics did begin receiving communion more frequently in the 1860s, although weekly communion was more common than daily. 32. Louis-Gaston de Ségur, “La Très Sainte Communion,” in Œuvres, vol. 3 (Paris, 1867), 415–79, quotation on 420–21 (emphasis in original). See also Sylviane Gresillon, “De la communion solennelle,” in Delumeau, La Première Communion, 219; McGrail, First Communion, 30–31.

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In an era when many Catholics took communion rarely (often only at Easter) the ritual of first communion was one of the few moments when the people assembled in the church saw themselves as a community defined by faith. Receiving the sacrament transformed the child into a full participant in that community. Since the eighteenth century, first communion had been a communal affair; children received the sacrament in their own parishes, from their own priests, and deviating from that practice as Léopoldine did required prior permission.33 Reception into the church was also reception into a parish, and the two lines of children—boys to the right of the altar and girls to the left—were the future of the parish. Children often had a partner with whom they approached the altar, and these “camarades de communion” served as witnesses at marriages, godparents, and even pallbearers later in life.34 For boys who received the sacrament away from home, a boarding school might substitute for the parish. At Stanislas, for instance, younger boys watched their older peers process toward the altar, and only communicants were eligible to join the school’s most desirable clubs, the Congregation and the Christian Academy, which organized prayers and debate sessions.35 Society’s next generation, linked by ties of affection, deference, and obligation, took shape as young people received the Eucharist. Symbols of adulthood confirmed the communicant’s new status in the community. Entry into the workforce, which a first-communion certificate made possible, was an obvious sign of maturity. Young people who had made their communion might also eat dinner with adults at the family table and help themselves from the serving dishes. Receiving jewelry, as Léopoldine did, was not uncommon for girls, who might also be allowed to wear their hair up or encouraged to begin sewing a trousseau. Boys, too, began dressing like adults in long trousers, and they might receive their first grown-up gift such as a watch or, later in the century, a bicycle. Léopoldine began to assert her new grown-up status after receiving the sacrament, commissioning her father to purchase novels for her, for instance. If her father refused, she wrote, Adèle should purchase them anyway, and “he’ll have to pay the bill.”36 Less than two years after her communion, Léopoldine convinced her parents to

33. Andreas Heinz, “Liturgical Rules and Popular Religious Customs Surrounding Holy Communion between the Council of Trent and the Catholic Restoration in the Nineteenth Century,” in Caspers, Lukken, and Rouwharts, Bread of Heaven, 119–43. 34. Mellot, “Rite de passage,” 176–78. 35. “La Congrégation est une réunion des jeunes gens” (n.d.), ACS, ter II-2–2. 36. Léopoldine Hugo to Adèle Hugo, 17 Oct. 1836, in Georgel, Correspondance de Léopoldine Hugo, 126.

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let her leave school, which she had never particularly liked. Although Victor Hugo’s daughter received more schooling than many girls of her age, she was not alone in believing that a girl who made a good communion had completed all the education she needed.37 Because first communion was such a significant event in young lives, it became a touchstone of memory for participants and their families. When in 1840 the young artist André Durand wanted to make a significant contribution to Mademoiselle Hugo’s album, he offered her a drawing of the rural church where she had received the sacrament four years earlier.38 Durand’s offering was a conventional gesture toward the highlight of a young girl’s life; printed souvenir communion-day prayer cards fulfilled a similar function for thousands of new communicants.39 Schools printed special cards with the names of all the boys who received communion together.40 Charles de Montalembert, who received his communion in 1822 alongside five or six hundred other boys, made a point of remembering that anniversary. He began keeping a diary in his communion year, and every year he noted the date, went to Mass, received the Eucharist, and contemplated his spiritual development, often bemoaning his loss of innocence.41 After Léopoldine’s early death, just months after her marriage, Adèle Hugo wrote a memoir of her daughter that conflated communion and marriage, focusing on the innocence of the young woman who had so tragically died. For both ceremonies, Léopoldine wore a white dress and veil, and according to Adèle, the Parisian church of St. Paul and St. Louis on the rue St. Antoine, where Léopoldine had married, had the same “rustic” air as the rural church at Fourqueux where she first received the sacrament. The same group of intimate friends attended both events, and Léopoldine had “the same aura of chastity” as a communicant and a bride: “She gave herself to her husband just as she had

37. Georgel, Correspondance de Léopoldine Hugo, 453–56. Among the French bourgeoisie, girls’ schooling was often closely associated with the sacrament. Rebecca Rogers, From the Salon to the Schoolroom: Educating Bourgeois Girls in Nineteenth-Century France (University Park, PA, 2005), 154; Christina de Bellaigue, Educating Women: Schooling and Identity in England and France, 1800–1867 (New York, 2007), 154–55; Françoise Mayeur, L’Education des filles en France au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1979), 21, 38. 38. Pierre Georgel, ed. L’Album de Léopoldine Hugo (Villequier, Fr., 1967), pl. 23, 78–79. 39. Catherine Rosenbaum, “Images-souvenirs de première Communion,” in Delumeau, La Première Communion, 133–69. 40. The Jesuit archives in Vanves contain several examples in I Pa 420, “Congrégations mariales.” 41. See the entries for May 9 in Charles de Montalembert, Journal intime inédit, vol. 2, 1830– 1833, ed. Louis Le Guillou and Nicole Roger-Taillard (Paris, 1990). See also Marguerite Castillon du Perron, Montalembert et l’Europe de son temps (Paris, 2009), 33.

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given herself to God.”42 Nostalgia was built into the first communion ceremony from the start, and communicants received the Eucharist expecting it to become a turning point of their life stories. “First communion” naturally appears in Gustave Flaubert’s midcentury compilation of bourgeois truisms, the Dictionnaire des idées reçues: “the most beautiful day of one’s life.” The cliché resonates through nineteenth-century accounts of first communion, and someone undoubtedly told Léopoldine Hugo that the late summer day in Fourqueux was and would remain the most beautiful day of her life.43 Twelve-year-old Charles de Montalembert described the event in precisely those terms, and graduates who wrote back to the Collège Stanislas in the 1870s recalled that communion had been the highpoint of their school days.44 Schoolgirls similarly anticipated what they were regularly told would be the most beautiful day of their lives, at least until they married.45 Drawing on the cliché identified the speaker as a member of the community that shared its truth—a society of individuals who had all contemplated the seriousness of the act and knelt together to receive the body of Christ.

Children’s Stories Children’s fiction offers another point of access into the cliché of first communion as the most beautiful day of one’s life. In early nineteenth-century stories, first communion was a moment when social tensions disappeared and children enacted an ideal of social coherence and harmony. Catholicism was a bulwark against a world that seemed desperately unstable and subject to revolution at any moment. As boys and girls approached the communion rail for the first time, they rejoiced in their successful moral transformation and, because they took communion with other children of all ranks, they simultaneously celebrated the achievement of Christian equality and the elimination of social strife. The years immediately following the French Revolution saw the expansion and consolidation of literary genres aimed especially at children: publishing houses specialized in the field; overall numbers grew dramatically, and

42. Quoted by Georgel, Léopoldine Hugo, 196. 43. Susan Ridgely Bales, When I Was a Child: Children’s Interpretations of First Communion (Chapel Hill, NC, 2005), 30, documents the same cliché in American catechism classes at the turn of the twenty-first century. 44. See letters from Louis Colette de Baudicourt, Aug. 9, 1879, and Louis Gaston de Sonis, May 12, 1874, ACS, 189, Dossiers d’élèves, fasicules 1825 (Baudicourt) and 1815 (Sonis). 45. Rogers, From the Salon to the Schoolroom, 154.

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tales written especially for girls or for boys gained an important share of the market. Explicitly Catholic content filled in the general outlines of these stories: childish goodness, misbehavior, and their consequences were almost unreflectively Catholic.46 Fictional children led lives punctuated by the rituals of the church, and they absorbed a view of a social order permeated by religious devotion and obligation. Although there were stories that went out of their way to present a secular or an anticlerical morality or to proselytize for the Catholic Church, the vast majority fell somewhere in between: storybook children say their prayers, put their pennies in the church alms box, learn their catechism, and make their first communion simply because those are the ordinary building blocks of childhood. Their lives, punctuated by Catholic observance, mirror the statistics indicating that first communion remained nearly universal. Catechism and communion were generic experiences for nineteenth-century French children, and Catholic morality was their default mode of storytelling. Early nineteenth-century children’s literature reflected the rigorist morality that shaped catechism in the same period. The standard for moral conduct was high, and many children who did not reach it suffered the consequences. These stories are, for the most part, strikingly simple: short moral tales in which children, often in pairs, personify various elements of virtue and vice.47 Their settings are usually vague: they could be anywhere, at any time period. Their characters tend to be single-dimensional, with each child protagonist representing a single quality, good or bad, such as docility or defiance. The plot of the story frequently centers on an isolated moment of moral transformation: the bad child learns from the example of the good child and receives a reward. Alternatively, that moral revolution fails to happen, and punishment follows—these are unforgiving stories. Characterization, setting, and even plot details are all subordinate to this moment in which fictional children reveal their true moral worth. In a sense, the protagonists of early nineteenth-century stories are all preparing for their first communion. The actual communion ceremony appears in many, although far from all, stories, but all the childish heroes and heroines face a test of their moral fiber that they may or may not

46. Jan De Maeyer, “The Concept of Religious Modernisation,” in Religion, Children’s Literature and Modernity in Western Europe, 1750–2000, ed. Jan De Maeyer et al., 41–50 (Leuven, Belg., 2005). On the expansion of children’s publishing, see Francis Marcoin, Librairie de jeunesse et littérature industrielle au XIXe siècle (Paris, 2006); Isabelle Havelange, “1650–1830: Des livres pour les demoiselles?,” Cahiers de la recherche en éducation 3 (1996): 363–76; and Annie Renonciat, Livres d’enfance, livres de France (Paris, 1998), 11–17. 47. On the moral tale for children, see Marcoin, Librairie de jeunesse, chap. 1.

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pass. One boy hero, Adolphe, walks out of church in the midst of his first communion ceremony because he has recalled an injustice against a friend for which he has not apologized, and he cannot approach the altar with the fault on his conscience.48 In a more elaborate tale, Charles, a rash and mischievous boy in spite of his catechism lessons, dares his younger brother Henri to jump a big ditch. When the wiser and more cautious Henri refuses, Charles impulsively drags his brother across, badly injuring him. When the parish priest confronts the boys, Charles shamefacedly admits that his brother, though younger, is more worthy of receiving communion. Although Charles initially fails to demonstrate the maturity that a catechumen should possess, he ultimately recognizes his fault and is willing to forgo his communion ceremony. The priest, confident that Charles has learned his lesson, admits the boys to the sacrament together, thus offering Henri the special reward of an early communion.49 Both Charles and Adolphe know that nothing could be worse or have more lasting consequences than a bad communion. The French Revolution haunted the children’s literature of the early nineteenth century, where social position was always precarious and uncertain.50 Catholic ritual, however, integrated children into a stable and coherent community. Religious practice in children’s stories acted as a sort of glue that held a social order in place and ensured that good fictional children would eventually find a safe haven. Even in a postrevolutionary world that had abolished the Old Regime society of orders, children were supposed to inherit their social status from their parents; only as adults would they take their fate into their own hands. The worlds that storybook children inherit always include the possibility of dramatic ascent or decline and fall. Catholic belief and practice, however, make the random and sometimes unfair world of children’s stories coherent. At the moment of first communion, in particular, children occupy a secure position in a society that recognizes and protects them.

48. Le Bon Génie, Aug. 1, 1824, 52. 49. A. J. Sanson, “Charles et Henri,” in La Petite Morale en action, dédiée à la jeunesse, 3rd ed. (Paris, n.d. [1820s]), 75–80. This story demonstrates how taken for granted first communion was: in spite of an anticlerical slant to the collection, whose preface argues that priestly disdain for the things of this world encourages lazy children (5–6), the author nonetheless assumes that first communion usefully disciplines children’s impulses. 50. I explore this theme at greater length in “Putting Faith in the Middle Class: Bourgeoisie, Catholicism, and Postrevolutionary France” in The Making of the Middle Class, Toward a Transnational History, ed. Barbara Weinstein and Abel Ricardo Lopez, 315–34 (Durham, NC, 2012). See also Rogers, From the Salon to the Schoolroom, 35–42.

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In the fictional worlds of French children, parents fall on hard times, die in unspecified circumstances, or simply vanish on business trips.51 Alternatively, families may happen across the obituary of a wealthy relative and inherit riches, or foundlings may discover their noble birth families and pension off their poor adoptive siblings.52 Although eventually vice and virtue will result in the appropriate rewards or punishments, children often initially find themselves in situations that they have done nothing to deserve—the positions they inherit are often precarious. Occasionally stories explicitly blame this social instability on the Revolution, as in the tale of young Corinne, whose besetting sin, pride, leads her to boast of her elevated social position only to see her parents imprisoned and executed under the Terror. Corinne herself is saved when we learn that she is in fact the daughter of a shoemaker and thus an enfant du peuple.53 Corinne becomes a good daughter to her artisan father, but she nonetheless finishes her story poor and with her adoptive parents’ death on her conscience, her fate an unending penance for childish pride. Corinne’s just deserts and the random ways of the world are both at work in this story. Many fictional children share the experience of social dislocation with Corinne even if they do not attribute their changing fortunes to revolutionary events. Receiving the Eucharist integrated children into a stable community, a process that in fiction was often represented by first-communion clothing. Communion dress was an important example of how to live in the world as a Christian: fine clothes were simultaneously a reward for good behavior, a potential occasion for conceit, a symbol of respect for the church, and an opportunity to demonstrate the equality of all believers. The ability to negotiate among these possibilities was a sign that a child had reached the age of reason necessary to receive the sacrament. Communion dress should be beautiful but not ostentatious, and the child should take care with his or her dress without becoming vain or proud. Good children resisted the egotism that followed from the excitement of a first grown-up dress or suit, and

51. See, e.g., “Le Plaisir de faire le bien: La punition du malfaiteur” and “La Docilité et la désobéissance,” in Nouveaux Contes et conseils à mes enfants à l’usage de l’adolescence (Paris, 1821), 133–55, 156–95, and Henry Muller, “La Dame,” in Innocence et vertu. Historiettes pour les adolescens des deux sexes (Paris, 1834), 24–27. 52. “Une Visite,” Journal des jeunes personnes 1 (1833): 17–28; “Pierre et Eugène ou le jeune mousse,” in Madame la comtesse d’Hautpoul, Contes et nouvelles de la Grand’mère ou le séjour au château pendant la neige, 2 vols. (Paris, 1823), 1:63–129; Muller, “La Nourrice à Paris,” in Innocence et vertu, 4–7. 53. M. Allent, Les Sept Péchés capitaux: Nouveaux contes moraux (Paris, 1823), 18–20. See also J. G. Masselin, “La Ménagère” and “La Frugalité,” in Le Monde en miniature ou les contrastes de la vie humaine (Paris, n.d.), 91–93, 100–104; and Le Bon Génie, Aug. 15, 1824.

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they recognized communion clothing as an opportunity for the practice of Christian charity. Dressing for communion was an opportunity to correct vanity and greed and to direct children’s attention toward their fellows and their place in society. Storybook girls often needed to be inoculated against vanity before they could be allowed to put on their white gowns and veils for the communion ceremony. When we first meet the heroine of Les Six Ages de Léontine, she is vain and willful, and her despairing mother has her transported in her sleep to a convent school, where she wakes up locked in her cell. The sisters take away her pink dress and pearl necklace and give her a dull gown, a black bonnet, and a cross to wear on a ribbon around her neck. A few years of this austerity reform Léontine so that she is ready to receive the Eucharist and, as her mother says, “entrer sérieusement dans la vie.”54 In another story featuring girls preparing for their communion in a boarding school, readers know immediately that Clémence is truly ready for the sacrament because she offers her dress to a classmate who has a temper tantrum because her own gown won’t be ready. Clémence, the narrator tells us, is thinking of more than keeping the peace: she is deliberately giving up her finery so as to discipline her own vanity.55 Fine communion dresses honored Jesus and his church, which meant that excessive austerity was also inappropriate. Ultimately, Clémence’s teacher won’t hear of her giving her dress to her ill-mannered classmate. Other little girls who try to forgo the fancy white dress in order to dedicate the money to charitable purposes are similarly found out and rewarded, usually with both money and a dress.56 Emma, heroine of a story illustrated with a series of paper dolls, exemplifies the appropriate attitude toward communion finery. Her communion dress is one of the outfits available for her paper doll: in addition to a long white gown, she wears a wreath of roses that her teacher and the priest offer her. They also pin her late father’s military decoration to her dress. Emma receives these ornaments, we learn, in recognition of her exceptional preparation for her communion; she should have placed at the head of the class, but because she entered school so far ahead of her classmates, she felt it would be unfair to accept the prize. Dressing and undressing

54. Les Six Ages de Léontine (Paris, n.d.), 31, 44. 55. “La Première Communion,” in L’Enfance pittoresque: Petite galerie en actions de la vie des enfans (Paris, 1842), 210. 56. See, e.g., Mlle M. V. Rousseau, “La Première Communion,” in Contes de la jeune tante, 97–109, 107 (Paris, n.d., ca. 1830); Modèles des jeunes personnes ou remarquables actions vertueuses, exemples de bonne conduite et morceaux extraits des meilleurs écrivains qui se sont occupés de l’éducation des filles, 4th ed. (Paris, 1817).

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the Emma paper doll, girls would remember that Emma deserved her pretty communion dress because of the time she spent working diligently in her simple, neat schoolgirl frock. The communion gown pointed forward as well to the last dress in the series: a lacy wedding dress for when “Emma marries well.”57 The best way for a girl to enjoy her pretty communion dress and triumph over the pitfalls of vanity was to approach the altar with identically dressed classmates, and this image of equality features in many first-communion stories.58 Léontine, who was originally so proud that she had to be confined in the convent, provides identical veils for all the village girls and walks to church with them rather than riding in a carriage. The villagers crane their necks to see her, and they are satisfied that she “will never torment the poor folk.”59 Sisters Amaglia and Pulchérie decide to provide clothing for all the poor girls in their communion class, so they set about sewing goods for sale. Amaglia wakes at dawn and sews until the light fades and her wrists ache in order to produce two beautifully embroidered dresses. Pulchérie, in contrast, turns out dozens of shoddy garters and purses that she is unable to sell even at a charity bazaar. Ashamed of her poor results, Pulchérie resolves to learn from her sister’s example. Amaglia’s profits purchase materials for twentyfour communion dresses, and the sisters end the story diligently sewing for their fellow communicants.60 Girls’ stitchery could either nourish the sin of vanity or lead them to Christian charity. A long white dress might make a girl like Eugénie, heroine of a serialized first-communion story, feel like a “young lady,” ready to dance with grown-ups, but readers knew that she would not receive the sacrament unless her vanity gave way to more charitable sentiments.61 Persistent sewing would remind her that the labor was more important than any finery she might produce. “Little girls,” one storybook mother reminds us, “don’t have very much money, and even their clothes don’t really belong to them; the only thing that they can give away is their time. If they dedicate a few hours of their spare time to working for their poor neighbors . . . that may

57. Augustin Legrand, Contes pour les enfans avec gravures découpées, vol. 1, Emma, ou la bonne petite fille (Paris, n. d. [1840s]), 14–16, doll 4 (communion) and doll 5 (marriage). 58. Gabrielle Houbre, Histoire des mères et filles (Paris, 2006), 87, notes the case of one late nineteenth-century mother who had saved her own communion dress for her daughter and was disappointed when the girl could not wear it because all her classmates dressed identically. The daughter wore her mother’s veil and carried her rosary. 59. Les Six Ages de Léontine, 49. 60. “La Sensibilité et la susceptibilité,” in Nouveaux Contes et conseils, 103–35. 61. Ernest Fouinet, “Journal d’Eugénie,” in Le Journal des jeunes personnes 9 (1833): 327–28.

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be the only act of charity within their reach.”62 Next to Christian charity, sewing was a girl’s best defense against possible reversals of fortune: the girl who could afford to purchase lace for her communion dress now might find herself sewing to clothe and feed her family in the future. In their boarding schools, between their governesses’ lessons, and in their mothers’ salons, girls stitched for the poor, and the stories they read reminded them that, while not poor, they were, like the objects of their charity, propertyless.63 Boys, too, might provide communion suits for their poorer comrades, although of course they purchased rather than sewed these clothes. In “Adolphe, ou le jeune bienfaiteur,” the hero offers a communion suit to a poor boy and finds the experience so satisfying that he encourages all his cousins to chip in to fund a good apprenticeship as well.64 The story of Eusèbe, brought up in his grandfather’s household under the avaricious housekeeper, Berthe, turns on his communion suit. Patient Eusèbe puts up with a great deal of abuse from Berthe, but he reaches the end of his rope when the housekeeper announces that he must make his communion in shabby hand-me-downs. Eusèbe confronts Berthe and appeals to his priest; it transpires that Berthe has embezzled quite a sizable fortune, so Eusèbe is able to clothe twenty other boys in suits identical to his own with the money recovered from the theft. His chastened grandfather purchases dresses for twenty girls and asks them to pray for Eusèbe’s late mother.65 For boys, greed rather than vanity was the sin that led to self-absorption and indifference to the plight of others. Boys’ moral victory usually involved giving their pocket money to the poor rather than fulfilling their own desires, as in a set of arithmetic problems that challenged young readers to divide small sums among various numbers of paupers.66 Saint Anthony’s alms box

62. Lydie de Gersin, ou Histoire d’une jeune anglaise de huit ans, pour servir à l’instruction et à l’amusement des jeunes françaises du même âge (Paris, 1812), 60–61. The plot of Madame Carroy, La Journée d’une petite fille (Paris, n.d., ca. 1840), turns on whether or not little girls can rightfully dispose of property—in this case food—to the poor. Nursing the sick was another form of charity involving time and labor rather than property: see e.g. the heroine who begins by tormenting the sickly girl in her class but who, after catechism, learns to dress the other girl’s wounds instead. “La Première Communion,” in L’Enfance pittoresque, 215. 63. For girls’ charitable sewing in a variety of contexts, see Madame Wetzell, Contes à mes petits élèves (Paris, 1846), 65–76; La Guerre des Juifs, pour servir à l’éducation et à l’amusement de l’enfance (Paris, n.d.); Carroy, La Journée d’une petite fille, 75; Le Mérite des jeunes mères (Paris, 1817), 105–6; Scènes de la vie de pension, ou souvenirs d’une jeune pensionnaire (Paris, n.d. [1835]). 64. Contes et conseils à mes jeunes enfans convenables à la première enfance pour les deux sexes (Paris, 1822), 175. 65. “Le Bonheur d’être riche pour faire des heureux et le mauvais emploi des richesses,” in Nouveaux Contes et conseils, 212–49. 66. La Recréation: Journal des écoliers 20 (1834): 251.

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in the church was often the centerpiece of boys’ stories and the trade-off of candy for charity was a standard feature of the lives of storybook boys. Even a book that is all about food—the Abécédaire des petits gourmands—includes stories about food refused. “F,” for “flan,” features three brothers, one of whom gives to the poor the money he could have spent on flan, while his brothers make themselves sick by overeating. The good brother’s charitable act is discovered, and his father rewards him with a special excursion to the countryside.67 Money, which storybook boys often possessed, could either feed their egotism with sweets or direct their desires outward toward the practice of charity. Benevolence was the only reliable response to an unstable society in which identity and social position might be snatched away without warning, and children in a position to offer compassion now might find themselves in need of it later. When identically dressed children filed into church to receive the sacrament, an observer might not be able to tell which child had purchased or sewn the garments and which had gratefully received them as a charitable gift. Indeed, as noted above, those roles might at any time be reversed, and the girl who had sewn for charity might find herself stitching for a living. Society, as it appeared in idealized microcosm in the first-communion ceremony, was simultaneously egalitarian, affectionate, and deferential, and it was, above all, united in a common Christian purpose.

Catholic Adventure: Le Journal de Marguerite Beyond a doubt, the best-known fictional child to make her first communion in nineteenth-century France was Marguerite Guyon, heroine of the best seller Le Journal de Marguerite, written by Victorine Monniot (1824–1880) and published in 1858. On the “most beautiful day of [her] life,” Marguerite receives the Eucharist in a church on the island of Bourbon (now Réunion), a French colony in the Indian Ocean. Although the setting is exotic, the ritual is universal; young readers would recognize all the details of their own communions in Marguerite’s account. Our heroine wears her first long dress: a white muslin gown and veil identical to those of the other girls because, as

67. Abécédaire des petits gourmands (Paris, n.d., ca. 1820), 20–23. See also “Hippolite ou le petit têtu corrigé” and “Laurence et Rogacien ou les petits mendians” in Contes et conseils à mes jeunes enfans, 77–85 and 103–12; Soirées du père de famille ou conversations familières d’un père avec ses enfants sur plusieurs sujets de morale et d’instruction, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1822), 45–46, 55. The gluttony-charity pairing is much less common in girls’ stories, but see Rousseau, “Les Pensionnaires” in Contes de la jeune tante, 304–58.

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the priest tells them, they are all sisters, with no rich or poor among them. As she kneels at the altar, Marguerite trembles as the host approaches and she gathers her veil tightly around her as if she were hiding away with God. Marguerite’s communion is the apogee of her young life, the culmination of long preparation, prayer, and interrogation of conscience. The ceremony recalls and anticipates other sacraments that shape Marguerite’s life: she reenacts confession by asking forgiveness of her family and the servants, and of course her veil, which her mother solemnly places on her head, refers to a potential future marriage. Intimations of mortality also resonate through Marguerite’s communion: she begins the day by visiting the tomb of her baby brother, and after the ceremony she lays her wreath at the foot of a statue of the Virgin with a prayer that Mary might give it back to her someday in heaven.68 Communion marks a new stage of life for Marguerite: her younger sisters and even the household servants view her with greater respect, and her mother promises to treat her “like a friend, since I would no longer be a child.”69 The second half of the nineteenth century opened the golden age of French children’s publishing, dominated by female Catholic authors. Works by writers like Monniot and, especially, the Countess de Ségur introduced the techniques of the realist novel to the world of children’s fiction.70 The simple, short moral tales of the early part of the century gave way to longer, complex narratives with more fully developed characters who lived in specific and recognizable settings. Children’s books were an important component of the expansion of the Catholic press, which grew in large measure because of its determination to provide good alternatives to what many Catholics viewed as a flood of bad and immoral books. In the middle decades of the century, Catholic publishing houses abandoned their strategy of promoting the faith through theological and devotional tracts and turned increasingly to fiction, producing thousands of Catholic novels for children and adults.71 Catholic

68. Hérault, La Grande Communion, 44, records a first-communion song that similarly refers to a child offering Mary a wreath that he or she would retrieve in heaven. 69. Victorine Monniot, Le Journal de Marguerite ou les deux années préparatoires à la première communion, 10th ed. (Paris, 1867), 503–17, quotations on 508, 511. Subsequent page citations in parentheses in the text. 70. Laura Kreyder, L’Enfance des saints et des autres: Essai sur la comtesse de Ségur (Fasano, It., 1987); Renonciat, Livres d’enfance; Bénédicte Monicat, “Romans pour filles et littérature féminine du dix-neuvième siècle,” French Literature Series 31 (2004): 197–208; Sophie Heywood, Catholicism and Children’s Literature in France: The Comtesse de Ségur (1799–1874) (Manchester, UK, 2012). 71. Claude Savart, Les Catholiques en France au XIXe siècle: Le témoignage du livre religieux (Paris, 1985); Loïc Artiaga, “Les Catholiques et la littérature ‘industrielle’ au XIXe siècle,” in Production(s) du populaire, ed. Jacques Migozzi and Philippe LeGuern (Limoges, Fr., 2004), 221–33; Michel Manson,

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writers and publishers participated fully in the development of a modern culture of mass literacy; Madame de Ségur’s collaboration with the publisher Hachette, whose railway bookstalls transformed book distribution, exemplified this determination to provide mass audiences with Catholic literature. Le Journal de Marguerite was Victorine Monniot’s first and most successful novel; although other titles followed, Marguerite was the book that supported the author and her mother in their old age. Monniot herself was an example of the reversals of fortune that the Revolution had introduced into children’s lives. She was the daughter of a governess in the service of Marshal Oudinot, who had made his career first under Napoleon and then under the Bourbons. With the July revolution the Oudinots lost much of their influence, and the children of the family, now grown, no longer needed their governess.72 Madame Monniot, widow of a cavalry officer with four daughters, tried her hand at running girls’ schools, first in the provinces and then in the colony of Bourbon. Victorine followed her mother into the teaching profession, but neither woman found the work satisfying or profitable. Le Journal de Marguerite mobilized Monniot’s experience of girls, governesses, travel, and exotic settings to produce a best seller; the Journal passed through 169 printings for a total of between 300,000 and half a million copies.73 Writing about Ségur, Laura Kreyder notes the irony that “the children of the secular and anticlerical catechism of the Third Republic” grew up on “a family ideal [that] . . . refers neither to Oedipus nor to a mother goddess, but which locates the origin of all social order in a community of sisters (practically a convent) and in the Immaculate Conception in which man is present, but with a fleshly role that completely preserves female moral integrity.”74 Like Ségur’s fiction, Le Journal de Marguerite shifted first communion into a world of devout women, and receiving the sacrament marked a girl’s full entry into a community of women. The women of Marguerite’s world cared for men, but husbands, fathers, and brothers were nonetheless secondary characters. Catholic society could survive without them, and they were its most unreliable members. Increasingly in the second half of the nineteenth century, Catholics represented society as essentially female.

“Children’s Literature, Religion, and Modernity in the Latin Countries (France, Italy Spain)” and “The Editorial Strategies of Provincial Catholic Publishing Houses for the Young in the 19th Century in France,” in Jan De Maeyer et al., Religion, Children’s Literature, and Modernity, 175–94, 423–44. 72. Madeleine Lassère, Victorine Monniot ou l’éducation des jeunes filles au XIXe siècle: Entre exotisme et catholicisme de combat (Paris, 1999), chap. 1; Olivier Lefranc, Victorine Monniot, sa vie, son œuvre (Paris, 1907). 73. Marcoin, Librairie de jeunesse, 484. 74. Kreyder, L’Enfance des saints, 16.

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Le Journal de Marguerite coincided with and encouraged the shift in Catholic thinking about communion that would ultimately produce the Eucharistic reforms of Quam singulari. Marguerite’s serious preparation for and joyful reception of her first communion leave readers in no doubt that she will embrace the new Eucharistic piety, turning to the sacrament frequently for sustenance. Communion, for Marguerite, is not simply a onetime test that she will pass or fail but rather an opening onto a new life in which she is responsible both for her own soul and for the souls of others. The Journal does remind its readers that girls may be recalled to heaven at a young age, but it also presents them with an exciting and adventurous version of Catholic adulthood. The path through life that starts with first communion promises to lead Marguerite beyond the family circle into a wider Catholic world that spans the globe. Although Le Journal de Marguerite echoes the children’s tales of the early nineteenth century, it is a fully developed novel that relies on precise setting and characterization to give verisimilitude to the details of its plot. Marguerite is neither the good nor the bad child, and she does not exemplify a single trait, whether a virtue or a fault. Rather, Marguerite is generous, intelligent, and clearly inclined toward piety; she is also impatient with her siblings, occasionally jealous, and prone to losing her temper. She struggles with her faults, sometimes making progress but at other times backsliding. Although the arc of the novel tends toward Marguerite’s improvement, there is never a single episode in which she learns her lesson and reforms for good. Moreover, Marguerite lives in a morally difficult world in which it is not always immediately obvious what the best course of action might be. Other characters like Marguerite’s playmates have flaws as well, and Marguerite must learn to love them in Christian charity while also recognizing their failings. Choosing the virtuous path involves both self-knowledge and an assessment of the merits and capabilities of others. Readers follow Marguerite’s development through the immediate, firstperson, and present-tense text of her journal, which she keeps for the two years leading up to her first communion. There is no narrative or editorial framing; Marguerite’s journal entries are the text of the novel. Marguerite begins writing at the behest of Mademoiselle, her governess, who explains that a diary should “resemble confession; it should be just as sincere, just as complete, [and] just as sacred” (18). Journal keeping is the ideal activity for a girl preparing her communion because it is like an ongoing confession that keeps her conscience constantly on alert. Marguerite decides from the start that Mademoiselle will read her journal—it is a space for guidance and instruction, not for privacy or the uninhibited expression of self. If the journal

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is to be a confession, then it requires a confessor, and there is no question that Mademoiselle should fill that role; Marguerite’s actual priestly confessors barely leave an impression on the narrative. As Marguerite matures, Mademoiselle announces that she will no longer read the journal regularly, since her pupil has become accustomed to critical introspection. Mademoiselle remains the voice of conscience, however, and Marguerite will leave her journal open for Mademoiselle when she faces a particularly thorny problem or when she has to face up to behavior she is ashamed of (108, 123–24, 251–52, 287–91, 401). Mademoiselle—Caroline Valmy—is the moral center of a book that praises maternity but largely denies Marguerite’s mother any meaningful role.75 Mademoiselle’s guidance, rather than punishment, directs Marguerite’s improvement, and our heroine experiences none of the harsh penalties exacted for childish failings in earlier tales. The governess epitomizes the educational principles of gentle and loving correction that allow a child’s own intelligence and conscience to flourish; she is a Catholic Jean-Jacques to a female Emile. Mademoiselle is no ordinary governess offering her services in exchange for a wage, however. Rather, Caroline Valmy was Elise Guyon’s closest school friend, who, orphaned and fallen on hard times, joined her friend’s household to care for her daughters. Thus Mademoiselle is a second mother to Marguerite, untainted by wage labor, because devotion, not contract, ties her to the family. At the end of the novel, when Mademoiselle refuses an advantageous marriage, we learn that she has taken her own private vow of celibacy and dedication to the education of her pupils. Mademoiselle’s authority is thus without limit. She is the mother’s alter ego, yet she is free from the demands that a husband and a household place on Madame Guyon. Her devotion to her pupil exceeds even that of Marguerite’s mother because it incorporates the holiness of a nun; vocation produces a bond even stronger than biological motherhood. Other little girls in the novel have governesses whose authority they flout and whose social position they mock, but Mademoiselle’s benevolent rule over Marguerite remains unquestioned (147–48). Mother and Mademoiselle are the heart of the Guyon household; Marguerite’s father, in contrast, makes only brief appearances in the narrative. Le Journal de Marguerite fully embraces the trope of the husband and father who needs to be brought back to the church, and Edouard Guyon’s role is to challenge his womenfolk’s piety. Marguerite’s father is not wicked or

75. Lassère, Victorine Monniot, 108.

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dissolute, and no character in the novel would dream of condemning him: he is a successful and virtuous civil servant who ensures that his children receive religious training. He himself, however, is estranged from the Eucharist—he leaves religious practice to his wife and children. The novel never resolves the matter of Monsieur Guyon’s faith. Its few male characters are always on the verge of returning to the church: the death of a child encourages Marguerite’s father to begin attending services, and the doctor who claims to believe in God but to see no point to the Mass hints that he might attend just to remind Marguerite of her promise to pray for him (222–24, 319–20). Even the ship’s boy promises to make his first communion “as soon as he returns to his mother” (344). None of these characters—or any other adult layman—ever receive communion, however. Monniot suggests that praying to bring men back to the church is a woman’s perpetual obligation (253–54). The other moral force of the Journal is Marguerite’s best friend, Marie de Laval. The girls meet in their Paris catechism class and form an instant friendship. Marie, an orphan, is from Bourbon, the daughter of a naval officer and a beautiful Creole woman. Her Parisian grandfather dies early in the novel, leaving Marie in need of the Guyon family’s assistance. Marie, in contrast to Marguerite, is an extraordinarily good girl who never displays temper, petulance, or jealousy. She is not quite as far along in her lessons as Marguerite, but the chapel is her favorite part of her boarding school, and she makes her communion there over a year before Marguerite. Marguerite is a little jealous of her friend’s precocity, but she has to acknowledge that Marie is worthy of the sacrament; in addition to her moral qualities, Marie is so beautiful and so nearly grown up (157–58, 456). The Eucharist becomes Marie’s great consolation; having made her communion, she no longer feels the loss of her parents as acutely, and she prays for her friend as well as for her dead family (132). It comes as little surprise when we learn that Marie expects to die young, defying all her doctors, who see nothing wrong with her constitution (417). Nor is Marie’s death at the end of the novel a shock— her heart, which she knew all along was weak, never recovers from a carriage accident. Marie’s narrative trajectory explicitly links first communion with premature and tragic death. When Marguerite finally receives the much-anticipated first communion, Marie is already suffering from her fatal illness. Receiving the sacrament is a joyful occasion but also a test for Marguerite’s compassion and Christian fortitude. As she knelt at the altar, Marguerite records in her journal, she heard Jesus ask her to love him above all others. This was the sort of demand that Marguerite was familiar with from her catechism, but with her veil drawn around her kneeling body to shut out the rest of the world

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and facing the real presence of Christ, Marguerite is frightened and wonders if she cannot still love Marie here on earth. Jesus sternly asks whether she would give up her friend if he wished to take her, and Marguerite responds submissively that she can never say no to Jesus (517). The reader knows at this point that in spite of the doctors’ optimism, Marie will die because she has served her purpose of teaching Marguerite to sacrifice her own will. Indeed, overwhelmed by the joy of receiving the sacrament, Marguerite writes that she understands Marie’s preference for heaven over earth; cleansed of all her sins and with her “soul as white as snow to receive Jesus,” she can imagine Marie’s longing for death (506). Despite the doctors’ insistence that recovery is possible, Marie dies soon after, urging Marguerite to seek the consolation of frequent communion. Although Marie shares some traits with the “good” girls of early nineteenthcentury stories, her role in the narrative is clearly secondary; Marguerite is the heroine. The novel is not particularly fair to Marie—she receives no special treat, no school prize, no good marriage as a reward for her exceptional virtue, only an early death. She is slated for victimhood from the beginning. She goes to her grave dressed in her first communion gown, a reminder that she has already achieved the greatest degree of perfection possible and that achieving adulthood would serve little purpose for her.76 Young readers of Le Journal de Marguerite might weep at Marie’s death, but it is difficult to imagine them identifying with the dead girl, imaginatively projecting themselves into her role. Marie is a plot device; she is the means by which Marguerite develops Christian resignation, and her death is the occasion for Marguerite to demonstrate the submission of her will. Marguerite remains the more appealing character precisely because she does possess a will and frequently struggles to subdue it. The little girl who wrote in her own journal that she reread Marguerite regularly, each time choking over her tears, was projecting herself into the position of the grieving Marguerite, not the triumphant Marie.77 Marguerite’s story, in contrast to Marie’s, suggests that the life of a Christian girl can be an adventure, not a vale of tears. Cardinal Donnet, longtime archbishop of Bordeaux, described Le Journal de Marguerite as a “Telemachus

76. Imitators of Le Journal de Marguerite often emphasized the desirability of death immediately after first communion, when a girl’s soul was as pure as it would ever be. See, e.g., Mathilde Bourdon, Agathe ou la première communion (Paris, 1869), 78–79, 99–101, 124–26, and Journal d’une première communiante (Saumur, Fr., 1883), 8, 21. 77. Philippe Lejeune, Le Moi des demoiselles: Enquête sur le journal de jeune fille (Paris, 1993), 204–5, referring to the journal of Louise L***.

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for little girls”—like Odysseus’s son, Marguerite travels widely, encounters foreign people and customs, and en route learns to recognize her own abilities as well as her faults.78 Marguerite’s piety accompanies a clear zest for life and enthusiasm for the world—undoubtedly the combination that made the Journal such a runaway hit. Marguerite does endorse Marie’s view of life as suffering—at one point Marguerite even asks her friend to pray that they might die together (540). The trajectory of Marguerite’s life, however, tells a different story. While Marie’s life closes in on an exclusive relationship with Jesus, Marguerite’s opens out onto the world, which offers her discovery and excitement.79 The colonial setting is key to making Le Journal de Marguerite a girls’ adventure novel. At the beginning of the story, Marguerite and her family prepare to move to Pondicherry in India, where Monsieur Guyon has just been appointed governor. Marguerite is “mad with joy”: she will see the ocean, exotic countries, and “Creoles and loads of blacks!” (9). Marguerite sympathizes with her mother, who takes no pleasure in the voyage because her eldest, Gustave, must stay behind to attend school in France. Madame Guyon, torn between husband and son, experiences the voyage to India as a trial that tests her loyalties and her dutiful piety. Marguerite, however, feels sorry for her brother more than for herself: “poor Gustave” is a boy and therefore constrained by the demands of schooling, so he will have to miss out on all the fun. His teachers report that he is a promising boy who “will go far,” but his younger sister sees the world before he does. With Mademoiselle, Marguerite can learn her lessons and say her catechism anywhere, so in this novel it is she who has the adventure. The Guyon family voyage to India is indeed exciting and eventful. Madame Guyon’s suffering intensifies as her youngest child, known as Baby, dies on board ship. Marguerite’s mother is so devastated by her child’s death that her health, too, is in danger, and Monsieur Guyon decides that his wife and daughters will stop on Bourbon so as to recuperate and avoid the unhealthy summer season in India. Marguerite would like to accompany her father to Pondicherry, but he asks her to stay behind and look after her mother and younger sisters. Had Gustave been present, this role would have fallen to him, but Marguerite assumes the responsibility willingly, and it is she, not her mother, who visits his ship and stays up late to see it depart with the tide in

78. Quoted by Lassère, Victorine Monniot, 30. 79. Most critics overlook the adventurous qualities of Le Journal de Marguerite, focusing instead on Marie’s dolorist religiosity. See, e.g., Marcoin, Librairie de jeunesse, who sees Marguerite as being “crushed beneath the weight of a perpetually uneasy conscience” (485).

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the middle of the night (320, 347). Thus it happens that Marguerite receives her first communion in Bourbon with her mother, governess, sisters, and Creole friend Marie at her side but far from her father. Although Marguerite’s world of women and children seems dominated by illness and death, she never follows her mother into an austere and morbid piety. The ship is exciting, and Marguerite describes her accommodation in detail. She participates enthusiastically in the ritual of crossing the equator; it is just a little bit sacrilegious to call it a “baptism,” she thinks, but she nonetheless will “call it the same thing as everyone else” (214). Marguerite’s proudest moment on board comes during a storm when she proves herself a worthy sailor’s daughter. While her mother, younger sisters, and Marie cower below in the cabin, her father takes her on deck, to “toughen her up,” he explains to the other men. The waves look like mountains and the ship with all its sails lowered looks desolate, and Marguerite is even knocked over by a wave. She recovers, however; her father tells her that she is very brave, and the sailors cheer her spirit (280–81). Her mother is appalled when she returns below deck, soaking wet. Marguerite never doubts that God has responded to their prayers and saved them from the storm, but her readers will have noted that it is as possible to pray sincerely on deck facing the waves as in the cabin below. The island of Bourbon is a vividly drawn and detailed setting for Marguerite’s coming of age, and the novel reads like a geography textbook as the Guyon family explores France’s tropical colony. Because of the terrible heat, Marguerite learns to live like the Creoles, drinking black coffee all day so as not to doze off over her lessons. She encounters exotic insects and peculiar fruits, fords rivers, visits a mineral source, encounters a leper, and collects plants for her own herbarium (366, 367–68, 373–74, 385–88, 532). She eats curry and hot peppers and drinks coconut milk through a straw directly from the shell (397–98). She sucks on sugarcane as she visits a sugar house, whose workings she carefully explains in her journal (428–30). Cotton, cinnamon, cacao, and vanilla similarly feature in the narrative, and the girl who read Marguerite’s journal would end up with a thorough geography lesson, courtesy of Mademoiselle Monniot’s adolescent years spent on the island in her mother’s school (393, 400). Indeed, Monniot’s biographer describes Le Journal de Marguerite as an alternative Tour de France par deux enfants, that classic of the Third Republic secular classroom.80 Instead of the two orphan boys who travel around France learning the principal resources and manufactures

80. Lassère, Victorine Monniot, 151–52.

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of each region, in this novel a girl explores France’s distant colony. She learns about the products that Bourbon contributes to the nation, but she also recognizes that Catholics around the world form a single family, with the pope as father and the church as mother. She therefore has relatives all over the globe (432). Marguerite’s education on Bourbon is not limited to exotic plants and domestic customs; she also encounters—and condemns—plantation slavery and racist colonial society. Marguerite encounters Bourbon’s racial hierarchy in her first catechism class on the island: her classmates include mixed-race girls, some of whom are quite black while others are nearly as light-skinned as she is. Marie explains to her that these girls’ mothers are not received in polite society, and Marguerite innocently wonders why not: are they wicked? Mademoiselle quickly intervenes to explain prejudice: “a false, but deeply rooted judgment, an error that has become habitual but that we do not wish to correct, a culpable aversion that we maintain in spite of the truth.” Marie’s repetition of Bourbonnais prejudice is the only chink in her armor of goodness, and Mademoiselle calls her to account for it: “The mulattoes are as much our brothers as all the whites in the world; they are children of God just like we are, and we should love them and treat them as brothers. Yet they are rejected in society and forced to live apart . . . and if some more generous and enlightened persons understand and, in their consciences, feel the injustice of this law, still they do not dare act differently from the others, isn’t that true, Marie?” Marie’s eyes well up with tears and she agrees with Mademoiselle that prejudice has no place in a Christian heart (356). Her confidence buttressed by Mademoiselle’s moral authority, Marguerite for once outshines Marie by giving a friendly welcome to her mixed-race neighbors: “It is perhaps because the mulattoes are really our equals that we hold them at a distance,” Marguerite wisely suggests, “because our pride wishes to remain above them” (405). Le Journal de Marguerite is equally decisive in its condemnation of slavery, which Marguerite encounters when she visits the plantation of Marie’s Creole relatives. Marguerite makes this trip on her own, without Mademoiselle, so that readers can see that she has learned her governess’s lesson of Christian equality. The enslaved labor force of Marie’s uncle becomes an occasion for yet another geography lesson, as Marguerite writes about the different “nations”—Malay, Malagasy, Yambane, Tamil, etc.—represented among them. Even as she muses on the differences among slaves, Marguerite concludes that she is witnessing a repetition of the biblical story of Joseph, sold into slavery by his brothers. It is curious to have siblings of different colors, Marguerite thinks, but no doubt God varied the tint of our skin so as to challenge us to

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imitate his perfect love. It is clear to Marguerite that the people of Bourbon have failed to rise to God’s challenge (407–8). Monniot’s antislavery stance was hardly militant; in the tradition of the abolitionist domestic novel in the United States, she proposed Christian charity as the solution to all social ills, including racial prejudice and slavery. The protagonists of Le Journal de Marguerite demonstrate that even little girls can deploy charity against a social evil like slavery. Her conscience stinging from Mademoiselle’s rebuke, Marie vows never to own slaves, a promise that is put to the test when her generous uncle, Monsieur de la Caze, offers her a newborn girl from his own plantation. Marie reveals her resolution to her uncle, who cheerfully tells her that as mistress she may free her slave “later.” He asks that she not reveal her intention to the child’s mother; Marie agrees, and happily embarks on her plans for the child’s future, which the slave mother welcomes. Marie herself will be godmother at the baptism, and the baby will be christened Marguerite (411). Because Marie dies young, the slave Marguerite does not have to wait long for her freedom since the grieving Monsieur de la Caze follows his niece’s wishes and frees both the baby and her mother (581). The story of Marie’s slave owning is typical of the novel’s approach to the problem of slavery: Monniot condemns the institution without denouncing any actual slave owners. Marie’s Creole family is generous, charming, and well-meaning, and Marguerite meets no unhappy slaves. Marie assures her friend that most white Creoles actually do believe in the equality of all Christians and would like to be able to act on their beliefs; she implies that slavery is an unfortunate burden that Creoles have inherited (357). Marguerite, however, never completely accepts the slave owners’ protestations of innocence. Although she never witnesses cruelty, she nonetheless fears that owners “often have their poor slaves beaten” (397). As a well-bred little girl, Marguerite cannot criticize adults, but Mademoiselle, the real voice of authority, explicitly censures those who “claim to be Christians” and yet do not live up to the “fraternity preached by their master [ Jesus]” (356). Le Journal de Marguerite’s abolitionism is striking, both because Monniot goes out of her way to integrate an antislavery thread into her novel and because this position put her outside the Catholic mainstream. The Bourbon episode sets the novel prior to 1848, the year when slavery was abolished across the French Empire and the colony was renamed Réunion. The first two parts of the book, set in Paris and on board ship, give readers no reason to suppose that the setting of the novel is not contemporaneous with its publication date and its young readers’ lives—that is, the mid-1850s. Monniot herself lived on Bourbon in the early 1840s, but she could easily have

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adapted her local knowledge to the postemancipation situation and avoided the question of slavery. Instead, in the late 1850s, the years leading up to the American Civil War, Monniot deliberately chose to set her story in a slave society. Although her French readers could congratulate themselves on living in an empire without slaves, Monniot wished to confront her heroine with the evil of slavery. Abolitionism was not a consensus Catholic position in the nineteenth century; it smacked too much of liberal individualism for many, and abolitionists, in both France and the United States, had often relied on antiCatholic rhetoric and allies. The outspoken Catholic antislavery voices were those of men like Charles de Montalembert who had made their peace with postrevolutionary ideas about liberty.81 Victorine Monniot, similarly, presented girls with a Catholic Church that demanded liberty for the enslaved. Marguerite, like the many successful French translations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, demonstrated that in France as in the United States, the sentimental domestic novel could be a vehicle of social awareness and reform. In contrast to Uncle Tom, whose slave-owning villains were Catholic, Monniot’s novel presented Catholics in the forefront of abolitionist sentiment.82 The Catholic identity that Marguerite embraced with her first communion, the novel suggests, included an obligation to recognize and condemn injustice beyond the borders of her own nation. Le Journal de Marguerite never mentions the United States or slavery anywhere besides in Bourbon, but readers would certainly have been aware that the issue of slave emancipation, resolved in the French Empire in 1848, remained acute in other parts of the world. Christian duty, even for girls, required confronting and rejecting slavery and racial prejudice. Le Journal de Marguerite did not propose radical social transformation to its young readers, but neither did it suggest that their lives would or should be restricted to a claustrophobic world of domesticity and family duty. In the days leading up to her first communion, Marguerite recites Victor Hugo’s

81. Charles de Montalembert, La Victoire du nord aux Etats-Unis in Œuvres de M le comte de Montalembert, vol. 9, Œuvres polémiques et diverses (Paris, 1868), 295–367; John McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York, 2003), chap. 2; Barbara Karsky, “Les Libéraux français et l’émancipation des esclaves aux Etats Unis, 1852–1870,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 21, no. 4 (1974): 577; Lawrence C. Jennings, French Anti-Slavery: The Movement for the Abolition of Slavery in France, 1802–1848 (New York, 2000), 128–29; Troy Feay, “Mission to Moralize: Slaves, Africans, and Missionaries in the French Colonies” (PhD diss., University of Notre Dame, 2003). 82. Eleven French translations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, including three competing newspaper serials, appeared between 1852 and 1853, shortly after the novel’s American publication in 1852. Claire Parfait, “Un succès américain en France: La Case de l’Oncle Tom,” E-rea 7, no. 2 (2010), http://erea. revues.org/981.

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“La Prière pour tous”—Léopoldine Hugo’s prayer reaches faraway Bourbon, just as her father believed it could. Victor Hugo must be “so happy,” Marguerite thinks, “to write such beautiful verse . . . and to be so good and pious as [he] certainly must be” (435). Assuming her readers’ familiarity with the poem, Monniot cites only the first line: “Go pray, my daughter— Look, night has fallen.” The confidence that a girl’s prayer could transform the souls of distant strangers as well as those closest to her connects Hugo’s poem and Monniot’s novel. Instead of being reminded of their limitations, the thousands of girls who read Marguerite gained “a sense of ultramontane world community, European strength, and achievement against the odds.”83 First communion opens the world to Marguerite; she is more than a visitor to distant lands because as a Catholic she fits into a web of affection, respect, and obligation that stretches around the globe. Just as Marguerite looks to Léopoldine as a model, thousands of real girls patterned their own preparations for first communion on Marguerite’s example. Thanks to Philippe Lejeune’s study of French girls’ journals, we know quite a bit about how the fictional Marguerite both reflected and generated journal writing as a common educational practice in nineteenthcentury homes. Le Journal de Marguerite was a “cult novel,” indispensable to nineteenth-century girlhood, and many girls read the novel as they prepared for their own communions. Marguerite’s diary, spread over seven hundred pages, accompanied many of them through their catechism, with her experiences and journal entries mirroring their own. Girls who wrote journals often followed Marguerite’s lead: they began their journals along with their preparation for first communion and with the encouragement of a mother or governess. They did not treat their journals as purely private spaces for recording secrets because they expected their mothers or teachers to read over their shoulders. They often referred to the fictional Marguerite, measuring their journals and their spiritual development against her benchmark.84

Olga and Lina Olga de la Ferronnays and Lina Ravaschieri never met on earth, but their lives were imaginatively linked by their pious acceptance of the Eucharist and their early deaths. Their tragic stories resonate with Le Journal de Marguerite,

83. Bernard Aspinwall, “The Child as Maker of the Ultramontane,” in The Church and Childhood (Cambridge, MA, 1994), 427–45, 445. 84. Lejeune, Le Moi des demoiselles, 19, 104, 204–5, 318.

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although they played Marie’s role rather than Marguerite’s. The two girls met in heaven, according to a Ravaschieri family friend who recorded her vision of Olga welcoming Lina into eternity. As new communicants, Olga and Lina occupied the sacramental center of their families, and as girls who tragically never reached full womanhood, they retained this power eternally. First communion was the beginning of their stories even though they died soon after. The narrative of their lives continued in heaven as the girls in the white dresses and veils became the spiritual protectors of their families and of other Catholic girls. Olga de la Ferronnays received her first communion in 1833 at age twelve and died ten years later. She was French; her Slavic Christian name was a reminder of her birth in St. Petersburg during her diplomat father’s Russian tour. Lina Ravaschieri was Italian, born in 1848 to noble parents. She died in 1860 shortly after her first communion. Their lives are remarkably well known because of their connections to Pauline Craven, née La Ferronnays, whose memoir, Le Récit d’une sœur, will be the focus of chapter 4. Pauline was Olga’s older sister, and Olga’s death is one of the tragedies that shapes the memoir. The childless Pauline was also a close friend of Lina’s mother, Teresa Ravaschieri, and in their letters the two women referred to Lina as “our child.”85 They had dreamed of uniting their families with a marriage between Lina and one of Pauline’s La Ferronnays nephews.86 Devastated by Lina’s early demise, Pauline translated, edited, and published Teresa’s account of the little girl’s life and death. Olga de la Ferronnays received her first communion in Rome, which, her older siblings reminded her, was a special blessing. In May 1833 her father enrolled her at the Trinità dei Monti school run by the Society of the Sacred Heart, a French religious order whose mission was the education of the daughters of the elite. In the next four months, Olga completed her preparations for the sacrament, which involved learning her catechism and, probably, sewing communion dresses for poor girls, a common practice in Sacred Heart schools.87 Her communion day would be “the most beautiful day of her life,” her older brother Albert wrote. His own communion day had been the most beautiful of his life, and he carried the ribbon he had worn as an armband in his wallet until his death. Knowing that on that day God would refuse Olga nothing, Albert asked that she pray especially

85. Teresa Ravaschieri to Pauline Craven, Florence, Aug. 30, 1860, Institut Catholique de Paris (hereafter ICP), ms fr 599, I 2; and Teresa Filangieri Ravaschieri Fieschi, Lina (Naples, 1876), 12, 41. 86. Teresa Filangieri Fieschi Ravaschieri, Paolina Craven e la sua famiglia (Naples, 1892), 208. 87. Kilroy, Madeleine Sophie Barat, 63.

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for him.88 At the September ceremony Olga was both solemn and joyful, and she was beautiful without the least hint of vanity in her white dress and veil. Pauline remarked on Olga’s combination of innocence and wisdom: Olga understood “heavenly matters” better than anyone, but in all other things she was “more like a child than others of her age.”89 Lina Ravaschieri’s mother, Teresa, wrote a memoir immediately after Lina’s 1860 death; Pauline Craven translated it into French, and both texts circulated privately and were later published in the 1870s.90 The two memoirs emphasize the close link between Lina’s communion and her death. The symptoms of her long illness had already manifested themselves when she received the sacrament. Nonetheless, Lina had prepared to receive the Eucharist as carefully as a healthy girl: she sewed the dresses of the twelve girls who received the sacrament with her and, in spite of being weakened by the excitement and the fasting, she was able to serve a meal to the poor of the community after the ceremony.91 In the midst of her illness, Lina found great comfort in the Eucharist, and in her final year she received communion frequently. Even when she suffered from fever, she was determined to maintain the requisite fast (from midnight) for the Eucharist. She placed her mouth against the marble table next to her bed to assuage her thirst.92 Once when she was very near death, the Eucharist revived her, to her doctor’s astonishment.93 Two days later, however, the “poor martyr child” blessed her parents, received a final absolution, and died. The union of the Ravaschieri and La Ferronnays families happened not in a marriage but in a mystical encounter of two dead girls. The vision in which Olga and Lina met followed closely upon the latter’s death. Anna Tisserand, who was probably an elderly and poor teacher who spent some time convalescing with the Cravens, recorded her story about five months after Lina’s death.94 Teresa and Pauline had already written their accounts of Lina’s life for the edification of others, but Anna Tisserand had something

88. Pauline Craven, Le Récit d’une sœur, 28th ed., 2 vols. (Paris, 1875), 1:114, 121, 123–24. 89. Ibid., 1:139. 90. Teresa Ravaschieri to Pauline Craven, Bologna, Sept. 18, 1860, ICP, ms fr 599, I 2; Ravaschieri, Lina; and Pauline Craven, Réminiscences: Souvenirs d’Angleterre et d’Italie, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1879), 552–53. The text recording Anna Tisserand’s vision (see below) dated Jan. 19, 1861, refers to the existence of Ravaschieri’s and Craven’s then unpublished accounts. 91. Ravaschieri, Lina, 30–31; Craven, Réminiscences, 273. 92. Ravaschieri, Lina, 48; Craven, Réminiscences, 285–86. 93. Ravaschieri, Lina, 63–65. 94. Ravaschieri refers to “la nostra Miss Anna” in her biography of Craven. Ravaschieri, Paolina Craven, 323.

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important to add: she had “entered the shadows of eternal night” and seen Lina received into heaven.95 Tisserand was kneeling at the foot of Lina’s coffin when she was granted a vision of the child’s apotheosis. Twelve angels— the guardian angels of all the children whose communion clothes Lina had sewed—supported the cloud on which Lina ascended, and each angel added a pearl to the crown she wore. Olga de la Ferronnays greeted Lina, offered her a virgin’s halo, and invited her to sing in honor of their mother, the blessed Virgin. Hearing the word “mother,” Lina started, remembering her own mother, and she let fall her crucifix because she knew that the cross would “help her [mother] suffer.” Tisserand bent to retrieve the crucifix and when she stood up, the vision had disappeared, leaving her kneeling before the coffin, clutching her crucifix. Pauline Craven’s circle of family and friends was already aware that Olga de la Ferronnays might intercede in this world from beyond the grave. Olga’s final agony had been exemplary. Although she had never been trained as a poet, her simple faith overflowed in verse, and in a poem that she composed shortly before her death she wrote of her “thirst for innocence, for life . . . for infinite peace.” She found all of these as she died, still an innocent girl. Olga’s dear friend, a Russian girl named Natalie Narischkin, arrived too late to receive a final blessing, but she spent the night praying on her knees next to Olga’s body. According to Pauline, “Olga’s wishes prevailed in heaven”: Natalie converted to Catholicism soon after and within a few years had joined the Daughters of Charity.96 Pauline Craven would not have been surprised that her sister’s generosity should have encompassed Lina, a niece of sorts even though the two girls had never met. Welcoming Lina to heaven, Olga offered comfort to those left behind to grieve: girls who died with the innocent souls that they took to the communion rail for the first time enjoyed eternal happiness, and they continued to love their families with all the purity of childhood. Neither Pauline nor Teresa included Anna Tisserand’s vision when they published their accounts of Lina’s life and death over fifteen years later. It was right to make the intimate details of Lina’s death public, Pauline argued, because all readers would benefit from “breathing in the perfume of this flower of innocence, piety, and courage.”97 Both women, however, preferred to leave the details of Lina’s life after death to the imagination and the faith of their

95. Anna Tisserand, “Gloire de Lina,” Jan. 19, 1861, ICP, ms fr 599, I 2. 96. Craven, Récit, 2:347; Craven, La Sœur Natalie Narischkin, fille de la charité de Saint Vincent de Paul (Paris, 1877), 1–13, 40–46. 97. Craven, Réminiscences, 311.

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readers. Perhaps they doubted Tisserand’s veracity, although Pauline kept the account of the vision together with Teresa’s letters announcing Lina’s failing health and her death, and Teresa clearly believed that Lina in heaven intervened in her mother’s life on earth.98 More likely, they considered the details of Lina’s apotheosis unnecessary to their story. Believers would not need further assurance that Lina was with God, and nonbelievers would simply ridicule the hallucinations of one woman and the gullibility of the others. Anna Tisserand’s vision of two pious girls joining hands as they joined the communion of saints exemplifies the sort of spiritual power that Victor Hugo hoped to capture when he commemorated his daughter’s prayer. Olga and Lina embraced one another as they ascended into heaven, where they remained intercessors for their beloved families, who remained on earth. They derived this power from their perfect reception of the Eucharist; as young girls, free of sin, they had seriously and conscientiously received the body of Christ, and their lives had known no greater joy. At the moment when children, especially girls, received the Eucharist for the first time, they could, in Pauline Craven’s words, “defy the world to show you anything to equal what religion reveals or to make you experience anything that exceeds what religion makes you feel.”99 Girls kneeling to receive the Eucharist anchored their families to the wider society of Catholic believers—there could be, Craven suggested, no greater role. Léopoldine’s communion prayer began at home and extended to embrace wretched sinners everywhere. Marguerite invited other girls to imagine an active life of adventure but also reminded them that their religious faith imposed important obligations upon them. The power that Léopoldine exerted unconsciously, Marguerite suggested, really required a careful attention to conscience because girls who had been received into the community of Catholics should approach the world with a developed sense of Christian moral principles. The encounter between Lina and Olga likewise illustrates the mystical power of girls’ first communion as they reenacted in heaven the social bonds they had created on earth. The stories of girls at the communion altar suggested that the Eucharist retained a power that was not exclusive to devout families and that located Catholic ritual—and Catholic women—at the foundation of social order.

98. See, e.g., Ravaschieri to Craven, Oct. 8 or 9, 1860, and Florence, Feb. 10, 1861, ICP, ms fr 599, I 2. 99. Craven, Récit, 1:140–41.

 Ch ap ter 2 The Education of Maurice de Guérin

When Marguerite Guyon and Marie de Laval, the heroines of Victorine Monniot’s Le Journal de Marguerite, boarded a ship bound for the Indian Ocean, their brothers, Gustave and Albéric, had to remain behind in Paris to complete their schooling. We learn no details of their studies; the Journal was a novel for girls, about girls, and Monniot saw no need to fill her readers in on what boys might do in school. The Parisian educational market, however, provided options for families like the fictional Guyons and Lavals who wanted their sons to receive an education that would prepare them for success in the world while also anchoring them to the church. Catholic boys’ secondary schools offered parents the assurance that their sons could grow up to enjoy professional success without abandoning the faith of their childhood. Rigorous discipline and surveillance that kept boys on the straight and narrow during their dangerous adolescent years were the keys to this outcome. In the all-encompassing atmosphere of the school, boys would complete their studies and successfully pass competitive examinations, gaining access to their desired professions without being distracted by adolescent enthusiasms and desires. Unlike Gustave or Albéric, Maurice de Guérin wore a cassock on his first day of school at the Collège Stanislas in Paris. Maurice, who was fourteen when he arrived in October 1824 as a boarder at Stanislas, had a vocation to the priesthood that his pious father Joseph intended to protect. The Guérins 66

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were an impoverished noble family from the Tarn in the south of France, and Maurice had an elder brother, Erembert, who would carry on the family line and free the younger son for the priesthood. Their mother, who had been profoundly devout, had died in 1819 when her youngest, Maurice, was nine. His sisters, Marie (born 1808) and especially Eugénie (born 1805), nurtured their brother’s vocation vigilantly and looked to him to seal the family’s Catholic devotion. Joseph de Guérin chose the Collège Stanislas with great care: he wanted his son to have the advantages of a Parisian school and Parisian connections, but he worried about the temptations of city life and the prevalence of radical ideas in many Parisian student circles. His motherless son would need encouragement in his faith, Joseph believed, if his precocious vocation were to come to fruition.1 Although he missed his family and wrote about his homesickness, Maurice appears to have thrived at school, and he spent five years, from fourteen to nineteen, at Stanislas, never once returning home. He was proud of his success at school, where, he reported, he was one of the top students whom the headmaster invited to a “splendid lunch” where they toasted the king with good wine.2 Joseph was undoubtedly pleased, both with his son’s academic success and with his royalism. Maurice was also learning to appreciate his autonomy: he wrote his sisters about becoming a Parisian and familiarizing himself with the landmarks of the capital from the artworks at the Louvre to the exotic animals in the Jardin des plantes.3 Not surprisingly, Maurice’s school friends came to figure more prominently in his life than his family did. He embraced a notion of Catholic fraternity during his years at Stanislas that emphasized male friendship as a religious, intellectual, and social ideal. Catholic boarding school gave Maurice de Guérin the experience of being an autonomous young man but simultaneously embedded him in a loving society. For Maurice and many of his contemporaries, school was the setting in which a boy developed a sense of self—male autonomy emerged out of a highly structured communal experience. Maurice soon abandoned his cassock and redirected his ambitions toward literature, a goal that several

1. On the Guérin family, see Marie-Catherine Huet-Brichard, Maurice de Guérin (Paris, 1998); E. Decahors, Maurice de Guérin. Essai de biographie psychologique (textes et documents inédits) (Paris, 1932); Abel Lefranc, Maurice de Guérin d’après des documents inédits (Paris, 1910); and Emile Barthés, Eugénie de Guérin d’après des documents inédits, vol. 1, Avant la mort de son frère Maurice (Albi, Fr., 1929). 2. Decahors, Maurice de Guérin, 72, 79–80. 3. Maurice to his sisters, Oct. 6, 1824, and Maurice to Eugénie, Oct. 28, 1824, in Maurice de Guérin, Œuvres complètes, ed. Bernard d’Harcourt, 2 vols. (Paris, 1947), 2:7–9.

Figure 2.1. Maurice de Guérin, 1810–1839. Journal, lettres et poèmes publiés avec l’assentiment de sa famille par G. S. Trébutien et précédés d’une étude biographique et littéraire par M Sainte-Beuve (Paris : Didier, 1864).

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of his classmates shared. At Stanislas, Maurice developed a romantic sense of self, but he never embraced the isolation and solitary torment of the romantic genius. Poetry for him emerged not from solitude and discontent but rather from loving interactions with friends. Although Maurice adopted many of the tropes of romantic selfhood, notably the deep communion with nature, he never idealized isolation. He always sought out friendship, and his friends from the Collège Stanislas remained close throughout his life. His goal was to be a fully realized, individual, and autonomous self who was simultaneously embedded in an affectionate community. To be cast adrift in the world was a catastrophe, neither the poet’s inevitable fate nor a condition for writing verse. Aimless wandering in a world of unrealizable ambition seemed like a real possibility to Maurice when, at age nineteen, he completed his studies at Stanislas. His priestly vocation had evaporated, to his family’s great dismay, and the Guérins were not wealthy enough to support his literary goals. He briefly entered the law faculty, but he disliked it and could not imagine a future for himself as a lawyer. On the cusp of adulthood, Maurice decided to turn back toward his youth and the schoolboy camaraderie that fed his verse: he joined the community of lay Catholic scholars surrounding Félicité de Lamennais at La Chênaie. Several of his Stanislas classmates were already at La Chênaie, where they made a home for and by men, a domestic and intellectual retreat where women had no role. At La Chênaie, young men dedicated themselves to one another and to the cause of a revived Catholic scholarship in dialogue with the academic developments of the postrevolutionary period. The Stanislas boys found there a form of Catholic fraternity that they recognized and embraced gratefully: young, male friends working and living together with an intensely cultivated sense of higher purpose. At La Chênaie, they could continue as students, even as schoolboys. They renounced self-interest—or willfully postponed important life decisions such as career and marriage (depending on one’s perspective). First communion may have signaled maturity for girls like Marguerite Guyon or Léopoldine Hugo, but Maurice de Guérin was able to hold that moment at bay for much longer. Schoolboy rituals and affections continued to shape his life well into his twenties. La Chênaie’s atmosphere of monasticism and male domesticity encouraged intense self-examination and exalted commitment to a renewed Catholicism and to friends. Writing about another group of young romantic Catholic men who self-consciously organized themselves into a brotherhood—the German Nazarene painters—Lionel Gossman observes that their friendship “implied not only a desire for social and political change but a religious

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aspiration toward transformation, redemption, and union with the divine.”4 Fraternal love, Maurice and his friends at La Chênaie believed, would remake French society in the wake of Revolution, allowing them to be devout Catholics without requiring them to assume their parents’ reactionary nostalgia for the Old Regime. Their fraternal circle would rebuke revolutionary liberalism by demonstrating that men embraced ties of affection and obligation. Even men who might seem most likely to adopt the persona of the abstract liberal individual—young men of the social elite, just embarking on their lives and without dependents—might reject the revolutionary atomization of society. They aspired instead to Christian and fraternal obligations that would propel them forward toward a postrevolutionary Catholic future. Maurice de Guérin’s stay at La Chênaie was brief because shortly after he arrived, the community broke up in September 1833, succumbing to papal disapproval of Lamennais’s ideas. Maurice’s experience there nonetheless firmly established his sense of poetic mission, and he did not return to the study of law. In 1839, however, he died at the age of twenty-nine before publishing any of his work. His literary career began posthumously when George Sand included two of his prose poems in an obituary that appeared in 1840 in La Revue des deux mondes. Friends from his days at Stanislas and La Chênaie, especially the writer Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, then collaborated with his sisters to organize the publication of his work. Eugénie and Marie de Guérin gathered their brother’s poems, many of which he had sent as tributes to various friends, and edited them carefully in order to fix his image as a devout young man whose poems celebrating the pagan beauty of nature were in fact expressions of an entirely orthodox Catholic piety.5 Eugénie de Guérin died in 1848 before completing the editing of her brother’s work, and her own literary fame soon exceeded his. Like her brother, Eugénie was a poet, but Maurice’s editors were more interested in her journal, which they hoped would help attract attention to and promote sales of her brother’s work. They edited Eugénie’s diary so that it testified almost exclusively to her maternal devotion to her motherless younger brother, and they presented her as a paragon of Christian abnegation.6 In 1855 under the

4. Lionel Gossman, “The Making of a Romantic Icon: The Religious Context of Friedrich Overbeck’s Italia und Germania,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s., 97, no. 5 (2007): 11. 5. Marc Fumaroli, introduction to Poésie. Le Centaure, La Bacchante, Le Cahier vert, Glaucus, Pages sans titre, by Maurice de Guérin (Paris, 1984); Huet-Brichard, Maurice de Guérin, 10–15. 6. Eugénie de Guérin, Reliquiae, ed. Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly and G. S. Trebutien (Caen, 1855); Mathilde Kang, Le Parcours transatlantique du Journal d’Eugénie de Guérin. Un cas de transfert culturel (1850–1950) (New York, 2009), 21–33; Mary Summers, “The Letter-Journal of Eugénie de Guérin and Its Sources of Inspiration,” Critical Survey 14, no. 3 (2002): 28–41.

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title Reliquiae, Eugénie’s journal appeared in a limited, privately distributed edition, and it became a publishing sensation. Maurice’s works, whose publication followed a few years later, never matched the popularity of Eugénie’s Reliquiae. Late nineteenth-century readers were more inclined to appreciate expressions of conventional religious devotion in female rather than male writers; indeed, Henry James concluded that Maurice de Guérin, although a beautiful stylist, had produced a body of work that was “one long record of moral impotency.”7 In contrast, he wrote that Eugénie offered the reader “a figure of sweetness so perfect, so uniform, and so simple that it seems to belong rather to the biography of a mediaeval saint than to the complex mechanism of our actual life.”8 Eugénie’s journal, cast as dutiful expressions of a universal self-abnegating female piety, became an enduring best seller of female literature up to the First World War. More recently, scholars have become increasingly interested in uncovering a sibling couple who did not entirely reflect the pious expectations of a late nineteenth-century readership. This research has involved liberating Eugénie from her editors’ straitjacket and restoring complexity to her character: sensuality, ambition, and frustration formed the darker counterpoint to the piety and simple pleasures of her quiet country life.9 New scholarship has also reinterpreted the Guérins’ brother-sister bond, and Eugénie and Maurice no longer appear universal in their sibling devotion but rather quite particular in their consuming involvement with one another. Their relationship appears less that of an adoptive son and mother than of a romantic sibling duo; the Guérins belong in the company of François-René and Lucille de Chateaubriand or even Lord Byron and his half-sister Augusta. Determining the extent to which they were aware of the erotic charge of their love for each other has become the great challenge of recent Guérin scholarship. Sibling bonds were always central to Maurice de Guérin’s life, but the list of his siblings extended beyond Eugénie, Erembert, and Marie to include the “brothers” of his school days and of his retreat at La Chênaie. These boys were his companions growing up, and they were shaped by the same adolescent impressions. As much as his biological siblings, they reflected his likeness back at him. They were also, like Eugénie, his literary interlocutors

7. Henry James, review of The Journal of Eugénie de Guérin, in The Nation, Dec. 14, 1865, in James, Henry James: Literary Criticism; French Writers, Other European Writers, the Prefaces to the New York Edition (New York, 1984), 431. 8. James, review of Lettres d’Eugénie de Guérin in The Nation, Sept. 13, 1866, in James, Literary Criticism, 433–34. See also Mary Summers, “Mary Taylor’s Response to the Journal et letters of Eugénie de Guérin,” Brontë Studies 33, no. 1 (2008): 1–8. 9. See especially Wanda Bannour, Eugénie de Guérin ou une chasteté ardente (Paris, 1983).

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who inspired his poetry, judged it generously, and eventually arranged to publish it. Maurice celebrated the “absolute affinity of soul” that he experienced with his adoptive brothers as well as with his biological sister, and these sibling relationships were far more intense and probably more erotically thrilling than anything he felt for Caroline de Gervain, the woman whose fortune made her a suitable bride for the aspiring poet in 1838, shortly before his death.10 Maurice’s relationship with his extended family of brothers gave him resources for understanding and forming his own character; as Alan Richardson, writing of romanticism’s incest trope, has observed, his siblings were “[l]ike and yet crucially unlike, a locus for egocentric self-reflection and a resource for androgynous self-transformation . . . intimately familiar yet provocatively other.”11 Maurice and his friends built brotherhood not merely from biology, choice, or the accident of school enrollments: most powerfully, they were brothers in Christ. Their fraternity reflected God’s order in the world as well as human political and social choice. The Catholic foundation of their fraternity intensified its emotional impact and their conviction that it served as a model for social transformation. Together, these boys of the postrevolutionary era had broken with their fathers’ reactionary desire to keep “look[ing] at the world from the vantage point of the steps to the throne.” Instead, Maurice wrote, they would “climb up to the foot of the cross, where the world would reveal itself . . . with the sublime workings of Providence and the profound eternal and immutable laws that govern it.”12 The fraternal support that brothers offered to one another was the necessary starting point for their ascent.

Maurice de Guérin at the Collège Stanislas The Collège Stanislas was an expensive choice for a family like Maurice’s, but Joseph de Guérin was anxious to send his son to a school whose principles matched his own political and religious views. When Maurice arrived at Stanislas in 1824, its founder, the abbé Claude Rosalie Liautard, had just stepped down as headmaster, and he had built the school to reflect

10. Eugene Stelzig, “‘Though It Were the Deadliest Sin to Love as We Have Loved’: The Romantic Idealization of Incest,” European Romantic Review 5, no. 2 (1995): 231. 11. Alan Richardson, “Rethinking Romantic Incest: Human Universals, Literary Representation, and the Biology of Mind,” New Literary History 31, no. 3 (2000): 564. See also Philippe Berthier, “Jules et Maurice: Un De Amicitia romantique,” in Maurice de Guérin et le romantisme, ed. MarieCatherine Huet-Brichard (Toulouse, 2000), 201–18. 12. Maurice to Eugénie, May 20, 1831, Œuvres complètes, 2:44.

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conservative Catholic and legitimist ideals. Liautard imagined Stanislas as a foundation stone in the rebuilding of a Catholic France; it would “heal . . . the wounds to the social body” by supporting Christian families that lived according to principles of hierarchy, deference, and affection.13 This worldview was entirely congenial to Joseph de Guérin, who owed his position as mayor of the small town of Andillac to his staunch legitimism and who raised his children to be loyal to the Bourbons. Every year, for instance, the Guérins attended an expiatory Mass on the anniversary of Louis XVI’s execution at which they prayed to expunge the sins of the Revolution.14 Joseph de Guérin remained a man of the Old Regime committed to the alliance of throne and altar. In his eyes, the Revolution was not an event that had occurred in the past but an ongoing existential threat to everything that he held sacred. Sending his son to study in Paris was simultaneously a good career strategy and a risk—the quality of instruction and the networking potential in the city were high, but Maurice might be exposed to radical religious and political ideas that would shock his deeply conservative family. Choosing Stanislas reduced that danger. Like Joseph de Guérin, the abbé Liautard believed that the Revolution was a permanent menace to French society and to Christian belief. He had concluded that the Revolution had sunk its deepest roots in education, especially with the creation of the Napoleonic University, and he established his school as a bulwark against godless, revolutionary instruction. Established in 1808, just four years after Stanislas opened, the University consolidated all schools into a single corporate entity, which enjoyed a monopoly over education. It was supposed to create a meritocratic elite for the Napoleonic Empire, and it privileged professional education; institutions like the engineering school Polytechnique that prepared students for functions of obvious utility to the state sat at the apex of the pyramid.15 As far as Liautard was concerned, the University destroyed the authority of fathers by placing boys in the service of the state. Liautard himself had been an early student at Polytechnique, where he had enrolled following his military service in an infantry regiment during the levée en masse of the 1790s. After refusing to swear his hatred of royalty, he had left Polytechnique and entered the newly reopened Saint Sulpice

13. Liautard, “Réponse du Correspondant,” ACS, 102 ter II-3–4. 14. Barthés, Eugénie de Guérin d’après des documents inédits, 54. 15. R. D. Anderson, “France from the Enlightenment to the Napoleonic University,” in European Universities from the Enlightenment to 1914 (New York, 2004), chap. 3, and Isser Woloch, The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789–1820s (New York, 1994), chap. 7.

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seminary, where he discovered his vocation for education while teaching catechism to children preparing their first communion.16 As headmaster of his own independent school, he operated on the margins of legitimacy and at the sufferance of University officials. He especially despised the University rule that required him to send his older pupils across town to attend classes at the Lycée Napoléon. His boys had to wear a military-style uniform, just as he had as a student at Polytechnique, with only the buttons indicating that they were pupils at a private Catholic boarding school. This obligatory dress, he complained, made his peaceful school look like a military camp.17 At the lycée, the boys were subject to all the nefarious influences that their fathers had sought to avoid by entrusting them to Liautard in the first place. Lycéens who had long ago lost their fear of God and sense of decorum bullied Liautard’s pupils and slipped copies of Rousseau’s Emile or Voltaire’s scandalous Pucelle d’Orléans into their pockets, he claimed.18 When the empire collapsed, Liautard was confident that the University— “shameless daughter of irreligion, despotism, and tax policy, who will never be the daughter of our kings”—was on its way out.19 He thus felt truly betrayed when the restored Bourbon monarchy adopted this bastard child and maintained the structures of Napoleonic education. In particular, he raged against the renewed requirement that boys from his school attend classes at state institutions where the Christian education he offered his pupils and their fathers might be subverted. Liautard understood that the illegitimate ruler of a military empire like Napoleon might wish to enlist elite youth in highly regimented institutions under his own control, but legitimate kings who enjoyed divine favor, he felt, had no need to fear the educational choices of their loyal subjects. Enrolling boys in the machinery of the state served Napoleonic interests, but it could only undermine the foundations of Bourbon rule, the headmaster argued. By placing the interests of the state over those of fathers, the University weakened the basis of monarchy. Its bureaucratic apparatus broke down the natural ties of affection and obedience that united fathers and sons, and it taught boys abstract notions of patriotic duty in their place. Bourbon kings could rely on the devotion of their subjects

16. Abbé Denys, “Essai biographique sur M l’abbé Liautard, fondateur du collège Stanislas,” in Mémoires de M l’abbé Liautard, vol. 1 (Paris, 1844), 1–44. See also Georges Sauvé, Le Collège Stanislas: Deux siècles d’éducation (Paris, 1994), and Abbé Lagarde, Histoire du Collège Stanislas (Paris, 1881). 17. Copy of the order with Liautard’s marginal comments, Aug. 13, 1812, ACS, 102 ter II-3–9. 18. Liautard to the grand master of the University, July 3 or 4 [1811?], ACS, 102 ter II-3–8. 19. “Extrait d’une lettre de Strasb. à M. A.,” Dec. 9, 1814, ACS, 102 ter II-2–6.

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but only if they did not subvert that sentiment at its source by teaching sons to disdain their fathers.20 In his battles against the University during the school’s first twenty years of existence, Liautard elaborated the educational philosophy that attracted parents like Joseph de Guérin to the Collège Stanislas. Above all, he rejected centralization and standardization, the “academic barracks” in which thousands of boys were drilled in mathematics and Latin but morally abandoned to their own worst instincts.21 Fathers might think their sons were safe in public lycées, but in fact they were “thrown into the path of every error, accustomed to seeing every crime.”22 The revolutionaries’ confidence that they had attained perfection led them to “toss all their institutions into the same mold,” so that “the monopoly of education was added to that of coffee and sugar.”23 The Restoration had misguidedly maintained the centralized University so that its schools were full of “bleak, expressionless faces, identical postures . . . they could have been Prussian soldiers drilled by the father of Frederick the Great.” Liautard wondered “if Sparta had come to Paris, if these youth had French blood in their veins, if they were really at the carefree stage of life when the days pass . . . without worries over the future.”24 Bourbon kings failed to recognize that their schools had been infected by the “double leprosy of Jacobinism and impiety”—reform was inadequate, and only total destruction of the University could effect a cure. Liautard concluded that no matter how many different institutions the University created, there was no concealing the fact that they were essentially the same: “the same mania for generalization, for making everything derive from a single principle.”25 In his own school, Liautard promised parents an education that reflected the goals of a loving father rather than of a general or a tax collector. He

20. Adrien Garnier, Frayssinous, son rôle dans l’Université sous la Restauration (1822–1828) (Paris, 1925), 26–28. See also Liautard’s dialogues on the University: “Histoire d’Andronicus, maître de pension ruiné par les statuts universitaires” and “Explication entre Jean Chardin et son fils Xavier au sujet des cours de facultés,” 1828, ACS, 102 ter II-3–4. On Catholic opposition to the University, see the essays collected in L’Enseignement catholique en France au XIXe et XXe siècles, ed. Gérard Cholvy and Nadine-Josette Chaline (Paris, 1995), esp. Louis de Naurois, “L’Enseignement libre catholique au XIXe siècle: Aspects juridiques,” 13–23. 21. Liautard, “Etude de M Liautard sur l’Université,” n.d. [after 1822], ACS, 102 ter II-3–2. 22. Liautard, “Explication entre Jean Chardin et son fils Xavier.” Liautard wrote many of his attacks on the University in the form of dialogues between fathers, sons, and teachers. 23. Liautard, “Considérations sur l’université,” Feb. 13, 1816, ACS, 102 ter II-3–1. 24. Liautard, “Elèves de l’université,” 1828, ACS, 102 ter II-3–4. 25. Liautard, “Considérations sur l’université.”

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emphasized that his school served all students, not merely the clever ones. In public lycées, he alleged, teachers “limit[ed] themselves to calculating the pupil’s chances of success” and ignored the average students who would be “sacrificed to the glory of the school.” No father would abandon sons with merely ordinary intelligence, nor would the Catholic schoolmasters whom Liautard employed. Caring fathers would not permit their sons to get away with insolence and other forms of misbehavior merely because their examination results were likely to be good, another error Liautard attributed to lycées. In general, he considered the “emulation system”—whereby boys were constantly ranked and encouraged to compete with one another to improve their class standing—“outdated.” Its exclusive focus on public examinations privileged the talented students and left ordinary boys to stultifying mediocrity.26 Liautard’s school also functioned as a petit séminaire and trained many priests, especially in its early years. Under the Restoration, petits séminaires recruited and trained clerics in order to respond to postrevolutionary shortages, but they often quietly accepted boys who had no vocation but whose parents wished them to study in Catholic surroundings.27 Of the school’s students born before the 1801 Concordat between Napoleon and the pope, 10 percent went on to ordination. That percentage declined as the school’s numbers grew: of pupils born in the first decade of the nineteenth century, like Maurice de Guérin, only about 5 percent became priests.28 After the first few years, the school consistently attracted aristocratic families, and in most years around a third of the students boasted names with the particle “de” indicating nobility. This concentration on elites and the mixing of lay and clerical vocations was precisely what Liautard had in mind for his school. France should be reChristianized from the top down, he believed, and this goal required priests who came from the best families and who understood the challenges of modern life because they were educated alongside their lay brothers.29 The grim provincial seminary of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black—full of jumped-up peasants of limited intellectual horizons—was not Liautard’s idea of the future of France’s clergy. 26. Liautard, “Etude de M Liautard sur l’université,” 7–9. On emulation and education, see Carol E. Harrison, The Bourgeois Citizen in Nineteenth-Century France: Gender, Sociability, and the Uses of Emulation (Oxford, 1999), chap. 1; Alan Spitzer, The French Generation of 1820 (Princeton, 1987); Jean-Claude Caron, Générations romantiques: Les étudiants de Paris et le Quartier Latin, 1814–1851 (Paris, 1991). 27. Jean Leflon, “Les Petits Séminaires en France au XIXe siècle,” Revue d’histoire de l’église de France 61, no. 166 (1975): 25–35. 28. The percentage was especially high for older students: thirty of one hundred students born before the Revolution became priests. Abbé Lagarde, Diptyques du Collège Stanislas (Paris, 1880). 29. Liautard, “Réponse au Correspondant.”

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All the boys—future churchmen and laity alike—needed to acquire social polish at school. Just as Liautard disapproved of a University curriculum that made boys into “Latin and Greek machines,” so he also rejected seminary preparation that filled pupils’ days exclusively with prayers and pious readings, transforming them into the sort of narrow-minded prigs that Stendhal deplored. Maurice and his classmates took lessons in horseback riding, fencing, gymnastics, music, and drawing. The school’s promotional material emphasized that boys learned manners and cleanliness as well as the subjects they would need to pass examinations.30 Liautard did not share the Restoration clergy’s prejudice against dance; rather, he considered that it developed strength and grace, and he made a dancing master available to his boys.31 Parents could rest assured that their boys would emerge from school as polished men of the world, ready for any career, lay or clerical. Liautard’s view of priestly education suited Joseph de Guérin, who wanted Maurice to enjoy a successful ecclesiastical career. Maurice’s education led him toward the church from an early age: the parish priest was his first tutor, and as a boy Maurice made good progress in Latin. In 1822, when Maurice was eleven, his father gave up the lycée slot that he had previously solicited from family connections and sent Maurice to a petit séminaire in Toulouse instead. Even had he not intended Maurice for the priesthood, Joseph de Guérin might well have preferred a petit séminaire to a lycée whose educational goals he, like Liautard, would have mistrusted. Maurice’s vocation appeared quite strong, however: he began wearing a cassock at age twelve, shortly after he began his studies in Toulouse and several years before his first communion. With the expectation that his son would help make up for revolutionary losses among the clergy, Joseph de Guérin was able to negotiate a significant tuition reduction in Toulouse—163 francs per year, or roughly a quarter of the usual fees.32 At Stanislas, Maurice’s vocation would be secure—at least to the extent that was possible in Paris—and his father hoped that the Parisian school would be his path to a distinguished clerical career, one that led to the hierarchy rather than toward routine parish work. Certainly Maurice would meet the sort of young men who, as adults, could advance his ecclesiastical career. Fully 37 percent of the pupils who, like Maurice, had been born in

30. See the original prospectus for the school, July 19, 1805, ACS, 102 I-1–1, and “Collège Stanislas, sous la direction de M Augé,” ACS, 159. 31. Liautard to Mme la comtesse de Charpin, Oct. 21, 1828, ACS, 102 I-8. 32. Decahors, Maurice de Guérin, 51, 58–59, 70; Barthés, Eugénie de Guérin d’après des documents inédits, 65–66, 78–89.

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1810 came from noble families.33 By the time Maurice reached Stanislas, it was not quite the seedbed for vocations that it had been, but the school remained proud that each year a handful of its boys went on to seminary. Auguste Reynaud, a Guérin cousin located in Paris who had taught at Stanislas, also recommended the school highly: it would nourish Maurice’s vocation, but if he were to change his mind, Reynaud sensibly noted, Stanislas would also prepare him for other professions and give him access to competitive examinations.34 Maurice’s elder brother, Erembert, had just spent a year at Stanislas preparing to enter the law faculty, and while this was not Joseph’s plan for Maurice, it was nonetheless a good alternative in case the boy’s vocation proved transient. When Maurice transferred to the Collège Stanislas in October 1824, Liautard’s educational philosophy was firmly in place, but the abbé himself had been eased out of the headmaster’s role just a few months previously. The school had gradually reached a truce with the University: in 1821 it received the designation collège particulier de plein exercise, which indicated its integration into the University, although under private direction. All members of the teaching staff were required to have passed the University’s competitive qualifying examination, which increased the school’s costs but ensured the level of instruction and acknowledged the University’s role as guarantor of educational quality. Reconciliation with the state’s educational bureaucracy meant that pupils would be able to take public examinations for access to professions, which made the school an attractive option for boys like Erembert de Guérin who needed extra cramming. The truce did not, however, moderate the school’s legitimism and commitment to Old Regime political ideals: in 1822 the “pension Liautard” took the name Stanislas in honor of Louis XVIII’s great-grandfather Stanislas Leszczynski, king of Poland.35 The collège also stabilized its finances by selling its buildings to the city of Paris to pay off debt and then leasing the facilities back at an advantageous rate. Liautard was out of step with this new era of peaceful relations with the government, and he resigned in 1824, leaving the school in the charge of his associate, the abbé Augé.36 The new headmaster had been at Stanislas from the very beginning and shared Liautard’s educational philosophy, but he was less contentious than his predecessor and more inclined to focus on the daily management of the school.

33. Of seventy-six pupils born in 1810, twenty-eight came from noble families and two went on to complete seminary training and be ordained as priests. Lagarde, Diptyques. 34. Auguste Reynaud to Joseph de Guérin, quoted in Decahors, Maurice de Guérin, 64. 35. See Liautard’s prize-day speech, Aug. 20, 1822, ACS, 102 ter II-2–5. 36. Lagarde, Histoire du Collège Stanislas, 147–62; 169–75; Sauvé, Le Collège Stanislas, 106–9.

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This transfer of leadership was possible because Stanislas was a success with parents, and demand for places at the school was greater than the institution could handle. When Maurice moved into the dormitory in the rue Notre Dame des Champs, there were 250 pupils: 200 in the secondary curriculum and another 50 older boys preparing for seminary or competitive exams. Liautard considered that his school had reached its capacity; the headmaster could still know all the boys personally and follow their progress through the years of their youth.37 The parents who sent their sons to Stanislas paid hefty fees: 800 francs for tuition, a 40-franc fee to the University, and roughly 140 francs for miscellaneous costs such as school supplies, laundry, haircuts, and medical and dental services, which meant that families were spending roughly 1,000 francs a year for their sons’ education, a sum that remained relatively consistent through the 1840s.38 Joseph de Guérin was grateful that his cassock-clad younger son qualified for a discount because tuition at Stanislas was nearly twice that of his Toulousain institution and represented a real stretch for an impoverished southern noble family.

Life at the Collège Stanislas: The Domestic and the Monastic In June 1828, Maurice and his fellow pupils gathered for a family celebration. In a “voice that expresses the tender love we share,” they celebrated Monsieur Augé: “Let us sing for our father, / sing of his love. / Friends, swear to please him, / swear to love him forever.” Léon Barbey, a pupil and aspiring poet, wrote the lyrics, and the school’s music teacher composed the tune and accompanied the singers. In the image of the party printed on the sheet music, boys flock to kiss the hand of the elderly priest while their parents look on indulgently from the margins.39 This was Stanislas’s response to the University: a scene of family love, with parents, priests, and boys spontaneously expressing their affection for one another. Maurice was nearly eighteen by this time, and he had not returned home to Andillac since his original arrival in Paris. The pupils and the schoolmasters of the Collège Stanislas had, in many ways, become his family.

37. Another hundred boys were in the primary grades at the petit collège located outside Paris at Gentilly. Liautard, note on Stanislas finances: “Me retirer . . . ,” ACS, 102 ter II-2–15. 38. Abbé Goschler, “Notes sur le Collège Stanislas en instance devant la commission municipale de la ville de Paris pour devenir collège municipal,” Nov. 27, 1849, ACS, 103. 39. “Couplets chantés à la suite de la fête donnée à Monsieur Augé, Directeur du Collège Stanislas,” ACS, 114.

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Figure 2.2. Augé with his Stanislas pupils. “Couplets chantés à la suite de la fête donnée à M Augé, Directeur du Collège Stanislas le 24 juin 1828,” Archives du Collège Stanislas 100 W (anc. M 114). Courtesy of the Collège Stanislas, Paris.

This atmosphere steeped in Catholic sentiment was supposed to make the school resemble the home in crucial ways—in particular, by making it possible to direct boys through affection rather than a military-style discipline. Prayers, pious readings, and catechism punctuated daily life for Stanislas boys, and Liautard emphasized that the more consistency a child was subject to, the

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more his “character will become flexible and his temper amiable.”40 Daily religious observance should not, however, become a chore, and a good Catholic school should not inflict “boredom with God” upon its pupils. A school that proposed games, celebrations, and music alongside confession, catechism, and daily prayers was offering its pupils a “religion that one absorbs through all the pores”—much as very young children absorbed the faith of the devout families into which they were born.41 The school’s goal was to envelop its pupils, insulating them from the dangers of the outside world and infusing daily life with Catholic observance. Although Stanislas’s promotional literature routinely described the school as offering pupils a familial atmosphere, Maurice’s life at school was in fact profoundly regimented and scrutinized, not unlike that of boys boarding in public schools. Maurice, at fourteen, was older than the school considered desirable; pupils ideally began at age seven or eight so that Stanislas could shape their habits thoroughly before the onset of puberty.42 Joseph de Guérin’s decision to send his son away as a boarder was somewhat unusual in an era when boys increasingly attended local schools as day pupils, a preference that may have reflected a reaction against the Napoleonic emphasis on lycées as residential institutions.43 The administration at Stanislas, however, seldom accepted day pupils and preferred boys who rarely left the school grounds.44 Activities that did take pupils outside the school walls such as walks or horseback riding were hedged with rules to prevent boys from varying the route or loitering in front of cafés.45 Schoolmasters mistrusted the outside world and preferred that the “family” of the Collège Stanislas remain closed to all external influences, even those from boys’ real families. Surveillance of students’ activities within the school was strict—rigorous monitoring of pupils was the “soul of a good education,” and accordingly

40. Liautard to Mme la comtesse de Charpin. See also Liautard’s “Réunion des différens règlemens de la maison,” ACS, 102 ter II-2–1; and “Collège Stanislas, Règlement, 1846–1847,” ACS, 159, pp. 17–24. 41. Liautard to Mme la comtesse de Charpin. 42. See Liautard’s letter book, Minutier, ACS, 166, which includes correspondence with parents and survives for 1804–1811: Liautard to M Faget, letter 1002, May 1809, pp. 150–51; Liautard to M Garrigues [?], letter 965, April 1809, p. 140; Liautard to M Viala, letter 2588, Sept. 1810, p. 271. 43. Maurice Crubellier, L’Enfance et la jeunesse dans la société française, 1800–1950 (Paris, 1979), 145. Percentages of boarders rose again after midcentury. 44. For Liautard’s view of day pupils, see “Elèves de l’Université.” Baron Carra de Vaux, May 1, 1879, recalled that his admission as a day pupil in the 1820s was a special favor to his family. ACS, 189, Dossiers d’élèves, fascicule 1802. 45. “Collège Stanislas, Règlement, 1846–1847,” pp. 47–48 (Gymnastique et équitation) and pp. 53–54 (Promenades).

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their lives were closely regulated.46 No daily schedules survive from Maurice’s years at Stanislas, but later published rules reflect the regimentation that Liautard promoted in the 1820s. After a morning bell, boys changed their shirts, underpants, and socks in their bed. Seven minutes after the bell, they lined up to go to the washroom. Older students with beards were allowed an extra twenty minutes in the washroom each Wednesday, under the inspection of a teacher. Every evening boys had seven minutes to undress and go to bed before the lights went out. During the day, pupils moved between classroom, study hall, and refectory on a rigid schedule; they passed through the halls lined up in pairs and in silence.47 Privacy was no virtue at Stanislas and was as limited as possible: each boy had a small box in which he was allowed to keep personal items, and he was permitted to open that box once every evening. Desks could contain nothing but a boy’s school materials, a clothes brush, and personal books, each of which had to bear the signature of a teacher. The headmaster read student letters, both those sent and those received. Stanislas’s surveillance of its boys was not uncommon in French schools, whether under Catholic or lay management; by creating a dense network of supervision, most schools sought to produce a disciplinary system in which a boy’s desire to conduct himself well or ill was irrelevant.48 In response to a parental inquiry about corporal punishment, Liautard proudly explained that he never beat his boys and indeed rarely chastised pupils at all because they were so closely watched that it was virtually impossible for them to commit any serious infraction.49 As at other boys’ schools, the main danger that Stanislas’s regulations sought to avoid was adolescent sexuality, and again surveillance trumped self-control.50 Stanislas’s rules spelled out in great detail pupils’ schedule for visiting the toilets: boys in small groups were always escorted by a teacher, and boys of different ages never crossed paths. Pupils in study hall were to keep both hands on their desks at all times.51 Entering Stanislas at age fourteen, Maurice might have appeared dangerously close to puberty, although the fact that he was already a seasoned boarder, with two years in the

46. Liautard to Mme la comtesse de Charpin. 47. “Collège Stanislas, Règlement 1846–1847.” 48. André Rauch, Le Premier Sexe: Mutations et crise de l’identité masculine (Paris, 2000), 182–84, 196–200; Gabrielle Houbre, La Discipline de l’amour: L’Education sentimentale des filles et des garçons à l’âge du romantisme (Paris, 1997), 82–86; Anne Vincent-Buffault, L’Exercice de l’amitié: Pour une histoire des pratiques amicales aux XVIII et XIXe siècles (Paris, 1995), 151–57. 49. Liautard to M Faget, in Minutier, letter 1002, May 1809, pp. 150–51. 50. Houbre, La Discipline, 70–72. 51. “Collège Stanislas, Règlement, 1846–1847.”

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Toulouse seminary behind him, perhaps mitigated this concern. The possession of “premature knowledge” that a boy might share with his fellows was one of the most common explanations for expulsion during the years in which Liautard’s correspondence with parents survives.52 Precocious sexual knowledge, Liautard assumed, always came from outside; he never seems to have considered that a gathering of pubescent boys might generate sexual curiosity in spite of monastic discipline. All would be well, he claimed, for boys who were firmly ensconced in the Christian atmosphere of the school before the “blood ferments” and the “passions of youth develop.”53 If young boys did not develop orderly affections—for their fathers, their schoolmasters, and their classmates—then they would be adrift, lacking respect for authority, when the disorderly desires of puberty set in. Against this regime of surveillance, boys formed deep friendships at school, and many of Maurice’s closest and most influential adult relationships were formed there. Dedication to both poetry and religion characterized Maurice’s circle of school friends. While they followed a classical curriculum, studying their Greek and Latin and drafting French compositions at their teachers’ behest, they also introduced one another to the literature of the romantic era, passing around copies of Victor Hugo, Walter Scott, and Lord Byron.54 Maurice’s own poems of the period trade in romantic tropes such as exile from his southern homeland and religious exaltation.55 He shared a desk in study hall with Jules Barbey (born 1808), who became the writer Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly and was the older brother of the Léon (born 1809) who wrote lyrics for school ceremonies. Jules’s teenage verse led to a literary career; his romantic novels, poetry, and accomplished dandyism of the 1830s gave way after his return to the church in 1846 to literary and cultural criticism.56 Léon Barbey entered the Eudist order and continued to publish verse; his nineteenth-century biographer referred to him as an “apostle-poet.”57 Their classmate Gustave Colas de la Noue (born 1812) gave up on his legal studies in order to become a poet and published two volumes of religiously inspired verse before his early death in 1838; he was also one of the earliest members of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, a Catholic charitable

52. E.g. Liautard to M Des[?], Minutier, letter 2441, Sept. 1810, p. 256. 53. Liautard to Mme de Berghes [?], Minutier, letter 280, n.d. [Nov. 1808?], p. 50. 54. Decahors, Maurice de Guérin, 87–91. 55. “L’Exilé ou le souvenir de la patrie” and “Le Crucifix” in Guérin, Œuvres complètes, 1:27–29, 33–35. 56. Patrick Avrane, Barbey d’Aurevilly (Paris, 2000), 39–44. 57. Joseph Dauphin, Un poète apôtre ou le Révérend Père Léon Barbey d’Aurevilly, missionnaire eudiste (Paris, 1891).

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association of young men.58 De la Noue was younger than Maurice and does not seem to have been a member of the inner circle, but his experience nonetheless suggests that poetry was a common passion among Stanislas boys. Eugène Boré (born 1809), who eventually led Maurice to Lamennais’s community at La Chênaie, never aspired to become a poet, but he won his scholarship to Stanislas in 1826 by sending a plea for support written in elegant Latin verse to the grand master of the University, Monseigneur Frayssinous. Like Léon Barbey, Eugène Boré also took orders, joining the Congregation of the Mission in 1849 after an academic career as an Orientalist.59 In his years as headmaster, Liautard always insisted that there was no better gauge of moral fiber than a boy’s choice of friends, and his letters to both students and parents emphasized the care with which pupils should compose their circle of intimates. Boys with bad friends took on “their tone, their thoughtlessness, their indolence,” so carelessness in choosing friends needed to be reported to parents.60 Giving up “useless friendships” was a good exercise for a boy preparing for his first communion.61 Friendships with older boys, he insisted, were potentially damaging and certainly nothing to brag about.62 We do not know what teachers reported to Maurice’s family about his friends, but he clearly moved in a talented and devout circle, although Jules Barbey, in particular, wrestled with his faith. In spite of their parents’ choice of the Collège Stanislas, Maurice’s friends were not committed to a thoroughgoing restoration of the Old Regime religious and political order. Their fascination with romantic poetry indicates that they were not interested in reproducing the world that their parents had lost; instead, they shared the generational consciousness of enfants du siècle. Stanislas’s dictum that a boy’s choice of friends at school would “determine his judgment in later life” held true for Maurice, who remained loyal to his schoolboy circle into adulthood.63 A wise boy’s choice of friends, Liautard maintained, included his teachers. In spite of their careful surveillance, the administration of the Collège

58. Lagarde, Diptyques, 225; Gustave Colas de la Noue, Enosh (Paris, 1834). 59. Stafford Poole, C.M., “Eugène Boré and the Vincentian Missions in the Near East,” Vincentian Heritage Journal 5, no. 1 (1984): 59–102, http://via.library.depaul.edu/vhj/vol5/iss1/2. 60. Liautard to M Castellain, Minutier, letter 295, p. 52. See also Liautard to M d’Ayguesvives [?], Minutier, letter 253, p. 47; Liautard to M de Chezalles [?], Minutier, letter 256, p. 47; Liautard to Mme Deparc, Minutier, letter 278, p. 49; Liautard to Mme Diericx, Minutier, letter 2425, Aug. 1810, pp. 251–52. 61. Liautard to M d’Ayguesvives, Minutier, letter 574, p. 88. 62. Liautard to Mme de Parseval, Minutier, letter 679, p. 99. 63. Liautard to Mme de la Rochefoucauld, Minutier, letter 948, Apr. 1809, p. 136.

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Stanislas always maintained that schoolmasters should be bound to their pupils by friendship. Liautard never presented himself as the stern headmaster-priest that one might expect from reading his critique of godless revolutionary education. Rather, he communicated with boys who were at home sick or on vacation in informal, nearly egalitarian terms, full of good will and helpful advice but never authoritarian. He regularly closed letters to pupils with the same affectionate words he used for close friends: “pray a little, for me too, and love me as I love you.”64 He teasingly scolded boys who neglected to write to him, and he urged pupils not to prolong their vacations: “pack your bags: your laundry will be clean, your desk as well, and I will be there with the best will in the world.”65 Maurice absorbed this ethos of friendship between pupils and masters, and at age eighteen, in his final year at Stanislas, he wrote a long, confessional letter to his favorite teacher, the abbé Charles-Louis Buquet, that demonstrated how completely the school had become a family to him. Maurice’s letter was a classic statement of mal de siècle: the aspiring poet felt that his soul, “finding nothing in the world to which to attach itself, [was] left to its own resources” and became “as if inanimate . . . fully absorbed by suffering.” Lacking a family, Maurice wrote, he turned to Buquet (born 1796), who was himself a former Stanislas pupil and recently ordained, to confess his anguish. Maurice attributed his existential unease to a solitary childhood as a motherless boy; he was the only child in a sad house, he told Buquet, strategically eliminating his elder brother and his sisters from the family story.66 Further heightening the pathos, he changed the date of his mother’s death to 1816, when he was six, when she had in fact died in 1819, when her younger son was nine. Maurice wrote that his pious but impoverished father and the parish priest who had tutored him had with the best intentions disabused him of any illusions about the world before he had even approached it. School, with its “turbulent youthful society,” could not counter his precocious worldweariness—he was adrift in the world and utterly on his own except for the sympathy he might find from his schoolmaster. Going to school in Paris had opened his mind and awakened his ambition, which only caused him further torment. He was greedy for praise, even for fame, yet he recognized the sin of pride at the root of his desires. Even as he aspired to achieve great

64. See, e.g., Liautard to Leon d’Archiac, Minutier, letter 154, Sept. 1808, p. 2. 65. Liautard to M de Buisseret, Minutier, letter 198, p. 32; see also Liautard to M Gustave de Moyenville, letter 7, p. 182; to M le Cordier, fils, letter 1249, Sept. 1809, p. 166. 66. On Maurice’s romantic self-presentation, see Bannour, Eugénie de Guérin, 153–55.

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things, he brooded on the emptiness of his life as he “wandered among the tombstones.”67 Maurice’s adolescent letter to the abbé Buquet proclaimed his allegiance to the family of men and boys who surrounded him at Stanislas. He erased the family—especially the loving sisters but also the stern father—who waited for him to return home to Andillac. It is unlikely that Buquet chided him. For all the Collège Stanislas’s professed respect for paternal authority and familial affection, the organization of the school manifested a certain mistrust of families’ capacity to prepare their sons for the future. Liautard’s writings on education have an Emile-like quality to them: fathers were their children’s natural educators, except for those boys fortunate enough to study at Stanislas. Ironically, most of the problems that Liautard acknowledged at Stanislas came, he asserted, from pupils’ homes: families undermined the discipline that was so important to raising boys. Maurice, in this respect, was an ideal pupil, since he never once returned home during his five years at Stanislas. His occasional visits to Parisian cousins represented his only opportunity to introduce outside influences into the school. The Collège Stanislas taught that filial devotion, like mathematics or rhetoric, was better learned at school than at home, and boys needed a “second father”—an affectionate priest-schoolmaster like Liautard, Augé, or Buquet—at least as much as they needed their first one.68 For Liautard and his staff, the family home was a sexualized environment in which women, from mothers to maids, might stimulate boys’ desire and consequently undermine the discipline of the school. The school, they felt, operated best when pupils had as little contact with this world as possible. Stanislas limited parental visits to the noon recess and discouraged “overly frequent” calls.69 Distant parents worried about homesickness might authorize their sons to visit family or friends in Paris, but Liautard did not hesitate to chide those who permitted too many such excursions.70 He also complained to parents when he felt a boy had been morally or intellectually backsliding during a vacation: it was impossible for the headmaster to do his work when vacations at home encouraged boys’ taste for “liberty and 67. Maurice to Abbé Buquet, 1828, Œuvres complètes, 2:18. Compare Simone Bernard-Griffiths, “Adolescence romantique et mal de siècle entre correspondance et autobiographie: Edgar Quinet au Collège de Lyon,” in Difficulté d’être et mal du siècle dans les correspondances et journaux intimes de la première moitié du XIXe siècle (Clermont-Ferrand, Fr., 1998), 91–123. 68. Student verses addressed to Liautard (“second father”), ACS, 102 ter II-2–9. 69. “Collège Stanislas, Règlement, 1846–1847,” and Liautard to M Faget, Minutier, letter 1002, May 1809, pp. 150–51. 70. “Collège Stanislas, Règlement, 1846–1847,” and, in Minutier, Liautard to M de Moyenneville, letter 72, Dec. 1808, p. 72; and to M Carmier du Vivier, letter 190, 1808, p. 20.

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pleasure.”71 In the winter of 1810–1811 when two pupils committed suicide at the school within a few months of one another, Liautard blamed their families’ indulgence. Antoine Ramé’s mother was principally at fault in her son’s death; he had been perfectly happy at Stanislas, the headmaster asserted, until she had intervened to remove him from the school and place him in a seminary—Liautard referred to it as a kidnapping. Fathers could be as guilty as mothers. Onésime de Musset’s father visited him daily, took him on frequent excursions, and generally made it impossible for the boy to settle into school life.72 Accustomed to such indulgence, Onésime refused to bend to Stanislas’s discipline, and he took his own life at age fourteen. The Mussets and the Ramés had ill-advisedly insisted on remaining actively involved in their sons’ lives, refusing to trust the priest-schoolmasters who “took as much care of the children as the most tender and intelligent mother, without her natural weakness.”73 Undoubtedly, God created families, and they deserved respect as models of authority and love. At school, however, Stanislas boys experienced the “community life of a religious family, a perfected, almost deified imitation of the natural family.”74 A family of priests and boys damped down the “flames” of adolescence and—at least theoretically—allowed boys to mature calmly, passing directly from the sweet innocence of childhood to adult maturity without ever having been confused or unhappy adolescents.75 In spite of the absence of women and Maurice’s general contentment at school, Stanislas’s Catholic atmosphere did not succeed in protecting his vocation to the priesthood. Much of the adolescent anxiety that fueled Maurice’s letter to the abbé Buquet derived from his recognition that he did not want to become a priest—at eighteen, he was no longer the earnest future cleric who had started at the school five years earlier. Anxious to fit in among his classmates, Maurice had obtained permission from his father to wear trousers

71. Entries in Minutier: Liautard to M de May, letter 252, Nov. 1808, p. 47; to M de Changy, letter 557, p. 87; to M Ghilin [?], letter 437, p. 70. See also the letter to M d’Ayguesvives [?] about Alphonse, whose vacation apparently turned his thoughts away from his upcoming first communion. Minutier, letter 574, p. 88. 72. Onésime’s cousin Paul de Musset (brother of the writer Alfred) wrote an account in which a cold, distant father and fear of being forced into the priesthood pushed Onésime to self-destruction. Biographie de Alfred de Musset (1877; repr., Paris, 1884), 64–65. For a fuller account of the two suicides, see Carol E. Harrison, “Protecting Catholic Boys and Forming Catholic Men at the Collège Stanislas in Restoration Paris,” French History and Civilization: Papers from the George Rudé Seminar 1 (2005): 162–73. 73. Denys, “Essai biographique,” 57. 74. Lagarde, Histoire du Collège Stanislas, 108. 75. On the category “adolescence,” see Agnès Thiercé, Histoire de l’adolescence (1850–1914) (Paris, 1999); J. R. Gillis, Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Relations, 1770–Present (New York, 1981).

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and a coat instead of his cassock shortly after his arrival. To his family’s chagrin, his letters home said hardly anything about his first communion, which he received a few months before his fifteenth birthday in 1825—not desperately late but nonetheless not what one might expect of a boy with a clerical vocation.76 Although Maurice’s school reports remained good, his teachers quickly concluded that he was unlikely to persevere in his vocation. His father and his sisters fretted that he might lose his faith entirely and be “lost in this world and for all eternity.”77 When Maurice finally admitted that he no longer felt a vocation (first in a letter to his sister Eugénie and then, through a family friend, to his father), Joseph de Guérin begged his son to reconsider. He feared that he had been mistaken to send his son to Stanislas, and he proposed that Maurice transfer to the more religious atmosphere of a seminary, where he might recover his vocation. He asked Maurice to consider Eugénie’s uncertain fate: she had always intended to keep house for her priest-brother, so it was her future as well as his at stake. He reminded Maurice of the threat of conscription from which the priesthood would shield him and painted a depressing picture of the other careers to which he might be suited.78 Possibly because he felt that his faltering vocation made him unworthy, Maurice seems not to have received Easter communion in 1828.79 Although his family feared that he would be swept into “the corruption of this century,” his path from the priesthood was not much different from that of other classmates who concluded during their school years that they were not cut out to be priests.80 Stanislas was not in the business of creating “mediocre churchmen,” its headmaster always insisted—better that his pupils become “honest laymen.”81 Even after leaving school, Maurice continued to confess to Buquet, and by Easter 1829 he was reconciled to his lost vocation and received communion.

Life after School: La Chênaie and Catholic Science Even once he had convinced his devout family that his vocation was irretrievably lost, Maurice de Guérin still had no plan for entering adulthood. He began studying law in Paris after leaving Stanislas in 1829, but he disliked it; the only compensation he could see was the chance to meet leading 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

Decahors, Maurice de Guérin, 92–93. Joseph de Guérin to Maurice, Feb. 20, 1826, quoted ibid., 94. Joseph de Guérin to Maurice, Oct. 7, 1827, quoted ibid., 96–98. Barthés, Eugénie de Guérin d’après des documents inédits, 130, 136. Joseph de Guérin to Maurice, Oct. 7, 1827, quoted in Decahors, Maurice de Guérin, 96. Liautard to M Ls Vandenhecke, Minutier, letter 2127, May 1810, pp. 220–21.

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writers and journalists and further his literary career.82 He taught a few classes at Stanislas—with no great enthusiasm—in order to make ends meet. He considered the possibility of returning home to live as a gentleman and pursue his pastoral poetry in an appropriate setting. In a letter to Eugénie, he suggested that she hint to their father that Joseph de Guérin would do better to save the tuition fees and bring Maurice home to dedicate himself to agriculture and his family.83 Eugénie concluded that marriage was the solution to her brother’s dilemma—if he was not going to join the priesthood, then he needed to give up the comradely life he continued to enjoy with schoolmates and create a conventional family. With a wealthy bride, Eugénie thought, Maurice could give up the law, return home, manage the estate, and write poetry. Eugénie had a candidate in mind: her friend Louise de Bayne, a young woman from another aristocratic family in the region, whom Maurice had met briefly during a visit home after leaving Stanislas. Maurice was willing to consider marriage to Louise, and, as Eugénie requested, he sent poems for the young woman that alluded delicately to his esteem for her family and hinted at the possibility of love. Negotiations for a marriage took place: Maurice returned home to meet Louise as a suitor, and the two fathers exchanged visits. Ultimately, however, Louise rejected Maurice’s proposal. His poetry, it seems, did not compensate for his status as second son with poor career prospects and uncertain health.84 Maurice returned to Paris and his law books, and Eugénie consoled him that Louise had not been as rich as they thought because her mother had run through much of the family fortune.85 Within a few weeks of his rejection, Maurice had found a new retreat from the uncertainties of his future. In December 1832 he announced to his father that he was leaving for Lamennais’s estate, La Chênaie, where a group of young men had gathered to create a new “Catholic science.” Maurice had been an enthusiastic follower of Lamennais for the previous two years, and his first venture into print had been an article on freedom of the press in the mennaisian newspaper L’Avenir.86 His invitation to join this circle came courtesy of his Stanislas classmate Eugène Boré, who had gone to La Chênaie shortly after leaving school in 1828 and who eventually recruited

82. Maurice to Eugénie, Jan. 6, Feb. 29, 1832, Œuvres complètes, 2:46–49, 50–53. 83. Maurice to Eugénie, Dec. 5, 1829, Œuvres complètes, 2:28–32. 84. On Maurice’s poetry for Louise, see Œuvres complètes, 1:55–63. On the courtship, see Decahors, Maurice de Guérin, 155–61, 181–85. 85. Kang, Le Parcours, 45. 86. Maurice’s article was unsigned: “Des procès de la presse,” L’Avenir, Apr. 12, 1831. Decahors, Maurice de Guérin, 147.

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two other Stanislas boys, the Scotsman John MacCarthy and René Richelot.87 Like Maurice, Eugène had planned to study law in Paris, and he had originally gone to Brittany merely to visit his brother Léon, who was part of the community at La Chênaie. According to Léon, Eugène immediately recognized that Lamennais would teach him more than the best professors in Paris, and he remained in Brittany.88 Maurice enthusiastically reported to his father that he could live with Lamennais’s disciples “absolutely for free” without even having to pay for laundry. He might take religious orders after all, but the question wouldn’t arise for a year at least.89 Joining the community at La Chênaie gave Maurice a sense of mission: he and his friends were reinvigorating Catholicism. But La Chênaie was also Maurice’s reprieve; it allowed him to prolong adolescence and to continue the schoolboy life into his twenties. The society of schoolmates and brothers was reassuringly familiar, even as their newfound mission seemed radical and new. His father and sisters were not entirely satisfied by Maurice’s sudden decision to move to Brittany, but he did at least seem fully committed to Catholicism, even if Lamennais’s religiosity was increasingly foreign to the conservative legitimism of Joseph de Guérin and his daughters. Eugénie, undoubtedly encouraged by her brother’s strategic hint that he might have a clerical future after all, declared herself ready to be persuaded that Lamennais represented the true spirit of modern Christianity.90 Félicité de Lamennais inspired a generation of young men like Maurice de Guérin and the Boré brothers because he brought intellectual excitement to religious polemic and pulled Catholic thought into the modern, postrevolutionary world.91 He was a new type of Catholic thinker: an intransigent 87. Léonce de la Rallaye, Eugène Boré, Supérieur général de la Congrégation de la Mission et des Filles de la Charité (Paris, 1894), 16; Decahors, Maurice de Guérin, 118. 88. Léon Boré to M Godard, Dec. 28, 1828, quoted in L. Cosnier, “Léon Boré et ses deux premiers amis,” Mémoires de la Société d’agriculture, sciences et arts d’Angers (1884): 117–160, 122. 89. Maurice to Joseph de Guérin, Dec. 5, 1832, Œuvres complètes, 2:56–57. Lamennais, however, eventually became annoyed that Maurice had not paid his board. 90. Eugénie to Maurice, May 1, 1831, in Eugénie de Guérin: Lettres à son frère Maurice (1824– 1839), ed. Emile Barthés (Paris, 1929), 42–43. Eugénie’s letters to her brother during his residence at La Chênaie have been lost. 91. Unfortunately there is no definitive (or recent) biography of Félicité de Lamennais. The best is Jean Lebrun, Lamennais ou l’inquiétude de la liberté (Paris, 1981), which stops in 1834, when Lamennais parted ways with the church. Georges Hourdin, Lamennais, prophète et combattant de la liberté (Paris, 1982) explicitly presents Lamennais as a precursor to the Second Vatican Council. Louis Le Guillou, Les Lamennais: Deux frères, deux destins (Paris, 1990) is a short but useful account of the lives and influence of Lamennais and his brother, the abbé Jean-Marie, founder of the Frères de l’instruction chrétienne. For brief accounts in English, see Alec R. Vidler, Prophecy and Papacy: A Study of Lamennais, the Church, and the Revolution (New York, 1954), and Peter N. Stearns, Priest and Revolutionary: Lamennais and the Dilemma of French Catholicism (New York, 1967).

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believer in Catholicism’s unique claim to truth who was also willing to come to terms with the changes wrought by the Revolution. Lamennais was no defeatist, and he asserted that the church was not destined to suffer eternally at the hands of revolutionaries. Much postrevolutionary Catholicism, like its eighteenth-century predecessor, was defensive; its response to philosophie was fearful and intellectually stagnant. Defenders of the church remained mired in the arguments and methods of the late Enlightenment, churning out defenses of tradition and faith, most of which drew on the condemnation of modern morals and a paranoid belief in conspiracy.92 Lamennais, in contrast, was never inclined to treat philosophie as a mysterious cabal of atheists, Protestants, and Freemasons, possibly in league with dark forces, whose project was the overthrow of Christianity and the perdition of France. In an atmosphere in which Catholic missions burned copies of Rousseau and Voltaire in revival meetings so as to protect the religious sensibilities of youth, Lamennais read them, and he recommended that his students read them as well. During the Restoration, he produced a series of polemical books and pamphlets in which he set about wrestling philosophie to the ground. Victories won by the philosophes, he asserted, were temporary, soon to be driven back by a resurgent Christian tide. Lamennais’s opening salvo, the Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de religion, whose first volume appeared in 1817, called on Catholics to reject the liberal attitude that declared religious belief relevant only in matters of private conscience and family life. He heaped scorn on views of religion that were primarily instrumental and that set aside the question of religious truth in favor of investigating its social and political uses. Such reasoning made religion the product of human invention, not its precondition. Instead, Lamennais asserted that religious faith was always and in all societies the foundation upon which knowledge was possible. A common core of beliefs that led individuals to live in society—most perfectly expressed by the Catholic Church—also allowed them to inquire into the natural world and human societies. For Lamennais, both atheism and liberal indifference to religious truth falsified the production of knowledge, and true science was therefore Catholic science.93 According to the archbishop of Paris, the Essai could “wake the dead,” and it catapulted Lamennais’s intransigent Catholicism into

92. Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (New York, 2001). 93. Lamennais used “indifferent” and “atheist” interchangeably. François Laplanche, “La notion de ‘science catholique,’ ses origines au début du XIXe siècle,” Revue d’histoire de l’église de France 192 (1988): 63–90.

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the limelight.94 By 1829, when Maurice de Guérin was finding his way to adulthood, Lamennais was triumphantly asserting that the time had come “for Catholic science to reap the rich harvest that awaits.”95 Catholic science, as Lamennais and his followers understood it, made faith modern and allowed it to enter into debate and dialogue with other, sometimes secular, philosophical currents. Lamennais was acutely aware that serious intellectual life after the Revolution was secular—it did not consider Catholic thought a legitimate participant and proceeded as if the church did not exist. Catholic scholars had no response to the eclectic philosophy of Victor Cousin or to the developing field of Orientalism because they had no common ground for engagement. Ecclesiastical training prepared them to fight the eighteenth century’s battles against Jansenism; they studied theological manuals that excerpted key texts and prepared pupils for orthodox polemic—and, in Lamennais’s mind, ensured that they could not depart from orthodoxy because they learned nothing else. The church had abandoned the intellectual field to the denizens of the godless Napoleonic University, but Lamennais was determined to assert that Catholic knowledge could more than hold its own against secular learning. Lamennais aspired to disrupt the insularity of French Catholics and their exclusive focus on the trauma of the Revolution by introducing new developments in Christian scholarship, notably from Germany. France had nothing to compare with German biblical criticism and no tradition of research based on the principle that investigating the mysteries of religion might develop faith, not damage it. French clerics—and French readers more generally—were largely unaware of the existence of a German Enlightenment tradition that studied the Bible as a historical text without necessarily rejecting it as a basis for faith.96 Gotthold Lessing’s Education of Humankind (1780), for instance, did not come to French attention until Madame de Staël’s De l’Allemagne (1813) and Benjamin Constant’s De la Religion (1824) mentioned it; the first French translation appeared in 1829 with an introduction seeking to integrate Lessing into the Saint-Simonian canon.97 German scholarship also raised the possibility of a Christian Orientalism, like that of Friedrich Schlegel’s On the Language and Wisdom of India (1808), in contrast to the strongly anticlerical

94. The Essai went through four editions and thirteen thousand copies in its first year. Vidler, Prophecy and Papacy, 71. 95. Du progrès de la Révolution (1829), 194, quoted in Jean-René Derré, Lamennais, ses amis et le mouvement des idées à l’époque romantique, 1824–1834 (Paris, 1962), 277. 96. Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton, 2005); Louis Le Guillou, L’Evolution de la pensée religieuse de Félicité Lamennais (Paris, 1965), 13. 97. Derré, Lamennais, ses amis, 32–33, 38.

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tone of much French Orientalism.98 Lamennais and his disciples recognized that French scholars such as Pierre Paul Royer Collard, Maine de Biran, and Victor Cousin had followed the Germans in formulating a critique of many of the materialist tenets of Enlightenment thought, notably the insistence that all knowledge must derive from sensory experience.99 Although Catholic theologians had not noticed it, the philosophe of the Voltairean type had already vanished from the intellectual scene, and his aggressive materialism was passé. France’s Catholic hierarchy was still fighting battles that had ended decades ago, Lamennais maintained; modern science was not a priori hostile to religion, and Catholics should not abandon it to anticlericals. Lamennais directed his critique of postrevolutionary Catholic teaching at individuals like the abbé Liautard who understood the Revolution as a pervasive and mystical force for evil and who believed that the church could survive the threat only if it remained locked in the tight embrace of Bourbon kings. It is ironic, then, that so many of Lamennais’s closest collaborators were graduates of Stanislas. The father figures in these young men’s lives—their actual fathers and the schoolmasters who headed their “second family”—promoted a reactionary political and religious view of France after the Revolution. These father figures also provided their sons with the intellectual resources to reject their conservatism, however. For all his Old Regime nostalgia, Liautard was nonetheless a former student of Polytechnique and fully at ease with a modern, secular curriculum. Young laymen like Maurice de Guérin and Eugène Boré, who had followed the University’s educational program even though their teachers despised its educational monopoly, were poised to recognize that there were opportunities for Catholics in French intellectual life. In spite of its rhetoric about paternal authority, Stanislas had in fact prepared its boys for a fraternal model of intellectual endeavor, and they fully appreciated the egalitarian, collaborative model of scholarship that they found with Lamennais at La Chênaie.

98. For the anticlericalism of French Orientalism, see, e.g., Dupuis, Abrégé de l’origine de tous les cultes (Paris, [1797]), 425, http://visualiseur.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k88260z, quoted in Le Guillou, Evolution, 21. But consider also the work of the Catholic Orientalist Silvestre de Sacy. Christian Décobert, “L’Orientalisme des Lumières à la Révolution, selon Silvestre de Sacy,” Revue du monde musulman et de la Méditerranée 52–53 (1989): 49–62. 99. Jan Goldstein, The Post-revolutionary Self: Politics and Psyche in France, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, MA, 2005), chaps. 3–4; Christian Décobert, “‘Une science de nos jours’: Le rapport de Bon-Joseph Dacier sur la classe d’histoire et de littérature ancienne de l’Institut,” Annales historiques de la révolution française 320 (2000): 33–45. Victor Cousin was sympathetic to mennaisianism in the 1820s. Arthur Mitzman, “Michelet and Social Romanticism: Religion, Revolution, Nature,” Journal of the History of Ideas 57, no. 4 (1996): 659–82.

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Lamennais’s disciples embraced liberty in their relationships to one another, in their intellectual endeavors, and, ultimately, as a political principle. Because La Chênaie was a private home, it was independent, with no ties to church institutions or hierarchy. The young men who joined Lamennais there were similarly free; no formal ties bound them either to the church or to one another. Friendship and piety rather than vows held the community together. Maurice de Guérin was typical of the young men attracted to La Chênaie: he was on the verge of adulthood; he felt no vocation to the priesthood, but he nonetheless wanted to experience a more Catholic life. He had received a modern education according to the University curriculum, which he combined with a disdain for rationalist, philosophical irreligion. In some ways Maurice wanted to turn his back on the world; he sought out the cloister, a society of men, intellect, and devotion. He rejected, at least temporarily, le monde—the world of women, pleasure, and frivolity—but also the serious business of marriage, family, and career. He and his companions formed an alternative, freely chosen family composed exclusively of men, with Lamennais—Monsieur Féli, as they affectionately called him—as father. They understood their retreat as a model of Christian liberty and fraternity, as an example of how Catholic men could redeem the basic principles of the Revolution. Within a few days of his arrival at La Chênaie, Maurice wrote enthusiastically to his sister Eugénie that he was studying Italian, ancient Greek, the history of philosophy, and Catholic philosophy more specifically. It was, he said, “a big effort . . . but with such a great general leading us I feel full of confidence, and I am certain of victory.”100 His family would be surprised, he wrote, at how diligently he worked, even waking at five in the morning.101 His colleagues similarly immersed themselves in the study of languages, comparative religions, and the origins of Christianity. Eugène Boré had started out working on his Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, as well as several modern languages, a program that would become the foundation of his career first as an Orientalist specializing in Armenia and then as a Lazarist missionary.102 Scholarship at La Chênaie was both individual and collective; each young man chose his own branches of study but with the goal of creating a community of expertise in all ancient and modern learning. In the mornings, everyone gathered to listen to lectures by Lamennais or his collaborator, the

100. Maurice to Eugénie, Dec. 18, 1832, Œuvres complètes, 2:61. 101. Maurice to Joseph de Guérin, Dec. 14, 1832, Œuvres complètes, 2:57–60. 102. Léon Boré to M. Godard, Dec. 26, 1828, reprinted in Cosnier, “Léon Boré,” 122; de la Rallaye, Eugène Boré, chap. 2.

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abbé Olympe-Philippe Gerbet, and in the afternoons they retired to their rooms to pursue languages, history, philosophy, and theology. They read extensively in the natural sciences as well; Maurice’s education at Stanislas had not given him much scientific background, but he nonetheless read recent work in chemistry and biology.103 The young men at La Chênaie even raised the possibility of composing a Catholic encyclopedia that would rival the philosophes’ eighteenth-century project and refute philosophical atheism on all points. The joyless, repressive atmosphere of the seminary that Stendhal famously described in The Red and the Black had no place at La Chênaie. Lamennais’s followers emphasized the liberty they enjoyed in their choice of reading, in contrast to the plight of seminary students, for whom many books were banned and others carefully excerpted.104 The young men regularly read newspapers—absolutely forbidden in seminary—because keeping up with the world that they hoped to transform was part of the curriculum. The encyclopedic ambitions of the community meant that nothing was off limits and nothing was a priori irrelevant. If truth ultimately derived from Catholic faith, then all genuine knowledge had Christian roots. Living at La Chênaie did not require any ascetic disciplining of the body, as seminary training did. At the end of each day, residents gathered in the salon for evening recreation, jokes, and—on the not infrequent occasions when they had guests—coffee and liqueurs.105 They enjoyed dancing, swimming, ice skating, and simple, occasionally rowdy, games like blindman’s bluff.106 Lamennais joined in, and his young followers “couldn’t help admiring the simplicity with which [he] . . . descended from the heights of his genius . . . to join in our games, to make himself young, even childish, with us.”107 Memoirs of La Chênaie emphasize the innocent boyishness of the community, whose members behaved not like future priests learning to regulate their minds and restrain their bodies but rather like children, exploring and rejoicing in their mental and physical capacities. La Chênaie, then, was like school with its games and study hall and friendly competition, but it had greater freedom: no uniforms, no regimented schedule, no surveillance. At La Chênaie, Christian boys domesticated themselves.

103. For instance, Pyramus de Candolle’s three-volume Physiologie végétale. Maurice de Guérin, “Le Cahier vert,” Apr. 24, 1833, Œuvres complètes, 1:166. 104. Camille Latreille, introduction to Souvenirs de jeunesse, 1828–1835, by Charles Sainte Foi [Eloi Jourdain] (Paris, 1911), 10. 105. Maurice to Eugénie, Dec. 18, 1832, Œuvres complètes, 2:61. 106. De la Rallaye, Eugène Boré, 10, 12; Sainte Foi, Souvenirs de jeunesse, 46–47, 102. 107. Sainte Foi, Souvenirs de jeunesse, 46–47.

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Maurice continued to write poetry at La Chênaie, where his friends and his mentor supported his literary vocation. Lamennais valued the arts and cultivated artists like Victor Hugo and Franz Liszt, who, he imagined, would demonstrate the creative power of Catholic faith and “give wings to Catholic thought that our pious writers often drag along the cobbles and even in the gutters.”108 Part of La Chênaie’s appeal to Maurice was that leading romantic writers formed an important part of the social circle; in addition to Hugo and Liszt, Lamennais’s movement attracted figures like Alphonse de Lamartine and Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who were inspired by the priest’s call to action. Maurice was nearly overwhelmed with the excitement of finding himself on the edge of the Parisian literary world. For instance, in a breathless account of a trip to nearby Saint-Malo with Edmond de Cazalès, a prominent critic and editor, Maurice recorded that he “thought of God, then of the Flood, of the Dove, of the continents beyond the abyss, of shipwrecks, of ocean battles, of Byron, of René who embarked at SaintMalo and . . . was carried away by the same waves I was contemplating.”109 The literary community at La Chênaie—young aspirants as well as elder statesmen—allowed Maurice to imagine his creative powers unleashed and himself as a new Chateaubriand. In addition to his scientific and philosophical reading, Maurice discovered Goethe and Herder; he pursued his attachment to Byron, Shakespeare, and Walter Scott, and he kept up with the latest works of Hugo, Alfred de Musset, and Charles Nodier. Just as they had at school, Maurice and his friends shared their literary enthusiasms, and La Chênaie became “our Parnassus.”110 Although Lamennais generally subordinated art to Catholic purposes, the fact that he did not automatically write it off as corrupting distinguished the movement and added to its glamour.111 From La Chênaie, Maurice encouraged Eugénie to write as well. She had always been the poet of the family—“our Sappho,” their father called her—but she had given up writing verse a few years previously. She claimed that poetry was too worldly a pursuit, but her biographer suggests that

108. Quoted in Louis Le Guillou, “Victor Hugo, Lamennais, et Montalembert jusqu’aux Paroles d’un croyant,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 6 (1986): 988–98, 989. See also the minor romantic poet Edouard Turquety’s account of his 1832 visit to La Chênaie, quoted in René Richelot, “Autour de Félicité de Lamennais à La Chênaie. Quelques lettres inédites, 1830–1836,” Bulletin et mémoires de la société archéologique du département d’Ille-et-Vilaine 72 (1958): 85–94. 109. Maurice de Guérin, “Le Cahier vert,” Apr. 15, 1833, Œuvres complètes, 1:164. 110. François du Breil de Marzan, “Séjour de Maurice de Guérin en Bretagne, impressions et souvenirs,” in Maurice de Guérin: Journal, lettres, et poèmes, ed. G. S. Trebutien, 21st ed. (Paris, 1897), 441. On Maurice’s reading, see Decahors, Maurice de Guérin, 220–28. 111. Arthur McCalla, “Liszt, Bricoleur: Poetics and Providentialism in Early July Monarchy France,” History of European Ideas 24, no. 2 (1998): 71–92.

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disappointment at failing to win the Jeux floreaux poetry competition in Toulouse motivated her retreat.112 Maurice declared her “strange scruple” incomprehensible, and he tried to convince her of the mennaisian view that valued even secular art and that admitted artists into the social circles of priests. He checked with the abbé Gerbet, who assured him that there was “no pastime as innocent as poetry.”113 Some priests’ fear of morally reprehensible literature was exaggerated, Maurice assured her, and if Christian readers limited themselves to books that were completely pure, Maurice and his sister would have nothing to read.114 Eugénie sent her thanks to Gerbet, and observed that if she had been Maurice’s brother instead of his sister, she would certainly have gone with him to La Chênaie, where talent and vocation flourished. She would have discovered there whether she had any true talent; her vocation, she pointedly remarked, was unshakable, even if the need to look after their father prevented her from pursuing it.115 Unperturbed by Eugénie’s scruples, Maurice composed a great deal of poetry at La Chênaie, most of which celebrated a world of male camaraderie tinged with religious devotion and an erotic frisson. “Maurice et François,” for instance, recalled the poet’s first meeting with another of Lamennais’s disciples, François du Breil de Marzan: every word spoken, every glance or gesture was “secretly anointed by a holy power whose divine scent aw[oke] Friendship that slept in the depths of the heart.” Friendship cured Maurice of the bitterness of his first, unhappy love for Louise de Bayne; François, the “angel of my salvation,” “delicately pulled this thorn from my heart and cleansed the wound with his cool breath.”116 The young men read one another their verses, and the honeyed taste of François’s words remained on Maurice’s lips as he composed his own. In the spring and summer of 1833, Maurice dedicated several sonnets to François and composed a poem for a younger Stanislas classmate that recalled their school days, when “divine friendship spun the lovely thread” that tied the two boys together so that the least tremor was instantly communicated from one to the other.117 Writing

112. Bannour, Eugénie de Guérin, 56. 113. Maurice to Eugénie, Apr. 29, 1833, Œuvres complètes, 2:71. 114. Maurice to Eugénie, June 21, 1833, Œuvres complètes, 2:90–91. 115. Eugénie to Maurice, May 1833, in Barthés, Eugénie de Guérin: Lettres, 68. 116. Maurice de Guérin, “Maurice et François,” Œuvres complètes, 1:66–67. I have adapted the translation of James M. Vest and Nancy Vest, ed. and trans., The Poetic Works of Maurice de Guérin (n.p., 1992), 144, 146. 117. Maurice de Guérin, “Entretien, à F. du Breil de Marzan,” “Premier sonnet à François,” “Sonnet à François du Breil de Marzan,” “Autre sonnet au même,” “Un jour François . . . à François du Breil de Marzan,” and “A mon ami de collège Raymond de Rivières,” Œuvres complètes, 1:70–74, 77–80, 82–87.

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in the voice of Antigone confronting Creon, Maurice asserted that wives and children could be replaced but that the death of a brother left one bereft forever.118 His verse celebrated his “dear friends, companions in study, saintly saplings that God plants in this solitude, to bear fruit here.”119 The world without women at La Chênaie provided Maurice with complete emotional satisfaction, and his poetry recorded his delight in his friends and the comfort that he found in their Christian fraternity. The community at La Chênaie simplified the problem of Catholicizing fraternity by excluding women and ignoring the kind of society that women occupied. Even Monsieur Féli’s sister—who had also grown up at La Chênaie, whose son was part of the colony there, and whose daughter had married another of Lamennais’s followers—stayed away, a “delicacy” that the young men “understood and . . . appreciated.”120 Maurice, smarting from his rejected proposal of marriage, wrote about La Chênaie as a “refuge” and himself as “a fugitive from the world.”121 It is difficult to imagine that Maurice could have been deeply attached to Louise de Bayne, whom he had only met a few times—the uncertainty that rejection had introduced into his future was probably as painful as any heartache he might have felt. Nonetheless, the role of heartbroken lover appealed to him. Repeatedly his poems referred to finding consolation for his unhappy love affair in male friendship. The residents of La Chênaie were either studious—even monastic— young men taking on the serious philosophical and theological questions of the world or carefree boys, playing together in a rough-and-ready manner free from a mother’s supervision. By joining Lamennais in his rural Breton retreat, they were avoiding the social responsibilities that confronted young men on the cusp of adulthood. Maurice had removed himself from his family’s influence, made himself unavailable to other potential marriage partners, and generally withdrawn from the ordinary social trajectory of a responsible young man. With the exception of Monsieur Féli—generally acknowledged as leader, genius, and father—no one at La Chênaie had any authority over Maurice and his friends. It was a community of equals: young men living similar Spartan lives, dedicated to a cause greater than themselves and living for that cause and for their friendship. The innocence that Maurice and his

118. Maurice de Guérin, “Antigone à Créon, fragment,” Œuvres complètes, 1:80. 119. Maurice de Guérin, “Des vers à moi, à Monsieur Henri Guillermard,” Œuvres complètes, 1:76; Vest and Vest, Poetic Works, 163. 120. Sainte Foi, Souvenirs de jeunesse, 89. 121. Maurice to M de Bayne (ironically, the father of Louise who had rejected Maurice’s suit), Christmas 1832, and “Le Cahier vert,” July 13, 1832, Œuvres complètes, 2:64–65; 1:144. Maurice continued to torment himself over his lost love: Decahors, Maurice de Guérin, 247–49, 253–54, 259.

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fellows cultivated was boyish and free rather than restricted and clerical; they intended eventually to take up the responsibilities of professional life, marriage, and fatherhood, but for the moment they were devoted to an ideal of friendship, which left no room for ambition or calculation.122 Hero worship, as well as friendship and intellectual ambition, drew young men to La Chênaie, where their adoption of Lamennais as father allowed them to continue as sons. Boys like Maurice who had found surrogate fathers in their clerical schoolmasters easily cast Lamennais in the same role. Maurice wrote that he trembled when he first met Lamennais, as one would “when approaching something divine or a very great man,” but he soon learned that Monsieur Féli was as “simple and gentle as a child.” Maurice put himself “body and soul in [Lamennais’s] hands, hoping that this great artist [would] reveal a statue from this formless block.”123 According to Léon Boré, La Chênaie was “a place of delight, in which one feels separated from heaven by nothing more than a curtain lifted by the hand of the ineffable” Lamennais.124 Charles Sainte Foi later recalled that some of his friends at La Chênaie “had a single occupation, for which there were hardly enough hours in the day: loving . . . M de Lamennais, drinking in his words, . . . letting themselves nestle like a child against this great soul and to melt like wax in his radiant warmth.”125 Memoirs of La Chênaie suggest an enclosed, hothouse atmosphere where loving friends opened their souls to one another but in which there was nonetheless a certain competition for Monsieur Féli’s attention and favor. Many years later, some former disciples concluded that there was something idolatrous about the community and that Lamennais “almost sensually fed off the homage and affection of these young souls who let themselves be absorbed by him and who then reflected back to him his own features.”126 In retrospect, the Christian friendship of La Chênaie seemed less benevolent and egalitarian, but at the time, when Lamennais was widely hailed as “the prophet of modern times,” his followers could see little fault in their community.127

122. Maurice emphasized that his conviction that he lacked clerical vocation grew at La Chênaie: see, e.g., Maurice to Eugénie, Apr. 29, 1833, Œuvres complètes, 2:73. See also Sainte-Foi, Souvenirs de jeunesse, 91. 123. Maurice to M de Bayne, Christmas 1832, Œuvres complètes, 2:64–65. 124. Léon Boré to M Godard, Dec. 26, 1828, in Cosnier, “Léon Boré,”122. 125. Sainte Foi, Souvenirs de jeunesse, 77. 126. Henri Lacordaire, Testament du P. Lacordaire (Paris, 1870), 51–53, quoted in Félicité de Lamennais, Correspondance générale, vol. 4, Juillet 1828–Juin 1831, ed. Louis Le Guillou (Paris, 1973), 280; Sainte Foi, Souvenirs de jeunesse, 77. 127. De la Rallaye, Eugène Boré, 13.

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By the time Maurice de Guérin arrived at La Chênaie, it was already a society in crisis. Papal disapproval of Lamennais’s ideas and activities— including his independent community that answered to no bishop—loomed over the young men; chapter 3 takes up the story of Pope Gregory XVI’s condemnation of mennaisianism. Maurice seems to have been largely unaware of his master’s precarious position through the spring of 1833.128 In September of that year, however, Lamennais announced the dissolution of his group of followers, and by the end of the year they had left La Chênaie. Some entered seminary to train for the priesthood under the episcopal hierarchy’s watchful eyes, while others returned to the laity to face decisions about marriage and career. Maurice was devastated by the choice. “My whole future is turned upside down,” he recorded in his journal. “The outside world [le monde] horrifies me. Oh! it is because my place is here, and in spite of being headstrong and making worldly jokes, I know it in the depths of my soul. I was just beginning to see my destiny clearly, and now I have to start over again not understanding anything.”129 Maurice and his friends found it difficult to believe that Monsieur Féli could be as wicked—or even simply as misguided—as Gregory XVI’s condemnation claimed. In his journal, Maurice addressed an absent Lamennais: “Poor M Féli! You have often held me to your breast, and I have breathed in your soul; my timid and unworthy gaze has looked into the bottom of your heart because there were days when you became so transparent . . . that one could see into your depths as into the clearest fountain.”130 How could friendship so profound lead one astray? Maurice and some of his fellow mennaisians could not avoid considering the possibility that truth was on the side of their friendship, not that of the church hierarchy. The consequence of that belief—that their church, or at least its leaders, was wrong—was terrifying. Neither theology nor politics had ever been the main source of La Chênaie’s appeal to Maurice. Friendship and poetry had always been what drew him to mennaisianism, and open revolt against the papacy—the path that Lamennais eventually chose—did not tempt him. He spent the months after the dissolution of the community staying with various friends from La Chênaie and renewing friendships from his Stanislas days, including that with Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly. His devout family, especially Eugénie, agonized over the

128. Although Decahors, Maurice de Guérin, 271, suggests that Maurice’s writing reflects Lamennais’s increasingly dark view of the church. 129. Maurice de Guérin, “Le Cahier vert,” Oct. 14, 1833, Œuvres complètes, 1:181–82. 130. Maurice de Guérin, “Le Cahier vert,” Jan. 2, 1834, Œuvres complètes, 1:193–94.

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danger posed to his soul by his attachment to Lamennais and by his apparent indifference to religion after his departure from La Chênaie. Maurice never left the church, but after the dissolution of La Chênaie religion no longer inspired him as it had during his youth. The enthusiasm for a modernized Catholic faith that had filled his friendships and his verse with a sense of purpose had waned. He dedicated the final six years of his life to writing and to maintaining a life on the edges of the Parisian literary world.131 In the 1870s when the Collège Stanislas contacted its former students in order to create an alumni directory, Maurice’s youngest sister, Marie, responded on her brother’s behalf. Marie de Guérin outlived her siblings, all of whom had succumbed to tuberculosis. She never married, and she devoted herself to protecting the memory of Maurice and Eugénie, who had become well-known literary figures. Marie had little to say about Maurice’s posthumous fame, and his card in the Stanislas file says nothing about George Sand’s approval of his poems or about the volume containing his poetry, letters, and journal that appeared in 1862. Marie wanted her brother’s old schoolmates to know that he had died a good Catholic. She wrote that before leaving Paris to return home during his final illness, he had confessed to Monsieur Buquet, his teacher and confidant from his Stanislas days. On his deathbed he had formally “renounced the doctrines of M de Lamennais” and received last rites.132 By the 1870s, when Marie de Guérin described her brother’s last days, the world of romantic Catholics in which Maurice lived had disappeared. Marie’s account of her brother, depicting a conventional, pious Catholic, missed the excitement and sense of experiment and possibility that had characterized his youth. Maurice would undoubtedly have been pleased to appear in Stanislas’s alumni directory; classmates had always been important to him, and he would have wanted his friends to know about his doings after their school days. He would have described his life in quite different terms from those Marie chose, however. Maurice probably would not have written about his faith without writing about his friends and poetry as well, and after the disappointment of his experience at La Chênaie, he might not have chosen to write about his church at all. Marie’s account of Maurice on his deathbed, facing God alone, certainly did not reflect her brother’s experience of Catholicism, which was 131. The influence of Catholicism on Maurice’s later poetry remains a matter of debate. Fumaroli claims that poetry replaced God in Maurice’s life. Introduction to Poésie, 10. Huet-Brichard, Maurice de Guérin, and Dominique Millet-Gérard, “Sublimitas et Profundum: L’Enigme du catholicisme romantique chez Maurice de Guérin,” in Huet-Brichard, Maurice de Guérin et le romantisme, 137–64, argue that Catholicism remained a key element of his poetic imagination. 132. See Maurice’s file in ACS, 189, Dossiers d’élèves, fascicule 1810.

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always collective and fraternal. Maurice’s relationship with God was always mediated by his affection for his friends, and he always understood Christian society as a fraternal assembly. The first generation of postrevolutionary boys to pass through the Collège Stanislas—the enfants du siècle of Maurice’s class—often spoke of their school in terms of “family,” but their classmates and masters formed a family that was more egalitarian and fraternal than their headmaster’s counterrevolutionary rhetoric suggested. In spite of the school’s commitment to legitimist politics and conservative Catholicism, Stanislas encouraged pupils to think of their school as an organic, Christian society that cohered because of the affection that its members had for one another, not because they accepted hierarchy on its own terms. The boys who studied at Stanislas in the 1820s absorbed the school’s ethos of Catholic fraternity, and the fact that several of them, including Maurice de Guérin, passed into Lamennais’s circle at La Chênaie demonstrated how effectively Stanislas had inculcated a romantic concept of Catholic community. At La Chênaie, the Stanislas boys found a form of Catholic fraternity that they recognized and embraced gratefully: young male friends working and living together with an intensely cultivated sense of higher purpose. They devoted themselves to the renewal of Catholic faith for the modern world and to the friends with whom they shared this goal. Papal disapproval of Lamennais’s ideas was a profound disappointment to his followers. Young men like Maurice and his friends, who believed themselves to be obedient sons of the church, found themselves in crisis when they discovered that their papal father rejected their love and condemned their vision of the future.

 Ch ap ter 3 The Dilemma of Obedience Charles de Montalembert, Catholic Citizen

In an 1844 speech before the Chamber of Peers, Charles de Montalembert, the thirty-four-year-old leader of France’s Catholic party, declared that he spoke for a generation of Catholics “born and educated in the midst of freedom, of representative and constitutional institutions” whose “souls ha[d] been penetrated . . . by their influence.” These Catholics demanded the most complete religious liberty—in this instance, the right to open independent schools, outside the government’s monopoly over secondary education. “We are the sons of the crusaders, and we will never retreat before the sons of Voltaire!” he concluded, with a flourish that soon became a slogan of Catholic politics.1 Montalembert’s affirmation that the “sons of the crusaders” had a role to play in postrevolutionary French society and politics captured a sense of Catholic revival and generational identity that had characterized his career since 1830. Although the issues raised by the Revolution of 1789 remained lively, he asserted, the generation that fought these battles had passed, leaving in its place a cohort of young men without firsthand memories of the Old

1. Margaret Oliphant, Memoir of Count de Montalembert, a Chapter of Recent French History, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1872), 2:59 reprints the speech. It also appears in Montalembert, Œuvres de M le comte de Montalembert, 9 vols. (Paris, 1860–68), 1:401. The “sons of the crusaders” statement is carved into his tombstone in the Picpus Cemetery in Paris. 103

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Regime but with shared assumptions about the value of liberty. Montalembert believed that in his fifteen years of involvement in Catholic politics, he and his collaborators had established a model for Catholic citizenship. Followers of the dynamic priest and writer Félicité de Lamennais, Montalembert and his close friend Henri Lacordaire spent the first years of the July monarchy asserting that Catholics had a role to play as Catholics in French political life and representative government. They focused primarily on schooling because they believed that educated Catholics who were aware of their modern rights and of the ancient traditions of their faith could transform French society, giving it a density that liberalism undermined. The sons of the crusaders would remind the sons of Voltaire, who mistook themselves for the abstract, rights-bearing individuals of liberal theory, that they were all in fact bound to others by sentiments of obligation and affection. Montalembert and Lacordaire, like Maurice de Guérin, were deeply attracted to Lamennais—both his ideas and his personal charisma drew the young men into his circle. Montalembert and Lacordaire, however, did not follow Guérin to the monastic, scholarly household at La Chênaie. Instead, they chose a more activist role, writing for and managing the daily newspaper L’Avenir, which promoted Lamennais’s vision of a dynamic, modern Catholicism in the months immediately following the July revolution of 1830. In the stressful, heady atmosphere of a crusading daily newspaper, the two young men embarked on a profound friendship that they came to understand as Catholic fraternity. They believed that their relationship demonstrated how Catholicism could both liberate the individual and locate him securely in a web of social ties: they had reconciled liberal citizenship with Catholic faith. Their friendship was a rebuke to the liberal idea that religion should restrict itself to the realm of privacy because their affection for one another demonstrated Catholicism’s relevance to modern political life. A citizenship modeled on disinterested and egalitarian male friendship, in which men freely chose their fellows and thus freely accepted their obligations, was a stronger foundation for the modern polity than a social order in which rights began and ended with individuals. Ultramontanism was central to Lamennais’s claim that the Catholic faith had something to offer postrevolutionary French society other than a return to the Old Regime. He scorned Catholics who were nostalgic for the eighteenth-century alliance of throne and altar; Catholics should look for leadership to the eternal city of Rome rather than to the flawed French state, he argued. “Without [the pope], no church; without the church, no Christianity; without Christianity, no religion for Christian people and, consequently, no society”—Lamennais tied together the destinies of French

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society, the church, and the papacy without even mentioning the state.2 His vision of society became progressively more radical, however, adopting a romantic populism that opposed despotic rule of all types—including what he eventually identified as pontifical despotism. Lamennais’s increasingly democratic politics resulted in Pope Gregory XVI’s condemnation of his writings in 1832 and 1834. He and his followers were left in the awkward position of being ultramontanes abandoned by their pope. Papal condemnation of mennaisian ideas shook Montalembert’s confidence in the capability of Catholic citizenship to create a coherent society. The dilemma of obedience—whether to submit to papal decree or to remain defiantly attached to mennaisian ideals—also strained Montalembert and Lacordaire’s friendship. Gregory’s pronouncements put them both in the position of having to choose between their religion and their progressive politics. Initially, Montalembert was inclined to abandon Catholic citizenship and to assert his right to act independently in all political matters, following his own conscience rather than papal direction. Faced with Gregory’s demand for submission, he found the liberal notion of religion as a purely private matter appealing. Lacordaire argued strenuously against this position; a true Catholic, he insisted, could not simply identify certain realms of human activity in which his faith was irrelevant. Ultimately, Montalembert and Lacordaire succeeded in bringing their concept of Catholic citizenship intact through the crisis. The Catholic citizen’s submission to his church, they concluded, did not mark him as unfit for modern political life but rather demonstrated his willingness to discipline his own will. Catholicism thus promised to stabilize modern participatory politics. Catholic fraternity, including obedience to Catholic authority, would improve liberal citizenship by countering selfishness and displacing competition as the sole organizing principle of political life.

“The Sacred Battalion of Twenty-Year-Old Souls” and the Pursuit of Liberty Charles de Montalembert and Henri Lacordaire, like their fellow members of Alfred de Musset’s generation of enfants du siècle, understood frustration with postrevolutionary paralysis. They felt detached from their surroundings, limited by their parents’ ambitions, and they chafed at the uncertainty and

2. Félicité de Lamennais, De la Religion considérée dans ses rapports avec l’ordre politique et civil, in Œuvres complètes de F. de La Mennais (Brussels, 1839), 2:45.

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caution that characterized their postrevolutionary world. Their passionate attachment to the Catholic Church was what made both of these young men feel most completely out of step with their contemporaries. Their goal was to find a Catholicism that would be expansive, dynamic, and glorious instead of the nostalgic, bitter, and fearful faith that was the stereotype of the Restoration years. Lamennais and L’Avenir showed them how to enroll in that cause. In an era when, in the words of a sympathetic contemporary poet, “the thinker was censored and God abandoned,” the two young men became the leaders of a “sacred battalion of twenty-year-old souls” dedicated to reminding their fellow citizens of their divinely ordained obligations to society.3 Henri Lacordaire was practically born with the nineteenth century, in 1802. His father, a military doctor, died in 1806, leaving his son alone to navigate the postrevolutionary world whose upheavals the father had participated in creating. The Lacordaire family intended Henri to become a lawyer, and he began his studies in Dijon before moving to Paris to complete his training. Lacordaire lost his faith shortly after his first communion, like many young men of his generation.4 He fit in well among law students and read the philosopes—Rousseau’s Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar was his “religious gospel” and the Social Contract his “social gospel.” He and his school friends knew that they were “not destined to drift through a quiet life” because they were “born in the midst of a revolution and . . . live[d] in the midst of revolutions.” Their postrevolutionary era would demand great sacrifices of them: “It is impossible to be a good citizen in troubled times without complete self-abnegation.”5 They were prepared for sacrifice and great deeds but unsure of what cause might be worthy of their efforts. Although Lacordaire had lost his faith during his lycée years in Dijon, he gradually returned to the church while studying law.6 University life in the 1820s was a hive of activity that produced a strong generational

3. Victor de Laprade (born 1812) wrote “Jeunes fous et jeunes sages” in 1860. Œuvres poétiques de Victor de Laprade. Poèmes civiques, tribuns et courtisans (Paris, 1879), 21–35, quotation on 22. Montalembert quoted the passage in Le Père Lacordaire (Paris, 1862), 48. 4. Théophile Foisset, La Vie du R.P. Lacordaire, 2 vols. (Paris, 1870). See also Lacordaire’s autobiography, dictated on his deathbed in 1861 and published by Montalembert: Le Testament du P. Lacordaire publié par le Comte de Montalembert (1870), reprinted in Mémoire dominicaine 4 (1994): 229–99. 5. Henri Lacordaire (hereafter HL) to Prosper Lorain, Jan. 18, 1823, in Henri Dominique Lacordaire, Correspondance répertoire, vol. 1, 1816–1839, ed. Guy Bedouelle and Christoph-Alois Martin (Paris, 2001), 64 (hereafter CR). 6. The best analysis of Lacordaire’s youth and conversion is Anne Philibert, Lacordaire et Lamennais (1822–1832): La route de la Chênaie (Paris, 2009), chaps. 1–3.

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consciousness.7 Young Catholics of the postrevolutionary generation organized and asserted their faith against the backdrop of the University, the state monopoly over education instituted by Napoleon and maintained under the Bourbon Restoration and that the abbé Liautard of the Collège Stanislas so despised. Law students in particular formed associations in which they debated revolutionary legal developments. Lacordaire joined all four sections (law, history, philosophy, and literature) of the Société des Etudes in Dijon, where he read German literature and learned to mistrust the materialism of the French philosopher Condillac. He caused the greatest sensation that society had ever witnessed when in 1822 he took the floor to abjure Rousseau. He confessed shortly afterward to his close friend (and later biographer) Théophile Foisset, “I have a religious soul, but a disbelieving mind, but, as it is in the nature of the mind to be subjugated by the soul, one day I will probably be a Christian.”8 His conversion reached its completion in Paris where he was finishing his studies, and the young Lacordaire immediately decided to abandon law for the priesthood. His previous ennui and world-weariness a thing of the past, Lacordaire wrote of his newfound enthusiasm: “I have come to belief, and I’ve never been more of a philosopher. A little philosophy distances one from Religion, but lots of it brings one back!”9 Lacordaire “remained a liberal while becoming a Catholic,” and this particular combination of beliefs made him an unusual figure in the seminary of Saint Sulpice.10 He was still the “son of a century that doesn’t know how to obey,” and in particular he disliked the seminary prohibition on close friendships—a clerical rule that he never managed to follow.11 Although he was a talented young man and his entry into the priesthood was a coup for the church, it was not immediately clear what role he should play in ecclesiastical affairs after his ordination in 1827. He spent two years as a chaplain, first at the convent of the Visitation and then at the public Lycée Henri IV, where his contact with the Restoration’s schools reinforced his objection to state control of education. In spite of the government’s best efforts to

7. Alan B. Spitzer, Old Hatreds and Young Hopes: The French Carbonari against the Bourbon Restoration (Cambridge, MA, 1971); Spitzer, The French Generation of 1820 (Princeton, 1987); and Anne Martin Fugier, “La Formation des élites: Les ‘conférences’ sous la Restauration et la Monarchie de Juillet,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 36 (1989): 211–44. 8. Foisset, La Vie, 1:55. For more on law students and HL in Paris, see Louis de Carné, Souvenirs de ma jeunesse au temps de la Restauration, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1873), 23–31, 159–60. 9. Quoted by Foisset, La Vie, 1:58. See also 1:94–96. 10. HL, quoted ibid., 1:96. 11. Foisset, La Vie, 1:75–76. See also HL to Archbishop Quélen, Mar. 21, 1843, CR, 509–10.

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Christianize its monopoly over secondary instruction—purging the ranks of teachers, appointing clerics to all the important positions—France’s schools remained places where boys mocked religion and tormented their comrades who tried to retain their faith. The only solution, Lacordaire was convinced, was greater freedom, which meant giving up the state’s control over education and allowing parents to choose appropriate schools for their sons.12 Unhappy to be working for an establishment that encouraged a “spirit of revolt” among boys who “regard school as a prison and their youth as a time of misery,” Lacordaire was planning a major career move when the July revolution occurred: he was going to America as vicar general to the bishop of New York. He was attracted to a country that, as he saw it, had successfully resolved the problem of how spiritual and civil society should interact. In the United States, he believed, the church was free, and it neither relied on the state for support nor feared the state’s oppression. In France, he felt that his ministry to young men was pointless and that the church, in its reflexive dependence on monarchy, had foreclosed avenues for development. “How can one think,” he wrote to a school friend, “when there is no Catholic thought?”13 Charles René Forbes de Montalembert, born in 1810, was several years younger than Lacordaire and from a family considerably higher up the social ladder. His father was an émigré, and Charles was born in London, to a Protestant British mother who converted to Catholicism at the time of her son’s first communion.14 After the Restoration, the count de Montalembert served the Bourbon monarchs as a diplomat and young Charles was raised in England and Germany, completing his schooling at the Collège Sainte-Barbe in Paris. From 1826 to 1828 Charles, by his own account, resisted the generally irreligious atmosphere of the Parisian school. As he recounted many years later to a former teacher, at Sainte-Barbe he “was walking on the edge of the abyss without even knowing it.”15 Charles de Montalembert and Henri Lacordaire thus shared what they considered the experience of having their childhood faith tested during the period of their

12. See the report (July 6, 1830) by HL and other school chaplains to Quélen, quoted in Foisset, La Vie, 1:88–90. 13. HL to Théophile Foisset, Dec. 29, 1828, CR, 274, quoted in Foisset, La Vie, 1:142; Philibert, Lacordaire et Lamennais, 338–42, 352–58. 14. Marguerite Castillon du Perron, Montalembert et l’Europe de son temps (Paris, 2009), 31–33. 15. Quoted in Vicomte de Meaux, Montalembert, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1897), 14.

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Figure 3.1. Charles de Montalembert. Image from Edouard Lecanuet, Montalembert, vol. 1, Sa Jeunesse (1810–1836) (Paris: Poussielgue, 1910).

secondary schooling—a trial they considered virtually universal among boys of the postrevolutionary generation. The moment following first communion when a young man’s faith had to withstand public scrutiny and carry him through the world of men, no longer sheltered by family and home, was a trope of early nineteenth-century biography. That Charles’s faith survived while Henri’s crumbled was less important than that they understood themselves as experiencing the same rite of passage.

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Although Charles did not lose his faith at Sainte-Barbe, he did become a liberal. Taking advantage of his English parentage, Charles made himself into a schoolboy expert on English parliamentarianism and declaimed the speeches of Charles James Fox and Edmund Burke in the courtyard at Sainte-Barbe.16 Like Lacordaire, Montalembert was leaving France when the July revolution occurred in the streets of Paris; he read about the uprising when he arrived in London on the thirtieth. He was devastated to have missed his generation’s revolution, “not to have drawn a sword and perhaps spilled [his] blood for the cause of the people.” He had, he confessed to his journal, a “secret desire to fight for liberty, perhaps to die for it.”17 He turned around immediately and returned to Paris. The young aristocrat’s vague desire to die for liberty was consistent with the rest of his adolescent uncertainty. He had no particular path in life and no need to earn a living. His beloved sister Elise had died in 1829, and in the years following her death he frequently mused in his journal on the possibility of joining her.18 At other times, he wondered if he might not have a vocation for the priesthood or whether he should perhaps join the Algerian expedition as a common soldier.19 Certainly he had no desire to settle down and establish the next generation of the Montalembert family; his mother’s demands on his time and her desire to establish him in society, which he referred to as a form of slavery, irritated him intensely.20 Family life seemed like “effeminate dependence” to him, and he chafed at the “servile obedience to the wretchedness of domestic and social life” that his mother in particular expected of him.21 He disliked thinking about marriage and instead obsessed over various married women, which in turn helped convince him that he was no fit husband for a young and innocent girl. In contrast, he was passionately attached to his school friends, who represented liberty and selfdetermination to him. Neither Montalembert nor Lacordaire was precisely a disobedient son, but both experienced the enfant du siècle’s alienation from his family and

16. R. P. Lecanuet, Montalembert, sa jeunesse (1810–1836) (Paris, 1910), 26. See also Charles de Montalembert to Léon Cornudet, Aug. 10, 1830, in Lettres à un ami de collège, 1827–1830, ed. Michel Cornudet (Paris, 1884), 395–98. 17. Charles de Montalembert (hereafter CM), Journal intime inédit, ed. Louis Le Guillou and Nicole Roger-Taillard, 8 vols. (Paris, 1990–2008): 2:48–49 ( July 29, Aug. 1, 1830) (hereafter Journal). 18. Journal, 2:2, 39–40 (Jan. 3, July 18, 19, 1830). 19. See, e.g., ibid., 2:2, 6, 11–12, 35–36 (Jan. 3, 22–23, Mar. 25, June 30, 1830). 20. Ibid., 2:54 (Aug. 17, 1830). 21. Ibid., 2:8 (Feb. 6, 1830).

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their century, opting for paths that their parents would not have chosen for them.22 Their fathers had been the men who made the French Revolution, albeit from widely different social and ideological positions as revolutionary and counterrevolutionary. The sons, however, concurred in their dissatisfaction with the postrevolutionary world they had inherited; their surroundings seemed smaller, less glorious than their fathers’, and the threat of violence perpetually justified a backwards-looking authoritarianism. Both young men wished to be good Catholics, but neither wished to devote himself to a moribund institution. Mennaisian ideas, especially in the heady atmosphere of the July revolution, appeared to them to offer a genuine opportunity to remake French society.

Lamennais and the Crusade of the Nineteenth Century When Lacordaire and Montalembert joined forces with Félicité de Lamennais in late 1830, the Breton priest had already achieved celebrity status in Catholic and literary circles. Lamennais insisted stridently that the universal and eternal Catholic Church did not need to look backward toward a lost Old Regime; it should, rather, assert its indispensability to the modern world. The mennaisian concept of a Catholic science that would engage with contemporary scholarship and defeat Enlightenment philosophie seemed to both Lacordaire and Montalembert like the remedy to their mal de siècle. They, like their contemporary Maurice de Guérin, looked to mennaisianism for a path out of adolescence into an autonomous adulthood that reconciled devout Catholicism with postrevolutionary citizenship. Instead of depending on the restored Bourbon monarchy, Lamennais called on modern Catholics to place their faith in what he referred to as sens commun—“social reason,” or the common core of beliefs that formed the basis of all society and was most perfectly expressed by the Catholic Church. Without this common sense of a transcendent truth, no society was possible, Lamennais asserted. Only through religion did individuals recognize their obligations to others; in spiritual society, “man became sacred to man.”23

22. On Madame Lacordaire’s “painful resignation” to her son’s vocation, see HL to Théophile Foisset, May 1, 1824, and Mme Lacordaire to HL, May 5, 1824, CR, 111, 112–13. See also Théodore Lacordaire to HL, May 24, 1824, CR, 119–20. 23. Félicité de Lamennais (hereafter FL), Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de religion, vol.1, in Œuvres complètes, vol. 1 (Paris, 1836), 5.

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In contrast, where the desires of the sovereign individual prevailed over the claims of the community, as in the French Revolution, enmity necessarily fractured society. Indifference to religious truth, whether outright rejection or liberal toleration of a religion relegated to private life, undermined any prospect that human beings could live in society. Individuals without religion had no cause to submit their reason or their will to any greater authority or to the needs of others. The central issue for Lamennais, then, was identifying and developing the social reason that made it possible for men to live in society with one another.24 Catholic science—the enterprise on which Maurice de Guérin and his friends at La Chênaie had embarked—was essentially the effort to understand the common sense of care and obligation that held all societies together. Many of the world’s systems of religious belief contained kernels of the truth that was fully and perfectly realized in Catholicism, Lamennais believed, and understanding them was a task for Catholic scholars, not godless philosophes. Lamennais opened up a new set of debates in Catholic life in the 1820s, but as the Bourbon Restoration entered its final crisis in 1829 and 1830, mennaisianism’s liberal future was not apparent to observers. Lamennais’s contemporaries regarded him as a royalist, although his books dedicated far more energy to defending papal, rather than royal, authority. Readers assumed that his radical ultramontanism would translate, in the French political sphere, into support for monarchy. The emphasis in Lamennais’s work, however, had been on society and on the church as its necessary precondition; the state had played a relatively small role. In Lamennais’s utopian vision of a single spiritual society—Catholic and encompassing all individuals—the state would function something like the administrative arm of the church, not as an autonomous actor. Moreover, although Lamennais emphasized the church’s need for liberty, especially in his 1829 book, Des Progrès de la révolution et de la guerre contre l’Eglise, his view of “liberty” was fundamentally different from that of liberals. Lamennais and French liberals could agree that liberty required recognition of rights, but for the priest, rights were always God-given, never “natural.”25 Lamennais therefore never saw religious toleration as anything more than a strategic

24. Louis Le Gillou, L’Evolution de la pensée religieuse de Félicité Lamennais (Paris, 1966), 57–63; Bernard Reardon, Liberalism and Tradition: Aspects of Catholic Thought in Nineteenth-Century France (New York, 1975), 71–78. 25. Vincent Viaene is particularly helpful on this point: “Liberal-Catholicism was not a Catholic form of liberalism, nor some kind of cross between liberalism and Catholicism, but a variation of political Catholicism.” Viaene, Belgium and the Holy See from Gregory XVI to Pius IX (1831–1859): Catholic Revival, Society, and Politics in 19th-Century Europe (Leuven, Belg., 2001), 71 (emphasis in the original).

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necessity for the state; his spiritual society would never recognize a “right” to soul-destroying error. The July revolution pushed practical politics to the forefront of the mennaisian agenda and led Lamennais to the conclusion that civil liberties—as liberals understood them—could be a useful tool with which to achieve the eventual rule of Catholic truth. Many of his younger followers, including Lacordaire and Montalembert, came to see liberty as a “charter of human dignity, a political translation of the moral freedom to choose between good and evil, which God had bestowed on mankind.”26 The July revolution had conclusively demonstrated the failure of the Gallican alliance of throne and altar that so many Catholics of the revolutionary generation had embraced. The spiritual society of Catholics, Lamennais and his collaborators insisted, should give up on French kings and look to Rome instead, relying on the sens commun of Christian people instead of the coercive power of monarchs. As Lamennais wrote in a letter to a friend shortly before the revolution, “Liberalism scares people. So, catholicize it, and society will be reborn.”27 This sense of opportunity and mission energized Lamennais and his young followers; this was their chance to remake France and the Catholic world. Lacordaire and Montalembert forged their bonds with Lamennais independently, but they discovered the same satisfactions in the mennaisian movement. Their collaboration with Lamennais gave them both prominent public roles and an exhilarating sense that they were bringing a regenerated Catholicism into public being. Their contact with him also introduced them to one another, and almost immediately the two men embarked on an intense romantic friendship that quickly came to replace family for them both. The two facets of the collaboration—the public activism and the intimate friendship—were inseparable and mutually reinforcing. Lacordaire and Montalembert understood their friendship as a form of Christian fraternity, the kind of bond that a healthy society required. Loving brothers like the two of them could create a genuinely civil society, and relationships like theirs would give postrevolutionary society the density and weight that a mere assembly of autonomous individuals could never possess. Henri Lacordaire was on the verge of leaving for New York when he changed his plans and remained in France to dedicate himself to the mennaisian movement. He had been acquainted with mennaisian ideas since the 26. Ibid., 66. 27. FL to Mme la comtesse de Senfft, Dec. 24, 1829, in FL, Correspondance générale, 9 vols., ed. Louis Le Guillou (Paris, 1971–81), 4:222 (hereafter CG).

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time of his conversion, and Lamennais’s collaborators, recognizing the young seminarian’s talent, had worked to recruit him to the movement.28 Lacordaire wrote to Lamennais in May 1830, and Lamennais reassured him that it was perfectly reasonable to feel like an exile wandering in an unreasonable world; he reiterated his “hope to have you soon at La Chênaie.”29 The July revolution convinced Lacordaire that the moment had come for French Catholics to seize the sort of liberty that he imagined American Catholics enjoyed, and he canceled his passage to New York. Although Lacordaire was never as entranced by “Monsieur Féli” as many of the disciples at La Chênaie, he was nonetheless dazzled: Lamennais was “a druid reborn in Brittany . . . who sings of liberty in a rough voice.”30 Mennaisianism responded to Lacordaire’s feelings of isolation and to his political desire for a Catholicism that could accept modern ideas of liberty. Lamennais’s concept of social reason was, Lacordaire said, the missing final page of Rousseau’s Social Contract; it Catholicized Jean-Jacques’s intuition that the people were just and right.31 The separation of church and state became the centerpiece of Lacordaire’s efforts. “The most important thing is to remove the church from its entanglement [with the state],” he explained to a friend, “to place it in the state of absolute independence that it enjoys in America. Once I understood that, I went to La Chênaie.”32 Within a month, Lamennais was addressing Lacordaire as “my dear child,” and Lacordaire in turn accepted his role as a son, confident of Lamennais’s paternal love.33 A few months later, in October 1830, Charles de Montalembert also wrote Lamennais to offer his services to L’Avenir. The young aristocrat was similarly looking for a political position that would reconcile his liberalism and his Catholicism and for a social position that would offer him individual autonomy and fraternal friendship. Like Lacordaire, Montalembert was leading an unsettled life in the revolutionary summer of 1830. After having rushed back to Paris upon learning of the July revolution, he had been unceremoniously packed off back to Britain within the month. His family was not in the mood for his youthful idealism; the revolution meant the end of a diplomatic career for his father, the count de Montalembert, and his younger brother, a page at court, had had to escape out of a window at Versailles.34 Montalembert 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

Philibert, Lacordaire et Lamennais, 72–73, 165–77. FL to HL, May 7, 1830, CG, 4:280. HL to Prosper Lorain, May 25, 1830, quoted in CG, 4:280n3. HL to Prosper Lorain, July 2, 1830, CR, 283. HL to Théophile Foisset, July 19, 1830, CR, 285, quoted in Foisset, La Vie, 1:143. FL to HL, June 7, 1830, CG, 4:294, and HL to FL, June 11, 1830, CG, 4:668. Lecanuet, Montalembert, 1:94–95.

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was not unwilling to leave Paris; his enthusiasm was for the revolutionary people, and the negotiations surrounding the creation of a new regime seemed considerably less sublime.35 While leaders in France haggled over the transfer of power, Montalembert was happy to move on to Ireland, where he looked forward to witnessing the union of Catholicism and liberty and to meeting Daniel O’Connell, the very model of Catholic political activism. Although O’Connell himself was something of a disappointment—he barely noticed his young French admirer— Montalembert was nonetheless full of enthusiasm for the Irish example of “a truly pious population.”36 By his own account, Montalembert, in a state of “effervescence” upon reading the initial issues of L’Avenir, offered himself completely to Lamennais: “It’s absurd and indiscreet,” he recorded in his journal after posting the letter, “but I can’t help myself.”37 He sent Lamennais articles on his recent experiences in Ireland, but he was hoping for much more than a publishing outlet. L’Avenir presented Montalembert exactly what he was looking for: a political career and intimate Christian friendship. He was back in Paris and ready to launch himself, body and soul, into the mennaisian movement within a month.

Romantic Friendship and Catholic Fraternity Lacordaire and Montalembert embarked together on their crusade in favor of faith and liberty, and their friendship became the centerpiece of their effort to invent a Catholic citizenship in which believers actively brought their faith into the political arena. The end of the Restoration monarchy opened up new possibilities for both young men; the July revolution freed them to explore political positions beyond legitimism and allowed them to imagine a state in which liberalism would benefit Catholics. Throwing themselves into political journalism, they asserted that Catholics were not inveterate subjects, bound to kings and to an authoritarian Old Regime. Indeed, as devout Christians, Catholics were model citizens who recognized their obligations to their fellows. Far from being a disability, their religion guaranteed their responsible performance of the citizen’s obligations. French Catholics therefore could and should participate in the fraternal practices of modern citizenship.

35. Journal, 2:49 (Aug. 1, 1830). 36. Ibid., 2:82 (Sept. 26, 1830). On O’Connell, ibid., 2:86–87 (Sept. 29, 30, 1830). 37. Ibid., 2:110–11 (Oct. 26, 1830).

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The charismatic, beloved Monsieur Féli was, of course, the fulcrum on which this friendship turned. Both Montalembert and Lacordaire were dazzled by their proximity to genius. Montalembert in particular quickly came to see himself as Lamennais’s loving and dutiful son. When the count de Montalembert died in June 1831, the now fatherless Charles comforted himself that “God has not completely abandoned me, because he made me Catholic and the disciple of such a man.”38 Love for his mentor and the frenetic activity of the cause comforted Montalembert in his loss, and he made a “solemn vow never to rest, never to give up on the struggle I have begun for the faith.”39 Soon, he was looking to purchase an estate near La Chênaie and hoping that Lamennais would “not love him less for knowing him better” because the priest was “[his] father and [his] mother.”40 Lacordaire, slightly older and himself a priest, was less inclined to see a father figure in Lamennais, but he was nonetheless convinced that mennaisianism represented the salvation of both France and the church. Lamennais would be, Lacordaire wrote, “the founder of an American-style Christian liberty” in France. Lacordaire did not love Monsieur Féli as Montalembert did, but he was nonetheless confident that Lamennais was “a man whose name will erase all others of this century, except Napoleon’s.”41 Although Lamennais brought the two young men together, their friendship quickly exceeded both their regard for him and even their commitment to the movement. Amid the excitement of revolution, of serving the cause, of seeing their names in print for the first time, and of being recognized as public men, Lacordaire and Montalembert embarked on an intense friendship; indeed, they fell in love. Looking back on their first year of affection and activism, Lacordaire wrote, “I have only breathed through your life, I have adored everything that you are . . . friendship has become a cold word to express my sentiments. . . . I love thee. There’s no language to say that in.”42 This sense of being not only equals but even in some ways the same— breathing through each other’s lives—was key to their friendship. In borrowing the English of Montalembert’s childhood—I love thee—Lacordaire

38. Ibid., 2:209 (June 29, 1830). 39. Ibid., 2:214 (July 10, 1830). 40. CM to FL, Nov. 3, 1832, in Lettres de Montalembert à La Mennais, ed. Georges Goyau and P. de Lallemand (Paris, 1932), 16 (hereafter Lettres) (emphasis in the original). 41. HL to CM, Sept. 1, 1831, in Lacordaire-Montalembert Correspondance inédite, 1830–1861, ed. Louis Le Guillou (Paris, 1989), 64 (hereafter L-M C). 42. HL to CM, Oct. 12, 1831, L-M C, 84 (italicized text is in English in the original).

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expressed both the strangeness of their intimacy and the ways in which differences between them vanished.43 Although Lacordaire and Montalembert’s insistence that they were equals and brothers with no secrets between them echoed revolutionary discourses about fraternity, their understanding of friendship was profoundly Catholic.44 To express their feelings for one another, they borrowed from the language of sacrament. Their friendship was “an austere choice of a common vocation for work and thought, the marriage of two souls that unite to accomplish life’s work,” Lacordaire inscribed on the flyleaf of a volume of Byron’s verse that he offered his friend in August 1831. Lacordaire was quoting Georges Farcy, a young man who had been killed on the Parisian barricades of the July revolution just a year earlier. Farcy’s invocation of sacramental friendship before his valiant death in the cause of liberty stirred the imaginations of his admirers, and in a letter a year later, Montalembert quoted the same passage back to Lacordaire as he affirmed the indestructibility of their affection.45 Montalembert also believed that Lacordaire’s friendship was a gift from God meant to comfort him for other losses, a conviction that the death of his father only strengthened.46 They shared with their contemporaries a belief that friendship was one of the “moral pillars for a civil society,” the school in which men learned regard and respect for one another.47 Instead of locating this function primarily in male conviviality and voluntary associations as many of their contemporaries did, Lacordaire and

43. In an expanding literature on male friendship, my analysis owes a particular debt to David M. Halperin, “How to Do the History of Male Homosexuality,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 6, no. 1 (2000): esp. 98–101; Stefan Ludwig Hoffmann, “Civility, Male Friendship, and Masonic Sociability in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” Gender and History 13, no. 2 (2001): 224–48; Anne Vincent-Buffault, L’Exercice de l’amitié: Pour une histoire des pratiques amicales aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles (Paris, 1995); Gabrielle Houbre, La Discipline de l’amour: L’éducation sentimentale des filles et des garçons à l’âge du romantisme (Paris, 1997); Victor Manuel Macías-Gonzáles, “Masculine Friendships, Sentiment, and Homoerotics in Nineteenth-Century Mexico: The Correspondence of José María Calderón y Tapia, 1820s–1850s,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 16, no. 3 (2007): 416–35; and Eve Kokofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, 1985). 44. On revolutionary fraternity, see William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of the Emotions (New York, 2001), chaps. 5 and 6; and Lynn A. Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley, 1992); chap. 3. Marisa Linton, “Fatal Friendships: The Politics of Jacobin Friendship,” French Historical Studies 31, no. 1 (2008): 51–76, explores Jacobin anxieties about friendship and its association with secrecy and conspiracy. 45. Philibert, Lacordaire et Lamennais, 684, reproduces Farcy’s original, which Sainte-Beuve publicized in the Revue des deux mondes, June 15, 1831. CM quoted the same passage to HL, Mar. 15–16, 1832, L-M C, 109. 46. Journal, 2:57 (Mar. 12, 1831). 47. Hoffmann, “Civility,” 226.

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Montalembert emphasized the intimacy of souls in communion with one another and with God.48 Confession was prominent among the rituals of Lacordaire and Montalembert’s friendship. Lamennais, the father figure whom Montalembert had chosen, occasionally heard his disciple’s confession.49 Lacordaire did not, at least in any sacramental sense, but confessing one’s innermost desires and failings to friends was an important element of romantic friendship, and Montalembert was anxious that there be no secrets between himself and his friend. Thus in August 1831 Montalembert opened his soul by handing Lacordaire his journal for the previous two years.50 Montalembert had already revealed his passion for a married woman to Lacordaire a few months previously. Lacordaire had responded with “gentle, but decisive disapproval” and encouraged his young friend to make a full confession and seek absolution, which Montalembert did the next day.51 The pleasures of knowing and being known in a way that approximated God’s knowledge of an individual soul were central to this friendship. Communion was also a foundation for intimacy in which friends, by opening themselves to God, simultaneously revealed themselves to one another. Both Montalembert and Lacordaire took communion from Lamennais, and Montalembert visited the chapel of the convent of the Visitation to receive communion from Lacordaire. Montalembert also frequently served at Mass for his friend.52 Montalembert’s journal reveals that communion was central to his most intimate friendships. He recorded special communions, noting where, from whom, and in whose company he received the sacrament. Thus Montalembert and his classmate, Léon Cornudet, celebrated their friendship as young adults by receiving communion together on the feast day of Saints Gervais and Protais, first-century twins martyred under

48. In addition to Hoffmann, see Carol E. Harrison, “Bourgeois Citizenship and Associative Practice in Postrevolutionary France,” in Civil Society and Associations in the Nineteenth-Century Urban Place: Class, Nation, and Culture, ed. Boudien deVries, R. J. Morris, and Graeme Morton (Burlington, VT, 2006), 175–90. 49. Journal, 2:229–30 (Sept. 19, 1831). The abbé Dupanloup was CM’s regular confessor. It was also common for young men at La Chênaie to confess to Lamennais. Charles Sainte Foi [Eloi Jourdain], Souvenirs de Jeunesse, 1828–1835 (Paris, 1911), 41. 50. Journal, 2:220 (Aug. 31, 1831). CM had also read his friend Léon Cornudet’s journal the previous year. Ibid., 2:123 (Dec. 8, 1830), and see ibid., 2:7–8 (Feb. 4, 1830), for CM reading an unnamed friend’s journal. 51. Ibid., 2:165–66 (Apr. 1, 2, 1831). 52. Ibid., 2:166 (Apr. 3, 1831, Easter Sunday) (CM receives communion from HL before attending Mass with his family); ibid., 2:296 (Feb. 21, 1832) (CM serves at Mass offered by HL in memory of CM’s friend Gustave Lemarcis); ibid., 2:327 (June 21, 1832) (CM serves at Mass offered by FL in memory of the count de Montalembert).

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the emperor Nero.53 After his father’s death, Montalembert took his mother to the Visitation convent, where Lacordaire said Mass for the late count de Montalembert.54 To receive God together was an act that cemented Christian friendship; in the Eucharist, friends recognized their equality, even identity. When Montalembert and Lacordaire knelt together to offer themselves as “Catholics and free men,” they were more than equals in a political and social sense; they were brothers, and there were no differences of any significance between them.55 Montalembert and Lacordaire cultivated this sense of transparency and identity—of looking into a friend’s soul and seeing a mirror—in their correspondence as well as in the rites of the church. When they could not take communion together, they could write, read, and reread letters. They could also plan for the future, which they imagined as “sweet and ineffable community of effort, pain, success, anxiety, hope, and emotion.”56 Montalembert noted that Lacordaire’s letters were “delicious” and “to be read over and over again.”57 These letters repeatedly asserted Lacordaire’s confidence in their intimacy: everything in their world might be unstable, with estates no longer passing from father to son, but they at least would build “an eternal friendship” in which “our hearts will replace our fathers’ dwellings.”58 The two young men just embarking on the careers of their choice found the pleasures of home not in domesticity but in one another. The friendship between Lacordaire and Montalembert was not entirely based on saintly assertions of Christian equality. Their pleasure in the friendship also derived from the inequalities in their relationship, which they invoked playfully, with schoolboyish competitiveness that allowed them the pleasure of “banishing any hint of subordination” between them.59 Without the mennaisian cause to bring them together, the two men would not have become friends: Lacordaire was the elder by eight years, and Montalembert’s social status was immeasurably higher. Lacordaire delighted in asserting the intimacy of egalitarian friendship against differences in status, joking about

53. Ibid., 2:31, 198 (June 19, 1830; June 19, 1831); CM to Léon Cornudet, June 19, 1834, in Correspondance de Montalembert et de Léon Cornudet, ed. Léon Cornudet (Paris, 1905), 155–56. 54. Journal, 2:208 (June 26, 1831). 55. Ibid., 2:271 (Dec. 31, 1831). 56. CM to HL, Mar. 15–16, 1832, L-M C, 109. 57. Journal, 2:210 (June 29, 1831). 58. HL to CM, Oct. 20, 1831, L-M C, 94. See also HL’s arrangements for their Paris lodgings with adjoining rooms: HL to CM, Oct. 16, 20, 1832, L-M C, 88, 92–94. Far more of HL’s letters survive; HL seems to have destroyed most of CM’s letters. CM’s daily journal and his letters to FL and other friends are therefore the main sources for his side of the friendship. 59. Halperin, “How to Do the History,” 101.

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Montalembert’s title and the social gulf it represented. He teased Montalembert about his aristocratic pride and reminded his friend that their mission required honest labor; the handsome nobleman should not expect people to subscribe to his cause because of his title or his good looks.60 Lacordaire also liked to pay homage to his friend’s nobility, however, declaring himself Montalembert’s vassal, “as if we lived in the twelfth century.”61 Lacordaire’s seniority balanced his social inferiority, and he regularly reminded Montalembert that his youth was likely to lead him into error more often than his older friend. “You must therefore, my sweet friend, not abuse the enormous power you exert over my poor soul,” Lacordaire wrote.62 Power, in this friendship, was playful and always shifting, at some times giving the advantage to age and experience, at other times to youth and the glamour of aristocracy. Both young men assumed that friendship should be a project of mutual improvement and that special insight into a friend’s character carried with it obligations of critique and guidance.63 Lacordaire’s greatest fault, in the eyes of his younger friend, was a taste for isolation. The desire for solitude, combined with a spirit of independence, might well lead to egotism, Montalembert warned.64 This, of course, was a failing that friendship could most effectively cure. Lacordaire responded with advice of his own. His young friend was too eager to leap into polemic and too easily carried away. Montalembert was too quick to find places and people congenial and to declare them “a sort of Catholic oasis,” and his taste for society meant that he was often too distracted to “feel a friend’s hand against [his] heart.” Lacordaire advised him to remember that while “the pyramids are sublime in the desert, Paris is nothing but noise, mud, and smoke.”65 Again, friendship was the necessary corrective. Choosing intimacy over the superficiality of society would remedy Montalembert’s faults and guide him surely into the future. The play of equality and identity with difference was central to the pleasures of friendship for Montalembert and Lacordaire. On the one hand, each man could see himself reflected in his friend—a Christian, kneeling before God, committed to the cause of liberty, and therefore the same in every way that mattered. On the other hand, however, the friend was different and

60. HL to CM, Sept. 1, 1831, L-M C, 65. 61. HL signed this letter “Tom Leude,” referring to the name given among Franks to free men who had sworn an oath of loyalty to the king. HL to CM, Sept. 30, 1831, L-M C, 72. 62. HL to CM, June 4, 1832, L-M C, 136–37. 63. Vincent-Buffault, L’Exercice de l’amitié, 126–27; Houbre, La Discipline, 95. 64. CM to HL, Mar. 15–16, 1832, L-M C, 111. 65. HL to CM, Apr. 22, June 4, 1831, L-M C, 119–23, 135–39.

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unequal, and their friendship was an achievement in which Christian love trumped social convention. Christian fraternity allowed each man privileged insight into the other because understanding one’s friend was like knowing oneself. That insight, however, enabled critical judgment whereby a man might change and improve both his friend and himself. The elision of women from the friendship was central to its emotional freedom, and the most obvious common ground on which Lacordaire and Montalembert stood was gender. Because a homosocial friendship was not a potential marriage, it opened the possibility of intense sentimentality. Friendship between men appeared to exist in the realm of pure feeling, independent of the calculations and obligations of marriage and therefore offering friends complete emotional freedom. Passionate emotions and the active exclusion of women also characterized Lamennais’s circle at La Chênaie, whose members were young men deeply attached to one another and to Monsieur Féli. They, like Montalembert and Lacordaire, were happy to exchange le monde— the world of careers and family, with women and marriage in a central role— for a society of men, intellect, and devotion. Both Lacordaire and Montalembert represented themselves as alone in a hostile world, even as orphans, despite the fact that both their mothers were very much alive. They tacitly agreed that their mothers should be written out of the story of their friendship; like the heroes in a children’s story, they faced the future alone, with only their friendship and their integrity to assure their survival and success. In fact, both young men were living with their mothers at the beginning of 1830. Montalembert’s relationship with his mother was particularly fraught, and he detested her efforts to present him to Paris society and, presumably, find him a good wife. When his father died in 1831, he described himself as an orphan and wrote his mother a “terrible letter” announcing their “irrevocable separation.”66 Instead of preaching filial duty, Lacordaire ratified Montalembert’s self-presentation as an abandoned child. “Poor orphan,” Lacordaire wrote after paying a call on Madame de Montalembert, “you have to make your own family.”67 God had denied him “all the joys of family life,” Montalembert wrote in his journal, but “who knows better than I the blessings of . . . pure and Christian friendship[?]”68 These two postrevolutionary orphans placed the values of friendship—fraternity, loyalty, and openness—over those of family. “This century is darkness,”

66. Journal, 2:240 (Oct. 13, 1831). 67. HL to CM, Apr. 22, 1832, L-M C, 124. 68. Journal, 2:205 (June 21, 1831).

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Lacordaire wrote, “let us embrace one another in its shadow, two sad souls loving one another for consolation and for strength.”69 Without parents, lost boys were excused from the obligations of filial obedience, and their only commitment—fraternal love—was one that they had freely chosen. The friends found pleasure in writing of the obligation that each had assumed to love the other; as Montalembert assured Lacordaire, “there is no one to whom I owe as much as to you, and you have a creditor’s rights to my affection for a debt that can never be paid.”70 This fraternal love echoed revolutionary discourses and practices in its preference for a voluntary love over filial duty, but Lacordaire and Montalembert had Catholicized fraternity, establishing love for God and Catholic sacrament as bonds between friends. Their friendship was divinely instituted, Lacordaire believed: “God . . . found for me the person who would comfort me for being without any family on this earth, and I was sure to keep him, I was sure that no one would love him as I do.”71

God and Liberty In place of family obligations, Lacordaire and Montalembert had freely chosen “the crusade of the nineteenth century”: they would bring Catholicism into the postrevolutionary world.72 Following Lamennais’s dictum that liberty would cease to frighten Catholics once it was “Catholicized,” the two men threw themselves into creating a modern Catholic political culture based on individual freedom. Their tools in this effort were a daily newspaper—L’Avenir, with “God and Liberty” as its masthead, and the Agency for the Defense of Religious Liberty, an association whose goal was to force issues of freedom of worship into the courts. Catholics needed to master the techniques of modern politics, the young men believed, because they would ultimately benefit more from a free press and a free civil society than from a stubborn attachment to an outdated alliance of throne and altar. The young crusaders proposed to seize on principles of the Revolution and demonstrate that they applied equally to Catholic citizens. They were reinventing the relationship between civil society and spiritual society, arguing that members of spiritual society should neither boycott civil society nor accept anything less than their full rights from it.

69. 70. 71. 72.

HL to CM, Feb. 27, 1831, L-M C, 55. CM to HL, Mar. 15–16, 1832, L-M C, 109. HL to CM, Apr. 9, 1832, L-M C, 115. The phrase appears in HL to Edmond Turquety, Mar. 1, 1831, CR, 320.

Figure 3.2.

First issue of L’Avenir, October 16, 1830. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

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L’Avenir was one of many newspapers that flourished in the aftermath of July 1830, pushing its editorial line amid the cacophony of political debate that filled the revolutionary public sphere.73 Lamennais wrote regular articles, but the bulk of the daily work of producing the paper fell on Lacordaire, Montalembert, and their associate Charles de Coux. The four-page paper published domestic and foreign news and reviews of books and other events daily for thirteen months, from October 1830 to November 1831. The center of each issue was an editorial article expounding the paper’s philosophy of a free church liberated from its ties to the state. Editorial writers emphasized the benefits that civil liberties would confer on Catholics, and they also located French efforts within an international Catholic framework in which the cause of Catholicism and liberty united French parents who wanted independent religious schools with Polish, Belgian, or Irish nationalists who wanted independent states. L’Avenir argued that liberty was itself a Catholic principle, not merely a strategic tool that Catholics could use in a struggle with a liberal state. If freedom of speech (liberté de la parole) were the most fundamental of all liberties, then those who preached the word (la Parole) of God should be the first to defend it. Lacordaire powerfully made this connection, insisting that at the moment of his ordination “[he] understood that men possessed within themselves something inalienable, divine, and eternally free: the word!” As a priest it was his duty to carry the word of God “to the ends of the earth, without anyone having the right to seal [his] lips for a single day.”74 In the nineteenth century, he asserted, a newspaper could effectively transmit God’s word to his people, and it deserved liberty as an instrument of both divine will and modern politics. The most important step toward creating an appropriate relationship between spiritual and civil society was the separation of church and state, and from its first issue L’Avenir called insistently for the “liberation” of the church from state control. L’Avenir’s position had nothing to do with religious toleration—none of its writers thought that the coexistence of different religions was a desirable situation. Rather, they delighted in explaining the ways in which the Concordat allowed the French state to enslave the Catholic Church. Government officials, who might or might not be Catholic, nominated Catholic bishops. Priests, whose salaries were paid by the state, were merely public administrators of consciences, and religion as a whole was 73. Christophe Charle, Le Siècle de la presse, 1830–1939 (Paris, 2004), chap. 2; Jeremy Popkin, Press, Revolution, and Social Identities in France, 1830–1835 (University Park, PA, 2002). 74. HL quoted in CM, Le Père Lacordaire, 30.

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nothing more than a governmental function, like customs or taxation.75 The sacraments, Lacordaire warned, risked becoming rights of citizenship that a priest could not refuse. Writing about an incident in which a subprefect had forced a priest to perform Christian burial for a man deemed unworthy of the sacrament, Lacordaire noted that the priest had little recourse against a state that paid his salary; he should not be surprised to be treated like a public gravedigger.76 Liberty could not exist under conditions of dependence, and the Concordat made the church into a servant of the state. If Catholics wished to be truly free, they would have to pay their own leaders and learn “to defend [their] rights, the same rights as all Frenchmen, the rights of anyone who is resolved not to bend to any bridle and to reject all forms of servitude.”77 Freedom of worship, L’Avenir maintained, could not exist on its own without the full package of civil liberties guaranteed by the Charter of 1830, and the newspaper aspired to familiarize Catholics with the language of rights. The church could not be free unless speech, education, association, and the press also enjoyed liberty, so Catholics should be prepared to make common cause with liberals, even nonbelievers, who were willing to recognize the rights of Catholics. Liberty of opinion and association were obviously vital to worship, Lamennais argued in an article laying out the “Doctrines of L’Avenir.” A religion that individuals could profess only individually was no religion at all, and Catholics who could not form associations were at the mercy of arbitrary government. Choosing how to educate one’s children was the “family’s first liberty,” without which it was pointless to speak of freedom of religion. The state’s educational monopoly was thus an obstacle to French Catholics’ right to practice their faith, and they should insist that the government make good on the Charter’s promise to give up its exclusive control of schools.78 Finally, the press was “a godsend” whose liberty Catholics should defend—this last point was probably the most unfamiliar to Catholic readers, who were accustomed to thinking of the periodical press more as a purveyor of immoral literature than as a guarantor of their right to worship.79 L’Avenir

75. FL, “De la Position de l’Eglise de France,” L’Avenir, Jan. 6, 1831, in Mélanges catholiques: Extraits de l’Avenir, 2 vols. (Paris, 1831), 1:157, and FL, “De la Séparation de l’Eglise et de l’état,” L’Avenir, Oct. 18, 1830, in Mélanges catholiques, 1:148. 76. See HL’s four-part series, “De la Suppression du budget du clergé,” L’Avenir, Oct. 27, 30, Nov. 2, 29, 1830, in Mélanges catholiques, 1:198–218. The account of the coerced funeral appears in pt. 4, pp. 214–18. 77. FL, “Introduction,” L’Avenir, Oct. 16, 1830, in Mélanges catholiques, 1:5, 6. 78. Article 69 of the Charter of 1830 promised that the new government would implement “liberté d’enseignement” as soon as possible. 79. FL, “Des Doctrines de l’Avenir,” L’Avenir, Dec. 7, 1830, in Mélanges catholiques, 1:10–16. See also HL, “De la liberté de la presse,” L’Avenir, June 12, 1832, in Mélanges catholiques, 1:247–52.

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recognized that Catholics had been suspicious of arguments about rights— not surprisingly, they maintained, since the French state had never invited Catholics to share in the rights of citizenship. Nonetheless, Catholics should know that these rights gave them the opportunity to participate as Catholics in the reconstruction of French society.80 The Agency for the Defense of Religious Liberty pursued a similar program of enlisting public opinion in the cause of Catholics’ exercise of their rights. The members of the agency, who were also the editorial board of L’Avenir, sought out cases in which they deemed that Catholic citizens had been denied their rights and took those cases to court.81 The agency tried to force the government to articulate its position vis à vis religious liberty by creating causes célèbres around issues such as individuals’ right to live in religious communities or parish priests’ right to instruct children. Lacordaire wanted to put his legal training to work and return to the Paris bar because the sight of a priest arguing a case before the court—wearing “a lawyer’s robe over the cassock”—would powerfully reinforce the agency’s contention that Catholic religious enjoyed the full rights of citizens. The bar, however, refused to admit Father Lacordaire.82 The agency’s strategy of pursuing alliances with prominent liberals was more successful: when Lacordaire and Lamennais were prosecuted for articles in L’Avenir that allegedly encouraged hatred of the government, a leading liberal and deist defended their right to publish their opinions. Liberty in the realm of education was the agency’s key concern, and its principal goal was to call attention to the government’s failure to realize its pledge in the Charter of 1830 to liberate education from the University. Catholics of all political persuasions despised the state monopoly over education that Napoleon had put into place: a “conscription of souls” equivalent to the empire’s conscription of soldiers’ bodies, they insisted.83 When the state denied Catholic religious the right to enter classrooms, it curtailed not only the rights of those individual would-be teachers but also the rights of fathers who preferred to educate their sons in the faith. The widespread notion that Catholic boys fell into unbelief when they passed through the “barracks” of state education—an element in Lacordaire, Montalembert, and Maurice de

80. On the imbrication of civil liberties, see also HL, “De la liberté de l’enseignement” pt. 3, L’Avenir, Oct. 25, 1830, in Mélanges catholiques, 1:242–46. 81. For a discussion of this strategy, see FL, “Oppression des catholiques,” L’Avenir, Nov. 26, 1830, in Mélanges catholiques, 1:192–97. 82. Carné, Souvenirs, 260; Foisset, La Vie, 1:167. 83. Foisset, La Vie, 1:14.

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Guérin’s biographies—featured prominently in Catholic denunciations of the monopoly. Boys floundering in godless institutions and fathers balancing their sons’ professional success against the state of their souls were common tropes in Catholic discussions of education. Lacordaire’s experience as a school chaplain had convinced him that there was no way to Christianize the University; the Restoration had placed priests in positions of authority and required religious education and observance but to no avail. Catholics should stop trying to take over the monopoly and recognize that only liberty would produce genuine faith among schoolboys. In May 1831 Montalembert and Lacordaire (with their collaborator, Charles de Coux) opened an independent school in Paris to teach Latin, mathematics, and sacred history to poor boys. The venture was a provocation intended to force the July monarchy to clarify its stance on education; the young men hung placards proclaiming liberté d’enseignement in front of their school so that the authorities could not miss the point. Lacordaire and Montalembert led classes and dared the state to shut down a charitable school run by young men of impeccable character and excellent education. On the school’s third day of operation, the police arrived and called on the students to leave the building in the name of the law. Lacordaire, kneeling, countered that the boys should remain in obedience to their parents, who had entrusted their well-being to him. Although the pupils declared their desire to stay, the police commissioner ordered their removal. Lacordaire, gesturing toward his camp bed, declared that he lived in the school building; in forcing him to leave the police were evicting him from his home as well as closing his school.84 The trial following the closure of the school was a sensational event; the defendants were clearly guilty, but their plea that the “conscience of a Christian and a citizen” justified this violation of the law galvanized public opinion.85 Shortly after initial charges were laid, Montalembert’s father died, an event that raised his son to the peerage and shifted the trial to the Chamber of Peers, further heightening the drama of the confrontation. The defendants insisted that the Charter of 1830 obviated laws promulgated under the empire that could not be said to have received the consent of the French people.86 Lacordaire quoted Saint Paul’s appeal to Caesar—Caesarem appello—which, in a modernizing translation, he rendered as “I appeal to

84. For accounts of the closure of the school, see ibid., 1:171–73; CM, Le Père Lacordaire, 36–37; Journal, 2:185–87 (May 9, 10, 11,13, 1831). 85. Journal, 2:186 (May 13, 1831). 86. CM, Le Père Lacordaire, 39–43.

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the Charter.”87 If Napoleon’s 1811 decree continued to have force of law in the face of the Charter that repudiated it, Lacordaire declared, then France ranked among those civilizations “in which the master’s order is called a law, so long as the slave has replied, ‘I obey.’”88 The codefendants were found guilty but fined only one hundred francs each, which transformed the verdict into a symbolic victory. Lacordaire and Montalembert had made their point: despite formal commitments to liberty, the July monarchy followed Napoleon and the Bourbons in holding tight to its monopoly of France’s sons. In the crucial matter of how they chose to educate their sons, Frenchmen—not Catholics alone—were not free. Mennaisian success in 1831 was often quixotic, with exhilarating public relations victories obscuring financial difficulties. By October, the cause of God and liberty was running out of money. L’Avenir was broke, and the agency could not function without the newspaper, so Lacordaire and Lamennais decided that the moment had come to shut both down. L’Avenir had never attracted more than 1,200 subscribers, roughly equally divided between lay and religious readers, and that figure was in sharp decline by the autumn of 1831.89 After a year of publication, readers’ enthusiasm had waned, the editors were exhausted, the hostility of much of the French episcopate had become clear, and rumors of papal disapproval had begun to circulate. Increasingly, the editors looked, in Lacordaire’s words, like “a troop of lost children, without ancestors and without progeny.”90 Lacordaire, extremely anxious about taking this decision while Montalembert was out of town, explained to his friend that “silence is today our cause’s only strength.”91 In fact, none of the collaborators were willing to let L’Avenir die quietly. The morning after their decision to stop printing, Lacordaire proposed to Lamennais that they travel to Rome and seek Pope Gregory XVI’s approval of their efforts to reconcile faith and liberty. Laying their case before the pope would be “a proof of [their] sincerity and orthodoxy,” a gesture that “would always be a blessing for [them] and a weapon wrested from [their] enemies.”92 Montalembert was, as Lacordaire feared, devastated by the news of L’Avenir’s closure, but the decision to appeal to the pope revived him: “What a project! What a dream!” he recorded in his journal.93 Lamennais,

87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

Foisset, La Vie, 1:171 (Acts 25). CM, Le Père Lacordaire, 43. Testament du père Lacordaire, 255. Quoted by Foisset, La Vie, 1:186. HL to CM, Oct. 29, 1831, L-M C, 102, 104. Quoted in Foisset, La Vie, 1:186. See also Testament du père Lacordaire, 255–56. Journal, 2:245–46 (Nov. 4, 10, 1831).

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too, was optimistic about their reception in Rome and thought that French Catholics might more greatly appreciate the role L’Avenir had played in defending their rights once it had ceased publishing.94 Within a month of L’Avenir’s closure, its trio of publishers was on the road to Rome.

The Pilgrims of Liberty in Rome The “pilgrims of God and liberty”—as the final issue of L’Avenir described Lamennais, Lacordaire, and Montalembert—seem to have had few doubts of their enthusiastic welcome in Rome.95 Their spirits were buoyed by their warm reception as they traveled across France; in Marseille, for instance, a crowd of supporters greeted them, and over fifty people followed their carriage to the inn. Montalembert was disturbed by his sense that in Italy “everything smell[ed] of despotism,” but he was enchanted with Rome.96 The entire city, he insisted, was “overcome by the idea of our arrival, and no one knows what could prevent our success.”97 He was delighted to be traveling with his “illustrious” patron, Lamennais, and his “dear and tender” friend, Lacordaire, and his earlier despair over the demise of L’Avenir had vanished.98 Lacordaire recognized that they had serious adversaries, but he was nonetheless optimistic that a clear statement from Rome would put an end to the rumors of papal disapproval that circulated in France.99 The pilgrims presented their case to Gregory XVI in a memorandum drafted by Lacordaire that justified their arguments and strategies by focusing on the perilous situation of Catholics and Catholicism in France in 1830. The Bourbon Restoration had favored Catholicism, and as a result the church suffered from the monarchy’s unpopularity. The lesson of 1830 for Catholics was that no amount of governmental goodwill could substitute for liberty. The writers of L’Avenir had absorbed this lesson, and they wanted to “plac[e] religion above the interests of party.” “The Catholic faith,” they asserted, “is not incompatible with liberty in matters of religion, education, or the press, or with any particular form of government.” Indeed, in France

94. FL to Benoit d’Azy, Nov. 17, 1831, and FL to Abbé Vuarin, Nov. 18, 1831, in CG 5:63–64. 95. Reprinted in Journal, 2:245; Philibert, Lacordaire et Lamennais, chaps. 11 and 12, gives a weekby-week chronicle of the Roman trip. 96. CM to Léon Cornudet, Dec. 13, 1831, Correspondance de Montalembert et de Léon Cornudet, 17. 97. CM to Léon Cornudet, Jan. 3, 1832, Correspondance de Montalembert et de Léon Cornudet, 25. 98. CM to Léon Cornudet, Dec. 13, 1831, Correspondance de Montalembert et de Léon Cornudet, 16. 99. HL to Ferdinand Delabaye, Nov. 19, 1831, CR, 378. See also letters to Théophile Foisset (Nov. 19, 1831, CR, 379); Prosper Lorain (Nov. 19, 1831, CR, 379); and Aristide Bernier (Jan. 16, 1832, CR, 382).

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these very freedoms were “the only force that could preserve the church from . . . catastrophe.” The separation of church and state, including the sacrifice of state stipends for the clergy, followed logically from these principles. A clergy that lived off the charity of its flock, as in Ireland or the United States, would be both more independent and more respected. L’Avenir and the agency—a daily newspaper and an association—were “the only means of action suitable to the present state of French society,” and they had successfully won many over to the cause of a Catholicism on the side of liberty.100 Lacordaire’s text carefully avoided all theological questions such as Lamennais’s doctrine of sens commun in favor of a pragmatic approach to French politics. With regard to the separation of church and state, Lacordaire asserted that there was no tradition of church teaching on the subject. The signatories declared their loyalty to the papacy and their opposition to Gallican elements within the French church. As evidence of their obedience, they cited the suspension of L’Avenir and the agency upon the first hint of possible papal disapproval. Lacordaire concluded by suggesting that a papal declaration of some sort was necessary because young Catholics who followed L’Avenir might be discouraged by papal silence, which they would interpret as disapproval. The church, the pilgrims implied, could not afford indecision; certainly L’Avenir could not afford to continue operating without some sign of papal approval. “Full of love for [the pope] and obedient to his voice like small children,” the pilgrims begged for Gregory’s approval and for his “paternal blessing.”101 It seems likely that papal silence was in fact the path that Gregory hoped to follow. The pope’s initial response, which the pilgrims received three weeks after delivering their memorandum, thanked the men for their service and suggested that they return home while the church examined their case. Two weeks later Gregory granted the pilgrims of liberty an audience; he greeted the Frenchmen cordially, chatted about various French and European subjects, and praised Montalembert’s mother. He spoke “not one word having anything to do with [their] mission” and certainly offered no hints as to how he might judge L’Avenir.102 Gregory would probably have been just as pleased to have left the matter there, in limbo waiting for a report that would,

100. “Mémoire présenté au souverain pontife, Grégoire XVI, par les rédacteurs de l’Avenir et les membres du conseil de l‘Agence générale pour la défense de la liberté religieuse,” in La Condamnation de Lamennais, ed. M. J. Le Guillou and Louis Le Guillou (Paris, 1982), 541–92, 565, 568–70, 573 (hereafter Condamnation). 101. Ibid., 587–88, 592. 102. Journal, 2:299 (Mar. 13, 1832).

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with luck, never have to be delivered.103 After all, mennaisian principles divided sincere and devout Catholics into opposing camps, and Lamennais, though a rabble-rouser, was also an ultramontane. In later life, Lacordaire and Montalembert both concluded that the pilgrims had erred in insisting on a response; they should have taken encouragement from the fact that Gregory had allowed free and public debate on these issues for over a year. Only the rashness of youth would have rejected a beneficent silence and insisted on a definitive pronouncement.104 Gregory’s nonresponse provoked the first fissures among the pilgrims of liberty. Lacordaire began making preparations to return to France in accord with the pope’s initial recommendation. The young priest’s letters still expressed his confidence that “Rome will not pronounce any condemnation or express any disapproval of the doctrines of L’Avenir,” but he planned to leave Rome nonetheless and let Lamennais “follow the affair to the end.”105 Lacordaire’s decision disappointed his friend deeply; Montalembert was having a wonderful time in Rome visiting churches and monuments, and he expected to be a true connoisseur by the time Gregory delivered his definitive approval of their work.106 He had been less moved by his first papal audience than he had anticipated; Gregory seemed like a pleasant man, but there was nothing “elevated, nothing spiritual”—nothing to compete with Montalembert’s veneration for Lamennais—in his demeanor.107 Montalembert left the audience believing that a return to Paris was merely a papal suggestion, and he chastised Lacordaire for his hasty departure, which he interpreted as evidence of the priest’s overly independent spirit. In abandoning his fellow pilgrims, Montalembert argued, Lacordaire was forgetting that “dedication and submission to authority that one has chosen, even created, for oneself is . . . liberty’s final victory.”108 For Montalembert at this stage, the “authority” that Lacordaire was guilty of infringing was friendship; the young layman

103. Le Guillou, L’Evolution, chap. 3. Le Guillou emphasizes that the pilgrims’ Roman trip seemed like an ultimatum delivered to Gregory XVI. He cites a letter from an unknown writer to an Italian priest: “He [FL] is going to Rome to convert the Pope, and if the Pontiff has the impertinence to laugh in his face, [FL] might just withdraw the certificate of infallibility that . . . the Holy See only received on condition of recognizing the infallibility of M de Lamennais and his school” (149). Le Guillou also argues that FL’s insistence on writing about foreign affairs, notably Poland, pushed Gregory toward condemnation. 104. CM, Le Père Lacordaire, 52, and Testament du père Lacordaire, 256. 105. HL to Aristide Bernier, Feb. 23, 1832, CR, 384. For HL’s confidence, see his letters to the abbé Prince (Feb. 25, 1832, CR, 385–86) and to Prosper Lorain (Mar. 10, 1832, CR, 387). 106. CM to Léon Cornudet, Dec. 23, 1831, Correspondance de Montalembert et de Léon Cornudet, 19. 107. Journal, 2:298–99 (Mar. 13, 1832) (emphasis in original). 108. CM to HL, Mar. 15–16, 1832 (HL left Rome on the fifteenth), L-M C, 111.

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had not yet seriously thought about how papal authority could impinge on their lives. While Montalembert remained confident that he knew how to identify liberty, despotism, and the appropriate response to each, Lacordaire was no longer as sure. In a long letter to his friend, written upon his return to Paris, Lacordaire explained that he was hurt that Lamennais had rebuffed his ideas and demanded that his disciples defer to his judgment; the three pilgrims had not in fact been equals. “Should I submit all my thoughts [to Lamennais], go as far as possible without breaking with the church?” Lacordaire asked. “Was there any peace for me short of giving myself up, bound at the wrists and ankles?”109 Lamennais was already planning to resume L’Avenir, possibly as an exclusively political paper, without religious content. Lacordaire, however, had committed to wait for a papal pronouncement, and Lamennais’s disregard for his scruples angered the younger priest.110 Determined not to undermine his submission to papal authority by prematurely resuming publication, Lacordaire was abandoning the limelight. He had recognized the vanity of grand ambition and great men, he told Montalembert, and he preferred to “live an obscure and good life.”111 He asked Montalembert to assure “M. de la Mennais” of his respect and even devotion, but he had decisively removed himself from Monsieur Féli’s family. Papal silence was not the only pressure on the friendship between Lacordaire and Montalembert. Montalembert had fallen in love with a Polish princess, Hedwige Lubomirska, in Rome. The young aristocrat was enjoying his independent social life in Rome, and he was particularly delighted with the Polish exile community—Catholics who had suffered for the cause of liberty. His mother’s earlier efforts to set him up in Paris society had annoyed him and led him to pay court to older, married women, but now that he could choose his own company he had, for the first time, fallen in love with a woman whom he could marry. Lacordaire had been unimpressed with the Polish princess, although as Montalembert’s infatuation grew, Lacordaire protested that he was not as hostile as his friend seemed to think.112 Still, Lacordaire regularly counseled restraint, reminding Montalembert that he could not defy the girl’s parents, who did not favor the marriage.113 Could Lacordaire and Montalembert continue as the “young hussars of Catholicism” if

109. 110. 111. 112. 113.

HL to CM, Apr. 9, 1832, L-M C, 116. HL to Abbé Philippe Gerbet, May 1, June 25, 1832, CR, 400–401, 417. HL to CM, Apr. 9, 1832, L-M C, 116. CM to HL, June 2, 1832, L-M C, 134, and HL to CM, June 21, 1832, L-M C, 140–41. HL to CM, Oct. 2, Nov. 11, 1832, L-M C, 151, 165.

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one of them wished to extend his commitments in the direction of marriage and family life?114 Lacordaire’s assertions that their friendship remained unchanged sounded plaintive in the months after his departure from Rome: “I am now a sealed oasis, which none but you may enter,” Lacordaire wrote at the end of the summer. “I have sun, shade, green grass, drinking water only for you, and I am content if a little love leads you to visit me. You are my Hedwige.”115 The stresses and faults lines that would shape Montalembert and Lacordaire’s responses to papal condemnation were thus already evident well before Gregory issued a pronouncement. Lacordaire would obey and then work to convince his friend that obedience was not incompatible with individual liberty. Montalembert would find himself torn, both by friendship and by his political commitments. He tried to remain loyal simultaneously to Lacordaire and to Lamennais even as the gulf between the two of them widened. Most difficult for Montalembert was the question of how he could preserve his newfound independence as an autonomous adult and French citizen while obeying his church. In the emotionally fraught correspondence of 1832–1834, Lacordaire and Montalembert responded to increasingly harsh papal criticism of mennaisianism and argued over the extent to which the church could legitimately impinge on the liberty of the individual citizen.

The Dilemma of Obedience Gregory XVI’s condemnation of Lamennais’s thought and strategy emerged in stages, beginning with the encyclical Mirari vos of August 1832. Mirari vos avoided naming Lamennais specifically, again suggesting that Gregory hoped to avoid any direct confrontation with mennaisianism. The encyclical did, however, touch on mennaisian themes, defending in particular the church’s historic ties to legitimate princes and its obligation to censor the press by “destroy[ing] the plague of bad books.” Most significantly, Mirari vos declared it “absurd and injurious to propose . . . ‘restoration and regeneration’ for [the church] as though necessary for her safety and growth, as if she could be considered subject to defect.”116 The encyclical thus explicitly deflated Montalembert and Lacordaire’s heady sense that they were participating in a Catholic revival for the modern world.

114. According to HL, Monseigneur du Pin, from the diocese of Lyon, was the source of the phrase. HL to CM, Oct. 3, 1831, L-M C, 74. 115. HL to CM, Aug. 15, 1832, L-M C, 148. 116. Text of Mirari vos, http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Greg16/g16mirar.htm.

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Mirari vos’s ambiguities made it relatively easy for the three pilgrims of liberty to accept. The three were together in Munich when they received the encyclical; Lamennais and Montalembert had given up waiting in Rome for a response and were returning to France, where they would, Lamennais claimed, resume publication of L’Avenir—an announcement that may have encouraged Gregory to issue Mirari vos. Lacordaire had traveled from France to meet his collaborators. He wanted to escape the publicity in France that exaggerated his rupture with Lamennais, and he planned to spend several years out of the country. He began his travels in Munich in order to preserve his friendship with Montalembert—he could not exile himself without seeing his friend again.117 The three men quickly signed a statement of submission to the encyclical, accepting that they could no longer continue the activities of L’Avenir or the agency and were therefore “retiring from the lists in which they had loyally fought for two years.”118 Like the encyclical, the submission included its own silences: it contained no acknowledgment of fault and no suggestion that any of the signatories had changed their views.119 The pilgrims’ submission to Mirari vos indicated the complicated nature of obedience. Was their declaration sincere or tactical? Unconditional or carefully hedged? The vicomte de Bonald praised “such complete and humble docility in one of the great men of our age”—a striking contrast, he asserted, to the era’s “prideful hatred of any subordination.”120 Lacordaire, too, found the submission convincing and returned with Lamennais to La Chênaie; they were, he said, “defeated men who had vanquished themselves.”121 Lamennais’s own behavior, however, soon called into question the extent to which he had defeated his own pride and subjected his will to that of the pope. Certainly Lamennais spoke often of his desire “to be forgotten in my obscure retreat.”122 His private correspondence, however, emphasized that he had submitted in matters of action, not belief, and that he had retired to his Breton home so that when the inevitable “storm that will shake Christendom to its foundations” came, he would be able to observe it from a distance.123 Mirari vos, Lamennais explained to his friends, represented the victory of politics 117. According to Le Testament du père Lacordaire, 258, HL left France to avoid the press, and it was Providence rather than any advance planning that brought the three of them together in Munich. See also CM to HL, Aug. 21, 1832, L-M C, 149–50. 118. Text of the declaration of Sept. 10, 1832, in Condamnation, 261–62. 119. In later life HL concluded that FL had thought through the careful terms of his submission in advance. Foisset, La Vie, 1:120; Philibert, Lacordaire et Lamennais, 957–61. 120. Louis de Bonald to the comte de Senfft, quoted in Condamnation, 262–63. 121. Quoted in CM, Le Père Lacordaire, 59. 122. FL to Charles de Coux, Oct. 20, 1832, CG, 5:205. 123. Ibid. See also FL to Father Ventura, Dec. 28, 1832, CG, 5:260.

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over spiritual principle. It was just a “protocol agreed upon by the Great Powers” that put the people of Europe on notice that “to be free, they have to stop being Catholics.”124 Rome, he wrote to another friend, was the “most dreadful cesspit ever to soil the human gaze. . . . [The Catholic hierarchy] would sell peoples, they would sell the human race, they would sell the three persons of the Holy Trinity one at a time or all together.”125 By the end of 1832 Lamennais’s insubordination seemed unlikely to remain private, confined to the Breton estate to which he had retreated. Certainly Gregory XVI was aware of it, since he read a great deal of Lamennais’s correspondence, courtesy of Metternich’s network of spies.126 Lacordaire left La Chênaie in December, departing suddenly and on foot, leaving behind a letter asserting “that the church has good and wise reasons . . . for refusing to move as fast as we might like.”127 Although he continued to agree with Lamennais on many issues, Lacordaire was unwilling to set his own judgment up in defiance of that of the church. Even Montalembert had to recognize the contingent nature of Lamennais’s submission when, in June 1833, he visited his mentor at La Chênaie and heard Lamennais read a draft of his latest work, Paroles d’un croyant. The book was incendiary and if published would undoubtedly provoke further conflict with Rome. Montalembert felt “the abyss opening beneath my feet and M Féli’s,” and he feared “that faith and conscience cannot reach an agreement.”128 He immediately left for Germany and begged Lamennais to join him there—or anywhere else—and abandon his publication plans. It was, Montalembert wrote, the saddest trip he had ever made.129 For Lamennais and his followers, the crux of the issue was the appropriate relationship between the Catholic and the citizen. Pressed to be more precise about his submission to Mirari vos, Lamennais asserted a clear distinction between the two; in a letter to Gregory XVI he explained that he would 124. FL to Vilain XIIII, Oct. 7, 1832, CG, 5:187 (emphasis in the original). See also FL to Benoit d’Azy, Oct. 7, 1832, CG, 5:189; to the Marquis de Coriolis, Oct. 9, 1832, CG, 5:193; to Mme La Baronne Cottu, Nov. 1, 1832, CG, 5:210. FL was particularly angered by Gregory’s brief to Polish bishops (CG, 5:194–95) that called on them to reject Polish nationalism. Viaene, Belgium and the Holy See, 74. 125. FL to Mme de Senfft, Nov. 1, 1832, CG, 5:209. 126. Jean René Derré, Metternich et Lamennais d’après les documents conservés aux archives de Vienne (Paris, 1963). Lamennais’s critics within the French episcopacy were also suspicious of his submission and aware of the fact that he had not admitted to any fault. See, e.g., archbishop of Toulouse to Monseigneur de Gregorio, Nov. 3, 1832, in Condamnation, 277–81. 127. HL sent CM a copy of his letter to FL: Dec. 11, 1832, L-M C, 171. 128. Journal, 2:361 ( July 20, 1833). 129. CM to Léon Cornudet, Aug. 19, 1833, and Cornudet to CM, Sept. 3, 1833, Correspondance de Montalembert et de Léon Cornudet, 82–86.

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obey in everything that concerned him as a Catholic but that he retained complete liberty to act in any way he saw fit as a citizen.130 His statements as a citizen were simply of no concern to Rome; they had nothing to do with his faith or with his obligations to the church. “[O]utside Catholicism, outside faith, there is reason; outside the church is humanity,” he wrote a colleague. Thus where matters of faith were concerned, Lamennais could “walk blindfolded along the common path,” but “in philosophy, in politics,” he asserted, “I feel free, perfectly free, and I won’t recognize anyone as having the right to impose an opinion on me.”131 To speak of a Catholic citizen, then, was nonsense; the two terms simply had nothing in common. Signaling that he intended henceforth to speak as a citizen, Lamennais also informed Gregory that he would no longer be fulfilling the role of a priest. Lamennais’s assertion that “Catholic” and “citizen” were two completely different categories whose coincidence in a single individual was inconsequential shaped a debate between Lacordaire and Montalembert that lasted nearly two years. Ultimately, neither young man wanted to abandon the idea that a Catholic citizenship was somehow possible. Ironically, Lamennais had taken a long and circuitous path back to the liberal concept of religion as a purely private affair that the citizen left behind when he entered the public sphere. Rejecting this liberal trope was what had initially propelled Montalembert and Lacordaire into Catholic politics; how could a man leave behind his most important convictions when he embarked on public affairs? And how could peace be maintained in a public sphere in which religious views, the foundation of moral behavior, were ruled out of bounds? Lacordaire and Montalembert believed that mennaisianism reconciled faith and citizenship, allowing men to embrace the possibilities of liberal citizenship without abandoning their faith and the social glue that it represented. To be pushed back in the direction of an either-or choice was devastating to them. Both Montalembert and Lacordaire found it difficult to give up the excitement of their collaboration and their participation in the intellectual ferment of Catholic renewal; both young men despaired that the significant and worthwhile part of their lives had ended in their youth. Montalembert, as a layman with no need to work for a living, found the direction of his life completely uncertain. He brooded over the encyclical’s description of himself and his companions as “impudent” and “execrable,” and he bitterly complained that “it’s not up to us to save what the pope and the bishops 130. FL to Gregory XVI, Nov. 5, 1833, Condamnation, 391. 131. FL to Abbé Combalot, May 26, 1833, CG, 5:401.

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want to lose.”132 He admitted to Lamennais that “seeing the church . . . neutralize a system that is as noble, complete, and absolutely and universally satisfying as the one which we defended under your auspices” had, for the first time in his life, “slightly shaken” his faith.133 He was facing “the collapse of [a] brilliant career” and had nothing to fall back on—especially, since Hedwige’s parents had rebuffed him, no wife or family.134 Despite his priesthood, Lacordaire was also coming to terms with the loss of career; journalism was now closed to him because of the papal command and because “there’s only one Avenir for this century.” “Born into a mediocre era,” Lacordaire mourned, “I will spend my time on this earth amid things that are not worthy of memory. I will try to be good, simple, pious . . . not blaming Providence which could certainly have burdened such an unremarkable life with much greater ills.”135 Although their friendship was no longer as joyful or uncomplicated as during their journalist days, it was nonetheless the means by which they worked out their paths to an obedience that could coexist with citizenship in the modern state. Their relationship entered a trying phase, “painful, but touching” as an elderly Montalembert annotated one of his friend’s letters from the period.136 They were deeply at odds over their faith and the degree of obedience it demanded, and each was profoundly concerned for the other’s future as a Christian. Although they disappointed and hurt one another repeatedly, they never abandoned their ideal of Christian fraternity. They trusted each other even as they argued, and neither allowed the other to walk away from the friendship. Indeed, throughout much of 1833 and 1834, Lacordaire forwarded Montalembert’s mail, opening all his friend’s letters so as to avoid paying postage for envelopes. When Lacordaire acknowledged that “heaven has opened a chaotic abyss between us, just as between heaven and hell,” Montalembert responded not only with a defense of his side of that abyss but also with the assurance that “[w]hatever your sentiments toward me may be, my sentiments for you since the first days of our alliance will never change.”137 A few months later when Montalembert suggested that the “spiritual disunion” between the two had ended their friendship, Lacordaire

132. CM to Count Rzewuski, Sept. 1, 1832, CG, 5:177. 133. CM to FL, Nov. 3, 1832, Lettres, 14. 134. CM to Léon Cornudet, Sept. 16, 1832, Correspondance de Charles de Montalembert et de Léon Cornudet, 71. 135. HL to CM, Dec. 11, 1832, L-M C, 171–75. See also HL to CM, Oct. 16, 1832, L-M C, 154–56. 136. HL to CM, May 15, 1833, L-M C, 177. 137. HL to CM, Sept. 15, 1833, L-M C, 199; CM to HL, Dec. 6, 1833, L-M C, 232.

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responded that such a thing was impossible: “you are my friend, my brother, my sister; I have loved too much to be happy without you.”138 Montalembert initially found Lamennais’s distinction between the Catholic and the citizen compelling, at least for himself as a layman—he could not accept Lamennais’s conviction that a priest could shed his Catholic character. Montalembert assured his mentor of the “enthusiasm with which [he] welcome[d] the idea . . . that so shocked M Lacordaire, that is, to fight not as Catholics but as Frenchmen” and compared himself to Ruth, devotedly following a master.139 He agreed with Lamennais that Mirari vos was basically political in inspiration, the result of Gregory’s unfortunate decision to cultivate conservatives like Metternich and the emperor of Russia. Obedience to such a politically motivated encyclical could therefore reasonably be limited and contingent, focusing on actions rather than ideas. He concluded that he could remain an obedient Catholic “without renouncing any of our opinions or principles.”140 Montalembert was not, however, willing to assert that a priest could declare the autonomy of his political views as easily as a layman. He worried that continuing the struggle might not be “appropriate to [Lamennais’s] dignity, [his] glory, [his] position, [and his] destiny in the world.”141 Upon learning that Lamennais had renounced his priestly functions, Montalembert was devastated. Receiving communion from Monsieur Féli had previously cemented his friendships and his political allegiances in addition to bringing him closer to God; no doubt Lamennais’s withdrawal seemed to endanger Montalembert’s most fundamental beliefs.142 Lacordaire’s campaign to convince his friend to submit to papal authority was full of paradoxes as he deployed a variety of strategies against Montalembert’s stubbornness. His goal was both to persuade Montalembert that he could reasonably subscribe to Mirari vos and simultaneously to convince him that true obedience meant putting reason aside. Similarly, he presented submission as necessary because of Montalembert’s individual status as a Christian as well as because of the web of social ties in which he lived. Submission was both the sensible thing for Montalembert to do and an act that could not be explained by reason alone. Montalembert would choose it freely, and yet it was also compulsory, a debt he owed to his fellow Christians.

138. HL to CM, Apr. 17, 1834, L-M C, 260. 139. CM to FL, Feb. 6, 1833, Lettres, 43, 49. 140. CM to unknown, Nov. 4, 1832, Condamnation, 358. CM’s letter found its way to the antimennaisian Jesuit Father Rozaven in Rome. 141. CM to FL, Feb. 6, 1833, Lettres, 43. 142. Journal, 3:13 ( Jan. 8, 1834).

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Lacordaire presented Montalembert with a series of arguments in favor of submission couched in pragmatic political terms. He avoided Lamennais’s liberal conclusion that religion should be relegated to a sphere separate from that of politics and instead focused on convincing his friend that careful reading of papal pronouncements revealed them to be acceptable to a rational individual. Lacordaire’s technique here was to limit the implications of Mirari vos and to insist that subscribing to it did not in fact require Montalembert to compromise any of his beliefs; the tenets of the encyclical, narrowly interpreted, were the sort of compromise that a realist like Montalembert could reasonably make. The real sticking points that required Lacordaire to deploy a certain logical flexibility concerned liberty of the press and obedience to legitimate power. Obviously, a free press did not necessarily produce good or virtuous ideas, and Montalembert could surely agree that the church should intervene, even censor the press, to protect faith and morals. Such censorship, Lacordaire argued, would naturally distinguish between legitimate political journalism and mere scandal-mongering, which harmed society and was an appropriate target for church intervention. Similarly, the encyclical’s injunction for Catholics to obey legitimately constituted political authorities did not mean that people could never free themselves from unjust rulers, merely that such an event was exceptional.143 Lacordaire suggested that Montalembert consider the early Christians who obeyed Caesar without accepting that his reign was divinely ordained or that his use of force was just. They recognized that insurrection would make their situation even worse, and eventually the conversion of Constantine rewarded their steady faith and obedience. In a similar vein, Lacordaire argued that Montalembert should take care not to confuse the encyclical with other actions of the pope that he might not like but that he was not being asked to endorse. Montalembert, for instance, read Mirari vos in the context of the unsuccessful Polish uprising of November 1830, but Lacordaire insisted that the document said nothing about either Poland or Russia. Montalembert might be angry at Gregory’s support for Russia, but submission to the encyclical did not “consecrate the use of force” against Poles.144 Because Gregory had not explicitly claimed that the papacy could deny a nation liberty, Montalembert could both accept Mirari vos and continue his support for the Polish cause. Montalembert was free, Lacordaire argued, to interpret Gregory’s support for Russian despotism

143. HL to CM, Dec. 14, 1833, L-M C, 235–36. 144. HL to CM, Jan. 4, 1834, L-M C, 244.

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as a failure to live up to the church’s ideals, not as a necessary consequence of Mirari vos. In spite of all of this careful reasoning, Montalembert’s membership in the church and in French society meant that his individual conscience was not the only or even the most important actor in question. Lamennais’s notion that he could simply secede from the community of Christians in all matters concerning politics struck Lacordaire as the worst sort of liberal fallacy— a betrayal of the idea of a Christian society—and he was determined to prevent his friend from ratifying it. Montalembert had to submit because the consequences for other people of his defiance were unthinkable; he was responsible not only for his own soul but also for others’. Lamennais’s other followers could not afford to wait for Montalembert to mature, put aside his stubborn ego, and accept papal teaching. Because he occupied a position of influence, he had to recognize that Lamennais was seducing others away from the truth and to accept responsibility for his own part in “weakening the respect due to the successor of Saint Peter.” Because the church was “the only society that survives in the world today,” no talent was so great as to justify harming it: “I would rather throw myself into the ocean with a millstone around my neck than to maintain any center of hope, ideas, even good works, next to the church,” Lacordaire announced.145 Ultimately, Montalembert should even consider whether he had encouraged Lamennais in his obduracy. Lamennais was “a man of great talent and celebrity who could have done a great deal for the church and for humanity,” and Montalembert’s own part in “push[ing] him towards the abyss” was “a bitter burden” for which he should repent.146 Lacordaire argued that Montalembert should understand his obligation to set aside his own reason as analogous to the sacrifice of Isaac, translated to their postrevolutionary context.147 Abraham saw nothing good in God’s demand that he kill his beloved son, but he was prepared to obey because he could not defy God. Political judgment, Lacordaire suggested, was Montalembert’s Isaac—what it would cost him most to sacrifice. Just as Isaac, the son born after years of a barren marriage, was crucial to Abraham’s manhood, autonomous citizenship was Montalembert’s badge of adult masculinity, all the more precious for its recently acquired status. Lacordaire himself was

145. HL to CM, Dec. 2, 1833, L-M C, 223; ibid., Oct. 6, 1833, L-M C, 207. 146. HL to CM, Nov. 21, 1833, L-M C, 219–20. HL considered, however, that CM’s responsibility for his error was diminished by virtue of his youth and his being “dazzled” by FL’s genius. HL to CM, Dec. 2, 1833, L-M C, 221. 147. HL to CM, Jan. 4, 1834, L-M C, 242.

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willing to pay any price for his friend’s soul; he would “fast for years on bread and water, wrap [him]self in a hair shirt, . . . have [him]self torn apart by whips . . . and still account [him]self too happy if God would have pity” on Montalembert.148 The point of the sacrifice of Isaac, however, was that it accepted no substitute. Autonomous political judgment was the young man’s greatest pride, the prize for the struggles of growing up, and, having barely achieved adulthood, Montalembert had to lay that judgment on the altar for no other reason than that God commanded him to do so. In begging Montalembert to submit to the pope, Lacordaire was defending the legitimacy of their notion of Catholic citizenship. For Lacordaire, the church did not merely dictate to the Catholic citizen, negating his autonomy and liberty. Rather, Catholicism disciplined the citizen’s freedom so that he could function in society. Citizens who turned their back on the church lacked discipline; witness the French Revolution. The church regulated human reason; it was a “beneficent bridle” on human ambition.149 Lacordaire’s account of the church’s disciplinary power bears quoting at length: The church doesn’t tell you: “Understand.” It doesn’t have that power. It tells you: “Believe.” It tells you now as a twenty-three-year-old man attached to a particular school of thought the same thing that it told you at your first communion: Receive the hidden and incomprehensible God, subordinate your reason before God’s and before the church. . . . You’re amazed that the Holy See should put M de la Mennais in this position between open revolt and the eradication of his conscience and his reason. But he has been in that situation as long as he’s been in the world. Since his baptism, he has had to choose between disciplining his opinions, his wishes, and his firmest convictions and open revolt. Only, it’s harder to do it when one has spoken out in public than when everything is between your heart and God. But that’s the test for men of great talent. The church’s greatest men have had to break their lives in two, and, on a smaller scale, that’s what every conversion is.150 Lacordaire did not recommend a cynical acceptance of papal authority or one hedged about with qualifiers; true obedience, he recognized, would be so painful as to constitute the fulcrum on which Montalembert’s life turned. After breaking his own will and submitting, Montalembert’s sense of self

148. HL to CM, Dec. 2, 1833, L-M C, 222. 149. HL to CM, Jan. 4, 1834, L-M C, 242. 150. HL to CM, Aug. 2, 1834, L-M C, 281–82. CM later quoted most of this passage in Le Père Lacordaire, 79.

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would be changed, and while his life might be less joyful and carefree, it would also be wiser, more mature. By disciplining himself to the rules of his spiritual society, Montalembert would be better able to live in and contribute to civil society. Ultimately Montalembert came around to Lacordaire’s point of view, but only after the younger man’s hope that it might be possible for him to separate the citizen from the Catholic had been completely demolished. His efforts in that direction proved spectacularly unsuccessful. In May 1833 Montalembert published his translation of the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz’s Book of the Polish Pilgrims with his own introduction; Gregory XVI viewed the project as evidence of mennaisian obstinacy and condemned it accordingly. Montalembert had remained deeply involved in the Polish cause since his stay in Rome, and he was still infatuated with the Polish princess Hedwige, despite her parents’ disapproval. He understood liberty for Poles and for French Catholics as two sides of the same coin. He was, for instance, planning a school for the children of Polish émigrés in Paris that would both provide charitable education to Polish exiles and challenge the French educational monopoly. L’Avenir had always espoused a similar view of Poland as the nation that stood as the sentry of both liberty and God himself.151 In biblical and prophetic language, Mickiewicz presented Poland as the crucified Christ among nations, victim of satanic forces represented by the Russian Empire. Montalembert added a preface that described Polish patriots as having realized a synthesis of Catholicism and liberty. In Poland, he asserted, “the holy and chivalric qualities of the Middle Ages joined together with the dynamic and progressive qualities of our own era.” God had chosen Poland to “redeem the sins of modern society with its blood,” so saving Poland from further Russian brutality was vital to the future of all of Europe.152 According to Lamennais, Polish Pilgrims showed its readers “how beautiful religion is, when we don’t use it as a cesspit for all the stupidity and all the corruption of the human heart.”153 Gregory XVI was less impressed by Polish Pilgrims, however, describing it in a widely circulated brief addressed to the bishop of Rennes as “a work that is full of temerity and malice.”154 The papal disapproval shocked Montalembert because it referred to him specifically; he was no longer involved

151. HL, “La Bataille d’Ostrolenka,” L’Avenir, June 9, 1831, in Mélanges catholiques, 2:71–75. 152. CM, “Avant-propos” to Livre des pèlerins polonais, by Adam Mickiewicz, trans. CM (Brussels, 1834), 35–36, 64. 153. FL to Benoit d’Azy, May 8, 1833, CG, 5:385. 154. Gregory XVI to Monseigneur Lesquen, bishop of Rennes, Oct. 4, 1833, Condamnation, 377.

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merely by virtue of his association with Lamennais. Gregory cited Polish Pilgrims as evidence that mennaisians continued to work in concert and to offer Lamennais cover. As far as Montalembert was concerned, this papal censure was unjust since he certainly had not produced Polish Pilgrims at the behest of Lamennais.155 The Polish Pilgrims affair shook Montalembert’s confidence that he, as a layman, would be able to separate politics from religion in order to enjoy his intellectual autonomy while remaining a faithful Catholic. Political liberty and devout Catholicism were inextricably tied in Montalembert’s support for the Polish cause, and he was simply unable to shrug off Gregory’s condemnation of his work. It was, Montalembert wrote, as if God were “pulling away one by one all the pillars that support my life, public and private, intellectual and moral.”156 While Montalembert discovered that he could not separate his political and religious commitments, Lamennais was acting on his assertion that in political matters he was entirely autonomous, answering only to his own conscience. His manuscript for Paroles d’un croyant had been complete for months, and in the spring of 1834 he finally decided to publish it and proclaim his contempt for papal support of reactionary, Restoration-era policies. Paroles, like Mickiewicz’s Polish Pilgrims, introduced a primitive, biblical language, an apocalyptic tone, and a quasi-liturgical structure to political writing. Lamennais asserted that God had created all men equal, and he described the enslavement of the people at the hands of kings, sons of Satan. The book promised, however, that “justice is the harvest of the people” and liberty its glory; soon the people would claim their patrie and live under the rule of Christ.157 The book created a sensation; it was the first great publishing success of the nineteenth century.158 According to commentators, Paroles was like “a red [Phyrgian] cap placed on top of a cross” or like “1793 taking Easter communion.”159 Lamennais maintained that Paroles did not violate his promise “not to write on religious questions”; he spoke, he maintained, as a citizen on political issues. In Paroles he “made [him]self one of the people” and “identifie[d]

155. On CM’s response to the Polish Pilgrims affair, see Léon Cornudet to CM, Nov. 29, 1833, and CM to Cornudet, Dec. 6, 1833, Correspondance de Montalembert et de Léon Cornudet, 98–99, 100–101. 156. CM to Léon Cornudet, Dec. 22, 1833, Correspondance de Montalembert et de Léon Cornudet, 104. 157. FL, Paroles d’un croyant, ed. Yves Le Hir (Paris, 1949), 106 (“sons of Satan”), 266 (“justice”). 158. Frédéric Barbier, “Une production multipliée,” in Histoire de l’édition française, vol. 3, Le temps des éditeurs (Paris, 1985), 112. 159. Quoted by Alec R. Vidler, Prophecy and Papacy: A Study of Lamennais, the Church, and the Revolution (New York, 1954), 244.

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[him]self with their suffering and misery” in order to “stir in them the sentiments of fraternal love and sublime charity that Christianity has spread in the world.” The relationship between Lamennais’s “people” and God is entirely unmediated; he simply ignores the church. He had, he explained to the archbishop of Paris, avoided any mention of “Christianity as defined by dogmatic and positive teachings.”160 Lamennais effectively claimed Christ’s redemptive message for himself and asserted that it had nothing to do with “religious questions”—dry dogma and theological argument that had no relevance outside Rome. This particular reordering of the “political” and the “religious” was obviously unacceptable in Rome. Montalembert ultimately found his way to the obedient submission that Lacordaire advocated by repeating his friend’s arguments in letters to Monsieur Féli. Although Montalembert never convinced his mentor of the force of Lacordaire’s argument, he did succeed in convincing himself. Paroles d’un croyant was a beautiful book, Montalembert insisted, and there wasn’t “a single line” that he wouldn’t sign off on with his own blood.161 Nonetheless, the duty of the Christian was “to bend beneath harshness and to resign himself to ingratitude.” Lamennais should recall that “there will always be enough philosophers, liberals, patriots, and great geniuses in the world . . . but there is not and there can never be enough submission, Christian humility and unity in Christ’s church.”162 What the two men might believe was irrelevant when the church asked them to obey, a point that Montalembert insisted that he derived from his daily reading of Lamennais’s own translation of the Imitation of Christ.163 Lacordaire’s argument about Abraham’s sacrifice reappeared as Montalembert begged Lamennais “to immolate your Isaac, your conscience.” Individual conscience should not be the final arbiter of a man’s actions, Montalembert argued: “I don’t see that Jesus Christ spoke so much of conscience . . . rather, it seems to me that he always spoke of obedience, of the faith of small children who don’t have a conscience.” Lamennais faced a “martyrdom” that would “break [his] life” and “demolish” him, but that was the price God demanded in exchange for the genius with which he was endowed.164 In his letters to Lacordaire, Montalembert defended Monsieur Féli and the autonomy of conscience, but in letters to Lamennais, Montalembert adopted his friend’s arguments, pushing their mentor toward submission.

160. 161. 162. 163. 164.

FL to Monseigneur Quélen, Apr. 29, 1834, Condamnation, 457–58. CM to FL, June 25, 1834, Lettres, 215. CM to FL, Nov. 22, 1833, Lettres, 155–56. Ibid., 156. CM to FL, July 19, 1834, Lettres, 233–35.

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Montalembert also implored Lamennais to think of others whose relationship with the church he placed in jeopardy. Lamennais’s conscience, Montalembert maintained, was individual and private, but in stubbornly following it he abandoned his followers whom he had taught to trust a common direction—a sens commun—represented by the community of Catholic believers.165 Lamennais’s obstinacy also gave the church hierarchy the justification it needed to pursue his followers into the secrecy of their own consciences so that men who “in . . . their hearts venerat[ed] both God and liberty” found themselves forced to choose between the two.166 The fact that Montalembert was one of those souls endangered by their association with Lamennais went unspoken in the correspondence, and Montalembert repeatedly assured Monsieur Féli of his dedication. The younger man remained the loving son of a beloved father: “I belong to you completely, and I am happy . . . to be able to rest my poor soul against yours,” Montalembert wrote.167 Lamennais, Montalembert, and Lacordaire all knew that Montalembert’s promise to follow his mentor anywhere, like Ruth, raised the possibility of following Lamennais out of the church. Singulari nos, Gregory’s June 1834 encyclical condemning Paroles d’un croyant, despite being predictable, was nonetheless a blow to Montalembert that destroyed his last illusions that somehow Lamennais and Rome would overcome their differences.168 The new encyclical was more explicit than Mirari vos had been. It declared that although Paroles was “small in size” it was “enormous in wickedness,” and it “corrupt[ed] the people by a wicked abuse of the word of God, to dissolve the bonds of all public order and to weaken all authority.” Singulari nos left little ground for those who, like the pilgrims of liberty, had hoped to find a Catholic position from which to critique political authority. Lamennais’s politics, according to the encyclical, were nothing but a “passion of insane reform” and the “ravings of human reason”; they led directly to treason and anarchy. The encyclical did not entertain the possibility that some versions of public order might be open to rational Catholic critique.169

165. CM to FL, Dec. 8, 1833, and July 19, 1834, Lettres, 165–66, 231. 166. CM to FL, May 31, 1834, Lettres, 206. 167. CM to FL, Nov. 22, 1833, Lettres, 158. 168. Journal, 3:55 (July 19, 1834). 169. Singulari nos, http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Greg16/g16singu.htm. Monseigneur Garibaldi, papal nuncio in Paris, reported that some commentators described Paroles as the “Koran of the nineteenth century”—that is, Lamennais’s claims to prophetic status were as false as those of Mohammed. See Garibaldi dispatch, May 9, 1834, Condamnation, 465.

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Following Singulari nos, Lamennais’s disciples found themselves cornered and forced to choose between their mentor and their church, just as Montalembert had warned. In the late summer and fall of 1834, virtually all of Lamennais’s friends and collaborators recorded their submission to papal teaching; even Félicité’s brother and collaborator, Jean-Marie de Lamennais, repudiated Paroles, and the two never met again.170 Paroles and Singulari nos framed the debate as an either-or choice, eliminating the possibility that Catholics could reach some accommodation between God and liberty in the privacy of their consciences. A handful of the young men who had formed the core of his circle at La Chênaie followed their mentor’s defiance.171 Most of Lamennais’s friends and colleagues, however, could not choose him over their church; even if they could follow him to the frontiers of Catholicism, they would not step over the line.172 Montalembert was among the last to give in. He postponed facing the issue with a long, wandering trip through Europe, hiking the Alps, deepening his appreciation of the Gothic, and contemplating a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in order to avoid both Paris and Rome. He explained that because he had no future and the present was too painful to contemplate, he buried himself in the past, studying medieval history and preparing a life of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary. He visited sites associated with Elizabeth’s life and charity, maintained his correspondences with both Lamennais and Lacordaire, and considered his options. His conscience, he noted in his journal, had been “not just shaken, but practically pulled up from its roots.”173 His letters and his journal both speak to his profound loneliness; he was at least partially estranged from his collaborators, and his hopes of marrying Hedwige had collapsed entirely, leaving him deeply humiliated.174 He was visiting many of the same cities he had previously seen with his sister Elise, in one case even staying in the same hotel, where the staff asked after the young woman, who had died five years earlier.175 Perhaps, he speculated, God had given him an unhappy childhood to prepare him for misery as an adult, and the last few years full of purpose and hope had been entirely illusory.176

170. Auguste Laveille, Jean-Marie de la Mennais (1780–1860), 2 vols. (Paris, 1903), 1:505–6, 522–23. 171. See, e.g., Eugène Boré to FL, Dec. 31, 1834, in Alfred Roussel, Lamennais intime, d’après une correspondance inédite (Paris, 1897), 311–14. 172. CM used this image of a frontier in a letter to FL, Jan. 20, 1835, Lettres, 271–72. 173. Journal, 3:63 (Aug. 6, 1834). 174. Ibid., 3:21–24 (Apr. 29, 1834). 175. CM to FL, June 25, 1834, Lettres, 220. 176. Journal, 3:20 (Apr. 16–30, 1834).

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Montalembert finally wrote his submission to Gregory in December 1834, excusing his delay by noting that he had been traveling abroad.177 Ultimately, the outcome of his struggle was not in much doubt. His solitary wanderings had convinced him that although he might have to go through life without domestic happiness or even lasting friendships, he could not do without the church. On the day that he drafted his statement of obedience, he recorded in his diary, “I have sacrificed my convictions to the fear of finding myself one day deprived of that community of the faithful that is my only patrie, the only home . . . that remains for my heart.”178 Lamennais had “been a whole world” for him when, with Lacordaire, he had defended the union of Catholicism and liberty, but ultimately Montalembert could not risk “the chance of finding [him]self outside the church that alone could offer [him] consolation for the most private suffering that neither political nor intellectual activity could assuage.”179 Lamennais alone was not enough for a young man who wanted to live in a meaningful society of individuals bound together by ties of affection, duty, and worship. Thus when Lamennais accused his disciple of being fickle, Montalembert responded with conviction: “I have never been and I have never wanted to be anything but Catholic, and as Catholic as it is possible to be. That’s what I was when you met me in 1830, and that’s what I still am.” Montalembert remained convinced that society without religious faith was unstable, even impossible, and he refused to pursue the path of liberal individualism. Ultimately, Montalembert chose solidarity with his friend and with their fellow Catholics.180 In his journal, he wrote that the act of submitting to papal authority had destroyed him and he wondered why God did not claim him, either as a priest or as a corpse. He could only conclude that God found him unworthy.181 In spite of this despair at seeing his life reduced to rubble, he nonetheless recognized that individual conscience would serve him little if that were all he could salvage of his youth. In his travels to the sites of Saint Elizabeth’s life, he had tried life without community and had found that the conviction of his own righteousness did little to make isolation more acceptable. To transform friendship into solidarity—the kind of durable bond out of which society might be made—Montalembert had to value the social and religious ties of love and duty above his individual judgment. He also 177. CM to Gregory, Dec. 8, 1834, Condamnation, 492. 178. Journal, 3:100 (Dec. 8, 1834). 179. CM to FL, Dec. 13, 1834, Lettres, 264–65. 180. My thanks to Avery H. Kolers for thoughtful conversations about solidarity; see his “Dynamics of Solidarity,” Journal of Political Philosophy 20, no. 4 (2012): 365–83. 181. Journal, 3:100 (Dec. 8, 1834).

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had to consider the possibility that conscience was in fact a manifestation of individual willfulness and desire. Montalembert’s future role as leader of the sons of the crusaders was impossible without this commitment to solidarity, and his confidence in a Catholic future derived from his conviction that Voltaire’s sons could never muster such strong ties to one another. Restored to the community of the faithful, Montalembert recovered from his dejection within a few years and embarked on the political career that made him the leading lay spokesman for French Catholics until his death in 1870. Friendship like Montalembert and Lacordaire’s was what a liberal political order of atomized individuals needed in order to preserve the liberty of all from the selfishness of sinful men—it was the model Christ offered his followers. Montalembert’s youthful response to the dilemma of autonomy and obedience demonstrates the creativity of French Catholicism in the postrevolutionary period as well as the pressures, from both church and state, to which his brand of Catholicism was subjected.

 Ch ap ter 4 Pauline Craven’s Holy Family Writing the Modern Saint

On January 1, 1866, as she awaited the publication of her first book, Pauline Craven jotted a prayer on the first page of a small, leather-bound notebook: “May God bless this new year that begins for me with an important act. Within a fortnight, this dear treasure of my past will leave the sanctuary of respect and love where it has dwelt for so many years. . . . Now strangers, people whom I don’t know and who may not care at all, will share it with me.” Le Récit d’une sœur, Craven’s memoir of her youth, recounted the lives, loves, and ultimately the deaths of her brother and sisters; it was a deeply personal book whose publication caused Craven considerable anxiety. She prayed to be worthy of the beloved members of her family memorialized in Le Récit, and she asked Jesus to unite the strangers who would read her book “in the Beatitude of Your eternal love.”1 “This book has to be a success to spare me remorse,” she wrote a few months later when the second volume appeared.2 Craven repeatedly prayed that God would recognize and bless her good intentions in delivering her family to a public readership.3 The stakes were high, since only success—a large audience

1. Pauline Craven (hereafter PC), carnet de notes, Jan. 1, 1866, ICP, ms. fr. 583. 2. Ibid., June 3, 1866 (emphasis in the original). 3. Ibid., Jan. 15, Apr. 7, 1866. 149

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of souls touched by her literary monument to the dead—could ever justify Craven’s violation of her family’s privacy.4 Le Récit d’une sœur offered an intimate portrait of Catholic devotion in what readers soon referred to as a “family of saints.” Craven composed her narrative by weaving together selections from letters and private journals, primarily those of her sister-in-law and younger sisters. Most of the book is in the present tense and the first person, giving readers a sense of direct access to the souls of its characters. Her siblings’ sanctity was Craven’s justification for violating ordinary norms of family dignity and privacy; intimate and reflective texts like letters and diaries revealed their writers’ holiness and were thus valuable examples for ordinary readers. Their private reflections on their lives revealed Craven’s sisters as women whose faith required a constant assessment of the self and its relationship to the world. Craven proposed them to her readers as saints for modern times. Le Récit d’une sœur was a tremendous success, creating legions of fans and significant income for Craven. The memoir went though twelve printings and over ten thousand copies in its first year; multiple translations followed, and it won a prize from the French Academy.5 Nineteenth-century French girls grew up on Le Récit d’une sœur in the decades before the Great War. Craven’s sisters, like Victorine Monniot’s heroine Marguerite, were popular examples of women who achieved autonomy within a Christian and familial framework. Craven’s initial anxiety gradually gave way to greater confidence, and Le Récit d’une sœur was the first of a series of books, mostly focusing on women’s lives and including several commemorative biographies of friends, that she published in the last twenty years of her life. A best-selling memoir hardly resonated with stereotypical images of nineteenth-century Catholic female virtue in which silence was the appropriate accompaniment to piety. Craven’s literary work praised this model of self-abnegating piety, but it also proposed a more assertive and vocal—but equally devout—alternative. Craven’s sisters were precisely the sort of quiet Catholic women whose profound reflections on faith sustained themselves and their families without demanding public attention. Craven herself, however, fulfilled a different role: as a writer, she rescued her sisters’ example of modest and unassuming faith for a broad public.6 Le Récit d’une sœur ensured

4. Ibid., June 17, 1866. 5. Didier (publisher) to PC, July 14, 1867, ICP, ms. fr. 574. On Le Récit’s success, see Philippe Lejeune, Le Moi des demoiselles: Enquête sur le journal de jeune fille (Paris, 1993), 299–301. 6. Valerie Raoul, “Women’s Diaries as Life-Savings: Who Decides Whose Life Is Saved? The Journals of Eugénie de Guérin and Elisabeth Leseur,” Biography 24, no. 1 (2001): 140–51.

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that their self-abnegation did not lead to the negation of their lives. Although Craven shared with her sisters the sense that the only meaningful form of agency was “the ability to discern God’s will and act upon it,” she was confident that silence was not the only role that God had allotted to women.7 Delivering her family’s sorrows to an audience of readers was thus an act of devotion that saved the example of her sisters’ piety from their own humility. In composing and publishing Le Récit d’une sœur, Craven had a position analogous to that of Charles de Montalembert facing the mennaisian crisis. Both Craven and Montalembert explored the tensions between autonomous romantic selfhood and Catholic obedience. Craven and her sisters experienced the Christian life as a powerfully subjective, interior process in which the care of the soul overlapped with the care of the self. Craven believed that the achievement of female Christian selfhood was worth communicating and that its exemplary value outweighed concerns about female modesty or familial privacy. Not all members of her family shared her view, however. Their opposition ensured that Craven was intensely aware of alternative views of Catholic womanhood that assumed that female piety was incompatible with publicity. Le Récit d’une sœur quickly found an enthusiastic audience that recognized the risk Craven had taken in publishing her memoir. Readers hailed Le Récit as a model of pious literature and praised Craven for offering her sisters’ example to the public. Many readers, eager to establish a personal connection to the surviving member of the family of saints, wrote to Craven. They explained their sense of identification with her sisters and their hopes that Craven’s saints would hear their prayers. Her readers understood that they were participating in a devotional chain whereby faithful readers helped Craven rescue holy Catholic women from their own self-effacement in order to fulfill a greater role as saints and intercessors. Readers’ devotion to the characters of Craven’s memoir helped transform them into modern saints. Readers’ letters allow us to examine Le Récit d’une sœur from multiple angles; we can trace not only the composition of the book but also public reception of its presentation of saints for the modern world. Pauline Craven, née de la Ferronnays, was not an obvious candidate to become one of the nineteenth century’s most popular writers. Like Charles de Montalembert, she was a postrevolutionary child of the French aristocracy.

7. Maria LaMonaca, Masked Atheism: Catholicism and the Secular Victorian Home (Columbus, OH, 2008), 2. See also Phyllis Mack, “Religion, Feminism, and the Problem of Agency: Reflections on Eighteenth-Century Quakerism,” Signs 29, no. 1 (2003): 149–77.

Figure 4.1. Pauline de la Ferronays from AÐ Memoir of Mrs. Augustus Craven (Pauline de La Ferronays) by M. C. Bishop, Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA. Reproduced with permission.

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She, too, had been born in London, to émigré parents, in 1808. The family’s wealth disappeared with the revolution in Saint Domingue, and Pauline’s father, the count de la Ferronnays, tied his future to that of the Bourbon exiles, in particular to the duke de Berry, son of the future Charles X. In London, La Ferronnays and his wife stood as godparents to the daughters of the duke and his secret English wife, Amy Brown, and after the Restoration Madame de la Ferronnays served as lady-in-waiting to the duke’s second wife, the more suitable Princess Marie Caroline of Naples. The count enjoyed a successful diplomatic career under the Restoration as minister to St. Petersburg and to Rome. The family was just settling into its new quarters in Rome when the July revolution toppled the Bourbon monarchy and La Ferronnays resigned his diplomatic position, moving his family to Naples for a new period of exile.8 Pauline de la Ferronnays and her siblings came of age in this post-1830 Italian exile in a cosmopolitan social world described in Le Récit d’une sœur. Like children in a moral tale, the La Ferronnays experienced a reversal of fortune in which revolution left them homeless and relatively impoverished. Craven explains, however, that they were not shocked by this upheaval: their father had always taught them that “circumstances could change from one day to the next so that when that day arrived, it seemed as if I had always been waiting for it.” Pauline and her seventeen-year-old sister Eugénie responded like storybook girls, planning to contribute to the family coffers by teaching music or becoming governesses.9 As children of a diplomat, they were already cosmopolitans, and renewed political upheaval added to their rootlessness: they were aristocrats without an estate and a family without a home. These enfants du siècle were perpetually aware of the possibilities of revolution. Like Montalembert and many other children born with the postrevolutionary century, Pauline de la Ferronnays did not follow her parents’ path, and she was never nostalgic for the Old Regime. Her politics in particular were distinctly her own, and by 1866, when Le Récit d’une sœur appeared, she had left behind the instinctive Catholic legitimism of the La Ferronnays family and established herself within a cosmopolitan network of romantic Catholics. Like many young people in the 1830s, she had discovered Lamennais’s

8. Marguerite Savigny-Vesco, Les La Ferronnays: Une fresque romantique (Paris, 1957), chap. 1. 9. Mme Augustus Craven, Le Récit d’une sœur: Souvenirs de famille, 28th ed., 2 vols. (Paris, 1875), 1:16–17 (subsequent references in parentheses in the text). Shortly after her death, Craven was the subject of two biographies written by friends: Teresa Filangieri Ravaschieri Fieschi, Paolina Craven e la sua famiglia (Naples, 1892), and Maria Catherine Bishop, A Memoir of Mrs. Augustus Craven, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London, 1895).

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brand of romantic and dynamic Catholicism. Instead of marrying a suitable French nobleman, she chose Augustus Craven, son of a British diplomat stationed in Naples, Sir Richard Keppel Craven, who acknowledged his son without ever identifying the boy’s mother. Augustus had appeared on the London stage before choosing a diplomatic career, and although he converted to Catholicism immediately following the marriage, he was hardly the son-in-law that the La Ferronnays would have chosen, since his birth, position, and wealth all left much to be desired.10 The Cravens lived in London, Lisbon, Brussels, Paris, and Naples, not achieving a home (a word that always appears in English in Pauline’s writing) until the 1850s, when they settled into a villa near Naples and eventually lived on the revenue from Pauline’s books. While her brother served the Bourbon pretender, the count de Chambord, as a loyal vassal, Pauline Craven was more interested in coming to terms with the modern world and finding a place for her Catholic faith within it. Through the prism of the Italian Risorgimento she confirmed her embrace of the modern constitutional nation-state, and by the 1860s she maintained that Italians, too, deserved the rights of citizens. Throughout her career, Craven remained true to her belief that faith was compatible with— even a precondition for—genuine political liberty. Le Récit d’une sœur, however, has little to say about politics or rights; its focus is on the self and the family and the role of Catholicism in maintaining the two in loving harmony. The sister of the book’s title is Craven’s sister-inlaw, Alexandrine, whose life, faith, and death structure the narrative. Alexandrine’s own memoirs, which she compiled by copying passages extracted from private letters and journals, form much of the text of Le Récit. The title is ambiguous, however, since Craven herself composed the book; the “sister’s story” is both Alexandrine’s life and Pauline’s narration. Alexandrine was the self-effacing Catholic woman, hesitant to believe that her life and example had meaning beyond the family circle. Craven had no such hesitations, and her decision to publish rested on her confidence in the spiritual power of her sister-in-law’s example, especially as experienced via Alexandrine’s life writing. Her own calling, Craven believed, was to prevent Alexandrine’s life from disappearing into obscurity and to preserve her words.

10. Savigny-Vesco, Les La Ferronnays, 142. Catherine Clinton, Fanny Kemble’s Civil Wars: The Story of America’s Most Unlikely Abolitionist (New York, 2000), 93. Sir Richard Keppel Craven was the son of Elizabeth Berkeley, who was widely assumed to have foisted a lover’s child on her husband and who published an account of her own exploits. Elizabeth Craven, Mémoires de Elizabeth Craven, princesse de Berkeley (1826; repr., Paris, 1999). Rumors concerning Augustus’s mother pointed sometimes to Princess Caroline of Naples (whose chamberlain Sir Richard had been), sometimes to a pearl diver or a dancer.

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A Sister’s Story Readers wept as they followed the life stories of Alexandrine and Craven’s brother and sisters through Le Récit d’une sœur; “delicious tears” commonly feature in the fan mail Craven received. The emotional intensity of the memoir derived from its juxtaposition of ordinary life and extraordinary, even saintly, virtue. The La Ferronnays were real, contemporary people who inhabited the same world as readers, but their devotion and their faith so dramatically exceeded the norm that readers routinely invoked the notion of a family of saints. The La Ferronnays siblings made their way through society, fell in love, married, had children—much like many of the book’s readers. Most significant, however, were their deaths, and readers of Le Récit knew from the beginning that they were embarking upon a memoir of loss.11 The La Ferronnays died good deaths, in the company of their loved ones and with the comfort of the sacraments. Moreover, even as they navigated the worldly concerns of marriage and social position, they prepared for death, and the future that these good Catholics imagined was always primarily otherworldly: they anticipated the moment when they would be reunited with their loved ones in heaven. As they settled in to a story that combined the modern memoir with the tradition of the saint’s vita, readers recognized that “Pauline,” their narrator, was the sole survivor left to tell the story of her family of saints. Craven’s memoir opens with the brilliant social circles of the La Ferronnays in Naples; heavy foreshadowing reminds the reader that mortality looms in the future, but the present is charming and gay. Indeed, much of the first volume was so delightful and romantic that some readers worried that it might not be suitable for impressionable girls.12 The La Ferronnays’ July monarchy exile is a cosmopolitan social whirl, full of dancing, singing, performing in plays and tableaux vivants, sailing, picnicking, and attending concerts. Every afternoon the girls stroll in the garden to collect flowers for the bouquets they will carry that evening (1:18–19). This sunny and carefree existence contrasts both with their expectations of exile and with their future suffering. Their circle includes the young Charles de Montalembert, who was visiting Italian sites during his Roman stay with Lamennais and Lacordaire. Montalembert befriends the second La Ferronnays son, Albert, who was just eighteen when his father chose Mediterranean exile.

11. Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York, 1981), 412–31. 12. See the review from La Semaine du fidèle 5 (1867), and Augustin Cochin’s review in Le Correspondant, June 1866.

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Like Montalembert, Albert de la Ferronnays was afraid that great events might leave him behind; their pleasant life in Naples might be too easy for a young man ambitious to “fill his soul and his mind with serious and elevated matters” (1:20). Ultimately, what sets Albert’s life on its intended course is falling in love. In 1832 he meets Alexandrine d’Alopeus, daughter of a German mother and a recently deceased Swedish father who had been in Russian diplomatic service. Albert instantly knows that his earlier flirtations were pointless; his life’s purpose is loving Alexandrine and encouraging her conversion to Catholicism. Within weeks of meeting her, Albert is walking barefoot through Rome, visiting all of the seven basilicas of the city to pray for her soul (1:29). The courtship of Albert and Alexandrine reads like a romance novel; readers, like the couple themselves, know instantly that they are meant for each other, but the lovers face obstacles that require faith and patience. Albert and Alexandrine choose each other against their parents’ judgment; Madame d’Alopeus worries about Albert’s weak health and about his prospects as the unpropertied son of an exiled nobleman, and the La Ferronnays fear that Albert is too young, at twenty, to choose a bride. All the grown-ups object to the mixed marriage, since Alexandrine is Lutheran and a pious girl, not likely to convert merely to please a potential husband. Readers know, however, that religious differences and parental misgivings will be resolved; the La Ferronnays girls, especially Pauline, embrace Alexandrine as their sister long before her engagement. Alexandrine and Albert even refer to each other as “brother” and “sister” during their courtship; their love affair may initially appear star-crossed, but it is never illicit (1:36). Death, not parental disapproval, is the real threat that looms over the lovers. Calling on Alexandrine early in their courtship as she pastes calling cards into her album, Albert adds his own, along with the inscription: “The sweetest immortality begins here on earth in the heart of someone who misses you” (1:31). It is an oddly dark sentiment for a lover, of course, but it reminds readers that this is no traditional courtship. Although the relationship between Albert and Alexandrine includes plot twists that might appear in any romance—misunderstandings, a stolen kiss, a trial separation, and the threat of a duel—theirs is no ordinary love story because we know from the start that the real issue is whether the lovers will be together for all eternity. Overcoming parental disapproval to marry and make a life together is, by comparison, a minor hurdle, and the fancifully romantic first section of the book clearly presents itself as a foil for the suffering that follows. Marriage alone is never sufficient reason for Alexandrine to renounce her Protestantism, and she marries Albert in both Protestant and Catholic

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ceremonies in 1834. Le Récit d’une sœur emphasizes her possession of an autonomous conscience, albeit one torn by conflicting loyalties. Alexandrine is a devout Christian who instinctively recognizes Roman Catholicism as the true faith even before falling in love with Albert, but she feels obliged to balance the claims of her Protestant mother and father against those of her Catholic husband. The stakes for her discernment of final truths are high: her eventual reunification with loved ones in heaven. She fears an eternity in which she must choose either Albert or her parents, but she also maintains that “conversions based on human circumstances or even on tenderness” are imperfect and even impious (1:218). Alexandrine knows the true faith and embraces it in her heart, but public abjuration of her Protestantism means breaking family ties, both in this world and, even more important, in the next. At the moment of her marriage, she explains to her sister-in-law Pauline that any one of three deaths or a birth would immediately make her a Catholic (1:191). Were her mother, Albert, or Alexandrine herself to die, or were Alexandrine to bear Albert’s child, her dilemma would disappear, because altered family obligations would tip the balance decisively toward Catholicism. No child arrives to resolve Alexandrine’s dilemma, but death does bring her conscience to the point of crisis. “If this story were a novel,” Craven writes, it would end with a wedding, but since Le Récit is not about “imaginary characters” but rather “Christians found worthy of suffering,” the story continues past Albert and Alexandrine’s nuptials, and true love finding its way to marital happiness turns out not to be the real drama of the book at all (1:197). The newlyweds enjoy nine blissful days, but on the tenth day of their marriage Albert begins coughing blood, and the stage is set for his slow and painful death. As Albert’s health fails, Alexandrine begins her instruction in the Catholic faith. In a letter to her mother she “open[s] her soul” and explains “the irresistible need to belong to the same faith as my poor Albert.” She remains confident of salvation for her mother, who is a Protestant in good faith, but because Alexandrine herself no longer shares that faith, she cannot live a lie. Her Protestantism is increasingly a sham, an act of filial duty without true conviction, and it endangers her soul and her future with Albert (1:370–72). Both Alexandrine’s letters and Craven’s narration emphasize that although Albert’s illness determined the timing of her conversion, her decision to become a Catholic was entirely independent. The story of Alexandrine’s marriage culminates with the dramatic coincidence of the sacraments of first communion and extreme unction at Albert’s deathbed. Alexandrine is received into the church as her husband prepares for his death; the makeshift altar in the sickroom is covered with a

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blue moiré silk purchased for Alexandrine’s trousseau but never made into a dress. Alexandrine, in a white gown with a blue ribbon and her wedding veil, echoes the legions of little girls who approached the communion altar, although her veil alludes to a consummated, rather than an anticipated, marriage. As the abbé Gerbet, Lamennais’s onetime friend and collaborator, says Mass at midnight, Alexandrine kneels beside her husband’s bed and holds his hand; Albert, however, releases her, telling her that she should “belong only to God” (1:406). Their joint communion—her first, quite possibly his last— marks both the completion and the rupture of their marriage, and they share a single communion wafer. Albert dies in Alexandrine’s arms, surrounded by family, listening to a priest offering him final absolution, and with the hope of eternal reunion (1:422–23). In her diary entry following Albert’s death, Alexandrine writes that she thanks God for “having given them what they both desired.” Albert had always declared that his greatest goal was to bring his beloved to the true faith and that he was willing to lose her, and even to lose his life, to achieve her salvation. Alexandrine asserts that she will be happier as a Catholic widow than she could ever have been as a Protestant wife (1:375). Both submit their will to God’s, seeking to discern his purpose rather than their own. If Alexandrine’s widowhood is full of loneliness and pain, at least its sadness is informed by hope; it is her chance to discipline her will and to learn to desire death for God’s sake instead of merely for Albert’s (2:13). Mothers did not need to fear letting their daughters read Le Récit because, in the words of one reviewer, the romance would eventually lead them to understand “the fragility of our desires, the persistence of our grief, the consolation of belief and the beauty of the holy union between tender love and pure souls over whom God watches.”13 Alexandrine’s widowhood sets the darker tone of volume 2, which includes none of the cheerful ambiance of high-society romance. With Albert’s death she recognizes the “error of youth” that sees “happiness on earth as a reward and that believes that love and faith in God protect one from unhappiness” (2:43). The scene shifts from sunny southern Italy to Boury, the “sad chateau in Normandy” that the count de la Ferronnays purchases (2:50, 54). Family gatherings around the piano for mournful ballads and sacred music replace the musical soirées of Naples’s warm summer evenings. The theme of the good death dominates the second half of Craven’s

13. Augustin Cochin, review in Le Correspondant, June 1866.

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story: first the count de la Ferronnays, then Craven’s younger sisters Eugénie and Olga and the countess all die. Alexandrine’s own prayers are answered, and she joins Albert in death, bringing the arc of the story—Alexandrine’s salvation, in which her marriage is merely an episode—to an end. In every case, death, willingly embraced, marks the individual’s final renunciation of self. Volume 2 is not unrelievedly bleak, however, and, like volume 1, it begins with a romance and a wedding. Eugénie de la Ferronnays marries Adrien de Mun, somewhat to her family’s surprise, since she had always insisted that she would never marry. Of all the siblings, Eugénie seemed most likely to pursue a religious vocation; from youth she went through life “with her face turned toward heaven and away from earthly happiness” (2:154). As a girl, she had always insisted on her love of death, and she filled her journal with imaginary scenes of herself dying, struck down by a slow illness, a murderer, or poison— “which is not at all likely,” she noted, only slightly leavening her adolescent morbidity (1:435). Eugénie was self-consciously preparing herself for sainthood: “Praying to God and loving Him, caring for the poor and devoting herself to Alexandrine, that was everything, absolutely everything to her, and she never hid the fact that she considered social demands and worldly concerns unworthy of any consideration” (2:121). Craven is reluctant to criticize her sister, but it is clear that their mother found Eugénie’s adolescent desire for martyrdom trying and did her best to discourage it. Even saintliness, Madame de la Ferronnays suggested, was no excuse for self-absorption (2:121). Only the countess was unsurprised when Eugénie suddenly changed tack and discovered the will of God in marriage and motherhood. Eugénie’s marriage is not like Alexandrine’s, however, because after Albert’s death, hope is associated exclusively with life after death. Marriage appealed to Eugénie because the de Mun family was already marked by tragedy; Adrien’s sister had died in 1837, and at the time of the wedding a year later, their traumatized mother had to be protected from displays of family joy, including her son’s wedding. The nuptial omens are dark: immediately after the ceremony Madame de Mun trips on her skirt and falls heavily, hitting her head on the stone floor. Eugénie, who rushes to help her new motherin-law, stains her white wedding dress with blood (2:174). The mishap is a reminder that Eugénie has found her way to marriage via the “appeal of devotion and sacrifice” (2:155). Not even the birth of two sons to Eugénie and Adrien changes the fact that the narrative thrust of the second volume pushes inexorably toward death. The first death of volume 2 is also the book’s most explicit and traditional claim to sainthood, since the body of Craven’s father is associated with a

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miracle, the famous conversion of the Jew Alphonse Ratisbonne. The count dies suddenly in Rome in 1842, and his body lies in the church of Sant’ Andrea delle Fratte awaiting his funeral. Théodore de Bussières, a Catholic convert and a friend of the family, visits the church with his guest, Alphonse Ratisbonne, in tow. Leaving Ratisbonne for a moment in order to speak to a priest, Bussières returns to find his friend on his knees weeping in front of the count’s coffin. Ratisbonne has seen the Virgin, who has directed him to enter the chapel in which La Ferronnays’s body rests; the whole episode was like the story of Paul on the road to Damascus, Gerbet reports to Craven. Ratisbonne’s first words are, “This man must have prayed a great deal for me” (2:313). Although the countess begs her daughter to “repeat these miracles in our hearts but say nothing of them,” the story of the count’s death became public currency long before Craven published her account (2:307). Bussières and others laid out the case for the count’s sainthood, and a church inquiry deemed the miracle authentic.14 Craven’s purpose was thus to reclaim her father’s sanctity for the family circle; instead of presenting the count as a singular miracle worker, she embeds him within a family whose sanctity derives from the patient discernment of and submission to God’s will. After the death of the count, the La Ferronnays women rapidly follow him to the grave. Eugénie succumbs in the same year to the ill health that had been a constant presence in her marriage. As Gerbet writes to Craven, there was no “celestial apparition above the coffin,” as in the case of the count, but “the light of the holy life” that Eugénie had led “reflected on her tomb illuminating . . . her soul in heaven” (2:324). Olga dies a few months later in Brussels, where she was staying with the Cravens. Her close friend, Natalie Narishkin, arrives too late to see the living Olga but spends the night in prayer holding the dead girl’s hand. Natalie, who was Russian Orthodox, resolved to convert soon afterward and eventually joined the Daughters of Saint Vincent de Paul; although Craven cannot know “[w]hat passed between the pure and fervent souls here below and the blessed soul hovering 14. Conversion miraculeuse de M Ratisbonne suivie de détails sur M de la Ferronnays et sur ses derniers moments (Avignon, 1842); Théodore de Bussières, Relation authentique de la conversion de M A.-M. Ratisbonne . . . suivie de deux lettres sur les derniers momens et sur les dernières années de M le Comte de Laferronnays (Paris, 1842); Comte Théobald Walsh, Le Comte de la Ferronnays et Marie-Alphonse Ratisbonne, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1843). William James analyzed the episode as “the most curious record of sudden conversion with which I am acquainted.” The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902; repr., New York, 1961), 184–86. After his conversion, Alphonse Ratisbonne joined his brother, Théodore, who had renounced Judaism in the 1820s, in founding a religious order dedicated to the conversion of Jews. Natalie Isser and Lita Linzer Schwartz, “Sudden Conversion: The Case of Alphonse Ratisbonne,” Jewish Social Studies 45, no. 1 (1983): 23.

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above” during that night, she is confident that Olga’s prayers for her friend’s conversion were answered (2:347). Although Natalie Narishkin’s path to the church was more deliberative than Ratisbonne’s, Craven suggests that the two were equally miraculous, both instances of saints intervening to bring individuals to the true faith. As the La Ferronnays die one by one, Alexandrine devotes her widowhood to preparing for her own death. She composes a memoir of her life with Albert, and she records Albert’s last days even as she watches over Olga’s deathbed (2:358). With the memoir complete, Alexandrine seems to enter a new phase of life marked by a calm happiness that foreshadows the “eternal joy that would be her lot”; she has “nothing left but death,” Craven tells us (2:394). Alexandrine achieves extraordinary self-abnegation in her final years, which she devotes to works of charity, joining a Vincentian lay order, selling all her belongings, and finding joy in reducing her own material comfort (2:367–69). Craven recounts the story of a Daughter of Charity who convinced Alexandrine to purchase a new pair of shoes by claiming that they were for a desperately needy woman—who turned out to be Alexandrine herself (2:386–87). This gentle subterfuge is the only way to convince the widow to attend to her own earthly requirements. Her final farewell to Pauline expresses her confidence that “soon [she] will . . . understand the wonderful unity that joins us all in God” (2:409). The countess de la Ferronnays, present at the deathbed, reports to Pauline that Alexandrine has been “forever reunited with her beloved Albert and all our dear saints, [so that] we weep only for ourselves” (2:408). Although Alexandrine’s death brings the narrative arc of the sister’s story to a close, in a sort of coda Pauline recounts the death of her mother a few months later. This final death is particularly poignant because only Pauline is left to record it. Although there are surviving La Ferronnays siblings (two brothers, Charles and Fernand, and the youngest daughter, Albertine), they have played only bit parts, and their voices do not contribute to Le Récit. By the end of the book the community of saints in heaven is complete, and Pauline is bereft, alone with memories and with the textual traces her loved ones left of their lives on earth. The countess’s is the only death that Craven narrates directly in her own first-person voice; in every other case she presents the reader with other accounts, contextualizing the letters and personal reflections of other members of her family. Ending the book with her own words, Pauline directly addresses readers, asking them to pray for her that she may be faithful to her memories of the dead (2:424). Pauline and the memoir’s audience end up in the same position, seeking access to God through his saints and hoping to emulate the saintly lives of the departed.

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From Private Devotion into Print In publishing her memoir of family tragedy, Pauline Craven asserted the value of intimacy at the same time as she violated it.15 The women at the heart of the memoir had committed themselves to lives of quiet devotion and self-effacement; they would never have offered their correspondence, much less their private journals, for public consumption. Craven’s task was to convince her relatives and her readers that Le Récit d’une sœur was not an unwarranted invasion of privacy or a crime committed against the defenseless dead. Rather, she asserted, publishing Le Récit was an act of piety because saving her sisters’ lives from oblivion allowed these devout women to facilitate the salvation of others. Craven acted as intermediary between her beloved dead and their (rather than her own) public; far from serving her ego via authorship, she set herself aside in order to allow others access to her family of saints. Reworking her siblings’ deaths in writing was a private devotional practice for many years before Craven ever delivered a manuscript to a publisher. Recording her memories involved a continuous, prayerful dialogue with her sisters as she sought meaning for their deaths and her own grief. She first wrote an account of Albert’s death and Alexandrine’s conversion almost immediately after his death in 1836, and she kept the fair copy in an elegant, velvet-covered notebook.16 In 1843 she began recording the story of Eugénie and Olga’s deaths in a manuscript entitled “Souvenirs d’une sœur.” This latter account hints at a desire to make her recollections more widely available: “I wish it were possible to conserve and embalm your dear memory so that its sweetness might touch other souls. I especially want it to sink into me so that I might become more worthy of you and so that the unbearable pain of living without you might ebb.”17 The ethics of remembering the dead were central even to Craven’s private devotions. Eugénie, for instance, hated praise, yet it would be impossible to write her life without drawing attention to her saintly qualities. In heaven, where there is no pride, Craven speculates, there can be no humility, so perhaps it no longer makes sense to speak of Eugénie’s humility, much less of wounding it. Setting the question of humility aside, Craven is confident that maternal love must induce Eugénie to forgive her sister for writing her memories. Eugénie’s young children need to know “what a mother they had on earth—and that they have in heaven.”18

15. Christine Planté, “L’Intime comme valeur publique. Les lettres d’Eugénie de Guérin,” in La Lettre à la croisée de l’individuel et du social, ed. Mireille Bossis (Paris, 1994), 82. 16. PC, carnet de pensées, ICP, ms. fr. 584, contains an account of the death and conversion originally dated July 21, 1836, copied Aug. 23, 1836. 17. PC, “Les Souvenirs d’une sœur,” ICP, ms. fr. 615 (emphasis in the original). 18. Ibid. (emphasis in the original).

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By the late 1850s, Craven had completed what eventually became the first volume of Le Récit. This new version pushed her own reflections on death and sanctity to the background and emphasized Alexandrine’s memoir, letters, and diaries instead. The protagonists of the drama drive the narrative with their first-person reflections written in the present tense. Craven found composing her memoirs exhausting; living with the words of the dead “woke cruel memories with such intensity” that she was unable to return to the story for several years (2:1). The 1860 death of twelve-year-old Lina Ravaschieri, the beloved daughter of a close friend, encouraged Craven to return to her family story. According to a friend’s vision, discussed in chapter 1, Olga de la Ferronnays had received Lina into heaven, and Craven was struck by the resemblance between “Lina’s angelic soul” and the souls of her beloved saints.19 Craven resumed Alexandrine’s story while bringing Eugénie and Olga into sharper focus, composing what would become volume 2 of Le Récit. By 1866, the complete story circulated in manuscript among family and friends as a nine-volume, leather-bound text, with the title “Les Souvenirs d’une sœur.”20 The family and friends who had access to these manuscripts found consolation, just as Craven did, in being reminded of times “when we were so happy” and especially of “the grace that God has granted our . . . families.”21 In 1866 Le Récit d’une sœur appeared in an edition of five hundred copies, the first hundred of which Craven gave to family and close friends.22 By this time, she wanted to make her memoir publicly available, and she was disappointed that instead of a wide distribution with profits that could be given to charity, the small print run actually cost her “a considerable sum.”23 She was undoubtedly aware of the success of Eugénie de Guérin’s Reliquiae, the intimate writings of a devout Catholic woman of the minor aristocracy published posthumously in 1855. Taking advantage of the success of the initial text, Didier, the company that later published Craven’s memoir, brought out an extended edition of Guérin’s Journal et lettres in 1862.24 Guérin had led a cloistered, even claustrophobic, life in her family’s rural chateau, a far

19. PC to CM, Florence, Nov. 13, 1860, reprinted in Ravaschieri, Paolina Craven, 227. 20. PC, “Les Souvenirs d’une sœur,” ICP, ms. fr. 529. 21. Octavie to PC, Strasbourg, Feb. 15, 1866, “Lettres à Mme Craven relatives à ses ouvrages,” dossier on Le Récit d’une sœur, ICP, ms. fr. 593. 22. Montalembert acted as PC’s intermediary with her printer. Correspondence between CM, PC, and J. Claye and others in “Lettres à Mme Craven relatives à ses ouvrages,” dossier on Le Récit d’une sœur. 23. PC, quoted in Bishop, Memoir, 1:251. 24. Eugénie de Guérin, Journal et lettres, publiés avec l’assentiment de sa famille, ed. G. S. Trébutien (Paris, 1862).

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cry from the cosmopolitan existence of the La Ferronnays, but both texts claimed to offer readers access to the inner lives of women whose reticence was the basis of their identity as Catholics. Readers’ experience of Eugénie de Guérin’s letters and journals was both voyeuristic and virtuous, and the book had been a best seller and a critical success, with no less a figure than Alphonse de Lamartine praising it, insisting that “literature may be outward and public, or it may be interior and private. The latter is as superior to the former as the soul is to the body.”25 Craven, holding a carefully polished manuscript that similarly invited readers into intimate communion with Catholic heroines, recognized opportunities for both publishing and evangelism and was eager for a larger public. Moving toward a mass market was a step that Craven’s family did not unanimously support, however. Adrien de Mun objected to the inclusion of his late wife Eugénie’s letters and diaries, especially anything composed after their marriage.26 Fernand de la Ferronnays, who, by 1866, was the head of the family, begged his sister to withhold the manuscript from publication. Fernand had liked earlier versions of the story that Craven had circulated privately; reading his sister’s account of their youth, he had been transported back to the “sweet intimacy” of the past, and he had wept “good tears that benefit the soul.”27 A private tribute to lost loved ones was a very different matter from a book that offered precious memories up for sale, however. “When for 7 francs anyone can admire or praise,” Fernand warned his sister, “they also have the right to criticize.” The book’s first critic, Fernand predicted, would be someone who admired the story but found it strange that an author would “put [her]self and [her] loved ones on stage, proposing them as a model for the rest of the world.”28 Although Fernand reminded his sister that the “memory of those dear angels” was as much his as hers, he did not forbid publication. He claimed the right to express his disapproval not as head of the family but because “no one else can love you as I do”—and therefore, no one else could speak as freely. He assured his sister that in public he would stand by her and “[would] not for a single moment let anyone think” that he objected to her decision to publish.29

25. Quoted by Planté, “L’Intime comme valeur,” 87. 26. Bishop, Memoir, 1:250. 27. Fernand to PC, Easter Sunday 1857, ICP, ms. fr. 605. 28. Fernand to PC, Mar. 15 [1865 or 1866], “Lettres à Mme Craven relatives à ses ouvrages,” dossier on Le Récit d’une sœur. The letter is either from 1865 (in which case Fernand is objecting to the initial print run of five hundred copies) or 1866 (in which case his objection is to the reissue in larger numbers). 29. Ibid. See also, in the same file, Fernand to PC, Thursday evening.

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Even with its limited circulation, Le Récit d’une sœur was much talked about. Friends asked permission to have the manuscript copied or even to copy it themselves if Craven preferred not to leave her memoir in “the hands of strangers.”30 The initial printing sold out in two days, and booksellers who had customers eager to purchase the memoir wrote asking if Craven had plans for a larger printing. It received a positive review in La Revue des deux mondes by noted literary critic Emile Montégut, and Craven’s publisher suggested that in an accessible, single-volume format it would sell as well as Eugénie de Guérin.31 The bishop of Orléans, Monseigneur Dupanloup, offered editorial suggestions to make the book more suitable for a mass readership; instead of merely “addressing the little world of dukes and marquises” she could reach “the souls of the public.”32 Louis Veuillot, publisher of the intransigent, conservative Catholic newspaper La Revue du monde catholique, published a story about Alexandrine using selections from Craven’s manuscript. Craven was outraged at this violation of her privacy and at Veuillot’s impertinent editing and misspelling of her maiden name; Veuillot apologized but insisted that Alexandrine’s story was well known and widely circulated. According to Veuillot, Craven should make her book generally available because her memoir was “God’s response . . . to all the stupid and infamous novelists who have been corrupting us for the last half century. Alexandrine de la Ferronnays will crush old Dudevant.”33 Although she certainly did not approve of Aurore Dudevant, better known as George Sand, Craven, unlike Veuillot, was not sufficiently combative to wish to crush her fellow writer, and she would have been appalled at the idea that her beloved dead should be enlisted in this cause. Nonetheless, the Veuillot affair was further evidence that there was a significant audience for her memoir. Public demand combined with Craven’s own determination to wear down family objections, and Le Récit was soon released to the wider public. In a world in which women authors commonly gained access to the world of publishing and protected their privacy with pseudonyms, Pauline Craven refused any form of anonymity, either for herself or for her family members

30. Courcy de Badaillan [?] to PC, Sunday, “Lettres moins intéressantes,” ICP, ms. fr. 592. 31. Emile Montégut, “Histoire d’un amour chrétien,” La Revue des deux mondes, 62, no. 3 (1866): 937–76. Sales: Bishop, Memoir, 1:252. Bookstore inquiries: Auguste Vaton to PC, Mar. 21, 1866; Librairie d’Amyot to PC, Apr. 14, 1866. Request from publisher: Didier et Cie. to PC, Apr. 30, 1866. All located in “Lettres à Mme Craven relatives à ses ouvrages,” dossier on Le Récit d’une sœur. 32. Dupanloup to PC, Mar. 9, 1866, ICP, ms. fr. 599, I A1. Craven refused to make the changes he requested. 33. Extracts from Veuillot’s letter enclosed in d’Esgrigny (PC’s intermediary in communicating with Veuillot) to PC, Wednesday, ICP, ms. fr. 592.

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who appeared as characters in Le Récit. The title page laid out her identity in detail: Madame Augustus Craven, née La Ferronnays—not even a discreet “Madame C***.” One has only to recall the horror of George Sand’s mother-in-law (“I hope that you are not going to put the name I bear on the cover of books!”) to imagine that invoking both the author’s birth and marital families might cause some discomfort.34 Moreover, Craven changed no names, and so her husband, parents, and brothers and sisters and their spouses, and even family friends like Charles de Montalembert were all available for public consumption as “characters.” It was strange, Craven reflected in her journal, to read about herself, “to be as it were separated from my own life so that I see the story of my life passing before me like a story from another century.”35 The experience was undoubtedly stranger still for individuals like Montalembert and Adrien de Mun; they were public men but hardly accustomed to featuring as characters in a marriage plot or having their private lives opened for public consumption.

Sanctity and Subjectivity Craven justified offering her sisters’ intimate correspondence to “that frightening world known as the public” because these texts were like relics of saints; the documents were capable of influencing lives and directing Christians toward their salvation (1:8). It was not enough for Craven to narrate the story in her own fashion because readers needed her sisters’ actual words; accordingly, Craven downplayed her role as author and minimized her own presence in the family story. The letters and journals excerpted in Le Récit d’une sœur had accompanied the La Ferronnays women in their grief; writing was the means by which Craven’s sisters forged their sense of self and their place in the world. This relationship to writing made the La Ferronnays women saints for modern times. They achieved sanctity in the pursuit of a modern subjectivity, reflecting on their selfhood and on its relation to others, notably family and God.36 Craven’s sisters were saints with great internal depth of character, and they responded to crisis with the same sort of individual soul searching as their nineteenth-century contemporaries. Le Récit d’une sœur was not simply a medieval saint’s life in modern dress because its vision of sanctity was itself profoundly modern.

34. Quoted in Christine Planté, La Petite Sœur de Balzac: Essai sur la femme auteur (Paris, 1989), 32. 35. PC, carnet de notes, Apr. 28, 1866. 36. Dena Goodman, Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters (Ithaca, NY, 2009), 2–4.

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Craven did not claim to be a writer; she merely guided readers through her sisters’ reflections, and Le Récit thus presents itself as possessing no literary artifice. Of course, Craven directed the composition and especially the pace of the narrative. For instance, Alexandrine’s abjuration, her first communion, and Albert’s last rites—the climax of volume 1—actually took place over several days, but Craven condenses them as if they had occurred in one dramatic and emotional night. The attentive reader can reproduce the exact chronology, but the emotional intensity of the first-person narrative sweeps the audience up in the unfolding drama so that first and final communions seem to have happened simultaneously. Time similarly telescopes in volume 2, as deaths that in fact took place in 1842–43 (the count, Eugénie, and Olga) and 1848 (Alexandrine and the countess) all occur in the final quarter of the book, as tragedy rains down upon the family. Craven also decided what to exclude from her memoirs: her account of Eugénie’s marriage, for instance, leaves out the fact that at the time of Albert’s death Eugénie was entangled in an unhappy engagement and that Pauline and Alexandrine were actively promoting her marriage to Charles de Montalembert. In 1836 Eugénie was anxious and confused, and Montalembert was terrified that he might be honor-bound to marry this emotionally exhausting young woman, but by 1866 Eugénie as a character in Le Récit is always serene and confident that she knows how best to serve God.37 Craven engaged in characterization and plot development, but Le Récit disclaims any literary ambition; its author preferred to present herself simply as the guardian of the words of others. The diaries and letters that Craven stitched together had a nearly mystical significance, like relics of saints, that Craven’s narration did not claim for itself. Literary quality was an irrelevant issue, Craven asserted: “Even if this story is considered defective in its form, I won’t complain, as long as its content speaks to the simple and pious souls to whom I offer it. God save me from bringing the least literary vanity to such a work or from seeking the slightest praise for myself ” (1:10). Craven’s narration reminds the reader that the words of the text were the actual products of her siblings’ suffering; the La Ferronnays siblings came to terms with tragedy by writing about it. Alexandrine’s story of her brief marriage, Eugénie’s private reflections on death, and the countess’s wise counsel to her children were all traces of the soul’s struggle for peace achieved through faith. In presenting readers with her sisters’ letters and journals, Craven offered them relics of the self instead of the more traditional relics of the body.

37. CM, Journal, 2:157–66 (entries from May 12–June 8, 1836).

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Textual relics were useful not merely because they were easily distributed to a mass public in a way that physical relics of bodies were not.38 Rather, letters and journals were the most powerful relics possible because they revealed the subjects’ inner struggles and their path to faith. Le Récit has very little to say about preserving the physical effects of beloved family members. Alexandrine does not keep Albert’s watch or his handkerchief; rather, she preserves his letters and journal entries in her own memoir of their marriage. By the time Alexandrine dies there is nothing left for Pauline to preserve; beginning with her wedding pearls, Alexandrine has sold all her possessions for the poor. Even the miracle-working count apparently leaves no relics more powerful than his loving letters to his children. Intimate writing, with its insight into a soul’s search for salvation, is the truly valuable relic. As she offers these relics to the public, Craven indicates to her readers that although they are privy to her siblings’ most intimate thoughts, they do not trespass or violate these individuals’ privacy. Readers could take comfort in the fact that Craven’s sisters intended even their most intimate writings to be read by others; not even their journals were secret. Because the La Ferronnays women wrote their lives in order to understand their Christian obligations, they recognized that the textual record of that effort might help others achieve the same goal. Sharing private reflections was also a way to bring the family circle close, and letters and diaries were very similar kinds of writing in the La Ferronnays circle, means of achieving both self and mutual understanding. On Easter Monday, 1836, as Albert lies dying and Alexandrine struggles with the question of conversion, Fernand de la Ferronnays “borrows” (dérober) Eugénie’s journal for Alexandrine to read. Eugénie had recorded her desire to assume Albert’s illness; she begged that Albert’s consumption might “burn completely through my breast to purify my heart.” Overcome by Eugénie’s faith and generosity, Alexandrine responds in her own diary: “Eugénie, my dear sister, I knelt twice and prayed fervently while reading your thoughts. Dear angel, I have faith in you; tell me that you still have hope and I will too!” (1:384–85). Similarly, Alexandrine shares with her husband her written confession—a laborious document that she prepares for her first communion and that covers the sins of her entire life—and asks his assistance in ensuring that nothing is missing (1:401). The couple prepares for Albert’s death by reviewing their past together, reading their letters and journals and ensuring that they hold no secrets from each other. Sharing their 38. On relics, see Philippe Boutry, “Les Saints des catacombes. Itinéraires français d’une piété ultramontaine,” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome. Moyen Âge—Temps modernes 91, no. 1 (1979): 875–930.

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most intimate selves so that husbands and wives, brothers and sisters are fully transparent to one another ensures that family bonds will survive past death. Although the La Ferronays cannot extend their permission to allow readers access to their lives, Craven maintains that her beloved family blesses her undertaking. As she embarks on the story of Eugénie’s marriage and death, for instance, she inserts a footnote thanking Madame de Mun—Adrien’s second wife and stepmother to Eugénie’s sons—for her approval of Le Récit. Eugénie’s successor’s “generous consent” eliminated an “obstacle” to publication—presumably Adrien’s opposition (2:154).39 Craven also gives the reader to understand that Alexandrine would not have objected to the publication of the memoir she composed in her widowhood. Shortly after Albert’s death Alexandrine lent her source materials—the couple’s letters and diaries—to Charles de Montalembert in the hope that he would find them edifying and perhaps publish them. Montalembert had, at the time, recently published his own account of marriage in his 1836 Histoire de Sainte Elisabeth de Hongrie, which Albert de la Ferronnays read on his deathbed. Montalembert suggested to the recently widowed Alexandrine that the story of her marriage might be a modern pendant to the life of the thirteenth-century saint, demonstrating that “even in our degenerate era, some privileged souls can still be true to the sublime traditions” of the Christian Middle Ages. Alexandrine’s generosity to Montalembert is, Craven observes, “the most complete sanction for the work I have undertaken,” and she is confident that, thirty years having passed, Alexandrine would not object to her sisterin-law’s assuming Montalembert’s mantle (2:143, 147–48). Although Montalembert compared Alexandrine’s story to a medieval saint’s life, the La Ferronnays saga as Craven composed it read far more like a modern novel. Montalembert’s own effort to capture the medieval vita produced a very different sort of saint from the women who recount Le Récit d’une sœur.40 Craven’s narrative gave its audience the immediacy of an epistolary novel; through a kind of sanctioned voyeurism, readers entered characters’ thoughts and feelings via their letters to one another, their personal reflections, and even their prayers.41 Pauline is not an overbearing presence; she merely guides readers in their discovery of the La Ferronnays’ beautiful souls. Readers can identify with the La Ferronnays women as they might

39. PC, La Marquise de Mun (Paris, 1877), 23–24. 40. CM, La Vie de Sainte Elisabeth de Hongrie (1836; repr., Paris, 2005). 41. On empathy and the epistolary novel, see Lynn A. Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York, 2007), chap. 1. Lejeune, Le Moi des demoiselles, 29, records one youthful reader describing Le Récit d’une sœur as a novel.

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with characters in a novel because Craven’s sisters are saints who encourage empathy, not awe. There is very little of the supernatural to their sanctity, which emerges from the situations of women’s daily lives. Natural human emotions such as grief and love are the foundation of their holiness. Exploring those emotions and reaching ever-greater levels of self-understanding is the basis of their devotional practice. No reader would mistake Montalembert’s vita for a novel, however, because his Saint Elizabeth lacks the interiority that encouraged readers’ empathy. In tune with the taste of the romantic era, Montalembert reveled in the medievalism of his heroine’s story. Elizabeth’s holiness emerges directly from her marriage; her parents send her at age four to Thuringia, whose duke, Louis, she is to marry, and until he goes on crusade she never leaves his side. As a young bride, Elizabeth scrupulously ensures that her devotions do not disturb her husband; still holding the sleeping Louis’s hand as she kneels by the bed, she prays for long hours every night, for instance. Having a saintly wife means that Louis of Thuringia can freely pursue his own sanctity as a crusader, and his death opens up further possibilities for selfmortification for the pregnant twenty-year-old Elizabeth. Montalembert’s account of Elizabeth’s widowhood glories in each episode that disciplines and ultimately destroys her will: she wears rags, spins for a living, obeys a confessor who sadistically forbids her even the comfort of offering charity to others, and forgoes seeing her own children. Villagers recognize her sanctity and cut pieces of her ears and breasts from her corpse, which remains soft and beautiful, untouched by rigor mortis. Elizabeth proves her sanctity as a torture victim, enduring ever more abuse in the name of God. It is difficult not to read the Histoire de Sainte Elisabeth in light of its author’s biography. Montalembert’s experiment with Catholic fraternity having reached a dead end and his love affair with Hedwige having collapsed, his duty to marry appeared particularly burdensome in the early 1830s. He threw himself into scholarship and emerged with Saint Elizabeth: a wife whose holiness foreclosed questions about fleshly motivations for marriage and who bore children without making any demands on her husband. It is possible that his friends’ plotting his marriage to the morbidly pious Eugénie de la Ferronnays put a new light on the Saint Elizabeth story, which he was then completing. He extricated himself from these expectations and, in spite of his fears that he might have angered Craven and her sister-in-law, soon married Anna de Mérode, daughter of an aristocratic Belgian family that claimed descent from Saint Elizabeth. Montalembert’s marriage literally concludes the Histoire de Sainte Elisabeth, whose last chapter is an account of the saint’s progeny, ending with the new Madame de Montalembert herself.

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Whatever her relationship to Montalembert’s life, Saint Elizabeth remains a medieval cipher who cannot reflect on her spiritual life. Interiority, for the medieval saint, has nothing to do with the contemplation and construction of self but is, rather, an ongoing dialogue with God, from which readers are excluded. The main point of Montalembert’s narrative is to watch torture inflicted upon Elizabeth and to see how much she can bear, not to identify with her. She practices the mortification, not the abnegation, of the self. It would be a mistake to exclude Montalembert’s life of Saint Elizabeth from a repertory of “modern” devotional practices, describing it as an atavistic fragment of medieval spirituality. Montalembert’s Elizabeth was very popular, and the vita’s emphasis on physical suffering—particularly of women—as a path to redemption was an important strand of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Catholicism.42 The spirituality of physical victimization often relies on women’s silence, and the experience of pain overwhelms all reflection on that pain.43 Elizabeth has nothing to say for herself; her story requires an omniscient narrator because she does not reflect on her own experience. The story of the sanctity of Craven’s sisters, instead of attempting to recreate a medieval past, looks forward and anticipates the autobiography of Thérèse Martin—Saint Thérèse of Lisieux—L’Histoire d’une âme. Written thirty years after the publication of Le Récit d’une sœur, Thérèse’s memoir similarly explored the possibility of sanctity in everyday life, and in both cases the setting for female holiness was the loving family. Thérèse’s and Craven’s books both emerged out of a constant, affectionate exchange with their sisters, expressed in writing. Craven’s communion with her dead sisters depended on their letters and journals, and although the Martin girls lived together in the Carmel convent of Lisieux, Thérèse nonetheless wrote for and to her sisters. The extraordinary success of both works relied on the denial of their literary qualities—they were relics of a saintly soul rather than products of authorial ego.44 The promise of an intimate view of women achieving selfhood by thoughtfully abandoning agency to God attracted

42. Paul Veyriras, “Sainte Elisabeth de Hongrie, héroine victorienne,” Cahiers victoriens et édouardians 23 (1986): 3–15. 43. Paula M. Kane, “‘She Offered Herself Up’: The Victim Soul and Victim Spirituality in Catholicism,” Church History 71, no. 1 (2002): 80–119. 44. Claude Langlois, L’Autobiographie de Thérèse de Lisieux: Edition critique du manuscrit A (1895) (Paris, 2009), 17, 29, 40, 66, 71; Richard D. E. Burton, Holy Tears, Holy Blood: Women, Catholicism, and the Culture of Suffering in France, 1840–1870 (Ithaca, NY, 2004), chap. 2; Thérèse Taylor, “Images of Sanctity: Photography of Saint Bernadette of Lourdes and Saint Thérèse of Lisieux,” NineteenthCentury Contexts 27, no. 3 (2005): 269–92; and Thomas R. Nevin, Thérèse of Lisieux: God’s Gentle Warrior (New York, 2006), chap. 5.

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early twentieth-century readers to Thérèse just as they had previously been drawn to the La Ferronnays women. L’Histoire d’une âme and Le Récit d’une sœur share a modern concept of sanctity that eschewed Sainte Elisabeth’s masochism in medieval dress. Like Thérèse, the La Ferronnays women become saints: they achieve sanctity through a process of discernment. Happiness and sorrow transform them individually, bind them closer to their loved ones, and bring them closer to God. Elizabeth, in contrast, passes through her trials fundamentally unaltered; only her degree of suffering changes, not her character. Physical victimization was not the centerpiece of Craven’s notion of sanctity, and sickness was not what made Craven’s siblings holy.45 Grief was an equally powerful mode of suffering, and the pain of losing loved ones required no hair shirts or other forms of physical mortification to render it more exquisite. Although illness was key to Thérèse’s life, she, too, ultimately rejected the expiatory potential of suffering.46 For Craven and Thérèse, grief and pain were opportunities for the abandonment of self into the hands of a mysterious but loving God, but they could not be offered up in exchange for his mercy. The deliberate ratcheting up of agony, obsessively attentive to the embodied self and its capacity to bear pain, is entirely foreign to Craven’s story.

Sympathetic Hearts That Beat in Unison: Readers Respond Readers responded enthusiastically to Le Récit d’une sœur’s depiction of sanctity in modern life, weeping copiously and hoping that the book would never end so that they might “live forever in this saintly company.”47 The “delicious novel of real life” made scores of fans, and many of them wrote to Craven to share their love of the book and their devotion to its saints.48 The La Ferronnays women, in particular, inspired both empathy and veneration and moved readers to join Craven in celebrating her sisters’ self-denial. Craven’s correspondents self-consciously balanced their sense that Le Récit read like fiction with their knowledge that it was fact. Readers acknowledged that Craven and her characters deserved privacy but also begged to be admitted

45. See Yvonne Turin on the spirituality of teaching and nursing congregations that taught acceptance of the suffering that God decreed without actively seeking ill health. Femmes et religieuses au XIXe siècle: Le féminisme “en religion” (Paris, 1989), 307–9, 329–30. 46. Burton, Holy Tears, 47–48. 47. ? to PC, Cannes, June 12, 1866, “Lettres moins intéressantes.” 48. John MacCarthy to PC, Saint Max près Nancy, Dec. 16, 1866, “Lettres moins intéressantes.”

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to some form of intimacy with her family. Craven’s correspondence suggests that readers were eager to participate in her project of saving her self-effacing sisters from oblivion and preserving the example of their lives. Readers joined Craven in exploring the fine line between the expression and the denial of self in the performance of Catholic womanhood. Craven’s files contain 185 letters from 155 readers written between the appearance of Le Récit in 1866 and her death in 1891. Although there is no way to be sure, she probably preserved letters that interested her and destroyed others. Roughly 30 percent of the letters in the files are from aristocrats who often claimed at least a passing acquaintance with Craven or her family. About 30 percent came from outside France; Craven’s fans wrote from as far away as New Zealand. Most of the preserved letters express more than simple appreciation for the book; they include eloquent discussions of conversion, grief, and widowhood, and their writers relate their own experiences to those of the La Ferronnays family. Craven, moved by their stories of faith and loss, responded to many of these writers. Although the surviving letters are probably neither a complete nor a representative sample, they do present extensive and thoughtful accounts of readers’ engagement with the text.49 Craven’s correspondents enthusiastically adopted the notion of a family of saints, and the idea of saints walking the streets of modern cities before ascending to heaven and receiving the prayers of other modern Catholics thrilled readers. “If it were a romance, I would think that the Author had dreamed of impossible perfection,” a fan enthused: “Being true, I can only wonder that such a family has existed, and that some of its members still exist in the nineteenth century!”50 Readers expressed their confidence that prayers to recently deceased saints like the La Ferronnays could be as efficacious as those addressed to their medieval fellows. “How can one not believe that Albert, Alexandrine, [and] Eugénie watch over Pauline?” one reader asked, since unquestionably their love for their sister would at least equal the love that a medieval saint might feel. Surely, worshippers should pursue relationships with these modern saints who understood them so well: “We invoke saints whom we have never known, we believe in their beneficent intervention, and yet [how can it be that] we don’t believe in the saints who loved us . . . !”51 One priest wrote movingly about the intimacy of his relationship

49. Most of Craven’s correspondence with readers is in ICP, ms. fr. 592, in three dossiers: one unlabeled, one marked “Lettres moins intéressantes,” and the third labeled “Lettres banales.” I do not know who sorted the correspondence into these categories. 50. Fanny Calderon de la Garca to PC, 93 Corso, Thursday, “Lettres moins intéressantes.” 51. Reignier [?] to PC, Paris, Sept. [?] 5, 1867, “Lettres moins intéressantes.”

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with Alexandrine: “I am always with her . . . I speak to her as if she were next to me, with a familiarity inspired by affection, the sort one sees between two sincere friends whose hearts have been formed in the same mold.” He had never, he explained, “experienced this with any canonized saint, even though there are several in whom I have great confidence. Alexandrine’s heart enchanted and subjugated me completely.”52 Readers addressed the La Ferronnays women with familiar and modern forms of affection: sisterly or romantic love seemed appropriate ways to approach these contemporary saints. Readers repeatedly commented on the contrast between the extraordinary sanctity of the La Ferronnays family and the ordinariness of their domestic life. Craven’s brother and sisters were holy without being ascetic or seeking out victimization; indeed, their charming Neapolitan social whirl demonstrated that they fully enjoyed life’s pleasures, and while they accepted loss, they did not seek out pain. The La Ferronnays women were “people who had lived in the world according to its actual ways yet whose inner existence was mystic as . . . figures of the Christian past.”53 The life of a saint was always a powerful example, one of Craven’s readers noted, especially “a saint from your own times, whom you might have met in a Parisian salon, [and] who lived in society.”54 Noting that none of the La Ferronnays siblings had experienced a religious vocation, another reader observed that their example showed that in the nineteenth century “a lay calling also has great value, especially when undertaken by persons who have all the attractive qualities of grace and goodness to make it succeed.”55 Other readers echoed this observation: Craven had demonstrated that individuals could “maintain the most worthy sentiments . . . without shutting [themselves] up in a convent and while living the most worldly life imaginable.”56 An English reader praised Le Récit for illustrating “that people who give God the first place in their hearts may yet have heart enough for the most passionate love also,” and an English reviewer approved of the fact that Craven’s sisters “were not the less delightful women for their saintliness; [they were] gifted with quick wits and ready tongues . . . and with a keen and cultivated interest in and love for all that is great and beautiful in art and nature.”57 Craven knew how to write about

52. Leveque to PC, Vaux le Penil (Seine et Marne), Dec. 28, 1868, “Lettres banales,” ICP, ms. fr. 592. 53. Bishop, Memoir, 1:253. 54. Théophile Foisset to ? [possibly CM], Feb. 27, 1866, ICP, ms. fr. 592. 55. Vicomte Amédée de Férron to PC, Feb. 3, 1868, “Lettres moins intéressantes.” 56. Marie Machin to PC, Feb. 23, 1866, “Lettres moins intéressantes.” 57. H. W. Wilberforce to PC, Malvern Wells, Mar. 23, 1867, “Lettres moins intéressantes”; Contemporary Review, Oct. 1868, copy in “Lettres moins intéressantes.”

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religious devotion without “that taste of the sacristy that is usually present in feminine Christianity.”58 The very act of writing to Pauline Craven—moving from the pages of a book to real life—struck many correspondents as bold and perhaps ill bred. Composing the salutation of a letter reminded the correspondent that the beloved “Pauline” of the book was in fact an aristocratic lady and a stranger, and many letters begin with an apology for writing without an introduction. One epistle in verse begged Craven to distinguish between the “sincere homage” of her “unknown friends” and the “banal praise” of “vulgar busybodies.”59 Although the vicomtesse de Tocqueville could claim no family ties, she refused to stand on ceremony because her “[h]eart is overflowing with admiration and gratitude for a woman [Craven] who has had the holy impulse to offer . . . the soul of those whom she loves as a model of the most charming and sublime virtues to those who still suffer on earth.”60 When a woman who had written to Craven about her despair over her husband’s ill heath received a response, she was both relieved and delighted, and she particularly noted her astonishment that Craven had asked for permission to continue the correspondence: “You don’t know what joy that request gave me!” she enthused.61 Craven’s readers knew that they were “utter strangers,” but because they had “sympathetic hearts that could beat in unison” they hoped that their tributes would be graciously received.62 A similar uncertainty about the requirements of propriety characterized letter writers’ discussions of the people who appeared in Le Récit. Readers identified deeply with Craven’s dead family members, and they were often conflicted over how to name Craven’s siblings. M. E. Grant Duff, a family friend, explained to Craven that Le Récit was “a sort of magical act by which you bring one into the closest communion with people who become one’s friends and more than one’s friends for life.”63 Alexandrine, Eugénie, and the others were characters to whom readers had grown deeply attached.

58. Adele to PC, June 22, 1868, “Lettres moins intéressantes.” 59. Sauveur Jacquemont to PC, Rome, Apr. 8, 1870, “Lettres moins intéressantes.” Letters from the same source that apologize for writing without introduction include A. M. Wood to PC, Paris, Nov. 19, 1876; Pauline Wolff née de Splitgerber to PC, Berlin, May 10, 1867; Comte de Mellet to PC, Paris, Feb. 5, 1867; Edouard Mougin to PC, Verrerie des Portieux, Mar. 2, 1867; A. le Gendre to PC, Racon [?], Sept. 19, 1866; Fanny Power to PC, County Waterford, Mar. 26, 1878. 60. Vicomtesse de Tocqueville to PC, Tocqueville, Aug. 1, 1866, “Lettres moins intéressantes.” 61. M. de la Guère, Comtesse R. de Buisseret to PC, n.d., “Lettres moins intéressantes,” and M. de la Guère, Comtesse R. de Buisseret to PC, Versailles, n.d., “Lettres banales.” 62. Mary J. Letts to PC, Oxford, n.d., “Lettres banales.” 63. M. E. Grant Duff to PC, Feb. 13, 1874, “Lettres moins intéressantes.”

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They were also, however, Madame de la Ferronnays and Mademoiselle de la Ferronnays, later Madame de Mun—real people of elevated social position whom one would not dream of addressing by their given names. Readers couldn’t help using Christian names, one woman explained to Craven, because “that is how you have taught me to know and love them.”64 One English widow begged pardon for using Alexandrine’s name; Craven’s sisterin-law was “a real friend to me, [and] every word she wrote seemed to find an echo in me.”65 Some correspondents noted that they really ought to refer to Alexandrine as “Madame Albert” since, according to Le Récit, that is how the widow preferred to be known, but for the most part, readers could not help themselves: she remained Alexandrine or even Alex.66 No fan of the book could stand on ceremony, and without exception they referred to the La Ferronnays siblings by their Christian names, as if they were old friends or saints. For many of those who wrote to Craven to express their admiration for Le Récit, the great advantage of a true story that read like a novel was that they could ask for more information, in effect requesting a sequel. When Le Récit ended, the lives of the La Ferronnays clan nonetheless continued, and readers wanted to know more about Craven’s saints as intercessors. Was Alexandrine’s mother still alive, and had she converted to Catholicism as well?67 Did the family still own the Norman estate at Boury?68 Had the youngest La Ferronnays daughter, Albertine, who barely appears in Le Récit, survived when so many of her family had died?69 Knowing whether or not Albertine and Alexandrine’s mother continued the tradition of saintly and tragic La Ferronnays women mattered to readers who wanted to understand the actions of modern saints in this world. Shortly after the publication of Le Récit, Craven’s only remaining brother, Fernand de la Ferronnays, died suddenly, encouraging readers’ sense that the family saga exceeded the book’s covers. Fernand’s death seemed like an appropriate continuation of a story that featured so much tragedy, and sending Craven a condolence letter inserted the reader into the narrative of the La Ferronnays family. Thus one Dutch reader, who explained that he felt as if he knew and loved all the La Ferronnays and hoped to meet them in heaven,

64. Adelina to PC, Naples, Feb. 7, 1866, “Lettres moins intéressantes.” See also Cecile Scott to PC, Southampton, Mar. 18, 1867, “Lettres moins intéressantes.” 65. Katherine Watkins to PC, Jersey, Dec. 13, 1876, “Lettres moins intéressantes.” 66. “Lettre à Mme Craven au sujet de Récit d’une sœur,” n.d., “Lettres à Mme Craven relatives à ses ouvrages,” dossier on Le Récit d’une sœur. 67. A. le Gendre to PC, Racon [?]. 68. Cecile Scott to PC. 69. Adrienne Auspark to PC, Geneva, Jan. 18, 1868, “Lettres moins intéressantes.”

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wrote that his first thought upon hearing of Fernand’s death was “Poor Pauline!”70 Fernand’s role as a character in Le Récit was limited because Craven focused the narrative on her dead sisters. The possibility of Fernand’s joining his saintly siblings in heaven, however, seemed to many readers to require revisiting the book and acknowledging Craven’s additional grief. Ironically, after his death Fernand became a central figure in the story that he had not wanted published in the first place. Asking Craven for some memento of her family was another common way for readers to extend the narrative of Le Récit and to insert themselves into it. Many readers, driven by the sense of not wanting the story to end, desired more than the textual relics of Le Récit and asked for images and tokens—such as a handwriting sample—of the La Ferronnays saints’ lives.71 Readers “longed to see their pictures and . . . clothe with a bodily shape the minds and characters.”72 Many readers requested photographs of their favorite character, and later editions of the book responded to their enthusiasm by including an engraving of Alexandrine based on a drawing by Adrien de Mun.73 A priest, Father Reuchon, begged Craven to provide him with photographs because, as he said, “this book goes with me everywhere, I live with it, or rather, with you all.” Perhaps recognizing that there was something not quite orthodox about his desire for La Ferronnays images, he asked that Craven not mention his request to anyone else.74 For these readers, the carte de visite came to function like a prayer card, reminding the possessor of the example and influence of the saint pictured, and it prolonged the pleasure of reading Le Récit.75

70. A. H. Singendanck to PC, the Hague, Jan. 18, 1867, “Lettres moins intéressantes.” See also Adrienne Auspark to PC, Geneva, Jan. 22, 1868; Vicomte Amédée de Férron to PC; Cecile Scott to PC; Marie Thérèse de Villeneuve to PC, Toulouse, Jan. 10, 1867, all from “Lettres moins intéressantes.” 71. See, e.g., Annie Boylan to PC, Auckland, Mar.18, 1876, “Lettres moins intéressantes.” Even though the handwriting sample in question was merely a page that Alexandrine took down as dictation, Craven regretted giving it away and asked Annie Boylan to make a copy; Boylan obliged and took the opportunity to ask for samples of Albert’s and Olga’s hands as well. Annie Boylan to PC, Auckland, Oct. 22, 1876, “Lettres à Mme Craven relatives à ses ouvrages,” dossier on Le Récit d’une sœur. 72. Florence Glyn to PC, London, June 27, “Lettres moins intéressantes.” 73. Didier to Monsieur ?, Aug. 27, 1866 and Didier to PC, Oct. 8, 1866, “Lettres à Mme Craven relatives à ses ouvrages,” dossier on Le Récit d’une sœur. 74. Père Reuchon to PC, n.d., “Lettres moins intéressantes.” 75. Françoise de Gesteminy [?] to PC, Oct. 13, 1878, “Lettres moins intéressantes.” On photography and relics, see Muriel Pic, “Le devenir image de la relique à l’époque de la reproductibilité technique: Photographie, copie, et métaphore,” in Reliques modernes: Cultes et usages chrétiens des corps saints des Reformes aux révolutions, ed. Philippe Boutry, Pierre Antoine Fabre, and Dominique Julia, 2 vols. (Paris, 2009), 2:847–64.

Figure 4.2. Alexandrine de la Ferronnays, by Adrien de Mun. Frontispiece to Pauline Craven, Le Récit d’une sœur, vol. 1, 5th ed. (Paris: Didier, 1867), Special Collections and Archives, John M. Kelly Library, St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto.

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Le Récit d’une sœur also led readers to embark on pilgrimages, sometimes to Paris or Italy but most often to Boury, where most of the La Ferronnays were buried. Correspondents occasionally asked Craven’s permission to travel to Boury, although the estate had been sold by the 1860s.76 In 1883, Craven arranged the construction of a monument to her beloved dead of Le Récit so pilgrims had a focus for their devotions.77 Eugénie and Louise Trocmé, sisters from Saint-Quentin, enthused about their 1878 trip to Boury; they visited the tombs on the anniversary of Alexandrine’s first communion. The girls’ letters gushed about their visit and begged Craven to write back, even if only to scold them for their impertinence; they would accept her reproof because they considered her “a little bit our mother.”78 An English reader left flowers on the tombs and “knelt down on the stone which covered the Count and Countess Albert and prayed that it might someday be granted to me to meet those blessed ones.” Her husband made a watercolor of the scene, which she had bound with her copy of Le Récit.79 A father wrote Craven an extensive account of his family’s pilgrimage: his daughters had made a wreath for the La Ferronnays tombs, and he personally had left a single verbena blossom on Alexandrine’s grave. The visit, he reported, was a moving experience for young and old: “for some, the Récit d’une sœur perhaps brings back memories, while for others it may bring hope.”80 As the pilgrimages and the images suggest, readers read Le Récit devotionally, as an aid to prayer and spiritual development. In the midst of daily life, Craven’s book allowed them to “forg[et] this mortal body that ties us to the earth.”81 Le Récit was a useful companion that reminded readers “that this world is nothing and eternity all.”82 Readers could look to the story of the La Ferronnays family for subjects for prayer and for spiritual readings; Le Récit was a reliable source for “the sacred fire that revives faith and purifies the heart.”83 For one reader who had “not yet taken the decisive step from girlhood to a settled state,” Le Récit offered “a more true and sensible

76. A. S. Hausay Barwell to PC, Horsham, June 19, “Lettres moins intéressantes”; A. Victor Pouré to PC, Mont de Marsan, Jan. 3,1878, “Lettres moins intéressantes”; Julie Austin to the comte de Mun, Burlington, VT, July 9, 1892, “Lettres à Mme Craven relatives à ses ouvrages,” dossier on Le Récit d’une sœur. 77. Correspondence concerning the construction of the monument is in ICP, ms. fr. 599 2 G. 78. Letters from Louise and Eugenie Trocmé, Saint-Quentin and Boury, Apr. 26, June 5, 1878, “Lettres moins intéressantes.” 79. Mary J. Letts to PC. 80. “Lettre à madame Craven au sujet de Récit d’une sœur.” 81. Vicomtesse de Tocqueville to PC, Tocqueville. 82. Mary J. Letts to PC. 83. Ebeley to PC, Lumigny, Saturday, “Lettres moins intéressantes.”

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as well as satisfactory view of life, happiness, and suffering than . . . all the Meditations that have been written on these subjects.”84 Another reader kept the book with him on his travels because it guided him on the path of a Christian life.85 Many readers noted that Craven’s presentation of Catholic worship was so compelling as to encourage conversions.86 The obstacles to living a Christian life in the midst of “the exigencies of the world” appear repeatedly in Craven’s correspondence; because the La Ferronnays sisters had triumphed over these difficulties, they could lead readers along the Christian path as well.87 Above all, Le Récit d’une sœur was a “manual for those who suffered,” to whom it provided instruction in Christian mourning.88 In the words of Henri Moreau, a member of the Institut de France, readers achieved “a sort of spiritual commensality” with the dead.89 The tears readers wept over the death scenes in Le Récit were a reminder of Christ’s death on the cross for them.90 Widows in particular often wrote of the solace they found in Alexandrine’s example, thanking God “that He put it into [Craven’s] heart to write that book to comfort us who are still struggling on here.”91 Speaking of a widowed friend to whom she had given the book, one Englishwoman explained that “[h]er life was all darkness until your ‘Récit’ roused her.”92 A bereaved mother explained to Craven that she had reread the book and identified with the countess de la Ferronnays, who showed her “how as a Christian to bear the cross that God has placed on my shoulders.”93 As one La Ferronnays after another died expressing confidence not only in eternal life

84. Fanny Power to PC. 85. Joseph Duesberg to PC, Buenos Aires, Jan. 11, 1869, “Lettres moins intéressantes.” 86. See, e.g., Baronne de Stampe to PC, Porte Lyngby near Copenhagen, Dec. 15, 1876, “Lettres à Mme Craven relatives à ses ouvrages,” dossier on Le Récit d’une sœur; Aubrey de Vere, Currah Chase, Ireland, Mar. 6, 1868; Georgiana Fullerton to PC, Brighton, Jan. 28; Adèle Loy to PC, Lyon, June 30, 1867; Sister Thérèse de Jesus-Crucifié to PC, Carmel d’Aurillac, June 4, 1867; and H. W. Wilberforce to PC, all in “Lettres moins intéressantes.” 87. Veuve Alphonsine Masson to PC, Sept. 14, 1891, “Lettres à Mme Craven relatives à ses ouvrages,” dossier on Le Récit d’une sœur. 88. Raigemont [?] to PC, Paris, June 20, 1866, “Lettres moins intéressantes.” See also Marie de Keller to PC, n.d.; A. H. Elton to PC, Clevedon Court, Somerset, Sept. 15, 1875; and A. H. Singendanck to PC, all in “Lettres moins intéressantes.” 89. Moreau to PC, à l’Institut, Dec. 9, 1866, ICP, ms. fr. 592. 90. Nectarée to PC, Apr. 28, 1867, “Lettres moins intéressantes.” 91. Katherine Watkins to PC. 92. A. M. Wood to PC. See also M. de la Guère, Bongren [?] to PC, n.d., “Lettres moins intéressantes.” 93. Elisabeth de Strach to PC, Berka, near Weimar, Nov. 14, 1871, “Lettres à Mme Craven relatives à ses ouvrages,” dossier on Le Récit d’une sœur. See also Aspasie Kotzbue to PC, Carlsruhe, Feb. 26 and May 17, 1867, ICP, ms. fr. 599, I Ae.

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but in an everlasting family life, grieving readers appreciated their assurance that loving families would be reconstituted after death. Overwhelmingly, Craven’s readers—female and male—identified with the women of her story. Alexandrine was by far the most common subject of reader letters, although Eugénie, Olga, the countess, and Pauline herself had fans. Albert was more popular than his father, but few readers embarked on a quasi-devotional relationship with him; those occasional readers who asked for his image wanted it to complement Alexandrine’s portrait.94 The La Ferronnays women embodied the form of holiness that spoke most urgently to readers because their sanctity did not require them to withdraw from the obligations of social life. They continued to tend to their families, visit the poor, and maintain their social position, serenely confident that God had called them to that life. The figure of the count de la Ferronnays, however, inspired little reader passion, in spite of his traditional, miracle-working claim to sainthood. None of the surviving letters request an image of the count, and none of the writers claimed a particular devotion to him. Although many of Craven’s correspondents wrote movingly of their own or their loved ones’ conversions, they cited Alexandrine as a model convert, not Alphonse Ratisbonne. The young woman’s quiet contemplation and discernment as well as her struggle to fulfill her obligations to her beloved Protestant parents spoke to readers in a way that the instantaneous and miraculous revelation of truth did not. In their own lives, too, conversion had been a heart-wrenching and often difficult affair, but it was also an achievement—a self-fashioning that led them to a profound understanding of divine truth, not an overbearing manifestation of God’s will that left the individual powerless. The count undoubtedly anchored the La Ferronnays’ claim to the “family of saints” title, but his story had prominent promoters already. Craven’s readers found greater meaning in the lives of the unassuming womenfolk who needed Le Récit’s readership to rescue them from their own modesty. Craven’s correspondents rarely failed to note that they hoped to join her family of saints in prayer and eventually in heaven. Readers addressed their prayers to the La Ferronnays dead, asking Alexandrine, for instance, to intercede with God to preserve the life of a beloved but sickly husband.95 “How 94. A. Victor Pouré, a military chaplain, asked Craven for copies of Le Récit for the barracks because he thought that Albert would be a particularly good role model for young men: Nov. 2, 1877, “Lettres banales.” 95. Léontine de Lacretelle to PC, Belair-Macon, Oct. 28, 1867, “Lettres moines intéressantes.” See also P. Daburoz to ? [possibly CM], Brézé, May 23, 1867; and Comte de Mellet to PC, Paris, Feb. 5, 1867, “Lettres moins intéressantes”; Thérèse Foursiez to PC, Marseille, June 29, 1869, “Lettres banales.”

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strange it is to think that my husband is with your dear ones in Heaven, [and] someday I shall be able to tell Alex what her life has been to me,” one English widow mused.96 Regularly, Craven’s correspondents noted that they prayed for her “in exchange for the pure and holy emotions that you have given me!” and they asked for her prayers as well.97 Readers imagined Craven’s arrival in heaven and contemplated “what a family will receive you there!”98 An Irish reader wrote to say that she was offering a novena on the anniversary of Albert’s death for Craven and for France.99 Craven’s readers were confident that her sisters and brothers awaited her in heaven and that those united now in prayer—including themselves—would eventually be joined for real and for eternity. In praying for Pauline, readers saw themselves as rescuing her from obscurity just as she had prevented her sisters from disappearing into their own self-effacement. Readers both praised and attempted to counter Craven’s presentation of herself as “merely” a guide to the saintly words of others. Because of her narrative reticence, Pauline was in many ways the character that best corresponded to readers’ own situations; she was not a saint, merely a mourner who needed saintly intercession. Readers suffering from grief at their own family tragedies identified with Pauline, the sister left behind to grieve and remember. As Craven deliberately diminished her own role in her family drama, readers became increasingly “avid to know [her].”100 Many of her correspondents asserted that in spite of her modesty, they knew Pauline’s soul quite well.101 They recognized her “absence of all personal pretension and [her] scrupulous self-effacement” as characteristics of true Catholic womanhood, and they admired her “reserve, dignity, and grace.”102 Pauline’s own faith and generosity were clearly so great that “she could not hide herself sufficiently to escape [readers’] admiration.”103 Her fans took comfort in believing that Pauline was equal to her brother and sisters “in faith and in courage and beloved of our Lord because he tested her by the

96. Katherine Watkins to PC. 97. Baronne de Ladonville [?] to PC, Drancy, June 7, “Lettres moins intéressantes.” 98. Amélie de Valcourt to PC, Cannes, Feb. 6, 1878, “Lettres moins intéressantes.” 99. Anna Dowling to PC, County Cork, June 27, 1883, “Lettres à Mme Craven relatives à ses ouvrages,” dossier on Le Récit d’une sœur. 100. Adrienne Ausparck to PC, Geneva, Jan. 22, 1868, “Lettres moins intéressantes.” 101. Constance Bonnier to PC, Geneva, Nov. 5, 1886, “Lettres à Mme Craven relatives à ses ouvrages,” dossier on Le Récit d’une sœur. 102. Vicomte Amédée de Férron to PC; Marie Thérèse de Villeneuve to PC. 103. Céline Renard to PC, Bourbonne les Bains, Apr. 9, 1867, “Lettres moins intéressantes.”

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loss of one after another.”104 Many readers agreed that “the most charming of all [the characters] is the one who most effaces herself.”105 Eager to pursue their identification with the saints’ sister, readers also requested images of Pauline herself: “any carte [de visite] of the ‘Pauline’ of your story would . . . be a great treasure,” one fan wrote.106 A male reader asked for a photograph of the author to give his wife, also called Pauline, for her feast day.107 Madame de la Guère, delighted to receive a response to her initial letter to Craven, declared that the author herself was a “precious relic” of her sainted family and that she kept Craven’s letter always to hand.108 Adrienne Ausparck showed her photograph of Craven only to select people who were capable of understanding the beauty of the author’s character, and Adèle Loy exulted in “the happiness I experience at possessing you; it [the photograph] is like an extension of your delicious and sympathetic words.”109 As a loving daughter, sister, and wife, Pauline shunned the limelight, which she directed instead on the exemplary lives of her sisters. Readers, however, could take up Craven’s own role, illuminating the virtues of modesty in Pauline’s life and establishing them as a model for others. Ultimately, what readers most loved about Pauline Craven was the sacrifice she had made by delivering her family to the public. The very act that Fernand de la Ferronnays had most objected to was, for many readers, the pinnacle of Craven’s generosity. She could have kept the story of her beloved saints to herself, along with their precious letters and diaries. There would have been nothing wrong with such a decision, which would have reflected ordinary standards of decorum and privacy. However, Craven had chosen the more difficult path, and none of her readers doubted that publication had added to the pain of her original grief. “What generosity,” one reader commented, “to have revealed personal memories . . . that a more selfish soul would have kept with jealous care.”110 Craven had opened her “precious casket” of memories, and it had undoubtedly required “courage” for her to “divulge . . . such intimate letters to the public.”111 Readers repeatedly 104. Annie Boylan to PC, Auckland, Aug. 3, 1874, “Lettres moins intéressantes.” 105. M de Fingherlin to PC, n.d., ICP, ms. fr. 592. 106. Fanny Power to PC. 107. Edouard Mougin to PC, Verrerie des Portieux, Mar. 2, 1867, “Lettres moins intéressantes.” 108. M. de la Guère, comtesse R. de Buisseret to PC, Versailles, “Lettres banales.” See also Abbé Thiret to PC, La Poutrouye, near Colmar, June 22, 1868, “Lettres moins intéressantes.” 109. Adrienne Ausparck to PC, Geneva, Feb. 4, 1868, “Lettres moins intéressantes”; Adèle Loy to PC, Lyon, June 30, 1867, “Lettres banales.” 110. M de la Salle to PC, Troyes, Sept. 21, 1889, “Lettres banales.” 111. Mary J. Letts to PC; Henri Auclerc to PC, Paris, Mar. 23, 1867, “Lettres banales.”

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referred to the “great dread” and “terrible effort” involved in “admit[ting] strangers into that inner Sanctuary” of family love.112 They assured her that they understood that “[e]verything about those who were gone seems so sacred and it must almost have seemed like profanity to you to send out all their . . . innermost thoughts into the world.”113 Readers understood Le Récit d’une sœur less as a publishing success than as a sacrifice made for their sakes, and they thanked and blessed Craven for her generosity.114 The letters that Craven so carefully saved reassured her that she had been right in her conviction that her family of saints could intercede in the lives of their contemporaries. The readers who were bold enough to write her offered confirmation that her book would “contribute to the sanctification of many souls,” and they urged her to accept as her reward “the many Blessings that are asked and felt for you and yours.”115 Her correspondents affirmed that her book was a “charitable work,” and reading it was “fortifying and satisfying alms” for the souls of others who grieved like Pauline.116 Doing such great good necessarily meant bearing a cross, and suffering on earth paid for merit in heaven.117

Catholic Abnegation and the Biographical Subject Craven’s later career as a writer reflected the relationship among authors, readers, and biographical subjects that Le Récit d’une sœur established. Her literary work put her at the center of a circle of cosmopolitan Catholic women writers whose books paid tribute to one another’s unassuming virtues. Craven wrote several spiritual biographies that drew attention to devout and self-effacing women. Sœur Natalie Narischkin, for instance, published in 1877, recounted the life of Olga de la Ferronnays’s friend, the young Russian convert who became a Daughter of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul. Lady Georgiana Fullerton (1888) commemorated the life of the English convert and novelist whose friendship inspired Craven’s own fictional efforts. Fullerton translated several of Craven’s works into English, and when she died in 1885, her family offered Craven access to her papers to produce a memorial

112. M. E. Grant Duff to PC; Frederica Swinborne to PC, London, Oct. 21, 1877; Florence Glyn to PC, all in “Lettres moins intéressantes.” 113. Katherine Watkins to PC. 114. See, e.g., Raigemont [?] to PC; Joseph Duesberg to PC. 115. Mme Molé to PC, Saturday Feb. 3; and Florence Glyn to PC, “Lettres moins intéressantes.” 116. Comtesse de Lévis Mirepoix to PC, Paris, June 20, 1866; and [illegible signature] to PC, Villa Julia, Cannes, June 12, 1866, “Lettres moins intéressantes.” 117. Esbeley to PC, Lumigny, Jan. 22, 1866, “Lettres moins intéressantes.”

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biography.118 La Jeunesse de Fanny Kemble (1880) and Adelaïde Capece Minutolo (1869) both commemorated the lives of women who moved in Craven’s cosmopolitan circle of friends and who dedicated themselves to social causes: American abolitionism and Neapolitan charity, respectively.119 Upon Craven’s death in 1891, her own life was subject to recuperation by other pious women. Her first biographer was Teresa Ravaschieri, mother of Lina, the child whose 1860 death had encouraged Craven to return to her manuscript for Le Récit d’une sœur. Ravaschieri’s first venture into writing had been an account of her beloved daughter’s life and death, which Craven translated into French and published in her Réminiscences: Souvenirs d’Angleterre et d’Italie (1879). Réminiscences testified not only to the piety of the “child martyr” but also to her quiet, charitable, grieving mother.120 Ravaschieri responded in kind with her 1892 biography of Craven, which she began by announcing her “trepidation” at the magnitude of the task. Only the certainty that “great souls” such as Craven’s “belong to humanity” convinced this retiring and modest Italian noblewoman to undertake the biography.121 An English convert writer, Maria Catherine Bishop, produced a two-volume English-language life soon afterward, which appeared in French translation in 1897.122 Both of Craven’s biographers followed her lead in quoting extensively from letters and diaries and largely effacing themselves from the narrative. Bishop, for instance, drew heavily on her correspondence with Craven, but because Craven’s letters were all addressed to “Miss O’Connor Morris”—Bishop’s maiden name—readers are rarely aware of her role in the narrative. Both biographers slipped into the background and allowed Craven to narrate her own life. Craven’s biographical writing and the biographies that featured her as their subject form a pattern of devout Catholic women rescuing one another’s stories and ensuring that the self-abnegating virtue of pious women did not negate the example of their lives. Le Récit d’une sœur proposed two

118. Sœur Natalie Narischkin, fille de la charité de Saint-Vincent-de-Paul (Paris, 1877); Lady Georgiana Fullerton, sa vie et ses œuvres (Paris, 1888). Fullerton translated Anne Séverin (1869), which Craven had dedicated to her, as well as Natalie Narischkin, and Eliane (1882). Craven’s other English translator, Emily Bowles, also a convert, wrote spiritual biographies as well, although primarily of historical figures such as Barbara Acarie (Marie de l’Incarnation) and Jeanne de Chantal. 119. La Jeunesse de Fanny Kemble (Paris, 1880); Adelaïde Capece Minutolo (Paris, 1869). 120. Teresa Filangieri Ravaschieri Fieschi, Lina (Naples, 1876); PC, Réminiscences: Souvenirs d’Angleterre et d’Italie, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1879), 252–311. 121. Ravaschieri, Paolina Craven, 1. Ravaschieri also published an account of Catholic charity in Naples: Storia della carità napoletana, 4 vols. (Naples, 1874–79). 122. Bishop also wrote an account of Marie Antoinette’s imprisonment and a biography of Harriet Urquhart, writer and wife of a prominent British diplomat.

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forms of female virtue, and Craven’s readers embraced them both. On the one hand, the La Ferronnays women were exemplars of humble women who constructed their sense of self on their abandonment of agency. Readers integrated them into their devotional practice, treating their words as relics and addressing their prayers to Craven’s sisters, confident that the empathy that modern women felt for one another would make those prayers efficacious. On the other hand, Craven herself, with her determination to rescue her sisters from the obscurity they sought, also emerged as a model for Catholic women. Following this example, readers wanted to rescue her too, and their letters insist that the “Pauline” of the story is a valuable link to the community of saints. Craven’s literary project asserted that women could be simultaneously self-effacing and the center of attention, both meek and glorified. These models of Catholic female virtue were not mutually exclusive, and the circle of women writing one another’s lives suggests that individual women sought to play the roles of both Alexandrine and Pauline. Craven’s literary career and her interaction with her readers suggest that rather than having to choose between the self-effacing devout Catholic on the one hand and the woman writer on the other, Catholic women could choose both. Pauline and Alexandrine were both, after all, writers, and they believed that the written word could serve a variety of purposes. Writing was a spiritual discipline that encouraged the abandonment of individual will at the same time that it developed an individual, Christian subjectivity. It could be a private devotional practice that was still capable of offering a public example. Craven and her sisters wrote in order to discover and discipline the self. Their writing, while reflecting a carefully cultivated interiority, also reached out to create community—both with the dead and with a Christian readership. The “woman writer” is a figure familiar to nineteenth-century historians; her struggle is usually to assert individual agency and to find a public. The devotional component of women’s writing, which has received too little attention, was nonetheless crucially important to the creation of women’s subjectivities as individuals always in communion with others.

 Ch ap ter 5 Frédéric and Amélie Ozanam Charity, Marriage, and the Catholic Social

Frédéric Ozanam, professor of comparative literature at the Sorbonne and, in his youth, founder of a Catholic charitable association known as the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, died in 1853, at age forty. His widow, Amélie, who was only thirty-two at the time, never remarried and dedicated herself to preserving her late husband’s memory. Like Pauline Craven, Amélie Ozanam sought to promote the example of her husband’s sanctity while effacing herself and her role in his life and work. She achieved both goals with remarkable success. Amélie’s commemoration of her husband’s life culminated a century after her death with his beatification on World Youth Day in 1997. In his homily, Pope John Paul II praised Frédéric Ozanam as an “apostle of charity, exemplary spouse and father, grand figure of the Catholic laity of the nineteenth century,” and he “invite[d] the laity, and in particular young people, to show courage and imagination in working to build a more fraternal society, where the less fortunate will be esteemed in all their dignity and will have the means to live in respect.”1 Most of the key elements of John Paul’s description of the Blessed Frédéric Ozanam were already in place in his first biography, 1. “Beatification of Frédéric Ozanam, Homily of John Paul II,” Paris, Aug. 22, 1997, http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/homilies/1997/documents/hf_jp-ii_hom_1997 0822_paris-ozanam_en.html. 187

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published by his friend and collaborator Henri Lacordaire in 1856. Above all, Lacordaire emphasized the innovative nature of his friend’s charity; Ozanam’s ministry had indeed aimed at the creation of a different kind of society rather than resigning itself to one in which poverty remained a mysterious, intractable constant. He had sought to apply fraternal sentiments to the practice of charity and thereby to recognize the dignity of the poor and the injustice of their plight. He believed that this reconceptualization of society had to begin with the laity because rich and poor laymen occupied civil society on the same footing, unlike priests who always held a position of authority.2 Amélie Ozanam did much of the work in preparing Lacordaire’s biography, and her notes on her husband’s life became the basis of the published book. “God rewards his saints,” she wrote Lacordaire, “not only for the good they do on earth, but also for the good that the imitation of their life accomplishes after their passing.”3 Marie Ozanam, Frédéric and Amélie’s daughter, received a copy of the biography on the occasion of her first communion in 1856. Lacordaire inscribed the flyleaf, and the donor noted that on the most beautiful day of her life, Marie should engrave her father’s example on her heart.4 Amélie’s desire was that the biography should touch the hearts of readers and deepen their faith. She was determined that Frédéric’s example should be widely available to the faithful, and in the years before her death in 1894, she collaborated with several other biographers to ensure that the Catholic world did not forget his public activism and his devotion to fraternal charity.5 Some elements of John Paul’s description of Frédéric Ozanam are more recent additions to the tradition that Amélie Ozanam fostered so carefully, notably that he was “an exemplary spouse and father.” Lacordaire’s biography

2. Henri-Dominique Lacordaire, Frédéric Ozanam (Paris, 1856). On Lacordaire’s role in the commemoration of Ozanam, see Charles Mercier, La Société de Saint-Vincent-de-Paul: Une mémoire des origines en mouvement, 1833–1914 (Paris, 2006), 34–46. 3. Raphaëlle Chevalier-Montariol edited and published Amélie Ozanam’s notes to Henri Lacordaire: “Notes biographiques sur Frédéric Ozanam,” in Frédéric Ozanam, ed. Isabelle Chareire (Lyon, 2001), 303–57. 4. Abbé Henri Perreyve to Marie Ozanam, May 14, 1857, Archives Laporte-Ozanam. Between 2002 and 2004 Ozanam descendants donated this archive to the Bibliothèque nationale de France (NAF 28199), and it is not yet fully classified. I am grateful to the late Raphaëlle Chevalier-Montariol for giving me access to these papers before their arrival at the Bibliothèque nationale and for her insight into the Ozanam marriage. 5. See, e.g., Amélie Ozanam to Kathleen O’Meara, 1876, Archives Laporte-Ozanam, about O’Meara’s Frederic Ozanam Professor at the Sorbonne, His Life and Works (Edinburgh, 1876), and Amélie’s drafts of letters to the abbé Hardy about a German-language biography (May 14, July 2, Aug. 26, Nov. 24, 1878).

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Figure 5.1.

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Frédéric Ozanam, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

barely mentions Amélie or their marriage; she no doubt considered these intensely private matters that would turn the spotlight inappropriately on her. More recently, however, the fact that Ozanam lived a full layman’s life that included marriage and fatherhood has become central to his cult. The Catholic Church offers its believers few married saints, and Frédéric and Amélie’s extremely ordinary family life stands out among the celibate ranks

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Amélie Ozanam with her daughter Marie, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

of the church’s exemplars.6 To supporters of Frédéric’s possible canonization, he is the lay saint, proof that Catholics can achieve extraordinary virtue without renouncing marital love or parenthood. Although the Ozanams’ marriage plays a significant role in his contemporary cult, it features much less in scholarship on Frédéric’s intellectual

6. Kenneth Woodward, Making Saints: How the Catholic Church Determines Who Becomes a Saint, Who Doesn’t, and Why (New York, 1996), chap. 11.

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legacy.7 Research on social Catholicism takes no notice of Amélie; indeed, it does not acknowledge that women or gender ideology played a significant role in the elaboration of a Catholicism that demanded justice for the poor.8 The evolution of Catholic social thought remains a subject of traditional high intellectual history, and Ozanam figures in a lineage of male philosophers and economic thinkers who contemplated the response to industrialization that their Christianity demanded. “The poor” feature largely as an abstraction, and the prevalence of women among their numbers does not factor into the analysis. Frédéric Ozanam was central to male communities of scholars and charitable activists who were interested in the social question, and the fraternal friendship of these men was fundamental to his sense of self and to his understanding of society, especially in his youth. His initial forays into Catholic activism were in the male world of mennaisian associations dedicated to the cause of religious liberty. Their emphasis on fraternity as a political and a religious concept shaped his youth. Even as he retreated from Catholic politics toward social engagement after the condemnation of Lamennais, he continued to rely on a fraternal Catholic community—the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul—as the most effective mode of intervention in social problems. Marriage and family life transformed Ozanam’s social thought in fundamental ways, however. In adulthood, he increasingly came to see marriage rather than fraternity as the basis for a society characterized by mutual affection and obligation. The bonds of society appeared as sacred to him as those of matrimony, and women represented men’s sacramental obligation to care for others, whether their wives or the less fortunate. Marriage to Amélie led him to consider what sort of social vocation a married couple might have. Women, he resolved, epitomized society because they represented weakness and dependency. Society was not a voluntary association like the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, the older, married Ozanam concluded. The web of

7. The availability of the Archives Laporte-Ozanam has produced a few recent exceptions: Gérard Cholvy’s major biography, Frédéric Ozanam (1813–1853): L’engagement d’un intellectuel catholique au XIXe siècle (Paris, 2003), and Agnès Walch, La Spiritualité conjugale dans le catholicisme français, XVIe–XXe siècle (Paris, 2002), chap. 7. 8. Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, Les Débuts du catholicisme social en France (1822–1870) (Paris, 1951). More recently, see Paul Misner, Social Catholicism in Europe from the Onset of Industrialization to the First World War (New York, 1991); Ernest L. Fortin, “‘Sacred and Inviolable’: Rerum novarum and Natural Rights,” Theological Studies 53, no. 2 (1992): 203–33; António Almodovar and Pedro Teixeira, “The Ascent and Decline of Catholic Economic Thought, 1830–1950s,” History of Political Economy 40, no. 5 (2008): 62–87; and Gilbert Faccarello and Philippe Steiner, “Religion and Political Economy in Early-Nineteenth-Century France,” History of Political Economy 40, no. 5 (2008): 26–61.

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obligations that constituted society could not be unraveled. As in the sacrament of marriage, it was impossible to discover precisely where the individual ended and the collective began. Examining Frédéric and Amélie Ozanam’s marital vocation restores women and gender to the history of social Catholicism, demonstrating their central role in efforts to find a Catholic response to a world marked by revolution and industrialization.

Lyonnais Youth, Parisian Ambition Frédéric Ozanam (born 1813), though slightly younger than Charles de Montalembert or Maurice de Guérin, shared their postrevolutionary Catholic ambitions and their mennaisian-inspired enthusiasm for fraternity. Ozanam, too, was an enfant du siècle, son of a revolutionary soldier of the year II who had participated in the Italian campaign. Released from service, JeanAntoine Ozanam married into a Lyonnais merchant family and went into the silk business with his father-in-law, taking advantage of his excellent Italian to open a branch in Milan. Aspiring to move into the professional bourgeoisie, he entered the Milanese medical faculty and qualified as a doctor in 1810. Frédéric was born in Milan, one of fourteen children, of whom only he, two brothers, and a sister survived childhood. The family returned to Lyon when Frédéric was six.9 Jean-Antoine Ozanam expected his sons to continue the family’s social ascent: the eldest, Alphonse (born 1804), was to follow his father into medicine, and Frédéric was to be a lawyer. Neither of the Ozanam boys was happy with this determination of his future, however. Alphonse announced his clerical vocation in 1821, but he completed his medical studies to satisfy his father; in 1825, medical degree in hand, he began his seminary training. Frédéric was no more amenable to their father’s plans for the family’s advancement, and he spent his twenties unsure of whether his vocation was to the religious life or as a man of letters. Like his brother, however, he completed the plan of studies that his father set out for him, qualifying as a lawyer in 1836. The dynamics of religious life in the Ozanam family followed stereotype: both Alphonse and Frédéric associated Catholic devotion with their mother. The script that set devout women in competition with their disbelieving husbands for the souls of their children was powerful enough to shape even the stories of families like the Ozanams in which there was no such dramatic religious division. Jean-Antoine, although a Catholic and, at least by the

9. Cholvy, Frédéric Ozanam, chap. 1.

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later 1830s, a practicing one, was never devout enough to satisfy his sons. Religious faith united the Ozanam boys with their mother and, implicitly, against their father.10 Frédéric’s first communion, which he received at age fourteen, was an occasion for Madame Ozanam and her sons, who arranged to receive the Eucharist at the same time, Frédéric and his mother in Lyon and Alphonse in Paris. No one mentioned Ozanam père, although it is possible that Alphonse was thinking of their father when he wrote Frédéric a letter exhorting him to treat his first communion as the beginning of a life of devotion, not merely as the end of childhood and the accomplishment of religious obligation.11 Jean-Antoine Ozanam disapproved of his eldest son’s vocation, but he supported Alphonse through the five years of Parisian seminary training that followed his medical diploma—although he did attempt to extract a promise that his son would never become a Jesuit. That issue reemerged in the 1830s when Alphonse decided that he did in fact want to enter the Society of Jesus, leading to further conflict between father and son. At the same time, Frédéric was contemplating giving up the law to enter the Dominicans. Both young men were looking for a strenuous Catholicism that demanded more of them than the perfunctory levels of practice they associated with their father. Although Frédéric retained both sentimental and practical ties to Lyon, education and career made him a Parisian. Both he and Alphonse (and eventually their much younger brother Charles) completed their schooling in Paris; the bourgeois Ozanams, like the aristocratic Guérins, never considered educating their sons entirely in the provinces. Paris, for Ozanam, represented ambition: it was where a young man could make his mark on the world, and it was where he met the other young men whose aspirations might compete with his own. Lyon, in contrast, he associated with childhood and family, and he eventually returned to the city to marry. Lyon was also a safe haven for Catholic faith, while Paris was a gauntlet that Catholic youth had to run—a “modern Babylon” that tested a young man’s moral fiber.12 The challenge was to retain the virtues of a Lyonnais Catholic home while succeeding in Paris’s masculine, competitive, professional world.

10. Ibid., 112–13, 343–45. 11. Ibid., 73. Ozanam recalled his communion in a letter to a friend some three years later as a “day of happiness, may my hand wither and my tongue cleave to my palate if ever I forget you!” Frédéric Ozanam (hereafter FO) to Auguste Materne, June 5, 1830, Lettres de Frédéric Ozanam (hereafter Lettres de FO), vol. 1, Lettres de jeunesse (1819–1840), ed. Léonce Celier, Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, and Didier Ozanam (Paris, 1960), 14. 12. Léonce Curnier, La Jeunesse de Frédéric Ozanam (Paris, 1888), 71.

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For several years before he began his studies in Paris, Frédéric followed events in the capital closely. The July revolution occurred when he was seventeen, completing his secondary education in Lyon and on the verge of beginning his law degree in the capital. Alphonse’s letters from Paris alarmed the family; fearing for his safety, the young priest had abandoned his clerical garb and wore lay dress in the streets.13 Confronted with a Parisian revolution, the Ozanams felt very Lyonnais, recalling the fate of their city in 1793 when it had rebelled against Parisian Jacobins. His parents decided that Frédéric was too young and Paris too unstable in 1830, and he remained in Lyon until 1831. This delay gave him the opportunity to try out political views with his friends as they observed Parisian events from a distance. Frédéric proclaimed his loyalty to the Bourbon dynasty, while several of his schoolmates declared themselves supporters of the revolution. Frédéric’s schoolboy politics were both pessimistic and melodramatic: he imagined a civil war in which he might find himself locked in fatal conflict with his closest friends. He would remain faithful to their friendship, he proclaimed, even if he had to suffer and die like his Lyonnais ancestors.14 He wrote long letters in which protestations of eternal friendship alternated with hectoring reminders to remain alert to the sin of pride and to confess regularly.15 Frédéric’s view of the revolution was not entirely bleak, however, and his conservatism was in flux in the summer of 1830. Foremost among his sources of Parisian information was L’Avenir, to which his father, a reader of Lammenais, may have subscribed.16 Frédéric, like many of his generation, believed that Lamennais was “called to reconcile Christianity with the developments of our century,” and he introduced his friends to the newspaper, answering their secular liberalism with the assertion that “Religion and Liberty do go together.”17 Lamennais’s Catholic science also inspired Frédéric. Bored by study of the law, he threw himself into learning languages—even Sanskrit—and studying comparative religions.18 In the “ruins of the old world,” he explained to a friend, young men like themselves would clear the thickets of error to find the “cornerstone on which to build a new one.” Confident that “religious ideas” were “society’s first necessity,” he “excavated the ruins of all the temples . . . from Cook’s natives to Sesostris’s Egypt, from

13. FO to Ernest Falconnet, Aug. and Sept. 19, 1830, Lettres de FO, 1:27–28, 29. 14. FO to Auguste Materne, Mar. 17, 19, 1831, Lettres de FO, 1:37–38; 38–40. 15. See, e.g., FO to Auguste Materne, Nov. 29, 1830; FO to Hippolyte Fortoul and Huchard, Jan. 15, 1831; and FO to Ernest Falconnet, Sept. 19, 1831, all in Lettres de FO, 1:30–31, 32–35, 49–52. 16. Cholvy, Frédéric Ozanam, 123. 17. Curnier, La Jeunesse, 47; and FO to Auguste Materne, Nov. 29, 1830, Lettres de FO, 1:30. 18. FO to Ernest Falconnet, Aug. 24, 1830, Lettres de FO, 1:25–26.

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Vishnu’s Indians to Odin’s Scandinavians.” Investigating religious belief in its many forms, past and present, the young Ozanam concluded that Catholicism remained “full of youth and dynamism,” ready to lead the century “toward civilization, toward happiness!”19 Ozanam finally reached Paris in November 1831 as an ambitious young man with a slightly priggish determination not to let the temptations of the city lead him astray. He avoided light reading and expensive indulgences, sending his accounts to his parents and making particular note of every penny he saved by giving up some treat like a panorama or an excursion to the countryside.20 He avoided mixed company, and he needed to change lodging immediately, he wrote his mother, since his boarding house rented rooms to women who sat at the common dining table and dominated conversation. He could hear their laughter—as raucous as that of market women—from his room two floors above theirs.21 Perhaps more pressing than the need to isolate himself from female society was the appeal of lodging in the family home of André-Marie Ampère, a prominent physicist originally from Lyon. Ampère was a devout Catholic as well as a successful scientist, and his son, Jean-Jacques, was a rising literary scholar. Living with the Ampères would cost no more than the boarding house and it would give Frédéric “polish and Parisian manners,” he explained to his father.22 In the Ampère home Ozanam gained access to the social and intellectual circles to which he aspired. He met the leading figures of the postrevolutionary Catholic revival, men like Lamennais and Chateaubriand, whose works he had devoured at school, and he reported home that “these Parisian intellectuals are quite friendly.”23 According to an anecdote that Amélie provided for his biography, Chateaubriand asked his young admirer if he ever went to the theater. Ozanam, although afraid of appearing provincial, confessed that he had promised his mother never to set foot in one. He was relieved that Chateaubriand approved both of his mother’s rigor and of his own obedience.24 The vitality of Catholic intellectual life meant that Ozanam hardly missed the theater, however. He became a regular at Charles de Montalembert’s Sunday evening gatherings, where he was dazzled by the cosmopolitan

19. FO to Hippolyte Fortoul and Huchard, Jan. 15, 1831, Lettres de FO, 1:33–35. 20. FO to his mother, May 26, 1832; FO to his father, Nov. 12, 1831, and Nov. 1831, all in Lettres de FO, 1:81, 56–57, 60–61. 21. He also noted that lodgers played cards and did not observe fasts. FO to his mother, Nov. 7, 1831, Lettres de FO, 1:53–54. 22. FO to his father, Nov. 12, 1831, Lettres de FO, 1:56. 23. FO to his father, Nov. 1831, Lettres de FO, 1:63. 24. Amélie Ozanam, “Notes biographiques,” 314; Lacordaire, Frédéric Ozanam, 22–23.

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celebrities he met there: Adam Mickiewicz, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Victor Considérant, even Victor Hugo. Montalembert himself—aristocratic, well-published, and already famous though barely five years older than Ozanam—was equally impressive to the Lyonnais student. Nothing could be more gratifying to the young provincial than to find himself welcomed in this “atmosphere of Catholicism and fraternity.”25 In addition to meeting Catholic celebrities, Ozanam built a social circle among his fellow students.26 Later in life, these friends, often other young provincials in Paris to complete their studies, recalled their struggle to live Christian lives far from home. Catholic students felt as if none of their classmates shared their faith, and their isolation in the notoriously anticlerical University was worse than the temptations of theaters and cafés. Several recalled that they practiced their religion almost furtively. They identified one another only gradually; a Catholic student might recognize a face among the worshippers at Mass, or he might notice other students who responded to professors’ anticlerical jabs with disapproving silence.27 Having found one another, Catholic students could mobilize to defend their faith from sneering intellectuals and to welcome other young men into their Christian society. Ozanam quickly established himself within active networks of Catholic student sociability. Devout young men often spoke of their isolation, but in fact Catholic student organizations had proliferated under the Restoration. These study groups, known as conférences, reproduced the competitive intellectual atmosphere of boys’ schools and explicitly aimed at protecting the virtue of young men on the threshold of independence.28 Groups like the 25. FO to Ernest Falconnet, Jan. 5–8, 1833, Lettres de FO, 1:92; see also FO to Ernest Falconnet, Mar. 19, 1833, and FO to his mother, Mar. 19, 1833, Lettres de FO, 1:95–96, 99. 26. Jean-Claude Caron, “Frédéric Ozanam, étudiant catholique (1831–1836),” Revue de l’histoire de l’église de France 85, no. 214 (1999): 39–53. 27. Origines et fondateurs de la Société de Saint Vincent de Paul d’après les souvenirs de ses premiers membres, Lallier—Lamanche—Letaillier—Deveaux (n.p., n.d.), 11, 17–19. Copy in the Archives of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul (hereafter SSVP). The society commissioned this compilation of memories of surviving founding members in 1879. Curnier, La Jeunesse, 29–31, tells a similar story about his first meeting with Ozanam. Armand Chaurand, an early member, recalled the Parisian student milieu in similar terms in the Gazette de Lyon, Mar. 19, 1856, quoted by Mercier, La Société, 54–55. Montalembert recalled his schooldays in similar terms. Charles de Montalembert and Léon Cornudet, Lettres à un ami de collège, 1827–1830, new ed. (Paris, 1884), v. 28. Anne Martin-Fugier, “La Formation des élites: Les ‘conférences’ sous la Restauration et la Monarchie de Juillet,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 36, no. 2 (1989): 211–44. The minutes of several of these Catholic associations are in the papers of Emmanuel Bailly, a Catholic publisher and boarding house owner who sponsored them: Archives de l’Assomption (hereafter AA), Rome, fonds Bailly, FU 5 (Société des études littéraires), B 71 (law). On student life of the period, Jean-Claude Caron, Générations romantiques: Les étudiants de Paris et le quartier latin, 1814–1851 (Paris, 1991).

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Société des bonnes études offered members a library, newspapers, a reading room, and a garden—a club, but one without gambling, drink, or, of course, women. By 1833 Ozanam was a regular participant in groups devoted to history, literature, and the law. With his fellow law students he practiced skills in oral argument, but he preferred the gathering of history students who delivered and debated scholarly papers.29 In their associations, Parisian students reproduced many of the key features of the mennaisian circle at La Chênaie: “a group of friends working together to build science under the aegis of Catholic thought” and enjoying “full and complete liberty.”30 The ties Catholic students formed in their study circles emboldened them to assert their presence within the University, and Ozanam emerged as a spokesman for Catholic interests, drafting responses to anticlerical statements that appeared in professors’ lectures. When the philosopher Théodore Jouffroy asserted that the Catholic Church “rejected science and liberty,” Ozanam and a group of Catholic students composed a rejoinder, which they delivered before an audience of several hundred classmates. Ozanam reported that Jouffroy was startled and impressed by the students’ challenge and that he assured them of his respect for Christianity.31 A student audience applauded a similar public challenge to the historian SaintMarc Girardin’s assertion that the papacy was a dying institution and that the clergy had always favored despotism. Such Catholic combativeness, Ozanam believed, was useful because “it shows students that one can be Catholic and still have common sense, that one can love both religion and liberty.”32 Ozanam also took the lead in bringing students to the attention of the clerical hierarchy. He led a delegation that asked the archbishop of Paris, Monseigneur Quélen, to appoint a preacher to speak particularly to young men for the Lenten season at Notre Dame; Henri Lacordaire was the man they had in mind. In 1834 Lacordaire delivered a series of lectures at the Collège Stanislas that had drawn huge crowds. Luminaries like Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and Hugo joined students to listen to Lacordaire proclaim thrillingly that the first liberty tree had been planted in the Garden of Eden.33 Lacordaire’s 1835 Lenten series at Notre Dame, the result of Ozanam and his friends’ request, was a huge success; students and the Paris social elite made

29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

FO to Ernest Falconnet, Jan. 5–8, 1833, Lettres de FO, 1:92. Ibid., Mar. 19, 1833, Lettres de FO, 1:94–95. Ibid., Mar. 25, 1832, Lettres de FO, 1:75. Ibid., Feb. 10, 1832, Lettres de FO, 1:72–73. FO to his parents, Feb. 12, 1834, Lettres de FO, 1:127.

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a point of attending, and Ozanam reported with great satisfaction that the seating reserved for men filled the entire nave.34 Ozanam found Parisian student gatherings and militancy congenial because he met others who shared his desire to combine religious practice with worldly ambition—to be successful professional men as well as faithful Christians. He and his fellow Catholics banded together to learn “their duties as men and Frenchmen . . . [to] civil society, to which we give the sweet name patrie, . . . and to religious society.” Scoring well on their exams and maintaining their faith, they became “more virtuous men and more enlightened citizens.”35 Although Ozanam might write home complaining about his life in the “capital of egotism” and comparing a godless Paris to a “vast cadaver,” he was navigating its challenges with great success and satisfaction.36

The Society of Saint Vincent de Paul The Society of Saint Vincent de Paul emerged out of these networks of Catholic students, but it was also a retreat from their combativeness. Ozanam’s political and social views were changing rapidly during his student years. The mennaisian call for a church capable of engaging with the modern world made his youthful legitimism seem irrelevant, and the papal condemnation of Lamennais surprised and disappointed him. In April 1834 Ozanam delivered a paper on the recently published Paroles d’un croyant to a private meeting of a Catholic student group, and he was startled to find his words reported in L’Ami de la religion, a legitimist Catholic paper that mocked Ozanam as one of those “young intellectuals [who] get carried away with theories and systems.” The paper published Ozanam’s response but sneered at his protest that he had merely offered a few modest remarks to stimulate discussion in a private meeting and that he had only religious, not political, convictions.37 There had never been any question of Ozanam’s obedience to Gregory XVI, but this brush with controversy left him feeling burned: “We Catholics have been punished,” he wrote, “for having placed more confidence in the genius of our great men than in the power of our God.”38

34. FO to his father, Mar. 15, 1835, Lettres de FO, 1:174–75; Anne Martin-Fugier, La Vie élégante ou la formation du Tout-Paris, 1815–1848 (Paris, 1990), 260–65. 35. New Year’s address to the Société des études littéraires by Auguste Valette, Jan. 5, 1829, AA, fonds Bailly, FU 5. 36. FO to his mother, Nov. 7, 1831, and FO to Ernest Falconnet, Dec. 18, 1831, Lettres de FO, 1:53, 67. 37. L’Ami de la religion, June 5, 1834, quoted in Cholvy, Frédéric Ozanam, 201; FO to Monsieur Cartier, June 5, 1834, Lettres de FO, 1:138–41. 38. FO to Léonce Curnier, May 16, 1835, Lettres de FO, 1:182.

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In the aftermath of Paroles d’un croyant, Ozanam confided to a Lyonnais school friend that he hoped for nothing more than to see the “destruction of political passions in favor of social ones.”39 Silk-worker revolts in Lyon in 1831 and 1834 caused Ozanam to worry about his family’s safety, but they also encouraged him to think about the industrial economy and worker organization. Men he admired, like Charles de Montalembert, assured him that that the rebels were in fact devout Catholics who marched “under the black flag of hunger” rather than supporting any particular political movement. The silk workers, Montalembert insisted, were opening a “new era in the history of revolutions” in which simple, devout men would look to the church to support the justice of their claims.40 Ozanam’s firsthand experience with charity was the decisive element that pushed him away from political questions and toward social ones. In the spring of 1833 he and five close friends discussed meeting as a conférence de charité, the kernel of what would become the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul. Like Ozanam, Auguste Le Taillandier, Félix Clavé, Jules Devaux (all born 1811), François Lallier (born 1814), and Paul Lamache (born 1810), were provincials in Paris to complete their education; Devaux studied medicine while the others were in the law faculty.41 They approached Emmanuel Bailly (born 1794), a Catholic publisher who also ran a boarding house where Catholic students lived and their student groups met. He provided them with meeting space as well as contacts in the world of Parisian charity, and he was a logical choice for president when the society moved to a more formal organizational structure. Bailly was also particularly devoted to Saint Vincent de Paul, and it may have been his inspiration to name the society after this seventeenth-century icon of French charity.42 The founding members all came from the world of Catholic student debating associations, but in the new organization faith was the foundation of their activities rather than an issue to be defended. As Lamache later recalled, “after having fought with pen and speech . . . for the defense of religion,” they all felt the need of “mutual support in the practice of doing good.”43 The intense emotions

39. FO to Ernest Falconnet, July 21, 1834, Lettres de FO, 1:142. 40. CM, “Lyon en 1831,” Union bretonne, Apr. 15, 1832, reprinted in Œuvres polémiques et diverses de M le Comte de Montalembert, vol. 1 (Paris, 1860), 217–38, quotation on 233. 41. On the founding members, see Mathieu Brejon de Lavergnée, La Société de Saint-Vincent-dePaul au XIXe siècle (1833–1871): Un fleuron du catholicisme social (Paris, 2008), 60–69; Georges-Albert Boissinot, Un Autre Vincent de Paul: Jean-Léon Le Prevost (1803–1874) (Ville St. Laurent, Can., 1991). 42. Pierre Jarry, “Un Artisan du renouveau catholique au XIXe siècle: Emmanuel Bailly,” (doctoral diss., Université catholique d’Angers, 1971). Bailly’s oldest son, born 1832, was christened Vincent de Paul; as an adult he joined the Assumptionist order and edited the daily paper La Croix. 43. Paul Lamache in Le Monde, Aug. 4, 1892, quoted by Louis Baunard, Ozanam in His Correspondence (Dublin, n.d.), 69.

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of the first Christmas Mass that the young men attended together reminded Ozanam of his first communion, he wrote.44 They were creating a fraternal Catholicism in which charity began at home, among the members of the society, who needed their brothers’ love to run the gauntlet of youth with their faith intact. Charity toward the poor was a means toward that end; young men who aided the destitute would be reminded of Christ’s life on a regular basis and would support one another’s faith. Ozanam quickly embraced an expansive view of the society and supported new memberships. Others found it more difficult to imagine that an association based on intimate friendship could accommodate new members. The question of growth arose at the third meeting when François Lallier proposed his classmate from the Collège Stanislas, Gustave Colas de la Noue, now studying law and writing poetry. There were objections to opening the society beyond the original tight-knit circle to include men who might be friends with one member but unknown to others. The founders concluded, however, that charity demanded that they reach out to other young men who recognized that their isolation endangered their faith and who asked for help. Colas de la Noue was admitted by unanimous vote, which became the standard procedure for new memberships. Within a few months the society had seventeen members; the ten additions included at least four law students, two more Stanislas graduates, and three Lyonnais friends of Ozanam, including his cousin.45 In 1835, the members of the society voted to admit Charles de Montalembert to what was essentially an honorary membership; Ozanam and his friends admired Montalembert tremendously but did not expect him to join them in the practice of weekly visits to the poor.46 Ozanam encouraged the growth of the society in Paris and beyond; his vision of Christian fraternity was almost infinitely elastic. Less than two years after the first meeting of the society, Ozanam proposed its division into three separate branches, each maintaining its own treasury and holding separate weekly meetings, and all three gathering once a month for a general assembly.47 Many members were reluctant to pursue expansion because members of different branches of the society would be merely acquaintances, not truly friends. The debate lasted for several months, but eventually members accepted Ozanam’s proposal. The following year he announced that a friend

44. FO to Ernest Falconnet, Dec. 30, 1834, Lettres de FO, 1:159. 45. Origines et fondateurs, 19–20; Brejon de Lavergnée, La Société, 70. 46. Minutes for the meetings of Mar. 24, 31, 1835, “Procès verbaux de la Société de Saint Vincent de Paul,” vol. 1 (Dec. 17, 1833–Aug. 16, 1836) (an undated copy of the original minutes), SSVP, 83–84. 47. Minutes for the meeting of Dec. 16, 1834, ibid., 63–65.

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from his childhood had created a similar society in Nîmes that sought affiliation with the Parisian group; the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul was moving away from its initial intimacy and toward a more bureaucratic structure. Ozanam’s hope was that young provincials would discover the society in Paris and establish branches across France as they returned to their homes after completing their studies, and he assiduously promoted memberships from Lyon.48 The society grew rapidly: by mid-1836, three years after its foundation, it had two hundred Parisian members who visited three hundred families on a regular basis.49 Shortly after the society celebrated its first decade, Ozanam reported to his friend Lallier that there were now over nine thousand members—much had changed since the day when they had been scolded for proposing Gustave de la Noue’s candidacy.50 The charitable practices developed by the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul were an innovation in lay piety in several respects. Ozanam and his friends brought the structure of the voluntary association—an emblem of bourgeois civic responsibility in the postrevolutionary years—to religious practice. The society was emphatically not a confraternity, a form that, by the early nineteenth century, increasingly organized female and peasant piety.51 Confraternities, which had been a prominent form of male, urban, elite sociability under the Old Regime, focused on the Eucharist and therefore required the leadership of a priest; Masses performed for the souls of deceased members were their primary activity. The Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, in contrast, had a lay membership and governed itself democratically and according to parliamentary procedure; it voted on candidates for membership, on the society’s leadership, and on recipients of charitable aid. At weekly meetings, members prayed together and discussed their charitable resources, but they did not receive communion. The prayers and support that laymen could offer one another replaced the Mass as the society’s main object.

48. Minutes for the meetings of Nov. 4, 1834, and Feb. 10, 1835, ibid., 54–55, 71–75; FO to Emmanuel Bailly, Nov. 3, 1834, and FO to Léonce Curnier, Nov. 4, 1834, both in Lettres de FO, 1:152–53, 153–55. See also FO’s letters to friends suggesting that they create provincial branches of the society: to Ferdinand Velay in Metz, May 2, 1835, and to M Gorse in Tulle, Jan. 4, 1836, both in Lettres de FO, 1:179–80, 208–9. 49. FO to his mother, July 23, 1836, Lettres de FO, 1:219–22. The annual budget was four thousand francs. 50. FO to François Lallier, Mar. 23, 1845, Lettres de FO, vol. 3, L’Engagement (1845–1849), ed. Didier Ozanam (Paris, 1978), 65. 51. Catherine Duprat, Usage et pratiques de la philanthropie. Pauvreté, action sociale, et lien social, à Paris, au cours du premier XIXe siècle, 2 vols. (Paris, 1996); Martine Segalen, Les Confréries dans la France contemporaine (Paris, 1975); and Hazel Mills, “Women and Catholicism in Provincial France, c. 1800–c.1850. Franche Comté in National Context” (D. Phil. thesis, Oxford University, 1994). Cf. Maurice Agulhon, La Sociabilité méridionale: Confréries et associations dans la vie collective en Provence orientale à la fin du 18e siècle, 2 vols. (Aix en Provence, 1966).

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Ozanam and the early Society of Saint Vincent de Paul were, in many ways, still caught up in the same dilemma as Charles de Montalembert and other young mennaisians: how could they be both obedient Catholics and autonomous adult citizens? They were determined to be an egalitarian association of laymen, and the central problem that faced the society in its first years was maintaining independence from clerical control. As branches of the society multiplied, the general council emphasized the need to consult with parish priests in an appropriately deferential manner but without ceding authority to them. For many priests, however, lay direction was a sign not of strength but of Catholic weakness, reminiscent of the darkest years of the Revolution.52 Jurisdictional conflicts erupted over whether bread and firewood coupons should bear the name of the society or of the parish priest and whether members were allowed to cross parish boundaries in aiding the poor.53 When new conferences elected priests as their presidents, the general council tried to remonstrate gently while preserving the principle that each branch of the society was autonomous and governed by the will of its membership. Ozanam was committed to maintaining the lay direction of the society, and he was convinced that the presence of clerical authority would undermine Christian fraternity.54 As they developed the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul’s charitable practice, Ozanam and his friends adopted a form of giving generally associated with women. The centerpiece of Vincentian charity was the home visit: instead of distributing aid from a central location, members of the society fanned out across the parish to identify and visit the poor in their own homes. Charitable visiting was a common practice among bourgeois women, and according to Ozanam’s Lyonnais friend and biographer, Léonce Curnier, young Frédéric had accompanied his mother on her rounds.55 Children’s stories about girls learning charity regularly featured mothers who visited

52. Gérard Cholvy, “De l’homme d’œuvres au militant: Une évolution dans la conception du laïcat catholique en France depuis le XIXe siècle,” Miscellanaea Historiae Ecclesiasticae 7 (1985): 215–42 and Cholvy, “L’Emergence d’un laïcat catholique: Le premier 19e siècle,” Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 93, no. 3 (2000): 274–88. 53. For conflict with priests, see, e.g., minutes of the meeting of the conseil de direction, Apr. 1 and Nov. 26, 1837, “Conseil général, Procès verbaux originaux, 14 avril 1836–5 avril 1841,” SSVP, 6–8, 10–11, and minutes of the meeting of the general assembly, Dec. 8, 1839, “Conseil général, Procès verbaux originaux, 21 février 1836–10 mars 1848,” SSVP, 52. For an example of debates over coupons, see Conférence de St. Nicolas du Chardononet, May 10, 1854, Archives nationales, 79 AS 35. 54. Minutes of the meeting of the conseil de direction, Nov. 11, 1850, “Conseil général, Procès verbaux originaux, 14 février 1848–26 décembre 1853,” SSVP, 137–39. 55. Curnier, La Jeunesse, 10–12.

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“their poor” weekly and who initiated their daughters—not usually their sons—into this tradition. Images of charitable visiting in the nineteenth century almost exclusively represented it as a female practice.56 The Society for Maternal Charity, founded at the end of the eighteenth century and present in every French town by the mid-nineteenth, emphasized the presence of elite women in the homes of the poor as a way of building cross-class sympathy. This relationship between mothers at opposite ends of the social spectrum was the quintessence of nineteenth-century charity. The destitute mother and child were the blameless victims of the modern economy, elite women were their natural protectors, and the home was their common domain.57 “Philanthropy”—a rational, outwardly directed ideology that sought to remedy social ills rather than to minister to individual souls—was charity’s more masculine counterpart.58 Enlightenment philanthropists argued that traditional Christian charitable practices had deleterious effects on society because almsgiving too often encouraged laziness. Charity’s focus on souls rather than on social and economic order opened it to abuse. Philanthropists, in contrast, wanted to create useful citizens and economic actors. Philanthropic critics of traditional charity often expressed their disdain in gendered terms for what they saw as ineffective, soft-hearted, and soft-headed almsgiving: one could hardly be surprised, they implied, that women encouraged begging and pauperism by indiscriminate generosity. Philanthropic giving refused to accept the maxim that the poor would be always with us; well-regulated aid should eliminate need and transform society. Ozanam and his friends explicitly rejected this philanthropic model. Philanthropy, Ozanam insisted, was nothing but bureaucratic paper pushing: memos, reports, and minutes that served as “decoration” for an essentially vain activity. Philanthropy, he wrote, “likes to look at itself in the mirror.”59

56. Mathieu Brejon de Lavergnée, “Le genre du philanthrope: Pour une histoire sexuée de l’assistance au XIXe siècle,” in “Femmes, genre, et catholicisme: Nouvelles recherches, nouveaux objets (France XIXe–XXe siècles),” ed. Bruno Dumons and Anne Cova, special issue, Chrétiens et sociétés, Documents et mémoires 17 (2012): 85–103. 57. Christine Adams, Poverty, Charity, and Motherhood: Maternal Societies in Nineteenth-Century France (Urbana, IL, 2010); Sarah A. Curtis, “Charitable Ladies: Gender, Class, and Religion in MidNineteenth-Century Paris,” Past and Present 77, no. 1 (2002): 121–56; Hazel Mills, “Negotiating the Divide: Women, Philanthropy, and the ‘Public Sphere’ in Nineteenth-Century France” in Religion, Society, and Politics in France since 1789, ed. Frank Tallett and Nicholas Atkin (London, 1991), 29–54. 58. Catherine Duprat, “Pour l’amour de l’humanité”: Le Temps des philanthropes. La Philanthropie parisienne des lumières à la monarchie de Juillet (Paris, 1993). 59. FO to Léonce Curnier, Feb. 23, 1835, Lettres de FO, 1:166.

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When philanthropists went to work, Ozanam noted in a speech shortly before his death, “one sees money changing hands, but without feeling the beat of the heart.”60 Members should take care that their society not become “a philosophical institution, a Christian bureaucracy where paper is everything and hearts count for little.”61 Ozanam’s deliberate embrace of charity characterized the society as a whole, which, as Emmanuel Bailly announced to the general council, “sets aside social theories in order to visit the poor.”62 Bailly, Ozanam, and other leaders of the society repeatedly reminded members that caritas was more important than cash and that bourgeois manhood was incomplete without compassion. The young men of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul were aware that they were following the lead of Catholic women. When speaking of the “revival of practical charity” that the society had generated, leaders noted that “half the human race” had preceded them in this work: “for a long time Christian women had the meritorious privilege, if not of charitable gifts, then at least of charitable acts.”63 In adopting a female form of charitable practice, the Vincentians modeled both the moral perfection associated with women and the humility attached to male imitation of female behavior. Their initial instructor in charity was Sister Rosalie Rendu, a Daughter of Charity famous for her work among the poor of the Mouffetard neighborhood on the Left Bank. In their first meetings, the young men of the society had recognized that the main obstacle to their plan to visit the poor was that none of them were acquainted with any suitable candidates. Sister Rosalie introduced the students to their destitute neighbors in the Latin Quarter and instructed them in the needs of poor families; she also encouraged the notion, associated with Saint Vincent de Paul, that the rich benefited most from the practice of charity because it caused them to grow in humility and faith.64 Like the women of the Society for Maternal Charity and similar groups, the young Vincentians emphasized that the essence of charity was the personal contact between the donor and the recipient, not the aid that changed hands. The physical presence of the bourgeois student in the home of the 60. FO, “Discours à la conférence de Florence” ( Jan. 30, 1853), in Œuvres complètes, vol. 8, Mélanges (Paris, 1855), 49. 61. FO’s report on Lyonnais conférences in the minutes of the meeting of the general assembly, May 3, 1840, “Conseil general, Procès verbaux originaux, 21 février 1836–10 mars 1848,” SSVP, 79. 62. Emmanuel Bailly speech in the minutes of the meeting of the general assembly, Apr. 6, 1845, ibid., 137–38. 63. Circular of July 14, 1841, “Conseil général, Procès verbaux originaux, 4 mars 1838–7 décembre 1845, Lettres et circulaires,” SSVP, 273. 64. Louise Sullivan, Sister Rosalie Rendu: A Daughter of Charity on Fire with Love for the Poor (Chicago, 2006), 210–14.

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destitute was a sign of their equality in Christ. Ozanam in particular imagined charitable visiting as a Catholic intervention in “the struggle between the rich and the poor, between the egotism that seizes and the egotism that hoards.”65 The society emphasized that this charitable visit was a difficult gesture, requiring resolution and self-discipline. A bourgeois student would feel disgust at encountering poverty for the first time, “all his senses . . . painfully assaulted” by squalor. Many men would escape as quickly as possible, tossing bread coupons into a filthy apartment. But the dedicated Christian mastered his natural repugnance and entered; he “breathes . . . without grimacing, cordially greets the humble inhabitant. . . . [He] takes his place next to the stove, talks to the family, often encouraging them, occasionally scolding them, but always with affection.”66 This act of “consecration of each for the good of all and especially for the protection of the weak” could defuse class conflict, replacing it with fraternal, Christian sentiment.67 Adopting a female form of charity posed certain problems for the young men of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul; in particular, visiting the poor involved spiritual danger for young, unmarried men. When wealthy women visited their poorer sisters, the common experience of motherhood shaped their relationship, but when young men paid similar calls, their motives appeared less innocent. For an organization like the Society for Maternal Charity, poor women represented the innocent victims of modern society, but for the members of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul they represented sexual danger. Vincentian rhetoric reversed the usual roles familiar from stories of students and shopgirls: young and inexperienced men were the potential victims, while the women of the lower classes, assumed to be sexually adept, were their temptresses. Branches of the society worried about the danger that poor women posed to members, so they arranged for men to visit in pairs, preferably with one older member as part of the team. Many conferences simply did not visit households with women, especially young or single women. Because their purpose was not to resolve the social question, members felt no guilt at excluding some households.68 65. FO to Emmanuel Bailly, Oct. 22, 1836, Lettres de FO, 1:236. 66. Minutes of the meeting of the general assembly, July 9, 1845, “Conseil general, Procès verbaux, 21 février 1836–10 mars 1848,” SSVP, 145–46. 67. FO to Louis Janmot, Nov. 13, 1836, Lettres de FO, 1:243–44; Duprat, Usages et pratiques, 953–60. 68. Minutes of the meeting of July 2, 1845, “Conseil général, Procès verbaux originaux, 4 mars 1838–7 décembre 1845, Lettres et circulaires,” SSVP, 334–35; and minutes of the meeting of the general assembly, Apr. 30, 1843, “Conseil général, Procès verbaux originaux, 21 février 1836–10 mars 1848,” SSVP, 115. See also the minutes of the meeting of the general assembly, Mar. 14, 1848, ibid., 41–42.

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The Vincentians’ attitude toward households with women suggests a certain abstraction of the poor. Ignoring women—the poorest of the poor—did not seem like turning their backs on the weakest members of society. Ozanam and his fellow students were more inclined to see their own weakness, which they understood as spiritual and sexual rather than social and economic. The destitute individuals who received students into their homes and who accepted coupons for bread and firewood were in some ways merely instruments to serve the spiritual needs of members, who saw no need to inquire into the causes of their poverty. Indeed, the society prided itself on avoiding such questions, which were for philanthropists rather than charitable Christians. Envisioning the poor as a group without women posed no difficulties for this early Vincentian practice of charity, which focused on the individual souls of members rather than on any concept of the social.

Marriage and the Social Marriage transformed Ozanam’s view of society and charity: Amélie Soulacroix, who married him in 1841, was an important catalyst for the development of her husband’s social thought. Where the young, bachelor Ozanam understood charity as a devotional practice that bound elite young men together in friendship, after his marriage he embraced a view of society as a web of obligations that extended beyond friendship and crossed class lines. Charity was foremost among these obligations. His fearful rhetoric of Catholics throwing themselves on the front lines of class warfare gave way to an optimistic view of democracy and its possibilities. This shift was not easy for Ozanam, who found it difficult to exchange his world of idealized male fraternity for marriage and family life. The letters Frédéric and Amélie exchanged during their courtship reveal his growing sense of the individual as embedded in a family and bound by ties of love and obligation. Although Ozanam had never fully accepted the liberal individual as an ideal social type, marrying and forming a family forcefully brought home to him the inadequacies of the liberal view of society. As Ozanam reached his late twenties, he faced difficult choices about the course of his life. In 1836 he passed his exams, qualified as a lawyer, and returned to Lyon to practice, which he disliked. He was closely involved in the Lyonnais branch of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, where he invested considerable effort in reassuring local “orthodox bigwigs” that the young Vincentians were not wild-eyed revolutionaries.69 His correspondence

69. FO to François Lallier, May 17, 1838, Lettres de FO, 1:306–7.

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fostered ties between Lyon, Paris, and the branches of the society forming around France and Europe. He wrote letters of recommendation for young men from Lyon studying in Paris, encouraged his friends to found new branches, and tried to maintain fraternal relations from a distance. However, the society was a young man’s game, and Ozanam still had to decide what to do with the rest of his life. Career and marriage were the obvious next steps, but he was hesitant to take them. The common notion that the marriage bond was the foundation of society did not resonate at all with the young Ozanam; indeed, he saw marriage as a threat to society and especially to the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul. His student friends were at the same stage in their lives, settling into professions and choosing brides, and Ozanam clearly disapproved. Family life, he feared, merely promoted “selfishness in pairs.”70 “[M]arriage has its dangers,” he wrote—he had never met a married man whose work and whose charity had not suffered from the “calamity of domesticity.”71 Loving friends and loving the poor both recalled Christ’s love of humanity, but loving a wife and children seemed to Ozanam merely self-absorbed. As his friends married, his correspondence revealed his conviction that they had abandoned true charity. He wrote them stilted notes of congratulation in which he hoped that their newfound happiness did not cause them to forget their friends. He chided them to remember that they had loved the poor first, long before they thought of finding a bride.72 In letters to his closest friend, François Lallier, Ozanam was more forthright, asserting that avarice was a factor in any marriage and commenting scornfully on the dowries of his friends’ brides. He archly declared that he always cried at weddings, and he tried to talk Lallier out of entering the “humiliating” state of matrimony.73 When his advice went unheeded, he reported the event to another, still-bachelor friend: Lallier had “just married an annuity of twenty thousand livres with the unfortunate condition that he has to be a full-time son-in-law in Sens where . . . his intellectual activity will be stifled by domestic concerns and the stupidity of small-town life.”74 Clearly, Ozanam assumed that marriage was incompatible with charity; once young men took on the responsibilities of a household, they would no longer be fully dedicated to their Vincentian brethren, much less to the poor.

70. FO to François Lallier, Oct. 13, 1838, Lettres de FO, 1:326. 71. Ibid., 1:327. 72. See, e.g., FO to Léonce Curnier, Oct. 29, 1835; to Alexandre Dufieux, Apr. 22, 1837; and to Auguste Le Taillandier, Aug. 21, 1837, all in Lettres de FO, 1:196–98, 261–62, 275–76. 73. FO to François Lallier, Oct. 5; 1837, Oct. 13, 1838; Feb. 22, 1839, Lettres de FO, 1:280–81, 326–27, 340–43. 74. FO to Ferdinand Velay, May 10, 1839, Lettres de FO, 1:348–49.

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Ozanam’s rejection of marriage was closely tied to his abhorrence of sex, and he hoped that male friendship, among its other virtues, would act as an antidote to sexual desire. The friends with whom he enjoyed a transparent, egalitarian relationship could replace women, whose company was deleterious to male virtue. On the verge of leaving for Paris, the young Ozanam congratulated himself that “love’s fatal passion still had no power over my heart and that I still know nothing but friendship.”75 His correspondence with friends and with his elder brother hinted at his struggles with the temptation of masturbation.76 In 1837, having completed his studies and returned to Lyon to practice law, he continued to praise “virile virginity,” next to which marriage seemed like “a kind of abdication, of disgrace.” Lallier frankly recommended marriage to his friend as the remedy for concupiscence, but Ozanam was inclined to see it as giving in to sin and acknowledging the defeat of his will.77 Ozanam’s freely expressed disdain for women and marriage reflected his own crisis of vocation, which peaked in 1839. He was not content to choose a path in life that served merely his personal or familial interests; he wanted to place his life in the service of God and the church, but he could not see how to proceed beyond the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul. His family situation made it imperative that he choose a path: his father died in 1837 leaving him to look after his mother; his elder brother, Alphonse, was a priest, and his younger brother, Charles (born 1824), was still a boy. Although he had a promising law practice, he disliked the work and began planning a move into academia, successfully lobbying for a chair teaching commercial law in Lyon. He admitted that teaching law appealed mostly because it did not commit him definitively to anything, as either marriage or taking vows would.78 He also completed his doctoral thesis in literature, writing about Dante. He certainly preferred Dante to law, but he saw no clear vocation in his love of literature. A clerical vocation seemed in many ways the most obvious path toward a life devoted to charity, and Ozanam came close to joining the Dominican order, which Henri Lacordaire was then reestablishing in France. When Ozanam contemplated a religious vocation, he was not looking for a safe retreat to distance himself from the world. He found Lacordaire’s example inspiring: 75. FO to Auguste Materne, June 5, 1830, Lettres de FO, 1:13–15. 76. On Ozanam’s correspondence and adolescent sexuality, see Cholvy, Frédéric Ozanam, 228–29, and Gabrielle Houbre, La Discipline de l’amour: L’éducation sentimentale des filles et des garçons à l’âge du romantisme (Paris, 1997), chap. 2. 77. François Lallier to FO, quoted in Cholvy, Frédéric Ozanam, 330–31. 78. FO to Henri Pessonneaux, Oct. 21, 1836, Lettres de FO, 1:234–35.

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after his preaching success at Notre Dame, Lacordaire had entered the Dominicans, the order of preachers, which had been dissolved in France during the Revolution. Lacordaire presented the restoration of the Dominicans as a test case for the July monarchy’s commitment to religious liberty: would France allow citizens who had taken vows of poverty and who wore the distinctive habit of the Dominican friar to live freely and in community on their native soil? His intention was simply to return to France and, without asking for authorization, live a communal life with his Dominican brothers—they would challenge the French state to arrest men living peaceful and productive lives in their own home.79 While Ozanam was agonizing over his future, Lacordaire was taking his final vows and preparing to return to France; they corresponded, and Lacordaire recognized that Ozanam would be an excellent recruit.80 Ozanam had long admired Lacordaire and thought that monastic life might be the way to realize permanently the Christian fraternity he had found in the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul. He was also drawn to the defiant Catholicism, asserting its natural affinity for liberty, that Lacordaire practiced. In late 1839 and 1840, a series of events resolved Ozanam’s uncertainties and set him on the path of a university career and a lay mission. The death of his mother in October 1839 freed him from the need to remain in Lyon, and he received a much-coveted appointment to teach literature at the Sorbonne. Finally, he met Amélie Soulacroix, who, first as his fiancée and then as his wife, encouraged him in the adoption of a new and broader vision of a Catholic society. Providence had intervened in the midst of his doubts, and the “cruel question of vocation” was suddenly clear: he was called to the “shifting sands” of Paris, but this time with a “guardian angel to console me in my solitude.”81 Going forward with a wife at his side, Ozanam could face all doubts because “although God might leave me to die blind and alone, He would not allow a girl full of innocence and purity, of strong principles and tenderness,” to give herself in vain.82 In the abstract, women and wives frightened Ozanam, but Amélie herself transformed the calculus of his decision and convinced him that women were in fact the heart of society.

79. The father of one of the French Dominicans had invited the group to establish their community in his home, and Lacordaire planned to test the government’s willingness to allow a young man to live with his friends in his father’s home. Lacordaire to Montalembert, Sept. 28, 1841, and Jan. 6, 1843, in Lacordaire-Montalembert Correspondance inédite, 1831–1861, ed. Louis Le Guillou (Paris, 1989), 531–34, 565–67. 80. FO to Henri Dominique Lacordaire, Aug. 26, 1839, Lettres de FO, 1:359–61. 81. FO to François Lallier, Dec. 6, 1840, Lettres de FO, 1:440. 82. FO to Amélie Soulacroix, May 13, 1841, Lettres de FO, vol. 2, Premières années à la Sorbonne (1841–1844), ed. Jeanne Caron (Paris, 1971), 150.

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Amélie Soulacroix was the daughter of the rector of the University in Lyon, age nineteen when she met Frédéric Ozanam at her father’s New Year’s reception. Amélie’s recollections attributed Frédéric’s initial attraction to the domestic scene in which they met. He was struck by her affection for her sick young brother; having received a small gift, she gave it to the boy so that he might unwrap the package and share her surprise. It was, she wrote, a “natural action, of no particular merit,” but it drew the attention of “a young man who didn’t seek out the society of women.”83 Having decided that his future path lay in the direction of a Parisian academic career, Ozanam was ready to fall in love quickly. Amélie was from Lyon, had grown up in an academic family, had been highly recommended as a suitable bride, and was demonstrably compassionate. Frédéric made up his mind almost immediately. Without being a disastrous choice, Frédéric Ozanam was by no means an obviously superior husband for Amélie Soulacroix. His decision to pursue a career in Paris meant separation from her family, especially her chronically ill brother. Frédéric’s Parisian position as adjunct to Claude Fauriel, who held the chair in foreign literature, was poorly remunerated; he was giving up a salary in Lyon that approached 10,000 francs for 2,400 francs at the Sorbonne and a contract that had to be renewed annually.84 Amélie was in no hurry to marry, and with her family’s support, she had already refused one suitor. However, she and her parents both recognized that Ozanam had prospects: in addition to a promising academic career, he had a considerable reputation as a Catholic activist. Moving to Paris would initially mean a tight budget for the young couple, but it would also put Ozanam at the center of French intellectual life. Amélie and her parents weighed these factors carefully before she accepted Ozanam’s proposal. The engagement was concluded in November 1840 and the wedding date set for summer 1841, after Frédéric had completed his first year of Sorbonne lectures. Amélie and Frédéric conducted a courtship by letter in these months before their wedding; in six months of frequent correspondence, they became acquainted while imagining future married life.85 Although Frédéric had found the decision to marry difficult, being engaged was delightful, and he quickly wrote himself into love with his fiancée. Amélie was more circumspect, and her preparation for marriage to an ambitious young

83. Amélie Ozanam, “Notes biographiques,” 326. See also Xavier Lacroix, “Frédéric Ozanam, amoureux, époux, et père,” also in Chareire, Frédéric Ozanam, 189–206. 84. Amélie Ozanam, “Notes biographiques,” 318. 85. For an extended discussion of the courtship, see Walch, La Spiritualité conjugale, chap. 7.

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professor included attending lectures on literature and lessons in composition with a tutor.86 Still, she quickly came to enjoy the self-conscious gallantry of their correspondence in which they played with the tropes of the love letter. Frédéric was Amélie’s knight in armor: he entered the lists—the amphitheater at the Sorbonne where he lectured—wearing her colors. Amélie sent him pressed flowers from bouquets she had worn that he could carry folded into her letters.87 Frédéric, who was reading troubadour poets, announced that he had studied enough to be allowed to advance from theory to practice, and he unsuccessfully begged Amélie to advance the date of their wedding to Easter.88 In the last letter he wrote to his fiancée before joining her for their wedding, Frédéric proposed to assemble and bind their correspondence—just as one might seal important documents and certificates in the foundation of an important edifice, their letters should be preserved as the basis of their marriage and the family they would build.89 As Amélie’s confidence grew, she loosened Frédéric’s earlier, rather priggish belief in his own moral superiority. She encouraged him to socialize more widely, reminded him that paying calls could be professionally useful, and recommended that he spend a bit more on his wardrobe. She chided him for working too hard and reminded him that his health was now tied to her happiness.90 Amélie was not interested in Frédéric’s capacity for renunciation, and she insisted that the family budget would be safe with her—she was studying domestic economy so that their household would be secure.91 Frédéric, who had previously been so confident in his own rectitude, was now anxious about the fact that he did not dance, and he repeatedly—but not entirely truthfully—assured Amélie that his objection did not spring from puritanical religious sentiment. He did not wish to deprive her of any enjoyment and hoped that he would have the pleasure of watching, if not partnering, her on the dance floor. Amélie responded that while she did not

86. FO to Amélie Soulacroix, Jan. 24, 1841, Letttres de FO, 2:59; Zélie Soulacroix to FO, n.d. [early 1841], and Amélie Soulacroix to FO, Feb. 7, 1841, Archives Laporte-Ozanam. 87. E.g., Amélie Soulacroix to FO, Apr. 3, 1841, Archives Laporte-Ozanam. 88. FO to Amélie Soulacroix, Mar. 14, Mar. 21, 1841, Lettres de FO, 2:102–3, 112; FO to JeanBaptiste Soulacroix, Mar. 17, 1841, Lettres de FO, 2:104–7. 89. FO to Amélie Soulacroix, undated [June 14, 1841], Lettres de FO, 2:182. The velvet binding of the Ozanams’ courtship letters is part of the Archives Laporte-Ozanam, and I am grateful to Michèle Le Pavec for bringing it to my attention. 90. E.g., Amélie Soulacroix to FO, Feb. 7, 1841 [Feb. 13]. See also Amélie’s letter about Charles Ozanam’s reluctance to join in parlor games for fear his brothers might scold: to FO, Mar. 27, 1841. Also Amélie to FO, Apr. 24, 1841, all in Archives Laporte-Ozanam. 91. Amélie Soulacroix to FO, Mar. 8–11, 1841, Archives Laporte-Ozanam.

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agree with him about dancing, she was nonetheless willing to give it up as a married woman.92 Ozanam’s shift toward a less rigid and moralizing approach to the world was part of a larger movement toward imaging life as a couple; women increasingly appeared to him as indispensable exemplars of virtue. He wrote to Amélie that although the “austere isolation” of his studies had left him “ignorant of the moral wonders of the character of a Christian woman,” he was learning quickly.93 Selfishness, which he had previously associated with marriage, now appeared as an “involuntary” consequence of the single life, the fate of the man “who does not surround himself with sacred affection.”94 He had previously thought of his life in Paris as the realization of all his ambitions; like the hero of a Balzac novel, he had the world at his feet. He now recognized, however, how limited and impoverished his ambitions had been. His previous refusal to think of marriage was, he admitted, prideful, because he had assumed that he was sufficient unto himself. In fact, he concluded, young men could not expect to fulfill their own needs as well as those of the poor without women’s help because “one cannot rest against oneself. The child lays its head on his mother’s lap; the sister wipes the dust from her brother’s brow, and though a wife may appear to lean on her husband, in fact it is her hand on his arm that supports his heart.”95 He was prepared to lay his scholarly accomplishments at Amélie’s feet, recognizing that they were hollow, because “solitude has done nothing to temper my character.”96 Frédéric’s solitude—and her role in breaching it—was also a common theme in Amélie’s letters. Amélie had little to say about the opportunities that Paris offered; she saw only isolation, and she sincerely pitied Frédéric’s solitary state. She felt almost guilty at being so happily surrounded by loving family when he was “alone and sad,” with only professional success to comfort him.97 There was nothing surprising about his occasional black moods, Amélie asserted, and certainly no “weakness of character”; how could he be happy when he was alone? The approval of his students and his colleagues would never produce more than temporary exhilaration.98 Marriage, Amélie

92. FO to Amélie Soulacroix, May 13, May 19, May 28, 1841, Lettres de FO, 2:149, 153–55, 161–65. Amélie Soulacroix to FO, May 23, 1841, Archives Laporte-Ozanam. 93. FO to Amélie Soulacroix, Jan. 10, 1841, Lettres de FO, 2:47–48. 94. FO to Amélie Soulacroix, Dec. 22, 1840, Lettres de FO, 2:36. 95. FO to Amélie Soulacroix, Jan. 24, 1841, Lettres de FO, 2:56. 96. FO to Amélie Soulacroix, Apr. 4, 1841, Lettres de FO, 2:124. 97. Amélie Soulacroix to FO, Apr. 3, 1841, Archives Laporte-Ozanam; see also May 12, 1841, Archives Laporte-Ozanam. 98. Amélie Soulacroix to FO, Mar. 14, 1841, Archives Laporte-Ozanam.

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assured her fiancé, would reconstruct the family that Frédéric had lost with his departure for Paris and the death of his parents. He would have not only a wife but also parents to replace those he had lost—her parents would become his and he would no longer be an orphan.99 By Easter, Frédéric had adopted Amélie’s interpretation of his solitary life and orphan status. He wrote of Paris as a “foreign city,” and he counted down the days of his “exile” until he could return to Lyon for their wedding.100 Although he welcomed the affection and advice of Amélie’s parents, in his version of family reconstituted through marriage, Amélie took the place of his mother. He was delighted to hear that his brother Alphonse had given Amélie their late mother’s parasol; he liked to think of his mother’s shadow surrounding and protecting his fiancée.101 He was also pleased to think that they shared brothers; he enjoyed hearing about the Soulacroix hospitality extended to his brothers in Lyon, and he maintained that he loved Amélie’s brothers like his own. In his exile life, he recognized, he had been incapable of true communication because without “the heart of a mother, or of the woman who replaces her” a young man’s most earnest sentiments remained locked inside of him.102 Amélie would be mother, sister, and wife, and Frédéric’s family would be fully reconstituted in her. Both Frédéric and Amélie took pleasure in writing of “we” and “us.” In spite of his philosophical objections to liberal individualism, Ozanam had never really thought of his future as tied to that of others. He and his Vincentian friends had been pursuing parallel, autonomous paths, but he and Amélie were following interlaced trajectories. He wrote to his fiancée that the “wretched I that I always used to fall back on is giving way to we, a lovely pronoun that encompasses so much.”103 Amélie insisted that this “we” had to be more than a rhetorical device as she scolded him for not telling her that Fauriel had decided to reduce the amount he planned to pay his adjunct. She 99. Amélie Soulacroix to FO, Mar. 14, 1841, and Mar. 27, 1841, Archives Laporte-Ozanam. Amélie’s parents, Zélie and Jean-Baptiste Soulacroix, corresponded regularly with their prospective son-in-law, assuring him of their parental affection; they even adopted Frédéric’s brothers, inviting them to dinner and including them in the family circle. E.g., Jean-Baptiste Soulacroix to FO, Feb. 5, 1841, with a note from Zélie at the bottom; Charles Ozanam to FO, n.d. [winter, Feb.? 1841]; Zélie Soulacroix to FO, Feb. 27, 1841, and May 12, 1841, all in Archives Laporte-Ozanam. 100. FO to Amélie Soulacroix, Apr. 21, 1841, Lettres de FO, 2:124. In May 1841, after a brief Easter visit to Lyon, Frédéric began counting the days of his exile in dating his letters to Amélie. E.g., May 1, 1841: “the 13th day of my second captivity.” Lettres de FO, 2:135. 101. Amélie Soulacroix to FO, Mar. 14, 1841, Archives Laporte-Ozanam; FO to Amélie Soulacroix, Mar. 17, 1841, Lettres de FO, 2:107. 102. FO to Amélie Soulacroix, Mar. 21, 1841, Lettres de FO, 2:114. 103. FO to Amélie Soulacroix, Feb. 20, 1841, Lettres de FO, 2:82. Walch, La Spiritualité conjugale, chap. 7.

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had learned of his reduced income from his brother Alphonse, and while she understood that Frédéric did not want to “speak to [her] about business,” she was not so reticent: “I will talk about business, about our business.” She could appreciate his desire to spare her unpleasant news, but she had never thought that “money can make happiness,” and she preferred to “share everything so that I can really speak of us.”104 Frédéric apologized and acknowledged that a burden shared was much lighter. He assured her that he detested speaking in the first person singular because it represented “a selfish solitude that does not answer the needs of my character; I need the moral support of family, the feeling of us.” Henceforth, he agreed, “we will speak of us; there will be no more isolation . . . just the complete fusion of two destinies.”105 “I believe sincerely in mutual vocations,” Frédéric wrote. “I believe in a Providence that made us for one another.”106 A fortnight before their wedding, Amélie reminded him of how close they were to the moment “when we will say: no you without me, nor me without you.”107 Although letters were the couple’s primary mode of communication, prayer was another. During their engagement, Frédéric regularly requested Amélie’s prayers, and she willingly offered them, although she emphasized their unworthiness—if her prayers had any effect at all, she told him, it was because they joined those of his mother in heaven. When Amélie and Frédéric addressed their prayers to God, they also communicated with one another, and they found great comfort in knowing that they prayed simultaneously for one another. Thus at the very moment when Frédéric was delivering his first Sorbonne lecture—a prospect that made him nearly ill with anxiety—Amélie and her mother attended Mass in the chapel at St. Nizier in Lyon, where the couple would later marry. One way of integrating Frédéric into the Soulacroix family was for him to join in novenas offered for the health of Amélie’s invalid brother, Théo.108 Amélie made a point of going to Masses offered by Alphonse Ozanam so that prayers might draw the entire family circle together. After their marriage, when circumstances forced them apart, Amélie and Frédéric continued to supplement their letters with joint prayers and communion. Ensuring that they were both praying and receiving the Eucharist at the same time remained a meaningful form of contact; the young couple prayed with as well as for each other.109 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109.

Amélie Soulacroix to FO, n.d. [Feb. 28] 1841, Archives Ozanam-Laporte. FO to Amélie Soulacroix, Mar. 6, 1841, Lettres de FO, 2:91–92. FO to Amélie Soulacroix, Apr. 21, 1841, Lettres de FO, 2:125. Amélie Soulacroix to FO, May 28, 1841, Archives Laporte-Ozanam. Zélie Soulacroix to FO, May 12, 1841, Archives Laporte-Ozanam. FO to Amélie Ozanam, July 23, 1842; July 23, 1844, Lettres de FO, 2:322, 559.

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In building a marriage on the foundation of a shared faith, Amélie and Frédéric had relatively little clerical guidance. Catholic writing about family in the mid-nineteenth century focused primarily on children as the purpose and culmination of conjugal love, and the obligation of fertility came to dominate clerical advice for married couples. Widows, especially those like Alexandrine de la Ferronnays who refused to remarry, were also emerging as spiritual models in the nineteenth century. In contrast, the devotional life of a married couple attracted little attention.110 Amélie and Frédéric worked out for themselves their sense that devotion to a spouse could both originate with and lead to devotion to God. As the months of their engagement drew to a close, Frédéric drew on the Book of Tobit to express his hopes for their marriage. The biblical story signaled to Amélie that Frédéric expected to observe the traditional three “nuits de Tobie” of continence after their marriage as a test of his will.111 It also reflected Frédéric’s anxieties about marriage: Tobias was initially nervous about marrying Sarah, whose previous seven husbands had all died on their wedding night, but the angel of God reassured him that it was his destiny to lift the spell that had doomed her previous bridegrooms. Like Tobias gazing on Sarah, Frédéric wrote Amélie, he had heard the voice of God when he met his future bride: “She will walk by your side on the same path, and the merciful God will save you through each other.”112 Where the biblical angel assures Tobias that he will save his wife, lifting a curse that had doomed her previous husbands, in Frédéric’s version, husband and wife are the vehicles of each other’s salvation. Frédéric returned to the story of Tobias on the first Easter of their marriage in a poem that he wrote for Amélie. In verses that he slipped inside a new prayer book, he contemplated his praying wife: “And I finally understand that a fraternal angel has been given to me from on high, as to Tobias, to prevent me from ever cursing the earth or forgetting heaven!”113 As Frédéric’s “fraternal angel,” Amélie strengthened rather than drained his charitable impulses. He confessed to her that his Vincentian friends’ zeal 110. Walch, La Spiritualité conjugale, 339, 375, 378–81. 111. John McManners observes that by the eighteenth century the custom of remaining continent for two or three “nuits de Tobie” was “out of favor with the clergy.” Church and Society in Eighteenth-Century France, vol. 2, The Religion of the People and the Politics of Religion (New York, 1998), 27. Nonetheless, devout Catholics like Ozanam and Montalembert preserved the practice in the nineteenth century. CM, Journal, 2:198–99 (Aug. 16–18, 1836). 112. FO to Amélie Soulacroix, May 1, 1841, Lettres de FO, 2:139. 113. Quoted by Agnès Walch, “Frédéric et Amélie Ozanam: Un Itinéraire matrimonial exemplaire,” in Frédéric Ozanam (1813–1853): Un universitaire chrétien face à la modernité, ed. Bernard Barbiche and Christine Franconnet (Paris, 2006), 75–83.

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always seemed to wane after marriage, but he was confident that she would encourage his attention to the poor. Among his fondest memories of their short time together after their engagement, he wrote, was that she had allowed him to spend one of his last nights in Lyon at a charitable assembly.114 Amélie also imagined charity as an important part of their future together; like many Lyonnais women of her class, she visited the poor regularly. When it came to visiting the sick, she assured her fiancé, she was “halfway to being a Daughter of Charity.”115 As their wedding neared, Frédéric wrote her long descriptions of his hopes and his strategies for the expansion of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul. Amélie no longer seemed to him to be in competition with the poor or with his friends. Rather, she was a reminder of divine presence that he had lacked since the death of his mother. Just as a “sealed urn is the best keeper of perfume,” a good woman, “sheltered from the bustle and the pollution of the world,” would help a young man like Frédéric maintain his love for humanity.116 Writing to François Lallier, whom he had earlier tried to dissuade from marriage, Frédéric acknowledged that “new ties don’t weaken old ones, and one’s ability to love, like anything else, becomes stronger as one uses it more.”117 Frédéric and Amélie’s epistolary courtship ended in June 1841 with their wedding, and their correspondence resumed only occasionally when Amélie visited her parents or went to the seashore on her own to recover her health after miscarriages in their first years of marriage. The letters they exchanged during these periods of separation demonstrate how fully their hopes for a loving married life had been realized and how deeply Frédéric came to depend on his wife. The young man who somewhat reluctantly entered into the engagement would not have recognized himself in the loving husband who complained of his wife’s long visit to her parents after a miscarriage and who petulantly insisted that he could not function in her absence. In the 1840s the Ozanams pursued the life that they had prepared for during their engagement; both Frédéric’s academic career and his charitable activities became joint projects that involved Amélie as well as her husband. The University was a family affair in the mid-nineteenth century, as Amélie, who both grew up and married into it, recognized. She organized his library and his notes and paid calls and received guests strategically, ensuring that the right people were aware of developments in Frédéric’s career. She also

114. FO to Amélie Soulacroix, Feb. 20, 1841, Lettres de FO, 2:80. 115. Amélie Soulacroix to FO, Mar. 17, 1841, Archives Laporte-Ozanam. See also May 12, 1841, Archives Laporte-Ozanam. 116. FO to Amélie Soulacroix, May 1, 1841, Lettres de FO, 2:135–40, quotation on 139. 117. FO to François Lallier, Apr. 30, 1841, Lettres de FO, 2:133.

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created a place for herself in the fraternal work of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul; she joined her husband on his charitable visits, and when he was occupied, she answered his charitable correspondence.118 Frédéric referred to the poor families that they visited as “our protégés.”119 Marriage definitively pushed the individual out of the center of Ozanam’s thought; the married couple, bound to one another by ties of affection and obligation, replaced it as society’s most fundamental unit.

1848: Going Over to the Barbarians The revolution of 1848 pushed Ozanam to reassess his views of society and charity, and it led him to articulate the new vision of faith and social responsibility that marriage had encouraged. Beyond the singular, individual encounter of the young Christian man with the poor, Ozanam identified social forces at work, and his view of charity increasingly rested upon a notion of justice. Women, instead of posing a moral and logistical problem to charitable men, defined society; the obligation to protect innocence and weakness was what held society together. Ozanam came to see marriage and society as similarly sacramental, imposing sacred duties on participants. The revolution also offered Ozanam opportunities to promote the vision of a Catholic social that his charity work and his discovery of family life had generated. In the 1840s, French Catholics organized politically, but Ozanam remained aloof from the political Catholicism represented by Charles de Montalembert. Montalembert had returned to public life after the mennaisian crisis of the early 1830s, and the compatibility of Catholicism and liberty remained the hallmark of his politics. He built a Catholic party around the cause of liberté d’enseignement—breaking the University’s educational monopoly so that Catholics might more easily send their sons to religious secondary schools. He was an active member of the Chamber of Peers, and he continued to place his faith in a lively Catholic press. Access to Catholic schools, he believed, was the issue that could mobilize the laity, which, with clerical support and a voice in the press, would become a force in French politics.120 He worked to create a network of “Catholic committees” across France that would report on candidates’ positions on independent schools.121 118. Walch, La Spiritualité conjugale, 372. 119. FO to Amélie Ozanam, Aug. 6, 1843, Lettres de FO, 2:344. 120. Sylvain Milbach, “La Liberté d’enseignement secondaire (1839–1847): Jalons et perspectives,” in Education et religion, XVIIIe–XXe siècles, ed. Christian Sorrel (Chambéry, Fr., 2006), 73–93. 121. Daniel Moulinet, Laïcat catholique et société française: Les comités catholiques (1870–1905) (Paris, 2008), 19–27.

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The campaign in favor of independent schools pushed Montalembert’s politics in an increasingly conservative direction that did not appeal to Ozanam. The national network of Catholic committees, in particular, meant that Montalembert’s closest allies were often the men of his family milieu— legitimist nobles—with whom he had broken during the July revolution. Montalembert’s objection to the July monarchy’s maintenance of the University became increasingly difficult to distinguish from his allies’ legitimist objection to Louis Philippe per se. The confrontational style that derived from his insistence that Catholics must make their presence in French political life known at all times also alienated moderates like Ozanam who felt that patience served the cause of French Catholics better than polemic. Montalembert described his politics as catholique d’abord—he claimed to place his religion ahead of any partisan position. His movement had the effect of revealing divisions among Catholics, however, and individuals like Ozanam found his distinction between what was “Catholic” and what was merely “political” to be problematic.122 Montalembert’s campaign placed Ozanam in a professionally awkward situation. He was a rising star within the University: his lectures in foreign literature had been a great success, regularly attracting audiences of 350 spectators, and he published his thesis on Dante in 1839.123 He firmly believed that Catholics could produce good scholarship and teach freely within the University. His religious commitments were also well known: his continuing role in the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul brought him some celebrity, and in the years after his marriage he was making ends meet by teaching at the very Catholic Collège Stanislas.124 In 1843 when the minister of public instruction, Villemain, asked Ozanam to refute some of the more virulent Catholic attacks on the University, Ozanam, who badly needed the minister’s goodwill, felt unable to refuse, although in an effort to avoid alienating Catholic friends he did request that his articles appear anonymously.125 When Fauriel died in 1844, Ozanam had hopes of being named to his chair. His father-in-law, Jean-Baptiste Soulacroix, was at the same time pulling all

122. Milbach, “La Liberté d’enseignement”; Milbach, “Les catholiques libéraux en révolution avant l’heure. Fin 1847: Suisse—Italie—France,” Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle 28 (2004): 59–78; and Milbach, “Frédéric Ozanam et les catholiques libéraux: Affinités et tensions,” in Barbiche and Franconnet, Frédéric Ozanam, 121–36. 123. FO, Dante et la philosophie catholique, vol. 6 of Œuvres complètes (Paris, 1855). 124. Gerard Cholvy, “Frédéric Ozanam et le Collège Stanislas,” in Sorrel, Religion et éducation, 109–28. 125. FO to Jean-Baptiste Soulacroix, Apr. 5, Nov. 29, 1843, Lettres de FO, 2:428–34, 506–8.

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available strings to find himself a position in Paris, close to the Ozanams.126 The opposition newspaper Le National found the simultaneous career maneuverings of the father and son-in-law suspicious: Ozanam’s nomination to the vacant chair in foreign literature and Soulacroix’s to the accounting office of the Ministry of Public Instruction suggested that Minister Villemain was pandering to Catholic opinion.127 Ozanam also found himself under attack from the Catholic newspaper L’Univers, which considered his moderation evidence of insufficient zeal for the Catholic cause.128 Frédéric and Amélie Ozanam spent much of 1844 anxious that the polemic surrounding Catholics and the University would derail both professional and familial projects. Ozanam’s desire to avoid the debate about Catholic education was not merely a prudent career strategy. He believed that he and his colleagues in the University were doing good work, and he doubted that Montalembert’s program would improve anyone’s education.129 The University, he wrote, allowed him to stand before “an assembly of young men in one of Europe’s great capitals” in order “to teach solid literary methods, to defend my faith freely, and from that faith to borrow insight into the great monuments of the human intelligence.”130 He did not feel persecuted or stifled as a Catholic academic, and he did not avoid lecturing on religious matters.131 Nor did he wish to confine his scholarship to Catholic apologia as a cleric might; laymen, he maintained, employed their talents more usefully in “grasping all of the details of [their] field in order to study them as a Christian.”132 He objected to Montalembert’s characterization of him as the lone Catholic in the University, struggling against his colleagues’ bigoted anticlericalism.133 Indeed, Ozanam freely expressed his respect for the talent of scholars who did not share his Catholic fervor; Victor Cousin, the bête noire of Montalembert’s movement, was, in Ozanam’s view, a man of undeniable ability

126. Among the many letters exchanged on the subject, see especially FO to Jean-Baptiste Soulacroix, Nov. 29, 1843; July 18, 1844; July 24–26, 1844, Lettres de FO, 2:506–8; 550–55; 560–64. 127. Cholvy, Frédéric Ozanam, chap. 9; FO to Jean-Baptiste Soulacroix, July 18, 1844, and FO to Jean-Baptiste and Zélie Soulacroix, Sept. 23, 1844, Lettres de FO, 2:550–55; 601–3. 128. Louis Veuillot, “De la modération et du zèle,” L’Univers, May 25, 1843, was a response to FO’s lecture “Des devoirs littéraires des chrétiens,” reprinted in Œuvres complètes, 7:137–47. 129. Even Montalembert had his doubts about the quality of secondary instruction that religious orders were able to provide; this concern pushed him to support the Jesuits, a position that the younger Montalembert of 1830 would have rejected. Milbach, “Les catholiques libéraux.” 130. FO to Auguste Materne, Dec. 4, 1842, Lettres de FO, 2:400–401. 131. FO to François Lallier, June 5, 1843; FO to Ernest Falconnet, May 22, 1844, Lettres de FO, 2:460, 535. 132. FO to François Lallier, Dec. 30, 1845, Lettres de FO, 3:151. 133. FO to Théophile Foisset, Oct. 21, 1843, Lettres de FO, 2:500.

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who was generally well disposed toward Christianity even if he was not devout. Nothing would be gained by refusing to engage with Cousin’s scholarship, Ozanam believed, and he mobilized his connections in Rome to keep Cousin’s work off of the Index of Prohibited Books.134 Writing candidly to his father-in-law about the difficulty of remaining neutral in the midst of polemic, Ozanam explained, “I stand with the Church and the University both, and I have not hesitated to dedicate to them my life, which will have been well lived if I honor God and serve the state. I want to reconcile these duties . . . [and] I think I have partially accomplished that in public education by standing in front of an audience of all faiths and parties and simply professing Christian learning.”135 Ultimately, Ozanam was unable to endorse the formation of a Catholic party or the mobilization around Catholic secondary schools because these issues increasingly seemed beside the point to him. Although Montalembert repudiated liberalism, his politics were, by the 1840s, too liberal for Ozanam.136 Free access to Catholic secondary schools was, after all, about giving individual Catholic fathers autonomy in their choice of where to educate their sons. Secondary education was also an elite preoccupation, and Montalembert’s concern was with shaping France’s leadership class. Ozanam did not oppose this agenda, but neither did he see it as sufficient to the future of Catholicism in France, which needed more than a leadership elite. Liberté d’enseignement was remote from the social questions that moved Ozanam; breaking the University’s monopoly over secondary education concerned the rights of autonomous citizens, but it said nothing about the obligations that Catholic citizens owed to one another. The web of obligation that, for Ozanam, constituted Christian society was infinitely more important than the rights of individuals. A Catholic party, he argued, could be decapitated in one fell swoop—better to work for a Catholic nation in which citizens recognized their duties to and affection for one another.137 In Ozanam’s view, the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul did more to constitute and strengthen social ties than secondary schools because Vincentian

134. FO to Théophile Foisset, Mar. 21, May 29, 1843, Lettres de FO, 2:426, 453–55. See also Christine Franconnet, “Jean-Jacques Ampère et Frédéric Ozanam: La Construction d’une amitié,” in Barbiche and Franconnet, Frédéric Ozanam, 61–74. Archbishop Sibour of Paris believed that if Cousin’s books stayed off the Index, the philosopher might convert. Austin Gough, Paris and Rome: The Gallican Church and the Ultramontane Campaign, 1848–1853 (New York, 1986), 56. 135. FO to Jean-Baptiste Soulacroix, Apr. 5, 1843, Lettres de FO, 2:432–33. 136. See Lucien Jaume’s discussion of Montalembert’s passage from “liberal Catholicism” to “Catholic liberalism” in L’Individu effacé ou le paradoxe du libéralisme français (Paris, 1997), 211–31. 137. FO to François Lallier, June 17, 1845, Lettres de FO, 3:86.

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charity was a tool of conversion both for young male elites and for the working classes. Face-to-face with one another, rich and poor experienced the very substance of society as they created the bonds that made society more than an abstraction. By the 1840s, Ozanam believed that the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul had proved itself an effective tool in the creation of a Christian elite; he reported proudly that his Vincentian brothers were reaching “the most eminent positions in society” in the courts, the medical profession, and the University.138 He was not a solitary, beleaguered Catholic at the Sorbonne precisely because the Vincentian movement had transformed his generation. Today’s students, he asserted, would no more return to the “irreligious prejudices of the Restoration” than they would to the principles of royal absolutism.139 Special Masses for men filled Parisian churches with Vincentians leading the way; for Easter 1844 they packed Notre Dame so tightly that it was impossible to kneel, he reported, and aristocrats rubbed elbows with workers, even a few liveried servants, as they waited in long lines to receive the Eucharist.140 The students from the faculties of law and medicine, Polytechnique, and the Ecole Normale who flocked to the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul demonstrated that a public education was perfectly compatible with Catholic faith. The birth of Amélie and Frédéric’s daughter Marie in 1845 confirmed both Ozanam’s distaste for political controversy and his belief that the bonds of society were more important than specious claims to individual autonomy. Before Marie’s birth Amélie had experienced several miscarriages, which Frédéric interpreted as evidence that God deemed him unready for fatherhood. Amélie, he concluded, was the innocent victim of his own unworthiness; her own merit was beyond question. The birth of a child was an indicator of Ozanam’s spiritual progress; God had now made him “the trustee and the guardian of an immortal creature.”141 Fatherhood was a form of ministry, Ozanam often noted, and when he looked at his daughter, he saw “the sacred imprint of our Creator, less blurred than in us.” Although he reported to a friend that “she cries a little more than I might like,” nonetheless, “every cry reminds me that I am a father and that I have a little angel imprisoned in my house.” “What philosophy there is in a cradle!” he concluded.142 As a

138. FO to Amélie Ozanam, May 1, 1841, Lettres de FO, 2:137. 139. FO to Ernest Falconnet, May 22, 1844, Lettres de FO, 2:535. 140. FO to Mme Haraneder (his aunt), Apr. 8, 1844, Lettres de FO, 2:528–29; FO to Théophile Foisset, Apr. 5, 1845, Lettres de FO, 3:68. 141. FO to M and Mme Haraneder, July 24, 1845, Lettres de FO, 3:106. 142. FO to Théophile Foisset, Aug. 7, 1845, and FO to Henri Pessonneaux, Aug. 29, 1845, Lettres de FO, 3:118–19, 125.

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young husband and father, Ozanam found himself “merely confirming what I used to call cliché, everything that people say about the holy sweetness of marriage, fatherhood, and family.”143 Marie’s birth completed Ozanam’s conversion to a worldview that emphasized identification with and obligation to the weak rather than fraternal bonding with social equals. Although Ozanam had become accustomed to thinking of himself as a scholar and a family man—certainly not as a politician—he found himself very much in the public eye when the February revolution occurred in 1848. For Ozanam, however, the revolution really began not in February in Paris but rather the previous year in Rome. He, Amélie, and Marie visited Italy in the first months of 1847, and he combined research on early medieval literature with observations of the reforms of Pius IX, who had become pope in 1846. Ozanam was among the Catholics inspired by the election to the papacy of the reformer Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti. In his first months as pope, Pius amnestied political prisoners, constituted a municipal government that included laymen as well as priests, and lifted some restrictions on the press. Ozanam saw Pius as the instigator of a quiet, beneficent “revolution” and as the “author of a new era” that would “reconcile the world with the papacy.”144 Both Frédéric’s and Amélie’s letters from Rome were full of their admiration for Pius IX. The family happened upon the pope as he was walking in a public garden, and he blessed them all, including little Marie. Previous popes had never walked through the city, Amélie reported, and they certainly did not pay surprise visits to adult night classes or call incognito on impoverished widows, as Pius did.145 He received the Ozanams in a private audience in which two-year-old Marie distinguished herself by kneeling and folding her hands in prayer as she had been taught.146 The Ozanams also received communion from him, and Amélie told her brother that Pius had “such a saintly air that you feel completely carried away in his presence.”147 Frédéric, too, wrote enthusiastically about this pope who took his pastoral duties as bishop of Rome so seriously. Freedom of assembly had come to Rome, he reported to his colleagues, and he had witnessed young men making political speeches in the streets in the presence of prelates.148 He was delighted that

143. FO to Ernest Falconnet, Jan. 2, 1846, Lettres de FO, 3:159. 144. FO to Alphonse Ozanam, Feb. 17, 1847, Lettres de FO, 3:248. 145. Amélie Ozanam to Théophile Soulacroix, Mar. 12, 1847, and Amélie Ozanam to Zélie Soulacroix, Feb. 3–4, 1847, Archives Laporte-Ozanam. 146. Amélie Ozanam to Zélie Soulacroix, Feb. 7 and Feb. 23, 1847, Archives Laporte-Ozanam. 147. Amélie Ozanam to Théophile Soulacroix, Feb. 13–15, 1847, Archives Laporte-Ozanam. 148. FO to Dom Prosper Guéranger, Jan. 29, 1847, Lettres de FO, 3:237–38; FO to Jean-Jacques Ampère, Mar. 31, 1847, Lettres de FO, 3:270.

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he and his family had been present in Rome for “this awakening of Italy, which [Pius] has pulled out of a sleep that resembled death,” and he was enchanted that one of the first words in his daughter’s vocabulary was papa, Italian for pope.149 Upon his return to France, Ozanam delivered a lecture on the new pope to the Catholic Circle, a gentleman’s club that offered devout laymen a religiously inflected sociability. Most of Ozanam’s lecture was a detailed account of Roman reforms combined with heartfelt praise for Pius’s wisdom.150 The virtues of moderation and caution, Ozanam claimed, characterized the new pope, who was skillfully navigating between factions. Some of Pius’s subjects looked to the medieval papacy and hoped to see the expulsion of the Habsburgs and papal rule over all of Italy, while others proposed constitutional charters as the model for modern papal government.151 Ozanam himself, like his hero the pope, refused to align with either faction; he was sympathetic both to Italian nationalist ambitions and to civil liberties. The impatience of both camps—to attack the Austrians immediately or to force an English or French mode of governance on Italy—was the principal danger that Ozanam saw facing Pius IX. At the end of his lecture Ozanam turned away from the theme of caution and from his careful discussion of Italian politics, and he addressed his hopes for Rome and for Catholic Christianity as a whole. A reforming pope in the nineteenth century would, he argued, “reconcile religion and liberty.” Ozanam’s measured argument gave way to rhetorical flight as he wrote of the “anguish in so many minds and the secret struggles of so many hearts” that “could not choose between these two things that were said to be incompatible.” The men of his generation, Ozanam wrote, were about to discover that Providence had chosen them to witness a transforming moment in the life of the church. A church that embraced liberty would revive Italy, placing it in the vanguard of progress. A regenerated Italy would be “proof for Ireland, for Poland, for all countries that have been sold, mutilated, and crushed by their masters that Christian nations never die.”152 Pius IX stood at a turning point comparable to that faced by the popes of late antiquity, and Ozanam believed that he would be similarly bold in moving forward. Pius’s predecessors on the throne of Saint Peter had been torn between Byzantium and the barbarian tribes. They owed love and loyalty to

149. 150. 151. 152.

FO to François Lallier, May 20, 1847, Lettres de FO, 3:298. FO, Les Dangers de Rome et ses espérances (Paris, 1848). Ibid., 7. Ibid., 22.

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Constantine’s empire, but they also recognized its decadence. The barbarians were violent and threatening, but discerning popes recognized “the vigor and the generous energy of the Carolingian people,” and they cast their lot with Charles Martel and Charlemagne, choosing an uncertain but promising future over a stagnant past. Similarly, Pius faced the choice between monarchy, which had long supported the church and therefore deserved Catholics’ respect, and democracy, the uncertain future, full of both threat and promise. Monarchy’s time was past “through its own fault” and by its “usurpation of God’s rights, by its trespassing on individual consciences.” Democracy, like the barbarians of the late empire, might at times be violent and cruel, but it indubitably represented the greater opportunity to bring souls to God. The papacy, Ozanam confidently claimed, would turn toward democracy, and French Catholics should be prepared to follow: “Let us go over to the barbarians,” he concluded, “and follow Pius IX.”153 Ozanam’s vision of the democracy that Catholics should boldly choose was, even in this lecture delivered before the February revolution, a social one. Ultimately, Pius would prevail among Roman factions because he had the people on his side. Ozanam dismissed the argument that Italy could not be reformed because it lacked a middle class; Catholic peasants and workers, standing beside the pope in “Christian fraternity,” were a solid foundation on which to build.154 Bourgeois Catholics like the men in Ozanam’s audience who hoped for a revived faith needed to recognize that it would not originate among them but rather among the poor and the working class. Elite and intellectual Catholics should accept that the future was in the hands of “this people that does not know us”; making their acquaintance was the most important task for elite Catholics like Ozanam and his colleagues.155 Bourgeois Catholics could facilitate the modernization of Catholicism by welcoming the poor into the church, but Catholics who merely bemoaned the working class’s lack of faith were missing the church’s destiny. The text of Ozanam’s lecture appeared in the Catholic newspaper Le Correspondant just twelve days before the February revolution began, and it helped set the tone for Catholic response to the Second Republic.156 Catholics generally welcomed the revolution: conservative legitimists were pleased to see the fall of the July monarchy, while more progressive Catholics believed that 1848 represented an opportunity for France to reconcile liberty

153. 154. 155. 156.

Ibid., 24. Ibid., 19–20. Ibid., 24. Le Correspondant, Feb. 10, 1848.

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and Catholic tradition. As part of this Catholic Left, Ozanam found himself swept up in what Pierre Pierrard referred to as the “fraternal, mysticoreligious, even messianic and prophetic tide” of February 1848.157 Like many of his colleagues, Ozanam believed that the revolution of 1848 was fundamentally different from earlier ones because its leaders regarded Christ and the Gospel (if not the Roman Catholic Church) with respect. Christian socialism flourished, and prints of Jesus as a worker and as the first socialist circulated widely.158 Henri Lacordaire, newly elected to the constituent assembly, famously entered the chamber and climbed to a seat in the upper left-hand corner, dressed in the white Dominican robes that he had risked arrest to wear when he returned to France in 1841. Félicité de Lamennais, too, sat on the left in the assembly as a representative of the city of Paris.159 Within days of the end of the July monarchy, Ozanam, Lacordaire, and the abbé Maret, a theologian at the Sorbonne, were planning to publish a daily newspaper, L’Ere nouvelle, whose prospectus appeared on March 1.160 The collaborators proposed a Catholic paper that would unambiguously express its support for the revolution, which they declared was “one of the most honorable, the most profound, and the most promising movements that the world had yet seen.”161 God not only permitted the revolution, they asserted, but actively encouraged it. When the first issue appeared in mid-April, the paper had just over 1,000 subscribers, a number that grew to 2,400 in its first two weeks. By June, the paper was printing 20,000 copies.162 L’Ere nouvelle was in some senses the heir to L’Avenir; Lacordaire’s participation made that lineage clear, and several of its main contributors had lived at La Chênaie or otherwise passed through mennaisian circles. In his endorsement of L’Ere nouvelle, the archbishop of Paris, Denys-Auguste Affre, specifically noted that it was innocent of all L’Avenir’s errors.163 By September, however, when

157. Pierre Pierrard, 1848: Les Pauvres, l’Evangile, et la Révolution (Paris, 1997), 10–11. 158. Edward Berenson, Populist Religion and Left-Wing Politics in France (1830–1850) (Princeton, 1984). 159. Pierrard, 1848: Les Pauvres, 35–28, 46–47. Ozanam stood unsuccessfully for election in Lyon, where his Parisian activities were not well known and he was generally assumed to be another legitimist Catholic. Cholvy, Frédéric Ozanam, 604. 160. Maret was a former mennaisian who had subscribed to the Agency for the Defense of Religious Liberty in 1830, collaborated with German biblical scholars, and joined the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul in its early years. His academic position meant that he, like Ozanam, was a member of the University. Claude Bressolette, L’Abbé Maret. Le combat d’un théologien pour une démocratie chrétienne, 1830–1851 (Paris, 1977), 70–100. 161. Prospectus for the Ere nouvelle, quoted in Pierrard, 1848: Les Pauvres, 44. 162. Christine Morel, “Un journal démocrate chrétien en 1848–1849: L’Ere nouvelle,” Revue d’histoire de l’église de France 63, no. 170 (1977): 25–55. Bressolette, L’Abbé Maret, chap. 7. 163. Bressolette, L’Abbé Maret, 460–62.

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Figure 5.3. Théodore Chassériau, portrait of Henri Dominique Lacordaire in his Dominican habit (1840), Louvre, Paris. Photo-Credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY. Used with permission of Art Resource, NY.

the more moderate Lacordaire left the paper and the editorial leadership passed to Maret, L’Ere nouvelle had become considerably more radical than its predecessor. Where L’Avenir argued that representative government was not necessarily incompatible with Christianity, L’Ere nouvelle insisted that democracy was intrinsically Christian.

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In L’Ere nouvelle Ozanam had the opportunity to work out what it might mean to “go over to the barbarians,” and he focused his efforts on social rather than political questions.164 He most fully elaborated his view of a Catholic society—one built on mutual obligation and anchored to women and family—in a series of articles written in response to legislation to legalize divorce proposed in the spring of 1848. For Ozanam, divorce threatened to achieve a liberal society composed of autonomous individuals by breaking the ties that obligated persons to one another. To other supporters of the February revolution, however, divorce seemed like a logical and necessary outcome of revolution; by restoring to French men and women the right to dissolve unhappy marriages, 1848 would realize the promise of 1789. During the July monarchy feminists and socialists had developed an extensive critique of marriage that linked it to property rights and economic order. They argued that free love and the abolition of marriage were necessary foundations for any society in which individuals enjoyed genuine liberty.165 The divorce legislation that Minister of Justice Adolphe Crémieux proposed in late May 1848 had, however, relatively little political support; few politicians, of either the Left or the Right, were prepared to associate themselves with socialist demands for free love. In the early, optimistic days of the Second Republic, few wished to risk the consensus that rallied Catholics to the cause of the republic. Thus when Ozanam opposed divorce in a trio of articles published in early June, his was hardly a lone voice; denunciation of divorce appeared in newspapers of most political shades, and Crémieux’s proposal never became law.166 Ozanam’s arguments against the Crémieux proposal relied on the novel proposition that divorce undermined democracy; he opposed divorce on both sacramental and social grounds. France should embrace indissoluble marriage not only because it corresponded with Catholic teaching but also because it sustained the social equality necessary to a republic. Unlike much Catholic polemic, Ozanam’s “Du Divorce” was not at all defensive; indeed, he welcomed the debate as an opportunity to reveal the depth of French society’s rejection of the idea.167 A society that rejected divorce was, he claimed, a society that was ready to put individual egotism aside and embrace democracy.

164. Morel, “Un journal démocrate chrétien,” 43. 165. Claire Goldberg Moses and Leslie Wahl Rabine, Feminism, Socialism, and French Romanticism (Bloomington, IN, 1993). 166. William Fortescue, “Divorce Debated and Deferred: The French Debate on Divorce and the Failure of the Crémieux Divorce Bill in 1848,” French History 7, no. 2 (1993): 137–62. 167. FO, “Du Divorce,” in Œuvres complètes, 7:151–83 (originally published in L’Ere nouvelle, June 6, 8, 10, 1848).

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In formulating this social argument against divorce, Ozanam broke with Catholic precedent, taking issue specifically with the most prominent Catholic writer on the subject, Louis de Bonald. Bonald’s 1801 essay, also titled “Du Divorce,” offered an explicitly political reading of the institution of marriage. Both marriage and the state, Bonald argued, were naturally hierarchical. The argument was familiar from the Old Regime: kings ruled over subjects just as fathers ruled over families. Bonald updated this account of royal authority for the postrevolutionary world; divorce, he argued, was democracy in the family, and monarchy could not survive in a society that permitted divorce. The “principle of indissolubility” had to operate simultaneously in the state and in the family.168 For Bonald, deference and obedience were the crucial relationships that organized individuals into families and polities. Divorce and democracy were both systems that inverted the proper distribution of power: divorce gave women the unwarranted capacity to challenge their husbands’ authority. That most divorces during the French Revolution had been initiated by women, Bonald claimed, proved nothing more than what was to him the obvious point that women were “weaker and more impassioned, not that they [were] more unhappy.”169 The proper role of the state, Bonald maintained, was not to create a fictive equality between spouses but rather to guarantee the proper concentration of power in the hands of husbands and fathers. Ultimately, Bonald’s rejection of divorce was political, not sacramental. He had little to say about marriage as sacrament or about spouses’ obligations toward God, and he described the ideal relationship between marriage and society without recourse to religious argument: “Peace and virtue will seat themselves at the domestic hearth when, between the father, mother, and children, the law of the State maintains the natural relationships which constitute the family, and when, in domestic as in public society, there is neither confusion of persons nor displacement of power.”170 He saw nothing fundamentally wrong with Jewish law on the repudiation of wives; as long as the capacity to break the marriage remained with husbands who retained control over any children, it was “an imperfect law . . . but . . . not evil or contrary to nature.” Repudiation might be unfortunate when used in excess, but it became abusive only when women claimed an equal right to it.171 Indissoluble marriage protected society from this usurpation of power by the weak.

168. 169. 170. 171.

Louis de Bonald, On Divorce, trans. Nicholas Davidson (New Brunswick, NJ, 1992), 39. Ibid., 106. Ibid., 129. Ibid., 81, 84.

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Ozanam, in contrast to Bonald, rejected divorce on social rather than political grounds. Family and society were both, in Ozanam’s view, organic relationships in which mutual obligation bound strong and weak members together. Ozanam turned Bonald on his head by arguing that divorce weakened democracy because it supported the interests of the strong (men) against those of the weak (women and children). Ozanam, who had no firsthand memories of divorce in the 1790s, assumed that it would be a tool that selfish husbands deployed against innocent wives and children. Men, whose earning power and social status grew as they aged, would benefit from divorce, while their former wives would sink into poverty, a situation with which Ozanam’s charitable work made him familiar.172 For Bonald, divorce produced an abusive egalitarianism; it gave the weak an unnatural leverage against the strong. For Ozanam, divorce encouraged an equally abusive authoritarianism, giving men license to indulge their appetites and to use their greater strength against their wives and children. Marriage, Ozanam insisted, was an institution that responded to the democratic need to provide protection for the weak. Ozanam’s desire to imagine a Catholic democracy that would repudiate divorce on both democratic and Catholic grounds required a certain amount of tortured logic. He argued that neither the February revolution nor the Revolution of 1789 had produced popular demand for divorce; neither the cahiers de doléance nor the protesters at the barricades in February called for the dissolution of marriages. During the Revolution, no one but materialist philosophes had wanted divorce, and now, Ozanam claimed, only a handful of lawyers who could not bear to see a single page of the Napoleonic civil code ripped out repeated their demands. Ozanam even interpreted high levels of concubinage among the workers of Paris as respect for the sanctity of marriage—they lived in sin because they respected the sacrament, which they would not undertake lightly, not because they wanted “the legal fiction of a dissoluble marriage.”173 No democratic consensus demanded divorce, Ozanam maintained, and a French state that listened to the will of its citizens would ensure the sanctity of marriage. Ozanam’s argument against divorce relied on a view of marriage that he had developed in his life with Amélie and during his charitable practice. As a husband and father, Ozanam saw marriage as the moment when a man was able fully to conceive of society not because he entered into the exercise of authority but because he willingly sacrificed his autonomy. Young men

172. FO, “Du Divorce,” 176–77. 173. Ibid., 174–76.

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joined society via sacrifice: when they married, they gave up the limitless possibilities of youth in return for heterosexual, marital love and its obligations. The passage from adolescence to adulthood, Ozanam theorized, was simultaneously the moment when the young man became “master of himself ” and the point at which he “tire[d] of belonging to himself.” Marriage was a divinely ordained and socially productive response to the young man’s “infinite need to give of himself.” Moreover, Christian marriage was inherently democratic because it made men equal—it gave them all “the same sacred position, the same obligations and the same joys.” Building on their equality as husbands and fathers, men learned “to treat one another as brothers.”174 Without the firm foundation of indissoluble marriage, then, the democratic project became impossible. In the early 1830s the adolescent Ozanam had agonized over losing to a wife the autonomy that he had gained among male comrades. By 1848, however, Ozanam declared that “the moment in which a man gives away his heart is also the moment when he controls his destiny.” Marriage with the possibility of divorce reduced this gift to the status of “a short-term lease.”175 Ozanam’s mature view of marriage built on a new theology of salvation that emphasized that society was full of innocent people—notably women— who could expect God’s grace. Lacordaire was one of the most prominent Catholic writers to break with the doctrine that most people were damned and to propose that the list of the saved was in fact quite long. Women and the suffering poor featured prominently on Lacordaire’s roster of the elect.176 Romantic Catholics like Lacordaire and Ozanam looked at society and saw so much virtuous innocence—especially among women—that they could not believe that the majority of their fellow human beings would not reach heaven. Marriage depended on the extraordinary virtue that ordinary women exhibited. When women married, Ozanam argued, they gave themselves entirely to the sacrament, holding nothing in reserve. Married women inevitably lost some measure of their beauty, their capacity to love another man or form another family, possibly their health, and, of course, any economic resources. A woman’s sacrifice was thus far greater than her husband’s because her investment in marriage was completely unrecoverable. In exchange, she acquired “affection and familial respect”—not a fair trade

174. Ibid., 182, 183. 175. Ibid., 154–55. 176. Guillaume Cuchet, “Une Révolution théologique oubliée. Le triomphe de la thèse du grand nombre des élus dans le discours catholique du dix-neuvième siècle,” Revue d’histoire du dixneuvième siècle 41 (2010): 131–48.

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in any terms an accountant might set but a sacramental one requiring the security of indissoluble marriage.177 Women’s sacrifice created family and society, and because wives anchored men to the obligations of social life, they deserved male gratitude and protection. Ozanam was not interested in women’s political status, much less their rights. His discussion of women and marriage is much less passionate—and less thoughtful—than his account of young men choosing to marry, and he never considered other possibilities, even religious vocation, that women might pursue. He objected to Bonald’s political conception of the family because it assumed that the home would always be a realm of conflict with wives wanting the upper hand over their husbands. In Ozanam’s account of divorce, as in his charitable work, women featured as symbols of weakness and innocence. Ozanam was more convinced than Bonald of the immutability of women’s weakness; the possibility of women’s seizing power that so concerned Bonald does not seem to have occurred to Ozanam. Women’s extraordinary virtue that nearly guaranteed their salvation also made it impossible to imagine them as autonomous actors; they remained motionless in history, incapable of self-assertion and the possibility of mortal sin that agency would entail. Ozanam’s view of marriage as a school for fraternity opened a space for romantic Catholic social thought while eliminating active female participation within it. L’Ere nouvelle and Ozanam’s engagement with the Second Republic both ended in disappointment. The optimistic early days of the republic came to an end with the June Days, an uprising of Parisian workers protesting the closure of the National Workshops that had provided work for the unemployed. The National Guard led the repression, which killed over four thousand Parisians. Among the dead was the archbishop of Paris, Denys-Auguste Affre, who was killed on the barricades during an effort to mediate between workers and National Guard, an idea suggested by Ozanam and several of his Vincentian colleagues.178 Affre’s death was accidental, but it nonetheless served a conservative argument that democracy led necessarily to violence. L’Ere nouvelle made many enemies on the Catholic Right after the archbishop’s death by suggesting that the rioters’ socialist materialism deserved pity as well as condemnation. The paper continued to support working-class demands, notably the right to work, and found itself increasingly isolated from the Catholic mainstream represented by Montalembert, Louis Veuillot, and

177. FO, “Du Divorce,” 154–55. 178. Amélie Ozanam, “Notes biographiques sur Frédéric Ozanam,” 322–23.

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L’Univers. In the December presidential elections, L’Ere nouvelle supported General Cavaignac as the candidate most likely to preserve a moderate republic. Montalembert, believing that France needed to be saved from crisis, gave up on the republic and offered his support to Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte. L’Ere nouvelle acknowledged Bonaparte’s electoral victory and proclaimed optimistically that the republic’s institutions would prove stronger than any individual politicians. Long before Bonaparte proved them wrong, however, the owner of L’Ere nouvelle sold it to a legitimist buyer; the last issue appeared in April 1849, just shy of its first anniversary.179 Ozanam returned to his scholarship, and the work he produced in the final years of his life focused on his “precious barbarians,” as his wife described them: the Germanic tribes who had brought down the Roman Empire and who, in Ozanam’s research, continued to show clear affinities to the contemporary working class. La Civilisation au Ve siècle, his final Sorbonne lectures left unpublished at his death in 1853, analyzed “how Christianity was able to transform the ruins of Rome and the tribes camped on top of those ruins into a new society that was capable of knowing truth, doing good, and recognizing beauty.”180 This was Ozanam’s ambition for a democratic society, and he continued to believe that Catholicism could intervene in the social question, defusing the conflict between rich and poor and allowing for a just and peaceful transfer of power to the masses. He believed that just as the fall of Rome proved to be the necessary condition for the birth of European Christendom, the violence and instability of revolution would pave the way for a new Christian and democratic era. Ozanam began his Civilisation au Ve siècle with an autobiographical preface in which he presented his lectures as a Christian response to Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon, the eighteenth-century materialist sitting in the Roman church of Ara Coeli, wanted to peel away the distorting layers of the Christian past and restore the Temple of Jupiter that lay beneath. Ozanam, child of the postrevolutionary religious revival, also visited Ara Coeli, where he rejoiced to see the Franciscan brothers praying on the Capitoline hill; he resolved to write a story of Christian progress to counter Gibbon’s narrative of Roman decadence.181 Ozanam had come to see his life’s research—which he recognized that he might not complete—as a history of the Middle Ages bookended on the one hand by the fifthcentury barbarians and on the other by Dante. His history would reveal the 179. Pierrard, 1848: Les Pauvres, 63–66, 73–79. 180. FO, La Civilisation au Ve siècle, vol. 1 of Œuvres complètes, 1–2. 181. Ibid., 5.

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formation of European Christendom organized along national lines and producing national literatures. Like Dante’s great poem, Ozanam’s history would be a comedy: its hell would be the dark ages of the fall of Rome, its purgatory would be the chaotic and violent episode of the crusades, and its paradise would be the “religious splendors of the thirteenth century,” not least Dante himself.182 Ozanam pursued his analogy to Dante by invoking his own Beatrice—his wife, Amélie. He did not name her, but there is no mistaking the identity of the woman whose presence “reveal[ed] . . . the power of Christian love whose works [this book] will recount.” This unusually personal introduction led into a history in which women played a remarkably large role: Ozanam dedicated a full lecture to the history of women in the late Roman Empire, which resonated strongly with his journalistic writing on women of his own era. Christian women in the fifth century fulfilled the same destiny as Amélie Ozanam did in the nineteenth: they taught men to revere weakness and to care for those who suffered. Amélie and the barbarian Christian women of late antiquity represented social conscience as they taught men to respect “the dignity of the slave, the worker, the poor, of the man who obeys, works, and suffers, that is to say, of the better part of humankind.”183 In his lecture, “Christian Women,” Ozanam argued that women’s faith mediated the ultimately productive encounter of Roman and barbarian societies. Barbarian peoples, he claimed, respected women as priestesses and warriors who stood firm in conflict; strength and fortitude were the desirable qualities in women as well as in men. Roman society, in contrast, instrumentalized women, valuing childbearing over marriage, which was easily dissolved, especially in cases of barrenness. Christianity created a new social and sexual order that was superior to both the Roman and the barbarian. Christian marriage, according to Ozanam, rejected the reproductive imperative and instead presented itself as the example of how society should function; in marriage, partners abandoned their individuality in favor of unity. Husband and wife were equal—in human value if not in political rights—and they recognized their mutual obligation. Once accepted, that relationship could never be legitimately abandoned. Christian women—like Monica, mother of Saint Augustine, and Clothilde, wife of the Merovingian king

182. Ibid.; Isabelle Chareire, “Frédéric Ozanam, lecteur de Dante,” and Marco Bartoli, “Frédéric Ozanam, historien du Moyen Age,” in Chareire, Frédéric Ozanam, 233–46, 247–59; Raoul Manselli, “Il Medioevo come ‘Christianitas’: Una scoperta romantica,” in Concetto, storia, miti e immagini del Medio Evo, ed. V. Branca (Bologna, 1973), 41–79. 183. FO, La Civilisation au Ve siècle, 74.

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Clovis—gave birth to a new European society by introducing their sons and husbands to Christian love. Ozanam’s lecture explicitly drew parallels between the fifth century and his own. The account of Christian marriage as a sacrifice for both husband and wife that he had used in his Ere nouvelle essay on divorce reappeared verbatim in La Civilisation au Ve siècle.184 Christianity had assured women’s reception into civil society, and Christian women of the fifth century, Ozanam asserted, had passed through the streets of cities to visit the poor just as their contemporary counterparts did. Recognizing these devout women as rulers over the “gentle empire of charity,” men of both eras respectfully allowed them to pass without insult.185 Pursuing the analogy between the fifth century and the nineteenth, Ozanam clearly hoped that his era would also see the birth of a new Christendom in which nations realized the democratic potential of Christian societies. If his aspirations for a new Christian era were to be realized, it would be because Christian men, inspired by the example of Christian women, recognized that their obligations to the weak took precedence over their rights as individuals. Frédéric Ozanam died before he could finish his masterwork on the Middle Ages. His efforts to convince his contemporaries that they were living through a moment of Christian rebirth, parallel to the barbarian invasions of the late Roman Empire, remained similarly unfulfilled. Few of his fellow Catholics embraced his romantic view that the modern working class would revitalize Christianity and lead to a new era of achievement, just as the Germanic tribes had eventually produced medieval Christian society and Dante. Far from seeing working-class Christians as the harbingers of a new social consciousness that would replace liberal individualism, his fellow Catholics more often concluded that the 1848 revolution demonstrated workers’ covetousness and natural inclination to violence. In spite of his disappointments, Ozanam’s reputation survived, and his concept of a Catholic social never disappeared from view, in no small measure because of Amélie’s determination. A new generation of social Catholics at the fin de siècle was able to revive Ozanam’s ideas because Amélie had dedicated herself to preserving his memory. She promoted biographies of Frédéric and oversaw the publication of his complete works. She defended his status as founder of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul against those who advanced the claims of Emmanuel Bailly and his traditional, reactionary

184. Ibid., 85–86. 185. Ibid., 88.

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Catholicism, a mantle that his sons, the Assumptionist fathers Vincent de Paul and Emmanuel Bailly, assumed under the Third Republic.186 She also remained a very visible figure in the world of Parisian charity, focusing her involvement particularly on the Œuvre du bon pasteur, an association for the protection of girls and women. Restoring Amélie to the story of Frédéric Ozanam’s charitable thought reveals the centrality of women—in multiple roles, both actual and imaginative—to the development of social Catholicism. After his marriage, Frédéric gradually abandoned the fraternal model of Catholic society that had been so important to romantic Catholics around 1830. In its place, he elaborated a vision of society in which women represented the bonds that tied individuals together: marriage rather than friendship dominated his mature vision of a Catholic social. Women like Amélie possessed extraordinary virtue that should give all Catholics hope for salvation. They also embodied weakness and the fragility of these social ties, and the modern economic order routinely exploited their goodness. Women’s dependence reminded Catholic men of their own path to salvation, which lay in protecting and imitating women’s virtue. Ozanam hoped that just as the synthesis between Roman and barbarian that produced the medieval world had taken place first among Christian women, charitable women and their male imitators would be the vanguard of a modern synthesis between traditional Catholicism and the new barbarians of the working class.

186. On the controversies over the foundation of the society, see Mercier, La Société.

 Ch ap ter 6 A Free Church in a Free State The Roman Question

Frédéric Ozanam never wrote a critical word about Pius IX, although we know from Amélie’s correspondence that he lost sleep worrying about events in Italy and the pope’s abandonment of the reforming agenda that Ozanam had found so inspiring in 1847.1 The heady moment in which Ozanam called for his fellow Catholics to join Pius in welcoming the barbarians into the arms of the church did not last. Pius, forced into exile by revolution and the establishment of the Roman Republic in 1849, returned to govern the Papal States thanks to a French expeditionary force. The restored pope embodied clerical intransigence; he became the pope of the Syllabus of Errors and of papal infallibility, utterly rejecting any suggestion that the church might change with the times or accommodate modern liberal, nationalist, or democratic politics. Ozanam left journalism and retreated toward his historical research on the barbarians of the fifth century; the analogy he had drawn in 1848 between the Germanic tribes of the late Roman Empire and contemporary working classes had fallen on deaf ears. Ozanam died in 1853, before the conflict between Italian nationalism and papal sovereignty became acute. His fellow romantic Catholics of the postrevolutionary generation, however, had to confront the tension between

1. Amélie Ozanam to Zélie Soulacroix, Nov. 28, 1848, Archives Laporte-Ozanam. 236

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their aspirations for a modern Catholicism and the increasing intransigence of the Roman Church. The question of the temporal sovereignty of the papacy in the era of the Italian Risorgimento provoked a crisis that threatened the ideological foundations of the romantic Catholics of Ozanam’s generation. Their Catholicism had always been ultramontane, looking to Rome for leadership and associating the Gallican church with nostalgia for the Old Regime throne and altar alliance. Their attachment to the city of Rome was profound and emotional; pilgrims like Ozanam, Pauline Craven, and Charles de Montalembert felt a deep affinity with the Christian landscape of the city, especially the catacombs, which reminded visitors of the unbroken history that linked them to the early Christian martyrs.2 Having abandoned the tradition of fealty to a long line of divinely ordained French kings, they turned instead to the Roman inheritance of Saint Peter and rooted their identity in the cosmopolitan embrace of Peter’s city. Although Gregory XVI’s condemnation of mennaisian ideas had disappointed them, they remained confident that Catholics could always look to Rome in their effort to establish alternatives to liberal political regimes that embraced anticlericalism and privileged individual rights over social obligations. After 1848, however, the papacy rejected not merely specific modern political ideas such as liberalism and socialism but the entire gamut of postrevolutionary political and social thought. The 1864 Syllabus of Errors suggested that there was no meaningful difference between romantic Catholics and their liberal or socialist contemporaries; their common willingness to come to terms with the nineteenth century relegated them all to the same pariah status. Instead of guiding Catholics through the confusing modern world and helping them to live in it as devout Christians, the Syllabus of Errors famously and bluntly asserted that the Roman pontiff need not and should not “reconcile himself . . . with progress, liberalism and modern civilization.”3

2. Yves Bruley, “La Romanité catholique au XIXe siècle: Un itinéraire romain dans la littérature française,” Histoire, économie et société 21, no. 1 (2002): 59–70, and Emile Perreau-Saussine, Catholicism and Democracy: An Essay in the History of Political Thought, trans. Richard Rex (Princeton, 2012), 22, 29, 51. Pauline Craven’s first published work was an account of the catacombs that the abbé Gerbet encouraged her to write and then included in his Esquisses de Rome chrétienne as the words of “a young Christian girl of twenty.” Maria Catherine Bishop, A Memoir of Mrs. Augustus Craven, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London, 1895), 1:16. See also Philippe Boutry, “Les Saints des catacombes: Itinéraires français d’une piété ultramontaine,” Mélanges de l’école française de Rome 91, no. 2 (1971): 875–930, and Wendel W. Meyer, “A Tale of Two Cities: John Henry Newman and the Church of the Catacombs,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 61, no. 4 (2010): 746–63. 3. Papal Encyclicals Online, http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius09/p9syll.htm.

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In the years following the 1848 revolution, the liberty of the church as an institution eclipsed the issue of the liberties of individual Catholics. The city of Rome and the Papal States were at the center of this debate: could the Roman Catholic Church be free if it were located inside a sovereign Italian state rather than being itself a territorial sovereign? Pauline Craven and Charles de Montalembert both closely followed the Roman Question, as this complex set of issues about Italian nationalism and Catholic faith was known. They disagreed vehemently about the best possible outcome: Craven sympathized with Italian nationalists and believed that they might create new and peaceful relations between church and state, but Montalembert had little patience with residents of the peninsula who aspired to be anything other than Catholics. A new generation of Catholic response to papal danger ultimately overshadowed the differences of opinion between Craven, Montalembert, and other Catholics of the postrevolutionary era. These younger Catholics shared their elders’ romantic attachment to the city of Rome, but their affection and loyalty centered primarily on the person of the pope. They accepted his conservatism and his conviction that it was up to modern Christians to adapt themselves to papal teaching and not vice versa. The young men who volunteered for the pontifical Zouaves—an international military force dedicated to preserving the Papal States—exemplified this new ultramontane piety. Their approach to questions of religious liberty was fundamentally different from Craven and Montalembert’s; for this younger generation, the liberty of the church was everything, and individual liberty was worthless. Rather than seeking accommodation between church and state that would maximize their personal autonomy, they aspired to as complete a renunciation of self and will as possible. Zouave desire for martyrdom was the most extreme expression of this desire to deny one’s own agency so that the person became nothing more than the channel through which God’s will expressed itself. This reactionary ultramontanism of the later nineteenth century has largely eclipsed its romantic, progressive, mennaisian-inspired predecessor in recent scholarship. Historians examining the intensely emotive ultramontane piety of the second half of the nineteenth century have proposed that it originated in the unprecedented mobilization of women in the church.4 Linking the Romanization and the feminization of the Catholic Church rests on a series of 4. Christopher Clark, “The New Catholicism and the European Culture Wars,” in Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser (New York, 2003), 19–20.

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assumptions about gender that should raise historians’ suspicions: it presumes that a movement that embraced outward expression of emotion, passive suffering, and the denial of self must have originated with women because sensibility, passivity, and self-abnegation were female qualities. French responses to the Roman Question suggest, however, that describing ultramontanism as evidence of a feminized religion relies on stereotype rather than analysis. Pauline Craven was determined not to abandon her critical faculties where Rome was concerned; being a good Catholic did not require anyone, male or female, to abandon reason or to sacrifice conscience, she believed. Simultaneously, the Zouaves and their supporters promoted an ethic of sacrifice that called on all Catholics, male and female, to relinquish ego and suspend autonomous judgment so that their experience might be fully absorbed into the pope’s suffering. This emotive, papal-centered cult was neither the outcome of religious women’s extreme devotion nor a product offered to appeal to a particular female sensibility. Craven, for one, was neither a producer nor a consumer of Zouave piety, and she remained convinced that the church needed faithful believers who, while fully enjoying modern liberty of conscience, chose devotion and obedience with their eyes open. The postrevolutionary romantic Catholicism represented by Craven and Montalembert had definitively lost out to the newer ultramontanism of Zouave piety by 1870. Pius IX increasingly perceived the Roman Question as evidence that the modern world was irredeemably antagonistic to faith. Italian nationalists were hostile to the papacy not because their territorial ambitions unfortunately coincided, Pius concluded, but because the modern nationstate was irretrievably evil. The values of the nation-state, consequently, were anathema to the church. Individuals like Montalembert and Craven, who believed to the contrary that certain postrevolutionary political values like individual liberty were compatible with and even necessary to Catholicism, found themselves marginalized, especially in the wake of preparations for the First Vatican Council, which proclaimed papal infallibility in 1870. Craven suffered an intense, but largely private, anguish. Although her sentiments were widely known among her friends, she never published her views on the Roman Question, and the papacy was largely unconcerned with the obedience of its lay female faithful. Although Montalembert had been an ardent supporter of the Papal States, he opposed infallibility in part on the grounds that it was incompatible with temporal sovereignty: no government of this world could reasonably claim inerrancy without violating its subjects’ rights. A sovereign and infallible papacy, he believed, was merely a new version of Old Regime absolutism, and he published his views widely. Although the Vatican never officially condemned Montalembert, upon his death during

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the First Vatican Council in 1870 he was nonetheless the object of semipublic Roman humiliation—a striking end to the career of nineteenth-century France’s leading Catholic politician.

France and the Risorgimento The French state was deeply embroiled in the Roman Question as a result of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte’s effort to attract conservative support in his 1848 bid for the presidency, his 1850 coup d’état, and his subsequent declaration of the Second Empire. In November the 1848 revolution reached the city of Rome; Pellegrino Rossi, Pius IX’s minister of justice, was assassinated, and crowds in the streets demanded liberal reforms of papal government. Pius left the city and took refuge at Gaeta in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, where he refused all compromise and forbade Catholic participation in the elections that took place in early 1849. The declaration of the Roman Republic in February indicated reformers’ determination to pursue their goals without papal involvement. The republican overthrow of papal authority was also Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte’s opportunity to intervene in Italian affairs and solidify his conservative credentials in France. He promised Catholics like Charles de Montalembert that the papacy could rely on French support, and the French expeditionary force under General Oudinot that disembarked at Civitavecchia in April 1849 made good on that promise.5 The defeat of the Roman Republic inaugurated France’s complex and frustrating involvement in the Roman Question. Napoleon III found himself locked into military support for papal territory, unable either to lose face by pulling out or to force liberal reforms on the papal government. Pius IX proved as intransigent toward his benefactors as he was toward his enemies, and military presence in Rome gave the French no leverage over the Holy See. Pius refused to return to Rome in the train of the French army; he remained in Gaeta, on Neapolitan territory, until April 1850, nearly a year after French troops had dismantled the republic. Back in Rome, the pope rescinded the liberal measures that had seemed so promising to Ozanam in

5. For a brief account of the Risorgimento, see Lucy Riall, Risorgimento: The History of Italy from Napoleon to Nation-State (New York, 2009); for a Roman perspective, see Henri Daniel-Rops, The Church in an Age of Revolution, 1789–1870, trans. John Warington (New York, 1965), chap. 5; Mario Caravale and Alberto Caracciolo, Lo Stato pontificio da Martino V a Pio IX (Turin, 1978), chaps. 7–9; and Roger Aubert, “L’Eglise face au problème de Rome,” in La Fine del potere temporale e il ricogiungimento di Roma all’Italia, ed. Congresso di storia del Risorgimento italiano (Rome, 1972), 5–38. On French policy, see Jean Maurain, Un Bourgeois français au XIXe siècle: Baroche, ministre de Napoléon III, d’après ses papiers inédits (Paris, 1936), 181–94, 234–40, 389–94.

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1847, and no French pressure could force Pius to consider secular reforms. French disapproval did nothing to return Edgardo Mortara, the Roman Jewish boy secretly baptized by a Christian servant and kidnapped by Pius’s government, to his family.6 Nor could French diplomacy moderate the Syllabus of Errors. To Napoleon III and his ministers, Pius IX seemed a singularly ungrateful and intractable ally. France’s implication in Roman affairs deepened with the Italian war of 1859 as Piedmont, with French support, invaded Austrian territories in northern Italy. After a successful campaign, Napoleon III and King Victor Emmanuel of Piedmont entered Milan in triumph together. Events, however, moved more quickly than French diplomats had anticipated. Italian enthusiasm for the Austrian defeat encouraged the overthrow of rulers in the central part of the peninsula, including the cardinal legate of Bologna, who governed on behalf of the pope. Meanwhile, in southern Italy Risorgimento fever focused on Giuseppe Garibaldi, whose army of volunteers in red shirts quickly conquered Sicily and then turned to the mainland, entering Naples in September 1860 and overthrowing Francesco II and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Very little stood in the way of Garibaldi’s intention to march north and liberate Rome, which he hoped to establish as the capital of a democratic Italy. Garibaldi’s success in the south and Piedmontese victories in the north put the Papal States under tremendous pressure, and there were disagreements within the papal bureaucracy over the extent to which the Holy See should rely on the French presence to maintain temporal sovereignty. Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli, the secretary of state, focused on maintaining good relations with France, while Pius’s minister of war, Xavier de Mérode (who was also Charles de Montalembert’s brother-in-law), sought to create an independent papal military force.7 Volunteers arrived in Rome from all over the Catholic world to don the striking Zouave uniform—baggy Arab-style trousers, a short jacket with red braid, and a brilliant sash—that indicated their dedication to the pope.8 Their first encounter with the Piedmontese, at the battle of Castelfidardo in September 1860, was a disaster for the pope’s army, and their defeat established the dominant representation of the Zouaves

6. David I. Kertzer, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (New York, 1997), 86–88, 119–23. 7. Frank J. Coppa, Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli and Papal Politics in European Affairs (Albany, NY, 1990), 119–25; Roger Aubert, “La Chute de Monseigneur de Mérode en 1865,” Revista di storia della chiesa in Italia 9 (1955): 331–92. 8. Jean Guenel, La Dernière Guerre du Pape: Les zouaves pontificaux au secours du Saint-Siège, 1860– 1870 (Rennes, Fr., 1998); Philippe Boutry, “Zouaves, pontifical,” in The Papacy: An Encyclopedia, ed. Philippe Levillain, 3 vols. (New York, 2002), 3:1643.

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as men in search of martyrdom rather than victory. After Castelfidardo, the territory over which Pius IX exerted temporal sovereignty was reduced to the traditional patrimony of Saint Peter: the city of Rome and surrounding region of Lazio.9 Castelfidardo also demonstrated that Cardinal Antonelli had been right all along: French backing, not the self-sacrificing élan of the Zouaves, was Pius’s real guarantee of safety. The soon-to-be-proclaimed king of Italy, Victor Emmanuel, and his prime minister, Camillo di Cavour, understood that Napoleon III would not accept the complete dispossession of the pope; hence the post-Castelfidardo settlement that maintained a rump Papal State. They also recognized that their alliance with the radical democrat Garibaldi could never be more than temporary; Piedmont’s seizure of papal territory was in part a measure to avoid ceding all the initiative to the charismatic Garibaldi. Victor Emmanuel and Garibaldi met, somewhat awkwardly, north of Naples in October 1860. After a Neapolitan plebiscite in favor of annexation by Piedmont, Garibaldi handed his victories to the newly established Kingdom of Italy and declared his loyalty to Victor Emmanuel. Italy and its king controlled the entire peninsula with the exception of Venice and—most important—Rome. The diminished and precarious temporal sovereignty of the pope satisfied hardly anyone. Italian nationalists would not accept an Italy without Rome, and Pius IX refused to recognize either his loss of territory or the legitimacy of the Kingdom of Italy. Napoleon III, perhaps the only person who was satisfied with the situation, had no alternative but to prop it up with a French military presence, and a small French force remained in Rome as a reminder of French support for Pius’s temporal power. In 1864 Napoleon III tried to extricate himself from his Roman obligation; in the September Convention with the Kingdom of Italy France agreed to remove troops from Rome within two years in exchange for an Italian promise to respect papal territory. Just as French troops withdrew, however, Garibaldi began gathering volunteers to attack papal Rome, and Napoleon was obliged to send the French force back. French and papal troops together defeated the Garibaldini at the battle of Mentana in November 1867. Some Zouaves and their supporters interpreted the victory as providential endorsement of Pius’s temporal sovereignty, but the battle also emphasized how dependent the papacy was on its French protectors. 9. Papal territory was reduced from forty-one thousand to twelve thousand square kilometers. Caravale and Caracciolo, Lo Stato pontificio, 711.

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Ultimately, the Franco-Prussian War and the fall of the Second Empire resolved both the impasse of the French presence in Rome and the question of papal territory. Faced with a German war, Napoleon III ordered French troops back from Rome at the end of July 1870. Within a few weeks of the French defeat at Sedan in September, the Second Empire collapsed, Napoleon III abdicated, and Rome surrendered to Italian forces. Pius IX retreated to his palace, where, in the role of “prisoner of the Vatican,” he directed Catholics to follow his intransigent example by refusing to participate in Italian national politics. Until his death in 1878, Pius remained a powerful symbol of the clash between Catholicism and the new Italian state and, by extension, between the devout and modern nation-states. For Catholics, the disposition of Italian territory was not merely a matter for the diplomats but a question that placed souls in jeopardy. Risorgimento scholarship usually focuses on the intense emotions of Italian nationalism, but counter-Risorgimento sentiment—Catholic participation in the suffering of the pope and the church—was equally profound. The idea that the reorganization of Italy involved nothing more than redrawing maps, redistributing resources, and conciliating various political interests was a source of intense anguish for Catholics who believed that the Roman Question concerned God’s order in the world. Pius IX’s unquestionable charisma contributed to this emotional mobilization of Catholics around the world who sent money, heartfelt tributes, and sometimes their sons to participate in the defense of papal Rome. The Roman crisis and Pius’s response were the key ingredients in the creation of a new devotional style focused on the papacy that continues to characterize modern Catholicism.10 This deep emotional attachment to the pope has its origins in a nineteenth-century conviction that the status of Rome was not merely a question for political elites or even just for Italians. Rome not only existed on a horizontal plane that included France and Italy but also had a vertical dimension reaching to heaven. Pius IX, ruler of the city of Rome, became the fulcrum of many Catholics’ relationship with God. These Catholics felt that the threat to the pope’s sovereignty over Rome endangered the connection between heaven and earth, believers and their God. 10. Bruno Horaist, La Dévotion au pape et les catholiques français sous le pontificat de Pie IX (1846– 1878) d’après les archives de la Bibliothèque apostolique vaticane (Rome, 1995). For reverberations of the Roman Question outside France, see Emiel Lamberts, ed., The Black International—L’Internationale noire, 1870–1878: The Holy See and Militant Catholicism in Europe (Leuven, Belg., 2002); and Peter R. d’Agostino, Rome in America: Transnational Catholic Ideology from the Risorgimento to Fascism (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004).

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Pauline Craven, Italian Nationalist Pauline Craven shared the Catholic conviction that the Roman Question touched on divine rather than merely human issues, and the Risorgimento caused her considerable anguish. Craven hoped for a compromise that would result in both an Italian nation-state and a papacy whose authority was fundamentally undiminished. The presence of the papacy did not, Craven believed, preclude the development of Italy as a modern constitutional state whose citizens enjoyed civil liberties, including freedom of conscience. Catholics and their church could flourish in a modern Italy that respected liberty. What really threatened individual souls, according to Craven, was intransigence on both sides that obliged ordinary people to choose between being Italian and being Catholic. She feared, however, that Italians’ range of options was narrowing as both the papacy and the Kingdom of Italy obdurately refused to contemplate coexistence. In 1860, the year of the formation of the Kingdom of Italy, the Cravens were living mostly in their villa in Naples. Augustus’s diplomatic career had not been successful, but Naples, where he had inherited a home from his father, was an agreeable and inexpensive place to live. His investments in railway and water projects in southern Italy, which Pauline considered testimony to their faith in modern Italy, brought them to the brink of ruin over the course of the decade. Pauline worked on the manuscript of Le Récit d’une sœur, which would become their financial salvation, and she was deeply involved in charitable activities in Naples, where she helped the French Daughters of Charity establish a presence.11 She hosted one of Naples’s leading salons, which assembled a cosmopolitan company including prominent Neapolitan liberals.12 In her journal she wrote that she had “become half Italian”: being Italian, for Pauline Craven, meant experiencing Rome as a spiritual home as well as adopting her Neapolitan neighbors’ desire for a unified Italy.13 Eighteen sixty was a traumatic year, full of “inexpressible pain” for Craven.14 As Garibaldi’s army marched on Naples, twelve-year-old Lina Ravaschieri suffered through her final illness. Lina’s mother, the duchess Teresa Ravaschieri, was Craven’s dearest friend and the daughter of Carlo Filangieri, the former Napoleonic officer and reforming politician whom Francesco II had appointed premier upon his ascent to the throne in 1859. Unable to

11. 12. 13. 14.

Bishop, Memoir, 1:234. Elena Croce, La Patria napoletana (Turin, 1974), 117–25. PC, Journal, June 1860, 3v, ICP, ms. fr. 566 (hereafter PC Journal). Ibid., May 1860, 2r.

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persuade the king to promulgate a constitution, Filangieri resigned after a few months. His daughter and her circle of liberal friends, including Craven, feared that the king’s obduracy marked the end for the Bourbon kings of the Two Sicilies.15 Indeed, the prospect of political upheaval led Lina’s parents to move their desperately ill child—whom Craven thought too sick to travel— to Florence, where she died on September 1, 1860. Garibaldi entered Naples, overthrowing the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, a few days later. Craven’s prayers for Lina in her final illness and for Italy at its birth merged, she wrote; both were “too close to my heart and soul for me to think of them without torment.”16 Craven’s grief at Lina’s death was relatively simple; Lina was the child that Craven had never borne, and with her death, both Pauline and her dear friend Teresa were childless.17 The torment associated with the fall of Naples was much more complicated. In their grief, Craven and Ravaschieri prayed together for “our Italy”—an independent nation in which Catholics, including Pius IX, might enjoy unencumbered citizenship. They asked that God might “bless this misery . . . by restoring the pope’s love of Italy and Italians’ love of the pope.”18 As both the nationalist and the papal sides dug into intransigent positions, however, the two women felt increasingly isolated and the political situation compounded their personal sorrow. Only with one another could they express their hopes, as Ravaschieri wrote, “a modo nostro and without witnesses.”19 The friends shared a belief that both the nationalist and the papal causes were just, but by 1860 they began to despair that politicians and clerics would ever accept their view and reach a compromise. Although Ravaschieri described their common political conviction as private—indeed, almost secret—Craven was not inclined to keep her Italian sentiments to herself. Craven’s publishing career did not begin until the mid1860s, but throughout her life she corresponded with prominent Catholics all over Europe, who, she felt, lacked reliable information and generally misunderstood events in Italy. She particularly sought to interpret Italian patriotism to her French friends and to convince them that Italians deserved the same chance at nationhood as the French—that they were not exempt from

15. Ibid., June 18, 1860, 22r–23v. Teresa Ravaschieri, Il Generale Carlo Filangieri (Milan, 1902); Angelantonio Spagnoletti, Storia del Regno delle Due Sicilie (Bologna, 1997), chap. 6. 16. PC Journal, Thursday, June 14, 1860, 18v. 17. Teresa Ravaschieri to PC: “ Ma bien aimée, ma Lina, mon ange tu m’a quitté pour toujours! Childless comme Pauli. . . . . que vais-je devenir?,” n.d. [a few days after Lina’s death], ICP, ms. fr. 599, I 2. 18. Teresa Ravaschieri to PC, Feb. 14, 1861, ICP, ms. fr. 599, I 2 (emphasis in the original). 19. Teresa Ravaschieri to PC, Bologna, Oct. 13, 1860, ICP, ms. fr. 599, I 2.

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the century’s developments because of papal presence in the peninsula. Her journal contains a careful record of events, particularly in 1860 as the Bourbon monarchy collapsed and Garibaldi entered the city. She was determined to be an accurate witness, to keep an open mind and to “rectify anything that experience may show to be incorrect.”20 Beyond chronicling events, she rehearsed arguments about Italian nationalism in the pages of her journal, practicing responses to her French friends’ objections to the Risorgimento. The essence of Craven’s argument was that Italians were no different from French or any other group of Catholics in their desire to realize national aspirations while fulfilling their religious obligations. Her greatest fear was that intransigence on both sides would make these two goals incompatible and force Italians to choose between them. What would French Catholics do if told that they were to be “not only Catholics but subjects of the pope,” Craven wondered in her journal. She doubted that many would accept, and if the choice were phrased differently—“you can be Catholics only if you give up being French or at least give up everything that a Frenchman wants for his homeland”—then the Catholic faith would be in a dire position in France indeed.21 If forced, Italians would make the same choice, Craven believed, and she was afraid that events were pushing them in this direction. Craven’s perspective on the Risorgimento in 1860 was primarily Neapolitan, and she insisted that it was a great mistake to link the cause of Catholicism to that of the Bourbon monarchs of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Although scholars have recently reassessed claims about the poverty, backwardness, and poor governance of the Italian South, it is nonetheless clear that by the 1850s the Neapolitan Bourbons were “the pariahs of liberal Europe.”22 Craven suspected that her correspondence was monitored, and she knew that the Neapolitan press was a poor source of information. She was aware that individuals were imprisoned for their liberal views; indeed, she received political prisoners in her salon and heard their accounts of imprisonment without charge and solitary confinement. For all Francesco II’s personal piety, he provided little spiritual solace to those he imprisoned, Craven noted tartly.23 She had little faith that the kingdom could survive Risorgimento sentiment without considerable foreign support, and she believed

20. PC Journal, June 1860, 8r. 21. Ibid., Sept. 16, 1860, 64r–v (emphasis in the original). 22. John A. Davis, Naples and Napoleon: Southern Italy and the European Revolutions (1780–1860) (New York, 2006), 327. On the reassessment of the Italian South, see also Lucy Riall, Sicily and the Unification of Italy: Liberal Policy and Local Power, 1859–1866 (New York, 1998). 23. PC Journal: newspapers, June 1860, 10r; correspondence, July 1, 1860, 40r–v; political prisoners, June 19, 1860, 25v, 26r.

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that it was a mistake for Catholics to align their cause with oppressive government. England remained a Protestant nation, she mused in her diary, because the majority of its people mistakenly attributed its stable government to the Church of England, and the situation in southern Italy was analogous: patriots were irreligious only because they associated Catholicism with repression.24 Naples was no longer capable of self-government, Craven believed, because the Bourbons’ long reign had stifled civic capabilities, leaving annexation to the Piedmontese kingdom as Neapolitans’ best option.25 Craven argued that Italian national sentiment in Naples was a positive affirmation of identity, not merely a rejection of Bourbon misrule. The Italian masses were not simply dupes of revolutionary elites, nor could they easily be tricked or bribed into renewed loyalty for their local rulers. An Austrian diplomat who was a guest in her salon infuriated her by suggesting that the Neapolitan church should shore up the throne by fabricating an apparition of the Virgin who would proclaim her support for the Bourbon king. How could a gentleman propose such an unchristian ruse, and how could he fail to see that all of Italy sympathized profoundly with the nationalists?26 She tried to convince her many friends of “the dangerous and impossible position in which people and clergy are placed when driven to choose between their feelings of nationality, their (most natural) wish for liberty, and their religion.” Italians would behave no differently than any other people “if they found that a repugnant political opinion, or any political opinion whatever, was . . . imposed upon them as a conscientious duty.”27 Whether Catholic observers liked it or not, they had to acknowledge that Garibaldi’s two thousand volunteers had defeated the forty thousand men of the Neapolitan army—either the Garibaldini were “greater than Heroes,” Craven wrote, or they enjoyed “the consent and the aid of an entire people.”28 Although Craven never embraced democracy, on the question of nationhood she stood with the common people against what she perceived as the condescension of those who dismissed Italian national feeling as false, misguided, or temporary enthusiasm. Forcing residents of the peninsula to choose between their faith and their nation would, Craven feared, result in a hamstrung, crippled Italy. The worst possible outcome was that Rome might be “saved” for the pope and Italy

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

Ibid., Tuesday, June 12, 1860, 16v–17r. Ibid., June 1860, 11v, and Apr. 19, 1861, 56r–57v. Ibid., June 10, 1860, 14v, 15r. PC to William Monsell, Apr. 29, 1862, in Bishop, Memoir, 1:245. PC Journal, June 1, 1860, 4r (emphasis in the original). See also Apr. 19, 1861, 54v.

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lost: papal territory would be restored, but Italians would blame the pope for the demise of their national aspirations, and their souls would be forever lost to the church.29 She was convinced that the Italian people were, at heart, Catholic, and she claimed that the wounded Piedmontese and Garibaldini soldiers whom she met in hospitals were pious men who knelt on their beds when priests carried the sacrament through the wards.30 Any united Italy at odds with the church would be inauthentic, an incomplete or false reflection of national sentiment. “If God were to raise up a man, a saint, who could find the way to reawaken in Italian hearts the love of the Catholic Church without sacrifice of his national aspirations, he would be listened to by a people on its knees,” she wrote.31 Such reconciliation would require compromise on both sides: Italian nationalists would have to moderate their anticlericalism, and the Catholic hierarchy would have to accept the legitimacy of popular opinion. Craven’s belief that a fully realized Italy would be both united and Catholic led her directly to the Risorgimento’s most difficult question: the city of Rome. “I dream of a Rome that is capital of Italy, though only a nominal and religious capital, of a free, strong, and united Italy,” Craven wrote Ravaschieri. Her conception—possibly utopian, she admitted—of an Italy where church and state were not at odds, required the two sides to share the city and to think about sovereignty in less than absolute terms. The pope would remain in Rome “in his full sovereign power, surrounded by representatives of European powers . . . and with the freedom to handle major questions of a religious nature.” Rome would have a secular municipal administration so that “the government of Christ’s church” would not have to deal with issues like public safety and urban infrastructure. The Italian court would actually conduct its business in Florence or Naples. Some compromises—for instance, on minority rights to public worship—might be appropriate in Rome proper.32 Ravaschieri and Craven both prayed for this outcome, which would allow Rome to be simultaneously Christian and Italian. As Pius IX lost control over territory, Craven observed no diminution of his spiritual power. The pope as temporal sovereign might be “easy to defeat,” she mused, but the “pope as pontiff is and will remain always and everywhere invincible.” In the privacy of her journal, she noted that she would prefer to see “the guardians of our souls occupy themselves a little

29. 30. 31. 32.

Ibid., Sept. 16, 1862, 65r. PC to HL, Feb. 2, 1861, in Ravaschieri, Paolina Craven e la sua famiglia (Naples, 1892), 249–50. PC to CM, Nov. 13, 1860, quoted in Bishop, Memoir, 1:230–31. PC to Ravaschieri, n.d., reprinted in Ravaschieri, Paolina Craven, 264–65.

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less with a lost province and a little more with the souls who live there. . . . You don’t conquer or recover souls with bayonets.”33 Craven hoped that the church would emerge purified and strengthened from its troubles: “It is impossible for me to think that Italian liberty, even if it reached Rome itself, could injure the church as absolutism has done,” she wrote. In Rome as elsewhere in Europe, she believed, “liberty is the only healing power able to cure the ills of our time.”34 In the early 1860s she was convinced that the loss of temporal distractions might allow the papacy to exercise its spiritual power more effectively—to absolve the sins of the Italian national movement and to baptize the new state that would be both Italian and Catholic. The most painful aspect of the conflict between Italy and the church for Craven was her growing belief that she no longer enjoyed liberty of conscience. She was convinced that the future of Italy was a human, temporal issue, about which Catholics might legitimately disagree, but clerical teaching and many of her French friends increasingly sought to make opposition to a united Italy into a matter of dogma. On the question of the Risorgimento, she noted in her diary, “a Catholic’s opinion enjoys absolute and complete Liberty, even when obedience requires that he not act on it. . . . With regard to political views [about] the temporal position of the pope in Italy, [a Catholic’s] wishes, desires, hopes, and prayers remain perfectly free from any constraint.”35 In her diary she frequently referred to priests who shared her views but who also felt stifled by the party line—there were more of them than one might think, she maintained.36 She was grateful to priests who allowed her freedom in her prayers and who reassured her that it was not sinful to pray for both Italy and the church.37 Nonetheless, she abandoned her diary for nearly six months in September 1862 because she “could no longer see any possibility of exercising the Liberty that they say we have.”38 Seeking reassurance that her political views on Italy did not endanger her soul, Craven wrote to Father Henri Lacordaire in 1861, presenting him with her argument that Italian nationalism was not a matter of Catholic dogma. Her idea of the best possible regime, she wrote, was one in which “[r]eligion reigns the most completely over souls,” not a state in which religion could be neither debated nor attacked. “Looking around me,” she wrote, “I find that

33. PC Journal, June 1, 1860, 4v–5r. 34. Quoted in Bishop, Memoir, 1:237–38. 35. PC Journal, June 10, 1860, 15v (emphasis in the original). 36. Ibid., Aug. 17, 1860, 51v–52r. See also the draft of a letter to “Mon très Revd Père,” Nov. 15, 1859, in PC, “Par voies et par chemins. Pages de mon journal,” ICP, ms. fr. 562, 47–54. 37. PC Journal, June 13, 1860, 17r. 38. Ibid., Sept. 16, 1862, 62v (emphasis in the original).

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ideal far more fully realized in states where Liberty reigns, even when it is incomplete, as in France, or hostile [to Catholicism], as in England.” Despotism, they had both learned during France’s Bourbon Restoration, did not increase the church’s influence over individual souls, even when, as in Naples, “that despotism has been exercised for over thirty years by a sovereign who was personally quite pious.” As a daughter of émigré aristocracy, she reminded Lacordaire, she was hardly born to be a radical or to applaud the overthrow of Bourbon kings. Yet here she was, writing from Naples in 1861, accepting the overthrow of Francesco II as a necessary step in the reconciliation of the Catholic Church and modern liberty that Lacordaire had envisioned decades ago. She could not bring herself to disqualify Italians’ aspirations to enjoy a modern, free, and united state simply because they lived in the shadow of the papal court.39 In his response, Lacordaire acknowledged Craven’s insight; her letter had strengthened his conviction that “the right of Italy to shake off her foreign yoke is undeniable, and also the right to assert her nationality and insist on government by those civil and political methods which are in harmony with the ideas of modern society.” He believed that the papacy would undoubtedly suffer “for the present,” but he agreed with Craven that it might emerge stronger. “To suffer is not to die,” he wrote, “and from the expiation which belongs to sorrow a light may arise.” He reassured Craven that her views—“the feeling of a Christian and liberal mind”—need not trouble her conscience.40 Craven sent Teresa Ravaschieri a copy of Lacordaire’s letter and added at the end: “This gives me liberty to feel as I do, and peace returns to my mind.”41 Craven chose to write to Lacordaire because he was an influential French cleric and a well-known progressive, but perhaps especially because of his long friendship with Charles de Montalembert. Of all of her friends who failed to understand Italian national aspirations, Craven found Montalembert’s stance especially hurtful. Montalembert was a friend of her youth, one of the few people still living who remembered the family life that she commemorated as she wrote Le Récit d’une sœur in the 1860s, and he was also Europe’s leading champion of Catholic liberty. His rejection of Italian nationalism struck Craven as a betrayal. Begging him to see the justice of the Italian cause, she

39. “Extraits d’une lettre au Très Rev P Lacordaire,” Naples, Feb. 2, 1861, in PC, “Par voies et par chemins” (emphasis in the original). Ravaschieri also included long excerpts of the letter in Paolina Craven, 243–52. 40. HL to PC, reprinted in Ravaschieri, Paolina Craven, 252–55. 41. Ravaschieri, Paolina Craven, 255, and Bishop, Memoir, 1:241.

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reminded him of the 1830s, when he had broken with his family’s legitimism: “Were you not like these same men whom you today condemn, while you abuse Italy and possibly harden her in her temptation to seek and find justice only among men who, while loving liberty as you do, do not equally love the church?”42 Were the Italians really so different in their goals, so much more dangerous in their methods, than the Poles and the Irish whose cause Montalembert had taught Craven to love in their youth? Montalembert in his old age seemed to Craven to have lost all sympathy for liberal political aspiration and become incapable of understanding Italian nationalism. She complained in her diary that Montalembert seemed “to hate success as if God only ever protected the defeated.”43 Writing to Lacordaire, Craven was asking for reassurance that it was Montalembert, not she, who had abandoned the hopeful, forward-thinking Catholicism of their shared youth.

Charles de Montalembert, Papal Loyalist Montalembert did not believe that it was possible to be both a good Catholic and an Italian nationalist; his conviction, no less than Craven’s, derived from the mennaisianism of their youth. As a young man he had explored the sites of Christian Rome with Craven’s brother Albert de la Ferronnays, and with great effort and Lacordaire’s help he had chosen obedience to the papacy over his loyalty to Lamennais. Now in his fifties, he was convinced that Italians enjoyed the glorious distinction of providing a home to the Holy See and that their Christian heritage stretching back to antiquity was simply incompatible with—and immeasurably superior to—modern political organization. While Craven argued that Italians were basically like the French in their desire for a modern polity, Montalembert flatly contradicted her: Italians were different, and their political aspirations neither could nor should resemble those of other people. Thus Montalembert saw nothing to celebrate in the unification of Italy. Lacordaire suggested to Craven that Montalembert’s intransigent stance on Italy derived from his “profound dislike of the French Government.” Because Napoleon III was allied with Piedmont, Montalembert would automatically oppose any Piedmontese ambition.44 Montalembert’s disgust with the Second Empire was indeed profound; he blamed the empire and especially its conservative Catholic allies like the journalist Louis Veuillot 42. Quoted in Bishop, Memoir, 1:230. 43. PC Journal, June 1, 1860, 3v (emphasis in the original). 44. HL to PC, quoted in Bishop, Memoir, 1:240.

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for the ruin of his political career.45 Montalembert’s early support for LouisNapoleon Bonaparte in 1848 had strained his friendship with Lacordaire nearly to the breaking point. Lacordaire joined the democratic Ere nouvelle while Montalembert, fearful that liberty was giving way to revolutionary chaos, threw his support behind Bonaparte.46 In fact, the polarization of opinion between them did not last very long; Lacordaire found his Ere nouvelle colleagues too radical, and Montalembert quickly concluded that Bonapartism was essentially repressive and that the emperor’s view of the Catholic Church was purely instrumental. By the time Craven appealed to Lacordaire, the two men were carefully reconstituting their intimacy, which meant accepting—and sometimes tactically ignoring—their differences of opinion on the Roman Question. By 1860, both Montalembert and Lacordaire were conscious of their own mortality, and their political disagreements seemed minor by comparison. When he answered Craven’s letter, Lacordaire was already dying. The audience for his January 1861 inaugural speech at the French Academy was struck by the “funereal transformation of his physiognomy.”47 With Lacordaire at death’s door, Montalembert paid a final visit to his Dominican monastery at Sorèze later that year. On their final day together, a bedridden Lacordaire repeated, “I love you,” and Montalembert wept as he looked for the last time on his friend’s “keen and gentle goodness.”48 Lacordaire died three weeks later in November 1861, and Montalembert, “suffering from the bottom of [his] heart,” began rereading their long correspondence in order to compose a biography of his friend.49 By this time Montalembert had already begun experiencing the attacks of kidney pain that would become constant after 1866. Lacordaire’s death and his own illness combined with his corroding sense of failure after the collapse of his political career. In his journal he wrote that he was “defeated” and “humiliated” by the “universal confusion of liberty with Napoleonic democracy and, a thousand times worse, by the subjugation of religion” at the hands of a “servile and fanatical” faction willing to deliver Catholic support to the empire.50 He was determined to end 45. Marguerite Castillon de Perron, Montalembert et l’Europe de son temps (Paris, 2009), pt. 4, chap. 1. 46. HL to CM, Feb. 17, 1848, and Nov. 7, 1848, in L-M C, 615–18, 623–25. 47. CM’s notes on HL’s death, in CM, Catholicisme et liberté: Correspondance inédite avec le P. Lacordaire, Mgr de Mérode et A. de Falloux (1852–1870) (Paris, 1970), 201. HL owed his appointment to the Academy in no small measure to CM’s influence. CM led the group of academicians who wished to appoint a cleric in order to indicate support for papal sovereignty, and he assured his colleagues that HL would not use his maiden speech to call papal Rome into question. 48. CM, Journal, 7:375 (Sept. 29, 1861). 49. Ibid., 7:390–91 (Nov. 21, 1861). 50. Ibid., 7:272 (Jan. 1, 1861).

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his life as a servant of the church, however. French politics had betrayed him, but Rome, he believed, never would. Montalembert categorized his friends Henri Lacordaire and Pauline Craven among the “good and sincere but misled people who perceive the Italian war as a work of liberal emancipation.”51 Their error was to assume that Italy was like any other place. Arguing in 1859 that France should intervene to ensure the return of Bologna and the Legations to the papacy, Montalembert warned that to concede that Italians’ “human and national dignity is offended by pontifical domination” was a slippery slope that would soon call papal sovereignty over Rome itself into question. The issue was not how big or small papal territory should be but rather the right of rebellion against the pontiff. In denying that right, Montalembert insisted that he was not “breaking with modern society” but merely asserting that the right to rebellion was not “so absolute that it must triumph everywhere, always, and with no regard for any other principle or right.” A united Italy with its capital in Rome was a “chimera” because it was “contrary to the past glory of Italy and to the moral, intellectual, and social interests of its people.” Those who were taken in by the fantasy, he argued, risked becoming the Pontius Pilate of the papacy.52 Montalembert quickly emerged as the voice of lay French Catholic opinion. Disregarding Catholics like Craven, he asserted that “there aren’t three opinions, there aren’t even two; there’s only one. . . . I defy anyone to find one dissident in a thousand. . . . Everyone believes in the importance of the temporal power of the pope to preserve the spiritual independence of the Catholic world.”53 Montalembert had little patience for his old friend’s “exaggerated Italianism” and her failure to understand that the Italian cause had been “soiled by the blackest ingratitude and the most remarkable bad faith.”54 Montalembert was no more impressed than Craven with government in the Restoration states of the Italian peninsula, and he recognized that the “wretched edifice of Neapolitan absolutism,” in particular, was an affront to his notion of freedom. The situation of Neapolitan or other Italian subjects mattered less to him than potential danger to the papacy, however. He was outraged that Victor Emmanuel would dare to send troops across the pope’s borders, even if their ultimate purpose was to offer modern liberties to Neapolitans.

51. CM, Pie IX et la France en 1849 et en 1859 (Paris, 1859), 58–59, originally published in Le Correspondant, Oct. 25, 1859. 52. Ibid., 38–39, 41, 58, 74. 53. Ibid., 69. 54. CM, Journal, 7:247, 244 (Sept. 18, 1860 and Sept. 9, 1860).

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Both Montalembert’s conviction that Italians acted in bad faith and his position as lay spokesman for papal interests were strengthened by the very public debate in which he engaged with Camillo di Cavour. Cavour outraged Montalembert when, in a series of speeches to the Piedmontese parliament, he claimed to be taking up the mantle of a Catholic liberalism that Montalembert represented. As Piedmont was annexing central Italian states, Cavour reassured parliamentarians that the Catholic faith would flourish in a united Italy because “liberty [was] highly advantageous to the development of true religious sentiment.” Cavour had not opportunistically invented the notion that Catholicism would prosper in a liberal Italy, he maintained: it had a long and distinguished history, especially in France, among the “most passionate supporters of the Catholic idea,” including Charles de Montalembert.55 Cavour appealed to the French romantic Catholic tradition to justify Piedmontese expansion over Pius IX’s objections, and, citing no evidence, he proclaimed his confidence that Europe would soon witness “a significant alteration” of the pope’s view that would “reconcile him with modern civilization.” Once the pope had reassessed “the necessary relationship between religious society and civil society,” the Roman Question would resolve itself, Cavour asserted. Rome would be both the center of Catholic Christendom and the capital of a “regenerated” Italy.56 The separation of church and state would give the former the liberty that Lamennais, Montalembert, and Lacordaire had so persuasively argued for decades earlier. Borrowing a phrase directly from Montalembert, Cavour asserted that Catholics in the new Italy would experience “a free church in a free state.”57 Montalembert was incensed at being invoked in this justification of a cause that he despised above all others. Determined to retain the “free church in a free state” phrase for Catholics of his own ultramontane sensibilities, he composed two open letters to Cavour in which he sought to unmask the Italian statesman’s attempt to “veil [his] perverse aims with a false equivalence between religion and liberty.”58 “Your liberalism has nothing in common with mine,” Montalembert wrote. Cavour and Victor Emmanuel, who claimed

55. Cavour’s speeches to the Chamber of Deputies on the Roman Question from Oct. 11 and 16, 1860, and Mar. 25 and 27, 1861, are published in Camillo di Cavour, Stato e chiesa, ed. Paolo Alatri (Florence, 1992), 119–63, quotation on 120. 56. Ibid., 127. 57. Ibid., 161. 58. CM, “Lettre à M le comte de Cavour,” in Œuvres de M le comte de Montalembert, 9 vols. (Paris, 1860–63), 5:652, and “Deuxième lettre à M le comte de Cavour,” in Œuvres de M le comte de Montalembert, 9:3–64. See also CM, “Note sur la formule l’Eglise libre dans l’état libre,” in L’Eglise libre dans l’état libre. Discours prononcés au Congrès catholique des Malines (Paris, 1863), 179–83.

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that “for the good of the church Piedmont would steal the church’s goods,” belonged in the company of other hypocrites, not devout Christians or even honest liberals.59 Where the church was concerned, Cavour recognized no rights: he disbanded monastic communities, violated treaties with the Papal States, prevented the publication of episcopal statements, and persecuted journalists who wrote sympathetically about the church. Cavour’s “liberal” Italy respected neither property, association, contract, speech, nor the press; it was nonsensical to describe it as a “free state” that might protect a “free church.”60 Indeed, Cavour’s hypocrisy confirmed Montalembert’s conviction that Catholic liberty needed the guarantee of a free pontifical state, not the empty assurances of the new Italy. A decade of Bonapartist rule had made Montalembert skeptical of the plebiscites that indicated that subjects of the Two Sicilies or the Papal Legations wished to be annexed to the Kingdom of Italy. Universal suffrage was “imposing and grave” when it was allowed complete liberty, he wrote, but the French experience had shown how easily it could be “directed, exploited, [and] intimidated.”61 Montalembert saw no reason to believe that the plebiscites in the peninsula reflected a genuine national sentiment or a rejection of papal sovereignty; Cavour and his colleagues had merely learned from Napoleon III how to manipulate the electorate. Over the previous decade they had destabilized the Papal States, convincing Pius’s subjects that papal governance was the source of all their discontent and that as Italians their troubles would vanish. Now “the play is over, the curtain falls, one goes to sleep Roman and wakes up Piedmontese, but still just as liable to be taxed and now conscripted as well.”62 Ultimately, Montalembert could not understand why Pauline Craven’s “beloved Italians” would not be satisfied with simply being Catholics—an infinitely more noble identification, in his view. Why should they agitate for an exclusively national state when they already had the good fortune to live in the homeland that embraced all Catholics? “[W]hat will your patrie be without the papacy?” he asked Cavour. “You have the incomparable glory of possessing the capital of two hundred million souls, and yet your entire ambition is to reduce it to the seat of the government of the latest upstart kingdom of the earth!” Cavour’s “little Piedmontese majesties” would hardly attract the throngs of pilgrims for whom Rome was the center of the

59. 60. 61. 62.

CM, “Deuxième lettre,” 6–7. CM, “Lettre à M le comte de Cavour,” 655–57; CM, “Deuxième lettre,” 6–7, 16–17. CM, “Deuxième lettre,” 30. Ibid., 35.

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world.63 Indeed, compared with Pius IX, the Savoyard monarchs of Piedmont were barely Italian.64 The pope, a true Italian, recognized the charm and significance of local traditions within the peninsula, but Victor Emmanuel and Cavour would impose their centralizing agenda to force all citizens into a single mold.65 The Piedmontese version of a united Italy, speaking with a single voice, would require Italians to abandon their most meaningful community ties, and it could appear only through a manipulated plebiscite, Montalembert believed, never organically. “Italy” was not a real cause because it was not a real nation.

Zouaves and the Retreat to Martyrdom Craven and Montalembert, for all their differences, both represented an approach to the Roman Question that appeared increasingly inadequate to many Catholics in the 1860s. Although the two hoped for different results, they fundamentally agreed that the Roman Question was a human dilemma—it had been caused, and it would be resolved, by purely human decisions. Cavour, Napoleon III, and Pius IX acted according to their own conceptions of their best interest. Their decisions might be stubborn, short-sighted, or reckless because such human failings always characterized diplomacy. Reasoned argument in newspapers, speeches, or private correspondence might lead public opinion in a new direction or encourage the principal actors of the Risorgimento to rethink their positions. For Craven and Montalembert both, the Roman Question demanded statesmanship as well as prayer. By the 1860s, however, the public imagination increasingly associated the Roman Question with a new generation of ultramontane Catholics embodied by the pontifical Zouaves. The young men who joined Pius IX’s army interpreted the Roman Question as an apocalyptic struggle between good and evil. If, as one bishop asserted, God had appeared in three incarnations—“at the Virgin’s breast, in the Eucharist, and as the old man of the Vatican”—then no sacrifice could be too great to ensure the pope’s security.66 If Pius, like Christ, were in some sense the word of God incarnate, then the Roman Question bore no resemblance whatsoever to human politics. The Zouaves’ attachment to Rome and the papacy was just as intense as their elders’, but their attitude toward modern politics had shifted dramatically: pugnacious hostility to

63. 64. 65. 66.

CM, “Lettre à M le comte de Cavour,” 654. CM, Pie IX, 49. CM, L’Eglise libre, 71–72; CM, “Lettre à M le comte de Cavour,” 652. Monseigneur Mermillod, quoted in Horaist, La Dévotion au pape, 19.

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postrevolutionary states characterized the Zouaves and their followers. Where Craven and Montalembert remained convinced that the key challenge for Catholics was to reconcile their faith with modern political developments, the emotional distress of the Roman Question increasingly pushed other Catholics to reject any accommodation. Loving and defending papal Rome was all-consuming; it left no room for other interests or allegiances. Although the new ultramontanes of the late nineteenth century valued papal intransigence, recent scholarship has demonstrated that their strength derived from their eagerness to embrace modern methods of evangelization. They seized on the mass daily press and the railway pilgrimage as techniques for solidifying Catholic identity and mobilizing support for the papacy against secular states.67 Early nineteenth-century followers of Lamennais had sought to support the papacy against reactionary Restoration kings by creating an ultramontane intellectual elite well versed in secular and scientific learning. The July revolution of 1830 and L’Avenir had pushed Lamennais’s disciples toward engagement with a larger public. Ultramontanes of the era of the Risorgimento extended the logic of L’Avenir: theirs was fundamentally a popular movement that embraced mass culture even as it rejected democratic politics. The new ultramontanes defiantly embraced the supernatural as superior to the petty negotiations of human politics. The pontifical Zouaves were among the first celebrities of the new ultramontanism, and their charisma and selfless devotion to the pope were widely admired in the Catholic world. They were a brigade of international volunteers, roughly three thousand strong by 1870, who were prepared to die for Pius IX and his temporal sovereignty in Italy. They adopted the striking North African dress associated with their first general, Léon Juchault de Lamoricière, who had made his career in the French conquest of Algeria and gone into exile following Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’état. Thousands of young men from all over France joined the Zouaves; at least one hailed from every department, and groups of young men from the same village or Catholic school often signed up together. A disproportionate number—around 10 percent—of the French volunteers were noblemen, and deeply Catholic and counterrevolutionary regions like Brittany were particularly well represented.68 Although the Second Empire threatened volunteers

67. Margaret Lavinia Anderson, “The Divisions of the Pope: Catholic Revival and Europe’s Transition to Democracy,” in The Politics of Religion in an Age of Revival, ed. Austen Ivereigh (London, 2000), 22–42; Suzanne Kaufman, Consuming Visions: Mass Culture and the Lourdes Shrine (Ithaca, NY, 2005), 1–9. 68. On the composition of the Zouaves, see Guenel, La Dernière Guerre, 39–44, and Patrick Nouaille-Degorce, “Zouaves pontificaux et volontaires de l’ouest dans la guerre de 1870–1871: Présentation des matricules régimentaires” (Mémoire de DEA, Université de Nantes, 2000).

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with loss of French citizenship, the Zouaves accepted this risk because the protections of a modern state seemed paltry compared with the rewards of martyrdom.69 Although few Frenchmen ever donned the dramatic uniform, the pontifical Zouaves fired the imaginations of French Catholics. Accounts of Zouaves were a significant part of the heyday of Catholic publishing that occurred under the Second Empire, when biographical, fictional, and hagiographic stories of Zouave valor and piety circulated widely.70 The Catholic press, notably Louis Veuillot’s newspaper L’Univers, covered Zouave activities in detail. Catholic committees in French parishes raised money to equip and send Zouaves to Rome, and lists of donors to the cause featured in the local press. By the mid-1860s, the Zouave had emerged as the figure who created an emotional bond between devout Catholics and the beleaguered Pius IX.71 The Zouave epitomized all-consuming love for the pope and willingness to sacrifice everything in his cause, and Zouave literature contributed to the overwrought cult of the papacy that characterized the 1860s. The Zouaves reproduced the Roman Question on an intimate scale; issues of statesmanship, with which Craven and Montalembert were both preoccupied, dropped out of the narrative. Filial devotion to Pius IX was the central element of the Roman Question, not an understanding of the rivalry between Garibaldi and Piedmont or other political issues. The epistolary format of most Zouave stories emphasized the intimacy of the relationships at stake; the love between the soldier and his mother and their common devotion to the pope mattered more than political disputes and arguments that might be published in a newspaper. Privately printed tributes to dead Zouaves and collected Zouave martyrologies relied on personal letters that repeated the same stories of devout sons, beloved mothers, and their passionate dedication to the cause of papal Rome.72 Via this correspondence, readers entered the intimate worlds of these private Roman dramas. Like readers of Pauline Craven’s Le Récit d’une sœur, a contemporary of Zouave

69. Jules Delmas, Neuvième Croisade, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1881), 255–59. 70. Claude Savart, Les Catholiques en France au XIXe siècle: Le témoignage du livre religieux (Paris, 1985), 108–9, 194, 494, 713, notes that roughly 20 percent of titles published in France were “Catholic.” The Roman Question produced 72 out of the 2,032 Catholic titles produced in 1861, the year after Castelfidardo (lives of saints and devotional manuals, as always, dominated). 71. For an extended version of this argument, see Carol E. Harrison, “Zouave Stories: Gender, Catholic Spirituality, and French Responses to the Roman Question,” Journal of Modern History 79, no. 2 (2007): 274–305. 72. Delmas, Neuvième Croisade; Antonio Bresciani, Opere, vol. 15, Olderico, ovvero il Zuavo pontificio (1861; repr., Rome, 1868) (French translation, Le Zouave pontifical [Paris, 1862]); Anatole de Ségur, Les Martyrs de Castelfidardo (Paris, 1861).

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literature, Catholics who followed Zouave stories felt that they had access to the innermost thoughts of its leading actors. In the Zouave imagination, the Roman Question played itself out as a family drama in which the calculations of realpolitik had no place: good mothers and valiant sons offered sacrifice without measure for their papal father. Zouave intervention in the Roman Question did not focus on victory; the Zouaves were strange soldiers who sought martyrdom and savored pain without any expectation that their cause would prevail, at least in the immediate future. God, not Zouave prowess, would save the Papal States, if indeed they were to be saved. Readers of this literature were deeply pessimistic about the prospects for salvaging temporal sovereignty, since the Zouaves expected to lose to the evil forces of the Kingdom of Italy and Garibaldi. They wrote to their mothers of their desire to “carry into the grave the consoling thought that our cadavers . . . will become the pedestal on which right is reestablished.”73 Their biographers emphasized their extreme youth and often their physical fragility; they were lambs sent to the slaughter, not effective soldiers. Their chaplains proclaimed that “we need victims,” and argued that “voluntary sacrifice” was the “most noble of victories.”74 Dr. Charles Ozanam, Frédéric’s younger brother, who established a field hospital at the battle of Mentana, wrote of sending young men “to the glory of martyrdom.”75 Charles, a decade younger than Frédéric, lacked his elder brother’s optimism about the church’s future, and he healed Zouaves so that they might return to combat to die. Even Zouave commanders announced that “victory is not our goal” as they asked their men to sacrifice their lives in a “bloody protest” against the depredations of secular nationalism.76 If God did not save papal Rome, then it was undoubtedly because he sought to test Catholic faith through suffering. The Zouave movement was steeped in the traditions of a dolorist Catholicism that celebrated pain as a triumphant step toward the expiation of sin.77 Zouaves sought martyrs’

73. Delmas, Neuvième Croisade, 31. 74. Abbé Jules Daniel to Monseigneur Richard, n.d., Archives historiques de l’archevêché de Paris (hereafter AHAP), I DX7 (papiers Richard), folder A, letter B; Eugène de Gerlache, Les Derniers Jours de l’armée pontificale (Tours, 1870), 5. 75. Charles Ozanam, Une ambulance à la bataille de Mentana (Paris, 1868), 3. 76. Louis-Aimé de Becdelièvre, Souvenirs de l’armée pontificale (Paris, 1867), 67–68, 72. For more on General de Lamoricière’s embrace of defeat, see Oraison funèbre du Général de la Moricière, prononcée dans la cathédrale de Nantes, le mardi 17 octobre 1865 par Mgr l’Evêque d’Orléans (Paris, 1865), and Eugène de la Gournerie, Notes biographiques sur le Général de La Moricière (Nantes, 1865). 77. Richard D. E. Burton, Holy Tears, Holy Blood: Women, Catholicism, and the Culture of Suffering in France, 1840–1870 (Ithaca, NY, 2004), and Ruth Harris, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (New York, 1999).

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deaths in order to atone for the modern world’s contempt for papal dignity. In popular accounts of the Roman Question, Zouaves never kill; instead, they suffer exquisite pain, which they welcome as a sign of God’s favor. One Zouave chaplain maintained a “Book of the Dead” with a separate page to record each edifying death. The details of gangrenous or amputated limbs, smallpox, typhoid, high fevers, and abscessed skin filled each page, and in most cases the young sufferer transcended his tormented body and maintained full consciousness to confess and receive extreme unction.78 A death in a hospital was as valuable as a death on the battlefield because both contributed equally to the Zouave supply of expiatory suffering. Indeed, many Zouaves “achieved even more greatness in a hospital than on the battlefield” because their agony was extended, available for observation, and sanctified by the rituals of the church.79 The wide distribution of Zouave literature invited ordinary Catholics to participate in the Roman drama of sacrifice and expiation. Grieving mothers stood in for ordinary Catholics who would never visit Rome and would never become Zouaves but who could, the stories confirmed, share in the pontiff ’s anguish and in the sacrifice he asked of his children. Heroic Zouave mothers repeatedly declared their joyful willingness to offer their sons to the pope; they were modern mothers of the Maccabees, prepared to watch their sons die for the love of the church. Zouave mothers experienced “Mary’s maternity, her chastity, and her participation in all the mysteries of Christ” as they sacrificed their sons.80 Dying Zouaves’ last words were for their mothers, who often did not need an official report to know that they had lost a son. Writing to Pius IX, one bereaved mother declared that her “heart, ripped to pieces at it is, yet feels happiness at making this sacrifice for you.”81 Grieving mothers rejoiced specifically in the innocence of their sons’ deaths; having embraced martyrdom before they could encounter adult sin, the dead Zouaves remained forever their mothers’ children, their baptismal purity unsullied. Mothers’ pain carried their sons’ sacrifice beyond death, and the Zouave’s agony continued to accumulate merit even after his body reached its grave. The passive suffering of mothers who “were also part of that army” suggested ways in which other Catholics could participate in the work of

78. J.-S. Allard, Les Zouaves pontificaux, ou journal de Mgr Daniel, aumônier des zouaves, camérier secret de SS Pie IX et de SS Léon XIII (Nantes, 1880), e.g., 41–43, 64, 78–79, 84, 217–18. 79. Ségur, Les Martyrs, 51. 80. Ibid., 263–64. 81. Horaist, La Dévotion au pape, 329.

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expiation, and French Catholics enthusiastically “enrolled” in the ranks of the Zouaves.82 Tens of thousands of French citizens wrote to Pius IX, either as signatories of collective statements or in private letters, and many of them drew on Zouave analogies to express their devotion to his person and his cause.83 Peter’s Pence collections—the international fund-raising effort that the papal newspaper Civiltà Cattolica described as the “true universal suffrage of the people”—raised roughly forty-two million francs in France.84 Nuns like the Clares of Amiens called themselves “pontifical Zouaves” and vowed that their prayers, their charity, and their silence would be weapons in the pope’s arsenal. They sent testimonies to Rome with careful accounts of how many hours of prayer and devotion they were contributing to the papal armory.85 Bernadette Soubirous, the visionary of Lourdes, and her sisters at the convent of Saint-Gildard welcomed the papal nuncio in 1868 by informing him that they were “soldiers of duty, Zouaves of prayer.”86 Schoolchildren also enlisted as “Zouaves in prayer”; they vowed good behavior and special prayers that would contribute to the struggle. Thérèse de Chateaurocher, a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl whose brother was serving the pope in Rome, promised Pius that she too was “ready . . . to spill [her] blood for such a great cause.” Another schoolgirl, Marie Tocqueboeuf, wrote, “Under the watchful gaze of Mary, my tender mother, I enlist for three months in the pontifical Zouaves. Oh God, give me the strength I need to stand by my promise. Oh Mary my mother, bless this resolution and her who makes it.” Marie and her classmates signed their testimonies in their own blood.87 These civilian Zouaves demonstrated their willingness to violate the norms of daily life: nuns stockpiled symbolic arms, girls shed their blood, and mothers found comfort in their sons’ deaths. Devout Catholics kept careful

82. Eugène de Walincourt, Les Zouaves pontificaux: Mentana, Rome, campagne de l’ouest (Lille, 1873), 24. 83. In his study of these letters Horaist, La Dévotion au pape, conservatively estimates that about 2 percent of the French people made some formal expression of support directly to the pope in 1864 and 1870, a figure that rose to 6.5 percent in 1871 after the fall of Rome (59). Horaist’s figures do not include gestures of support addressed to other figures in the church hierarchy such as the secretary of state, the nuncio, and local bishops and priests. 84. Lamberts, Black International, 146. By the late 1860s, Peter’s Pence was responsible for about a third of the total budget of the Holy See. On the transformation of papal finances through “the emergence of a mass Catholic movement,” see John F. Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy: Financing the Vatican, 1850–1950 (New York, 2005), 33–35. 85. Sister Saint-Pierre to Pius IX, July 5, 1869, in Horaist, La Dévotion au pape, 429–30. 86. René Laurentin, Bernadette Speaks: A Life of Saint Bernadette Soubirous in Her Own Words, trans. John W. Lynch and Ronald DesRosier (Boston, 2000), 469. 87. Thérèse de Chateaurocher, with the pupils of the Sacré Coeur de Poitiers, Jan. 1, 1869, and Marie Tocqueboeuf with the school from Bourg Saint Andéol, 1868, in Horaist, La Dévotion au pape, 445, 428.

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accounts of their contribution to the cause: hours of silence, numbers of good deeds, prayers, and rosaries. At the same time, though, they recognized that the world’s sins were of such magnitude that their expiation required sacrifice beyond measure. A world where the pope did not rule was a disaster of such scale that it demanded a complete suspension of social expectations. Zouave piety imagined itself confronting an Armageddon, and even categories of human experience as natural as motherhood might be suspended to confront the danger to the papacy. The victory that the pope’s supporters ultimately expected also involved the abrogation of the natural order. Rome’s salvation would be a miracle, not a victory on the battlefield or a diplomatic settlement. Short of this ultimate miracle, however, God rewarded Zouave suffering with divine favor that revealed itself in supernatural ways: even beyond death, some Zouaves continued to act as a link that bound French Catholics to their martyred church. Observers and loved ones at home took the possibility of Zouave sanctity very seriously indeed; they scrutinized deaths, looking for signs of holiness, and they prayed to their lost sons for intercession.88 The most famous Zouave saint, Joseph-Louis Guérin, received fatal wounds at the battle of Castelfidardo, suffered excruciating pain in the hospital, and died “in ecstasy” on All Saints’ Day with his face fixed in “the angelic form it had had in life.”89 A few months later, he appeared in a vision to a young, paralyzed Roman girl, and he assured her that the Virgin would answer her prayers. Able the next day to stand and walk, she went to confession and recognized her mysterious visitor’s distinctive dress when she passed a contingent of Zouaves in the street. She identified Guérin from a photo, and her story quickly circulated. Within a few months a priest who had known Guérin as a seminarian back in France published his biography, and other authors quickly picked up the story.90 The baron de Charette, a Zouave officer, distributed prayer cards with Guérin’s image on them, and the Zouave chaplain was convinced that the pope was investigating the miraculous claims.91 Italian peasants carried away dirt and grass as relics from the battlefield where

88. See, e.g., the letters exchanged between Félicité de Laville Leroulx—who was convinced that her nephew, the Zouave Joseph Rialan, had been responsible for posthumous miracles—and Monsiegneur Richard, in AHAP, I DX7; see also Robert Oheix, Joseph Rialan, sergent aux zouaves pontificaux (Nantes, 1868). Walincourt, Les Zouaves pontificaux, 135, includes statements by priests testifying to the intact state of Rialan’s body two days after he had died in battle. 89. Delmas, Neuvième Croisade, 231–32. 90. J.-S. Allard, Le Volontaire Joseph-Louis Guérin du corps des zouaves pontificaux (Nantes, 1860). 91. Delmas, Neuvième Croisade, 335, and Daniel to Richard, June 13, 1863, AHAP, I DX7, folder A, letter E, and Jan. 9, 1862, letter G.

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Guérin had fallen, and by 1864 miracles had occurred in Brittany, Guérin’s native region, where his grave had become a site of pilgrimage.92 The bishop of Nantes, in whose diocese Guérin was buried, was careful not to make a definitive pronouncement on the Zouave’s sanctity, but he admired “the marvelous coincidence between prayer and simple contact with a relic of our little Zouave and a cure that either is instantaneous or follows a novena.”93 In stories of Zouave sacrifice, home and nation were both incidental settings in the real drama of human salvation. Neither the proprieties of ordinary life nor the protocols of political negotiation mattered to people for whom Rome was the fulcrum of their relation to God rather than a city on the map of an unstable region. French men and women across the social spectrum shared this conviction that the Roman Question was not merely politics as usual but rather a cataclysmic reckoning, with everything—in this world and the next—at stake.

Romantic Catholics and the New Ultramontanism Neither Craven nor Montalembert adopted the new Zouave-inspired piety. They would have concurred that the resolution of the Roman Question ultimately lay in God’s hands, but neither was inclined to passive, expiatory suffering. They had strong, albeit differing, ideas about the best arrangement of territory and authority in the peninsula, and they worked in practical ways to achieve those goals. They would never have denied the value of prayer, but they believed in politics as well. As well-connected French Catholics, Craven and Montalembert not surprisingly both had personal connections to the movement to build a volunteer force to save the papacy: Craven’s nephew Henri de la Ferronnays served in the papal army and recruited volunteers in France while Montalembert’s brother-in-law, Xavier de Mérode, was the secretary of war responsible for the Zouave strategy.94 In keeping with his anti-Italian views, Montalembert was initially more inclined than Craven to look favorably upon the Zouaves, but from the mid-1860s on, the two increasingly agreed that the new ultramontane piety was politically retrograde. By the end of the decade, they both feared that defending papal territory

92. Marcel Launay, Le Diocèse de Nantes sous le Second Empire: Monseigneur Jaquemet, 1849–1869, 2 vols. (Nantes, 1982), 2:738, notes that crowds of five hundred visited the tomb every Sunday after his burial in April 1861. When the chaplain Daniel visited in 1864, he reported thousands of visitors. Allard, Les Zouaves pontificaux, ou journal, 95, 120. 93. Monseigneur Jaquemet, in a Jan. 1862 letter to the bishop of Blois, quoted in Launay, Le Diocèse de Nantes, 2:740n229. 94. Henri de la Ferronnays, Avis aux volontaires pour l’armée pontificale (Nantes, n.d. [1867]).

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was less important than defending Catholics’ individual liberty against the papacy itself. Craven had little use for the Zouaves; she wished that foreign volunteers, whether Zouave or Garibaldini, would go home and leave Italians to sort out their difficulties. “The Holy See’s most mortal enemies couldn’t have come up with anything better” than the Zouaves, she wrote. The band of foreigners in their exotic uniforms further isolated the pope from Italian aspirations. General de Lamoricière, “even if he were a saint as well as a hero,” was still a foreigner, and he would never be as useful to the pope as a Catholic Garibaldi. It was far more sensible to pray for the conversion of Italy’s national hero, Craven believed, than to encourage idealistic youth to seek martyrdom in the service of the pope.95 If only Pius did not insist on surrounding himself with these deluded young men and their supporters, she suggested, he might be better able to see the merits of Italian patriotism. That papal independence depended on a human army, which was inevitably subject to defeat by stronger forces, seemed ridiculous to her. Pius’s spiritual sovereignty, which needed no army to defend it, was a far better claim to independence, she felt.96 Zouaves’ fascination with martyrdom and their expectation of miraculous intervention were foreign to Craven’s view of the world. Well into the 1860s she continued to believe that the Roman Question could be resolved by human compromise if participants would accept the legitimacy of interests on all sides. God should not have to resolve the impasse of Italian politics because his flock should be capable of the requisite negotiations. Moreover, there was real work for Catholics to do to prevent anticlericals from monopolizing policy in the emerging Kingdom of Italy; Craven mobilized all her connections in Naples to protect as many religious houses from dispossession as possible.97 She was completing her manuscript for Le Récit d’une sœur even as the Italian situation became increasingly tense, and the forms of sanctity that she explored in her memoir had little in common with stories of Zouaves like Joseph-Louis Guérin. Craven’s beloved saints accepted suffering, but they never sought it out and they achieved holiness through a long, arduous process of discernment. Incorrupt bodies, miraculous visions, and apparently effortless conversions had no place in Craven’s understanding of the modern Christian life.

95. PC Journal, Tuesday, July 17, 1860, 43v. 96. Ibid., June 1, 1860, 4v. 97. Ravaschieri, Paolina Craven, 241.

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Montalembert, in contrast, was more fully alive to the romance of the pontifical Zouaves. Especially as he became increasingly ill at the end of his life, he was inclined to view his own political career in terms of martyrdom and sacrifice. He relished his personal connection to the papacy; via his correspondence with his brother-in-law Mérode, he was able to communicate directly and personally with Pius IX. The pope occasionally added a few lines of blessing to Mérode’s letters, and Montalembert in turn offered to dedicate his most recent work to the pontiff.98 Montalembert thought Mérode’s plan for a papal army was “admirable,” and he participated actively in mobilizing French Catholic support for Pius IX, notably via the Peter’s Pence collections that funded the Zouave army.99 In his eulogy of General de Lamoricière, commander of the Zouaves at Castelfidardo, Montalembert celebrated the defeat in terms reminiscent of Zouave literature. Lamoricière could have collaborated with Napoleon III and ended his career among the emperor’s well-fed and prosperous generals, but instead he had sought “a glory greater than that military glory with which France had always been besotted.” Leading the Zouaves, he found merit in embracing exile, defeat, and sacrifice.100 Montalembert felt an affinity to Lamoricière; they had both sacrificed promising careers to adhere to their principles and had correspondingly “languished” in an atmosphere of “defeat [and] disgrace.”101 In spite of his occasional willingness to indulge in the Zouave celebration of failure, Montalembert never embraced martyrdom. Instead, he was determined to end his career by reasserting his youthful commitment to Catholicism and liberty. In his final years, he positioned himself as the defender of a modern, dynamic church that, in spite of political upheavals and revolutionary threats, did not retreat into an intransigent rejection of secular politics. Although he suffered kidney pain almost constantly from 1866 until his death in 1870, he never adopted passivity as a strategy but continued to write and speak extensively on behalf of Catholic causes. In the last year of his life, he made a daily journal notation of the quantity of pus removed from the abscess that tormented him, but his interest was clinical, not spiritual—his suppurating wound was a medical condition, not a spiritual blessing. Like the Zouaves, Montalembert intended to die as a defender of the church, but physical suffering was an obstacle to his campaign, not the purpose of it.

98. 99. 100. 101.

CM, Journal, 7:166, 200 (Jan. 13, 1860, and Apr. 21, 1860). Ibid., 7:192 (Mar. 17, 1860) (emphasis in the original). CM, Le Général de la Moricière (Paris, 1865), 19. CM, Journal, 8:111 (Sept. 13, 1865).

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In the 1860s, however, Pius IX increasingly turned his back on his romantic Catholic champions like Craven and Montalembert. The doctrine of papal infallibility, for which the 1864 Syllabus of Errors paved the way, was a rejection of Craven and Montalembert’s shared conviction that the church should develop along with the modern world; it reflected Pius’s conviction that liberty was necessarily revolutionary and anticlerical. The outpouring of love for Pius IX, which the Zouave movement encouraged and facilitated, prepared the Catholic faithful for infallibility. Papal inerrancy was the logical outcome of a cult of the suffering pontiff that steadily inflated the stature of the pope: if Pius were, as some commentators maintained, a continuing version of God’s Word incarnate, then to describe his own words as infallible was surely no great stretch.102 At the 1863 Catholic conference in Malines, Belgium, Montalembert initiated his effort to reclaim his position as lay standard-bearer of progressive Catholicism while simultaneously reasserting his authorship of the “free church in a free state” formula. He worked for weeks on his two speeches, which were his “attempt to find a way out of the anonymity that has surrounded me.”103 At Malines, Montalembert returned to the themes of his youth, asserting that the church would be the first to benefit from the political principles of modern liberalism. He aspired “to see democracy become liberal and liberty once again become Christian.” He filled the speech with praise for Belgium, a Catholic country that had come into being through an act of political will and a constitution and that had no Catholic Old Regime to look back on nostalgically. In contrast, states like the unlamented Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, a “paradise of religious absolutism,” foundered into false liberalism, fostered sullen disbelief among their subjects, and ended up as “the despair of all Catholic hearts.” He acknowledged that he himself had fallen into the trap of fearing the consequences of liberty in 1848, but he had learned his lesson from his friend, the late Henri Lacordaire: “the evils of liberty . . . derive from the learning process, not from its essence.”104 The conference at Malines rejuvenated Montalembert, who was delighted to be received by cheering crowds welcoming him as the “son of the crusaders.” As his invocation of Lacordaire’s example suggests, he felt that he was recapturing the verve and enthusiasm of their activist youth. Although he recognized

102. Roger Aubert, Vatican I (Paris, 1964), 32, 35. 103. CM, Journal, 7:617 (Aug. 5, 1863). 104. CM, L’Eglise libre, 107, 150–51.

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that some of the more conservative clerics in attendance disapproved of his remarks, he felt that on the whole the congress was “a triumph.”105 Montalembert was aware that his speech—and especially his decision to publish it with the title L’Eglise libre dans l’état libre—would raise eyebrows in Rome, but he was determined not to abandon the formula or the sentiments behind it to Cavour. He was not, however, prepared for the depth of hostility his speech aroused in papal circles, where some clerics viewed it as an attack on temporal sovereignty. Montalembert did not see his speech as immediately relevant to the Roman Question because he had always maintained that the Papal States were “a legitimate anomaly” among modern political entities. When he spoke of the appropriate relationship between church and state in the modern world, he was not referring to the church’s government of its own state, which would necessarily follow a different logic.106 In an effort to propitiate his critics, he included an explanatory “Note sur la formule l’Eglise libre dans l’état libre” along with the published text of his speeches; the note recounted Cavour’s appropriation of the phrase and Montalembert’s repudiation of Italian nationalist goals. As rumors circulated that Pius might formally condemn the speech and have the text placed on the Index of Prohibited Books, Montalembert mobilized his friends, including Xavier de Mérode, to argue his case in Rome.107 The reprimand Pius finally issued to Montalembert was private, but it stung deeply. Cardinal Antonelli, the papal secretary of state, wrote Montalembert a letter chiding him for his praise of the liberal state. In a particularly malicious twist, Antonelli suggested that the Malines speeches indicated that Montalembert had disregarded the papal teaching contained in the 1832 encyclical Mirari vos, “with which you are quite familiar.”108 Indeed, for the pope and his inner circle, the issue had not changed since Lamennais challenged the church to lead the modern world and Gregory XVI issued Mirari vos to discipline him. To argue that Rome should adapt itself to changing circumstances was still tantamount to denying that the church alone eternally held the keys to salvation, Antonelli asserted. Although the papacy never publicly rebuked Montalembert, Pius did not hesitate to make his displeasure

105. CM, Journal, 7:624, 636–37 (Aug. 20, 1863). 106. CM to Adolphe Dechamps, Aug. 8, 1863, in Correspondance entre Charles de Montalembert et Adolphe Dechamps, 1838–1870, ed. Roger Aubert (Leuven, Belg., 1993), 102–3 (emphasis in the original). 107. CM to Xavier de Mérode, Oct. 2, Nov. 28, 1863, in Catholicisme et liberté, 282–92. 108. CM, Journal, 7:671 (Mar. 5, 1864). The full letter is reprinted in Edouard Lecanuet, Montalembert, vol. 3, L’Eglise et le Second Empire (1850–1870) (Paris, 1905), 373–74.

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widely known. The broadly distributed papal letter of congratulation to the author of L’Erreur libre dans l’état libre, a satirical attack on Montalembert’s Malines speeches, was particularly humiliating.109 Papal obduracy led Montalembert to abandon his lifelong ultramontanism in his last years. Ever since his youth working on L’Avenir, Montalembert’s Catholicism had been fiercely ultramontane, and the most striking moments of his life had involved swallowing a bitter pill of submission to pontifical authority. For most of his career as an opponent of the Second Empire Montalembert could barely speak in public without attacking Gallicanism and those individuals in the French church who trusted Napoleon III’s assurances, yet by the late 1860s he had joined the Gallican camp in opposition to papal infallibility.110 In spite of the painful censure of his Eglise libre speeches, Montalembert had been unprepared for the 1864 encyclical Quanta cura with its accompanying Syllabus of Errors, which appeared just nine months after Malines. The syllabus and the proposal for the proclamation of papal infallibility at the Vatican Council pushed him to admit that the papacy was not always a source of wisdom—this papacy, he concluded, was even leading Catholics astray, herding them backwards toward a retrograde absolutism. Following Pius IX’s guidance, Montalembert fretted, “one no longer sees even the possibility of living in a sensible and practical manner in the middle of the nineteenth century.”111 Roman teaching “makes life completely impossible for Catholics who claim to believe in something and to do something here on earth.”112 Never one to give up on living and doing in the modern world, Montalembert threw himself into an alliance with the Gallican wing of the French episcopacy, which was preparing to resist infallibility at the council.113 As Montalembert increasingly found himself at odds with Rome, Craven continued her ever more difficult effort to balance her Catholic faith and her Italian allegiance, and she, too, felt ill at ease among the new ultramontanes. After the battle of Mentana in 1867, when French and Zouave forces defeated Garibaldi to preserve the pope’s remaining territory around the city of Rome, Craven feared that “the errors of Italy are now taking the shape

109. CM, Journal, 7:706 (Nov. 7, 1864). 110. Jean-Rémy Palanque, Catholiques libéraux et gallicans en France face au Concile du Vatican, 1867–1870 (Aix en Provence, Fr., 1962), 33–58; Austin Gough, Paris and Rome: The Gallican Church and the Ultramontane Campaign, 1848–1853 (New York, 1986), 65–66. 111. CM, Journal, 8:489 (June 27, 1868) (emphasis in the original). 112. Ibid., 8:486–87 (June 19, 1868) (emphasis in the original). 113. For a summary of CM’s anti-infallibility activity and publications, see Nicole RogerTaillade, introduction to CM, Journal, 8:29–34.

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of serious crime.” She worried that intransigence on both sides would lead the Italian forces to commit the unforgivable act of despoiling the pope and unifying Italy by means of sacrilegious violence. “Victor Emmanuel and the Italian nation should be grateful to the pontifical Zouaves and the French soldiers,” she wrote. By “prevent[ing] Garibaldi and his volunteers from accomplishing their suicidal and parricidal expedition against Rome,” the Zouaves had, she hoped, salvaged the possibility of a peaceful and Christian solution to the Roman Question.114 Craven could not, however, join in Catholic celebrations that presented Mentana as a mark of divine favor; French troops, not miraculous intervention, had produced the victory that saved the rump papal state from Garibaldi’s forces. Wintering in Rome, Craven joined a committee of the “ladies of the foreign colony” in a project to honor the fiftieth year of Pius IX’s priesthood, but she was appalled when their choice of a gift fell on “a somewhat gaudy picture of the battle of Mentana.” The best that could be said for Mentana, in her view, was that it had prevented an even greater disaster, and commemorating the sacrament of ordination with a gory and fratricidal battle scene struck her as lamentable. Craven and a small group of women “of softer natures and more liberal politics” decided instead to offer the pope “a well-filled purse” to be used for charity.115 The bellicosity of the painting and of the women in what Craven referred to as “our battle of Mentana” reminded her of her growing isolation.116 She was increasingly anxious that “Catholic Italy, moderate Italy, liberal and honest Italy” would find itself silenced between the noisy intransigence of the Garibaldini on the one hand and ultramontane infallibilists on the other.117

1870: “This Fatal Year!” In late 1870, Pauline Craven wrote to Teresa Ravaschieri of the pain and distress that the Roman Question caused her and that in the past months had spilled over into all facets of her life, disturbing her conscience and her soul. Eighteen seventy had been a “fatal year” indeed.118 Charles de Montalembert died in March; his final illness took place against the backdrop of the First Vatican Council and the church’s repudiation of their shared belief that

114. 115. 116. 117. 118.

PC to Ravaschieri, quoted in Ravaschieri, Paolina Craven, 301–2, and Bishop, Memoir, 1:257. Bishop, Memoir, 1:264. PC to Miss O’Connor Morris [Maria Catherine Bishop] in Bishop, Memoir, 1:268. PC to Ravaschieri, quoted in Ravaschieri, Paolina Craven, 302. PC to Ravaschieri, ibid., 330.

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Catholics could make their peace with the modern, postrevolutionary world. Although Craven’s views never attracted the public and pontifical attention of Montalembert’s, she was just as devastated as he by the council’s reactionary majority and its proclamation of papal infallibility. Montalembert’s death also spared him from witnessing the disaster of the Franco-Prussian War. Almost simultaneously with the council’s final adoption of infallibility, in July the threat of war with Prussia led Napoleon III to recall French troops from Rome. Their return, along with that of many of the French Zouaves who reconstituted themselves in the French army as a battalion of Volontaires de l’Ouest, had little impact on the war. The disastrous battle of Sedan in early September sealed French defeat and the fall of the Second Empire. A few weeks later, after a purely symbolic Zouave resistance at the Porta Pia, Rome surrendered to Italian forces. Catholic commentators of the 1870s who looked back on the last days of papal Rome often concluded that God’s purpose for the Zouaves had been not to save temporal sovereignty but merely to postpone its overthrow. According to this interpretation, Zouave sacrifice was the price paid for the First Vatican Council and its doctrine of papal infallibility. God had worked in mysterious ways, just as the Zouaves always maintained that he would. After 1870, the church’s security no longer depended upon territorial sovereignty because it now lay instead in the acknowledgment of papal inerrancy. The Zouave martyrs thus had succeeded in protecting the papacy, although in ways they had not fully anticipated. Debates about infallibility presented the question primarily as a political rather than a theological issue. Joseph de Maistre’s assertion—“Infallibility in the spiritual order and sovereignty in the temporal order are two words perfectly synonymous”—shaped understanding of the issue among both its proponents and its opponents.119 Montalembert and Craven certainly understood infallibility as the basis of “papal absolutism”—it gave popes the same kind of authority over Catholics as divine-right monarchs had claimed to exert over their subjects, and it ruled out any possibility of liberty within the church. Critics of infallibility since the First Vatican Council have focused largely on the incompatibility of infallibility and sovereignty: the doctrine implies that each pope’s sovereign authority must be strictly limited by the infallible statements of all his predecessors.120 At the time of the council, 119. Joseph de Maistre, The Pope Considered in His Relations with the Church, Temporal Sovereignties, Separated Churches and the Cause of Civilization, trans. Aeneas M. Dawson, ed. Richard A. Lebrun (New York, 1975), 1 (emphasis in the original). 120. Hans Küng, Infallible? An Inquiry, trans. Edward Quinn (New York, 1971); Brian Tierney, Origins of Papal Infallibility, 1150–1350. A Study on the Concepts of Infallibility, Sovereignty and Tradition in the Middle Ages (Leiden, Neth., 1972), 1–14; Perreau-Saussine, Catholicism and Democracy, 61–66.

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however, the majority fully approved of infallibility’s resonance with monarchy; they intended for infallibility, like the syllabus, to refer to Old Regime political ideas and to reject any suggestion that the church should concern itself with being up-to-date or modern. When the Vatican Council opened in December 1869, Craven was in Rome, and her salon was one of the most active centers of debate in the city. Although her affinity with the anti-infallibilists was well known, she took care to invite leading clerics and laymen of all opinions, which was, she reported, occasionally awkward.121 There had not been such a storm within the church for centuries, and she was certain that “no council decree has ever been awaited with such trepidation by good and true Catholics” who feared that they would be labeled “rebels” or even “heretics.”122 She wrote regularly to Montalembert, who was suffering his last illness in Paris, and she had paid a final visit to his Burgundian estate in November 1869. Now that death and infallibility both seemed to them greater threats than Garibaldi, they put their differences on the Roman Question behind them. In their last conversation, they were “in full agreement,” Craven reported, “that the union between the church and liberty—today so feared and rejected—will become an accomplished fact everywhere once it has been fully realized in Italy.”123 When the pope asserted an absolutist sovereignty that denied his subjects’ liberty and affirmed his own right to coerce their belief, the size of papal territory seemed irrelevant. Liberty, as both Montalembert and Craven understood it, was as incompatible with papal as with royal absolutism. Although opponents of papal infallibility had prepared optimistically for the council, their optimism quickly disintegrated after its opening sessions. A majority of French bishops opposed infallibility, and important contingents of German, American, and eastern European bishops agreed with them.124 Figures within the Vatican, including Xavier de Mérode—who had been forced out of his position as minister of war—similarly rejected infallibility. Once the anti-infallibilists arrived in Rome, however, they realized that the Vatican’s preparations included inviting large numbers of pro-infallibility bishops without dioceses and arranging council procedures in order to favor the papal agenda. Notably, the council abandoned the conciliar tradition of moral unanimity in favor of majority voting.125 Anti-infallibalists accustomed to “parliamentary habits” were startled by the deep secrecy of many

121. 122. 123. 124. 125.

PC to Ravaschieri, Jan. 18, 1870, in Ravaschieri, Paolina Craven, 311; Aubert, Vatican I, 160. PC to Ravaschieri, Mar. 5, 1870, in Ravaschieri, Paolina Craven, 313. PC to Ravaschieri, Nov. 25, 1869, in Ravaschieri, Paolina Craven, 307. Aubert, Vatican I, 114–20. Gough, Paris and Rome, 240–55; Roland Hill, Lord Acton (New Haven, 2000), chaps. 12–13.

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meetings, and they were also dismayed by their lack of access to the press; they had to leave papal territory in order to print their opinions in Florence, capital of the Kingdom of Italy.126 Within days of the opening of the council Craven was “already quite demoralized,” Montalembert noted in his journal.127 She quickly recognized that, as one historian of the council has argued, “the historical and ecclesiological arguments had been secondary” to Pius’s majority, who “saw personal infallibility as the Church’s main weapon in a definitive struggle against that persistent and threatening entity ‘the Revolution.’ ”128 No amount of preparation and careful mobilization of argument would derail the infallibilist contingent, which saw itself engaged in a struggle against an endless and capacious anti-Catholic conspiracy. Grief at the death of Charles de Montalembert on March thirteenth exacerbated Craven’s distress at the probable outcome of the council. Montalembert’s painful last days did not prevent him from lobbying energetically against infallibility. In his final week, a private letter he wrote denouncing “Roman absolutism” was leaked and published; in it he referred to infallibility as an “idol” erected in the Vatican. Two days before his death, he recorded in his journal his fear that “having lost the Orient a thousand years ago and half of the West 300 years ago, [the church is] going to lose the half that remains.”129 Because Montalembert died before the final decisions of the council, he did not have to choose a course of action in response. It seems certain, however, that he would have submitted. Craven, in fact, believed that Montalembert, aware that his end was near, had proclaimed his unconditional obedience to whatever decisions the council might make. His widow, Anna, later wrote that although he intended to continue the struggle to the end, he planned to submit to infallibility on the very day of the vote.130 As a young man in 1834, faced with the painful choice between his conscience and his church, he had chosen the church, without which, he said, he would be truly alone in the world. Lying on his deathbed in 1870, he would have felt that same threat of solitude—now potentially eternal—even more acutely.

126. Albert de Boÿs, Souvenirs du concile du Vatican, 1869–1870, ed. Jacques Gadille (Leuven, Belg., 1968), 113, 130–31; François Guédon, “Autour du Concile du Vatican,” Les Lettres, May 1928, 19–34. 127. CM, Journal, 8:735 (Dec. 14, 1869). 128. Gough, Paris and Rome, 259. 129. CM, Journal, 8:799 (Mar. 11, 1870). “Lettre de M de Montalembert à M Lallemand,” appeared in La Gazette de France on Mar. 7, 1870, and was reprinted, approvingly, in Le Correspondant on Mar. 10, 1870. It is also available in Journal, 8:792–96. 130. Lecanuet, Montalembert, 3:471.

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Although he feared that the church might lose those souls that had not already gone astray in the Reformation, he had no doubts about his own soul, which would remain loyal to the church beyond death. In recognition of his decades of service to the church and especially of his role in planning France’s Roman expedition, Montalembert had been honored with Roman citizenship, and he was therefore entitled to a funeral Mass on the Capitoline hill in Ara Coeli, a Capuchin church often used to honor foreign dignitaries. Xavier de Mérode planned the service, which was widely publicized, including an announcement from the pulpit of St. Louis des Français. Pius IX, however, was not prepared to overlook Montalembert’s opposition to the council majority or his comment on the idolatry of papal infallibility, and on the night before the funeral Mass was to take place he canceled the service. Craven climbed the hill to Ara Coeli at the appointed time only to learn there of the insult to her friend. According to her account, Louis Veuillot, Montalembert’s “implacable enemy,” stood outside the church with the announcement that the service was forbidden “lest it should be used as a Gallican demonstration.”131 Even before the council’s final proclamation, Veuillot and the infallibilists were celebrating their victory and the defeat of their leading antagonist. As she began an Easter retreat in the week following her friend’s death, Craven wrote that “this year everything fails me at once. . . . Today no home anywhere on earth is mine.”132 Pius IX did eventually permit—and attend— a Mass for the soul of Charles de Montalembert several days later at the much smaller Vatican parish church of Santa Maria Traspontina. All the bishops were in a council meeting, so none attended Montalembert’s service, which was not widely announced. One anti-infallibilist French bishop passed the church hung with black and, being told that it was a funeral for “someone called Charles,” thought that it was perhaps for a dead Zouave.133 Craven referred to the service as a “necessary reparation that the head of the church owed to the memory of its most faithful champion,” but the funeral Mass did not expunge the humiliation.134 Montalembert had always maintained that Rome was above national identity because it belonged to all Catholics, and Craven had always experienced Rome as a haven, a patrie for all the faithful. In the wake of Montalembert’s death, however, the city no longer felt like 131. Ravaschieri, Paolina Craven, 316; Bishop, Memoir, 1:276–77; De Boÿs, Souvenirs du concile, 133–36. 132. Quoted in Bishop, Memoir, 1:280. 133. Monseigneur Foulon’s letters from Rome published by François Guédon, “Autour du Concile du Vatican,” Les Lettres, June 1938, 200–204. 134. PC to Ravaschieri in Ravaschieri, Paolina Craven, 317.

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home, and its integration into the Kingdom of Italy after 1870 did nothing to assuage Craven’s sense of loss. Craven’s defiance of infallibility never earned her the public opprobrium that Montalembert provoked. In spite of her influence, the church felt no need to demand obedience from Mrs. Craven—submission was, after all, women’s natural posture. She did find her way to acceptance of the pope’s infallibility, and her path was probably not very different from the one that Montalembert would have taken had he lived longer. Readying herself to obey, she wrote to Ravaschieri even before the council’s final pronouncements that there was nothing left for them but to “pray often and a lot, then to hope beyond all hope, and, finally . . . to prepare ourselves, our hearts, our souls, and our minds . . . to hear no other voice in the world except that of the church.”135 She eventually concluded that the proclamation of papal infallibility was a challenge to Catholics to accept the full significance of Christ’s words to Saint Peter: “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.” Because Christ had invested his authority literally in the very person of Peter, the power of the words of the saint—and of his successors—could not be underestimated. Consequently, Catholics should “blindly obey” that voice when it “speaks to us distinctly.” Infallibility, then, for Craven, was less an exaltation of the person of the pope and more a requirement that individual Catholics discipline their wills. She acknowledged that it had been painful to “compel my pride and my feelings to admit that those whom I disliked were in the right, and those whom I most loved and admired were in the wrong.” She remained convinced, however, that those whom she disliked were still gravely at fault; men like Louis Veuillot had given the doctrine of infallibility a bad name and even “tempted some to reject it altogether from mere repugnance to agree with them.”136 Having separated the essential—the church’s privilege to speak inerrantly for all Catholics—from the unfortunate insolence of some of its advocates, she was, she wrote, “daily happier and calmer in [her] firm adherence to the church’s decree.”137 Craven found this calm in a new period of peregrination through the ruins of the world to which she was accustomed. Returning to France during the Paris Commune was difficult, and although Naples had been her home for over a decade, she no longer felt Italian, as she had earlier claimed. She and Augustus left Italy in November 1870 and embarked on a period of homelessness: they spent the winter in Baden-Baden and the spring in Brussels 135. PC to Ravaschieri, Mar. 5, 1870, in Ravaschieri, Paolina Craven, 314. 136. PC to Miss O’Connor Morris, July 26, 1870, in Bishop, Memoir, 1:289–90. 137. PC to Miss O’Connor Morris, May 17, 1871, in Bishop, Memoir, 1:302.

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and passed briefly through post-Commune Paris in early summer on the way to stay with friends and family in various French country homes. They returned to Baden-Baden for the winter of 1871–1872 and then spent the spring and summer traveling around England, during which time she hoped to “decide whether prudence allows or forbids one to settle once more for good in Paris.”138 In 1873 the Cravens sold their Neapolitan house and established an apartment in Paris, although they continued to spend much of the year on the road staying with friends. Craven said nothing further about being Italian: whether as the capital of the new Italy or as the pope’s prison, Rome no longer held the same allure as it had in the past. After 1870, Pauline Craven chose to enter old age as a woman without nation or home: she clung to the Catholic cosmopolitanism of her youth rather than accept the demands of either national or ultramontane Catholic identity. Her choices, of course, were limited by her gender and by the intransigence of the modern nation-state and the Catholic Church. Nonetheless, her decision indicates that she did have choices. She was no more locked into a feminized, emotive, reactionary piety than her male contemporaries were constrained to abandon their religious faith by their duty to the nation. Moreover, Craven’s defeat by the modern nation-state and the Catholic Church was arguably temporary, because her best-selling Le Récit d’une sœur had already won over readers all over Europe. Craven’s many admirers valued Le Récit for its portrayal of a Catholicism that liberated men and women and allowed them to live happily in the modern world. After 1870, that depiction of Craven’s youth was both long past and rose-colored, but it remained deeply appealing to many European Catholics. The romantic Catholic project ended in defeat in 1870, but it did not disappear entirely. The Catholic hierarchy and the modern nation-state, especially the French Third Republic, rejected it, but the continuing popularity of Craven’s literary efforts suggests that many Catholic readers continued to look to her for guidance in living a Catholic life without rejecting the modern world.

138. PC to Miss O’Connor Morris, Mar. 4, 1872, in Bishop, Memoir, 1:312.

Epilogue The Devout Woman of the Third Republic and the Eclipse of Catholic Fraternity

The fall of Rome and the installation of the Third Republic transformed French Catholicism and disappointed the postrevolutionary generation of romantic Catholics who had hoped to reconcile their faith with the modern political and social order. The space that Catholics like Pauline Craven and Charles de Montalembert had hoped to occupy succumbed to pressure from both sides: neither the Roman Catholic Church nor the French state welcomed the idea that faithful and obedient Catholics could also be good citizens and autonomous participants in modern secular affairs. Instead, Catholics felt pressure to choose—either the nation or the church but not both in equal measure. Many members of the romantic generation had died: neither Lacordaire, Ozanam, nor Montalembert had to face the challenge of making himself a home in the post-1870 world. Craven had previously worried that Italians would be forced to choose between their faith and their nation, but after 1870 she realized that that choice faced other Catholics as well. She clung to her cosmopolitan, romantic Catholic identity, and after 1870 her years of traveling across western Europe from one friend’s house to another indicated her alienation from both her French and Roman homes. She continued to write for an international and largely female audience; like Le Récit d’une sœur, her later works were widely translated. Craven’s biographies in particular were deliberately out of step with the era of the nation-state: she commemorated the saintly 276

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lives of the English novelist Georgiana Fullerton, the Russian Daughter of Charity Natalie Narischkin, and the devout Neapolitan noblewoman Adelaïde Capece Minutolo, among others. Her subjects were not fully at home in the nation: Fullerton and Narischkin both left state churches to convert to Catholicism, and Minutolo, like Craven, witnessed the conflict between church and Risorgimento. Craven’s largely female audience, similarly, was wary of the nation-state—Catholic and female, they were doubly stigmatized as unfit for citizenship. As the Third Republic consolidated and Pius IX settled into his role as prisoner of the Vatican, the space available for Catholic life in France seemed to shrink. Certainly the scope for Catholic thought and action that romantics of the early nineteenth century had imagined was diminishing, and there seemed little likelihood that Catholic faith would be welcomed in the practice of citizenship or the definition of its social obligations. Increasingly, the figure who dominated the contracting space that romantic Catholics had delineated was female. It would be an exaggeration to say that Catholic men disappeared from public consciousness—after all, a Catholic parliamentary opposition soon developed under the Third Republic. Nonetheless, both Catholics and republicans increasingly associated the church with its female faithful. Michelet’s assertion from the 1840s that the church’s real force came from the alliance of priests and laywomen seemed on the brink of realization in the last decades of the century. The development of a monolithic image of the Catholic woman was a process in which both Catholics and anticlericals participated. Both sides were willing to embrace the notion that Catholicism was a religion of women. For republicans, this feminized church protected the masculinity of citizenship. For Catholics, it promoted a cult of victimization by associating the church with powerlessness. Although the Catholic woman of the fin de siècle had a sociological basis in the growing number of female congregations and vocations, she was nonetheless a construct intended to comment on the nature of religious belief in the modern world. This fictional Catholic woman, whatever her origin, suggested menace: either she herself was a threat to the republican order or she was the last bulwark against the threat that the republic posed to the Catholic Church. The stakes were high, and the conflict was apocalyptic. This epilogue analyzes two of these women of the late nineteenth century, one the invention of a Catholic novelist outraged by what she saw as France’s betrayal of the pope and the other a creation of republican writers anxious to circumscribe the authority of the church. Sister Marie Elisabeth, heroine of Victorine Monniot’s 1861 novel Marguerite à vingt ans, and the Empress

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Eugénie, scapegoat for French failures in republican histories of the Second Empire, were, in a sense, both fictional characters. They were both flat, singledimensional figures, distinguished only by their blind dedication to their church. The complexity of romantic Catholicism, with its attempt to shape a religious faith for lay women and men who would be both devout and in tune with the modern world, disappeared. The feminized church, ironically a notion embraced by both sides of the Catholic-republican divide, displaced romantic Catholic aspirations.

Marguerite at Twenty: Sister Marie Elisabeth Victorine Monniot wrote the manuscript for Le Journal de Marguerite, her best-selling story of a girl’s first communion, in the mid-1850s, when the situation in Rome appeared stable. Monniot was proud of her connection to papal Rome: Victor Oudinot, the commander of the French expeditionary force that toppled the Roman Republic, was her godfather. Monniot’s mother had been the governess of the younger children of the Napoleonic marshal Nicolas-Charles Oudinot and had continued at her post even after marrying and giving birth to Victorine and her sisters. Victor Oudinot, the marshal’s eldest son, and his sister Caroline had stood as godparents to Victorine at her christening in 1824.1 In 1856, when Monniot delivered the manuscript of Le Journal to her priest and asked him to submit it for approval from the archdiocese of Paris, she was confident that papal affairs were in good hands and that France would stand by Pius IX. French Catholics like herself and her heroine Marguerite Guyon could be satisfied that France was living up to its obligations as the eldest daughter of the church. Soon after Le Journal de Marguerite appeared in 1858, however, Monniot’s view of the world was no longer as sanguine. The Italian war of 1859, in which Napoleon III had supported Piedmontese ambition in the Italian peninsula, had placed papal Rome in jeopardy. By late 1860 most of Pius’s central Italian territory was lost and his army had suffered defeat at Castelfidardo. Devout Catholics, dismayed by Napoleon III’s alliance with Victor Emmanuel, no longer trusted that France would always support the papacy. Monniot abandoned the optimistic outlook of her popular novel: if the pope no longer ruled in Rome, Monniot could not imagine Marguerite’s encounter with the world as a happy adventure. 1. Olivier Lefranc, Victorine Monniot, sa vie, son œuvre (Paris, n.d. [1907]), 16–17. See also Madeleine Lassère, Victorine Monniot ou l’éducation des jeunes filles au XIXe siècle. Entre exotisme et catholicisme de combat (Paris, 1999), chap. 1.

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Thanks to the phenomenal success of Le Journal de Marguerite, Monniot was in a position to respond to current events and to express the anguish she felt as the Roman Question called papal sovereignty into doubt. She rapidly composed a sequel, Marguerite à vingt ans, which appeared in 1861. The shift in tone between the two novels that were published so close together is striking: the excitement and sense of opportunity that characterized the first book disappear in the second. Although the sequel maintains the diary format, Monniot was much less careful to preserve the voice of a day-to-day journal writer. Marguerite à vingt ans reads as if it has an omniscient narrator who retrospectively records long stretches of dialogue. Monniot only occasionally and awkwardly reminds her reader of the plot device of the journal. The sequel also lacks most of the interest of the original because its characters are entirely one-dimensional; Marguerite has successfully overcome her flaws and arrived at age twenty as a paragon of womanly virtue. Having been raised by the same governess and with the example of Marguerite before them, the younger Guyon girls are also faultless, so the first novel’s focus on education and improvement is lost in the second, whose main characters have nowhere to go. If Marguerite at age twelve was a sort of female Telemachus, traveling the world while preparing for her first communion, Marguerite at twenty follows the opposite trajectory. The sequel returns Marguerite to France and shows the progressive restriction of her life choices: she confronts her family’s poverty, finds herself in the humbling position of a governess, and eventually enters a convent. Monniot cruelly retracts all the opportunities that the first novel offered its heroine, leaving Marguerite nothing to embrace but suffering. Marguerite à vingt ans appears to be a marriage novel, and it initially picks up all the cues about its heroine’s future that the first book laid down. We fully expect Marguerite to marry Albéric de Laval, the brother of the saintly, dead Marie. Marguerite and Marie swore eternal sisterhood in Le Journal de Marguerite, and from her deathbed Marie begged Marguerite to love Albéric as her own brother.2 As the dying Marie tells Marguerite that God wants her to live, readers, alert to the novelistic role of female friends in facilitating marriages, can hear the wedding bells in her future.3 When we again meet Albéric in Marguerite à vingt ans, we are not surprised that Marguerite’s

2. Victorine Monniot, Le Journal de Marguerite, ou les deux années préparatoires à la première communion, 10th ed. (Paris, 1867), 551. 3. Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Marriage and Desire in Victorian England (Princeton, 2007), chap. 2.

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mother “likes to consider him another son” and that he enjoys a fraternal friendship with Gustave, Marguerite’s brother.4 It is Gustave, in fact, who proposes to Marguerite on Albéric’s behalf, reminding her that Marie would want her friend to make her brother happy (1:194). Marguerite’s family supports Albéric’s cause because they already know him as a “good son and a good brother”—naturally he will also be a good husband (1:212). Marguerite accepts and records the event in her journal by addressing “my beloved Marie”: “I will truly become your sister” (1:214). The two agree to marry after Albéric, who is a naval officer, completes his next tour of duty: “eighteen more months of suffering,” Albéric says, “but then happiness” (1:214). In spite of its heroine’s engagement, Marguerite à vingt ans contains far more suffering than happiness. The deaths of Marguerite’s parents frame the story. The novel begins on the island of Bourbon, where Marguerite, her mother, sisters, and Mademoiselle—whom the grown-up Marguerite can now call Caroline—hear of Monsieur Guyon’s death in Pondicherry. They have apparently spent the last six years on the island without rejoining Monsieur Guyon, and now that he is dead they must return to France. With the death of the head of the family, the Guyons are now poor, and a lawsuit filed by distant cousins threatens to make them even poorer. They suffer persecution at the hands of these mercenary relatives and the courts, and although they are destitute, they comfort themselves that the trial left no stain on their father’s honor. Madame Guyon dies near the end of the book; confident that her four surviving children have become good Christian adults, she can leave them with her blessing and rejoin her husband and Baby in heaven. Most of Marguerite à vingt ans concentrates on the humiliation its heroine endures as she seeks to make a living as a governess—a subject with which Monniot was bitterly familiar. Marguerite’s experiences as a governess also contribute significantly to the interest of the novel because they introduce characters—her young pupils—who are not (yet) perfect, Christian girls. Marguerite begins work in the home of wealthy Americans; the self-centered, petty, and Protestant Mrs. Bowes hires Marguerite to raise her Catholic stepdaughters and makes no effort to hide her disdain for the lowly governess. The household is miserable, and the two girls, reasonably enough, dislike their hypocritical stepmother and their overindulged stepsister. Their religious education has been neglected since their Catholic mother’s death, and Marguerite arrives just in time to prepare the younger girl for her first

4. Monniot, Marguerite à vingt ans. Suite et fin du Journal de Marguerite, 3rd ed., 2 vols. (Paris, 1862), 1:92, 177. Subsequent references in parentheses in the text.

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communion. She quickly teaches the girls to suffer their stepmother’s spiteful treatment in silence, and their reward is the improved behavior of their stepsister, who even converts to Catholicism so as to emulate their example. These excellent results do not save Marguerite from the humiliation of summary dismissal by her jealous employer. Her next placement is even more mortifying: she becomes governess to the children of the countess de Mérigny, who, in volume 1, was the most vain and disagreeable girl in Marguerite’s catechism class. Clara de Mérigny has little time for her daughters and little compassion for her governess, but Marguerite swallows her humiliation, prays for strength, and proceeds to transform Clara’s spoiled daughters into loving girls. Monniot weaves the story of Pius IX’s suffering and humiliation into Marguerite’s. Like Monniot, Marguerite enjoys a connection to the Oudinot family: the baroness Hainguerlot, née Stéphanie Oudinot, makes a brief appearance in the novel as “Madame H,” sister of the noble general who liberated Rome and a devout woman dedicated entirely to her husband, children, and charitable works.5 More important, Marguerite empathizes with the suffering pope, and she teaches her charges to love and defend him as well. Mrs. Bowes and the Protestant governess who replaces Marguerite mock the church’s claim to infallibility and tease the poor Catholic stepdaughters with stories of priestly misconduct. Marguerite has done her work well, however, and her former pupils merely bow their heads and observe that Jesus himself suffered unjust accusations (2:153–54). Marguerite approves of her pupils’ conduct and reminds them that Peter’s throne would always be threatened by the “tides of impiety, of envy, [and] of pride.” Although their stepmother and their new governess consider it “ridiculous” to love Pius IX, Marguerite confirms that he exemplifies “goodness, indulgence, charity, resignation combined with the most heroic courage, a noble dignity tempered by benevolence that even wins over his enemies.” “The majestic and gentle figure of Pius IX,” Marguerite affirms, “reminds us of the adorable image of the Savior. . . . The more a father is persecuted, the closer his children must gather lovingly around him” (2:156–59). The experience of pain and loss and the desire to sacrifice even more lead Marguerite to break her engagement and renounce the world. Her decision to enter a convent comes at the very end of a long novel, and Monniot does little to prepare her readers for the surprise. After her mother’s death, Marguerite opens her copy of The Imitation of Christ at random, and her eyes fall

5. Lefranc, Victorine Monniot, 210–11.

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on a passage that calls upon Christians to “rejoice and give thanks, yea, to account this as a special subject of joy, that afflicting thee with sorrows I do not spare thee.”6 Marguerite knows the path her life must take; she receives communion and then tells Caroline, her old governess, of her resolution to enter a convent. Marguerite’s decision to embrace the religious life is a curious mix of practicality and mysticism. Her retreat is supposed to help her family’s financial situation, which, with the loss of Madame Guyon’s widow’s pension, has become dire. The hospital sisters of Notre Dame de Bon Secours are willing to take Marguerite without a dowry, and Caroline and the younger Guyon girls will return to friends on Bourbon. Most important, Marguerite intends Albéric to find consolation in her younger sister, Stéphanie, who has, fortuitously, grown up to become the very image of Albéric’s dead sister, Marie (1:19). The novel has hinted that Stéphanie might be a suitable wife for Albéric and might, perhaps, even love him. Although Stéphanie begs to be allowed to follow her sister into the convent, Marguerite insists that her sister’s role is to “preach the faith by your virtues as wife and mother.” Marguerite takes the veil confident that Stéphanie will care for and console Caroline, their youngest sister, and their “brother” Albéric (2:259). Prior to her decision to enter a convent, Marguerite never mentions any desire for the religious life, and practical concerns do seem to be her primary motivation. Monniot’s first biographer noted that some readers accused her of misrepresenting religious vocation because Marguerite seemed more interested in a good husband for her sister than in becoming the bride of Christ.7 Having chosen the convent, Marguerite does experience an attraction to the religious life—or at least to an ideal of constant suffering that she associates with it. Marguerite describes her vocation as a “perpetual holocaust” in which she offers herself endlessly to the poor and the sick (2:254). Although she is clearly a talented teacher who takes pleasure in education, she chooses a hospital congregation so that she may devote herself to the diseased and dying rather than to children. She seems determined not only to do good in the world but also to suffer while doing it, and a teaching congregation might offer her satisfaction along with good works. When the mother superior tells Marguerite that she must be sure that she looks for nothing in the religious life except the crucified Jesus, Marguerite confidently asserts that 6. Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ in Four Books, trans. Richard Challoner (Dublin, 1842), 264; Monniot, Marguerite à vingt ans, 2:238. 7. Lefranc, Victorine Monniot, 84–86.

Figure epilogue: 1. Marie Edmée Pau, frontispiece to Victorine Monniot, Marguerite à vingt ans. Suite et fin du Journal de Marguerite, 3rd ed., vol. 2 (Paris: Perrin, 1862).

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she seeks nothing else. Certainly she does not expect joy or even redemption in exchange for her sacrifice. Although Marguerite à vingt ans takes a startling plot twist at the very end, Monniot asserts that Marguerite was in fact destined for the religious life. Marguerite feels that her calling comes at least in part from Marie, her saintly friend and adopted sister: “That angel exerts some mysterious influence on my destiny,” Marguerite tells Caroline (2:251). Sitting in the chapel of the sisters of Notre Dame de Bon Secours, Marguerite looks at the women who are to become her sisters in Christ, and their veils remind her of her first communion—the veil she wrapped around herself on that day did not anticipate a human bridegroom after all. She writes the last entry in her journal on the eve of her postulation because from that moment on she will be able to unveil her heart directly to God. The purpose of her journal, it turns out, was to bring her to a point where she no longer has any need to express herself because self no longer matters. She gives Caroline the journals before she “disappears” beneath the name Sister Marie Elisabeth—the names of the mother of God, of her beloved adopted sister, and of her own mother (2:270–71). Although readers might have thought that they were reading the story of a girl whose education gives her self-mastery and prepares her for life in the world, the conclusion of Marguerite à vingt ans tells them in no uncertain terms that they were wrong. Beginning with her first communion, Marguerite has been learning not merely to discipline her will but to renounce the self. Marguerite’s decision to enter a religious order surprised readers, but it resonated with the experience of thousands of nineteenth-century French women. Indeed, Marguerite’s practical approach to taking the veil is a reminder that the massive expansion of congregations of women religious presented thousands of women with new and expanded options for setting a life course.8 Religious congregations expected their postulants to experience a vocation to serve God, but they were also institutions that responded in practical ways to the needs of women in a variety of life circumstances. They offered thousands of women a stable position and a meaningful social role outside marriage. Teaching and nursing congregations were a new and dynamic form of religious life for women who were looking for active involvement in communities rather than for cloister or contemplation. The new congregations also offered opportunities for leadership and management, 8. Claude Langlois, Le Catholicisme au féminin: Les congrégations françaises à supérieure générale au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1984); Sarah A. Curtis, Civilizing Habits: Women Missionaries and the Revival of French Empire (New York, 2010).

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and a talented sister like Marguerite would likely end up with considerable responsibilities for large budgets, social services, and personnel. In light of what we know about the expansion of female congregations in the nineteenth century, what seems odd in Marguerite’s vocation is her insistence that entry into the congregation represents the end of her life story— that by taking the veil she chooses closure and retreat. One could imagine a third volume of Marguerite’s journal that would take readers into the adult life of a Catholic sister. This hypothetical volume could reconnect with the adventure-story element of the first: Sister Marie Elisabeth might return to Bourbon or serve in another foreign mission; she might convert heathens or at least baptize infidel babies. In the midst of the Roman Question, however, Monniot was not in a mood to project an exciting future for her heroine. Instead, Marguerite retreats into silence and pain, losing herself in the drama of the suffering church. Marguerite à vingt ans never enjoyed the success of its predecessor. By 1907, Le Journal de Marguerite was in its 145th edition, but its sequel, which had appeared only a year later, was in only its 23rd.9 The first novel enjoyed the advantage of being a common gift for that near-universal occasion first communion, but clearly there was more to the public’s preference than a gift opportunity. Readers—and probably their parents—appreciated the Marguerite of the first book, who anticipated a cheerful future of first communion, then marriage and motherhood. But the Marguerite of the sequel, whose Catholic devotion pushes her to embrace suffering and retreat from the world, was much less appealing. Even as a republican consensus established itself in the last decades of the nineteenth century, twelve-year-old Marguerite remained an attractive heroine, and girls still read about her adventures, her efforts at self-improvement, and her preparation for a Christian life. The older Marguerite, whose understanding of Christian womanhood was much narrower, was precisely the kind of woman that republican parents would hesitate to offer their daughters as a role model.

The Empress Eugénie The Empress Eugénie of early Third Republic histories was in some senses as fictional as Sister Marie Elisabeth, and she shared Monniot’s heroine’s rigid Catholicism. Eugénie’s religiosity and her inappropriate political influence percolate through a variety of genres as explanations for the decline and fall

9. Lefranc, Victorine Monniot, 77, 87.

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of the Second Empire. Focusing on Eugénie served a variety of purposes after the collapse of the empire: Bonapartists and republicans both found it useful to concentrate on the failings of the empress. Thus Léon Gambetta quoted Eugénie as referring to the conflict with Prussia as “my war,” and Prince Jérôme Napoléon famously claimed that Eugénie’s pet project—the occupation of Rome—had led directly to the loss of Alsace and Lorraine.10 General Barail, whose career survived the empire and who served as minister of war under Patrice de McMahon, was widely quoted as saying that Eugénie was “if not the sole, then at least a primary author of the war in 1870.”11 Before it became evidence of her irrationality, her incapacity for politics, and her disloyalty to France, Eugénie’s Catholicism was an important part of what qualified her to be empress. When the Emperor Napoleon III married Eugénie de Montijo, her devotion was an important element of her suitability for the position. Although Spanish-born, she had been educated in France by the Dames du Sacré Cœur, like many daughters of the French aristocracy, and at the time of their marriage in 1852, Napoleon III presented her as “Catholic and pious” and promised that she would join in his prayers for the happiness of France. He called attention to the fact that he was marrying a Catholic woman who was thoroughly French in culture, unlike Louis Philippe’s heir, who had embarked on a long effort to marry well and ended up having to be satisfied with a Protestant bride “of secondary rank.”12 A devout wife, like the Roman expedition in support of the pope, burnished the emperor’s conservative credentials, as did Pius IX’s standing as godfather to the prince imperial in 1856. The empress’s charity played a significant role in Second Empire propaganda: she requested that the Paris municipal council fund a girls’ school rather than purchase her a diamond necklace as a wedding gift; she fearlessly visited cholera patients and supported multiple organizations interested in the welfare of women and children. Biographies of the empress published during the empire focused almost exclusively on her charity, and images of her similarly emphasized her benevolence and her piety.13

10. On Gambetta, Thomas W. Evans, The Memoirs of Dr. Thomas W. Evans, 2nd ed., ed. Edward A. Crane (London, 1906), 1. Dr. Evans, as one of Eugénie’s defenders, was at great pains to refute Gambetta. On Prince Jérôme, Maurice Paléologue, The Tragic Empress: A Record of Intimate Talks with the Empress Eugénie, 1901–1919, trans. Hamish Miles (New York, 1928), 50. 11. Irénée Mauget, L’Impératrice Eugénie (Paris, 1909), 224; Sylvain Blot, Napoléon III: Histoire de son règne, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1899), 246. 12. Napoleon III, speech quoted in Eugène de Mirecourt, L’Impératrice Eugénie (Paris, 1867), 13. 13. Alison McQueen, Empress Eugénie and the Arts: Politics and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century (Burlington, VT, 2011), chap. 1. For biographies, see L’Impératrice Eugénie et le peuple (Paris, 1862); Comte Gazan de La Peyrière, L’Impératrice Eugénie sœur de charité, 3rd ed. (Paris, 1867).

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Figure epilogue: 2. de France, Paris.

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Gustave Le Gray, Empress Eugénie at Prayer (1856), Bibliothèque nationale

Eugénie certainly was devout, but her faith did not make her reactionary or set her at odds with the modern world. She even identified with the romantic Catholicism of her youth: she and the emperor both belonged to the “same generation of enthusiasts,” she told an interviewer shortly before her death. The “romanticism of 1830 and the utopianism of 1848,” she claimed,

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“were in both of our natures.”14 On questions like women’s education, for instance, the empress was notably progressive. She supported the project of Victor Duruy, minister of education, to establish secondary instruction for girls, and she sent her nieces to the lectures even though virtually the entire French episcopacy was hostile to the idea. She supported Julie-Victoire Daubié, the first Frenchwoman to pass the baccalaureate in 1861, and she intervened to support the enrollment of Madeleine Brès at the Paris Medical Faculty in 1868. On her own behalf, she had Duruy arrange a series of history lectures by the eminent scholar Fustel de Coulanges at the Tuileries. As regent, she signed the painter Rosa Bonheur’s nomination to the Legion of Honor.15 No doubt Eugénie did support the temporal sovereignty of Pius IX, but her position on the Roman Question did not imply that her politics were uniformly retrograde. Eugénie’s interest in women’s education disappeared from the memoirs and gossipy accounts of the imperial court written during the early Third Republic. Instead, a superstitious, atavistic Catholicism dominated her politics, especially where Italy was concerned. The emperor’s diplomatic priorities, according to these accounts, had little to do with the French occupation force in Rome. Rather, the manipulative, superstitious, devout empress sent French troops to aid the pope and thus ensured that the nation was unable to defend itself when the Prussian crisis arrived. Pierre de Lano’s The Empress Eugénie: The Secret of an Empire (1894) accused her of instigating the Franco-Prussian War: her credulous Catholicism drove French foreign policy as she and the ministers waged “a daily struggle, which wearied, which exhausted, and which weakened the initiative of the Emperor.”16 Less vicious critics, like Frédéric Loliée, writing in Women of the Second Empire, agreed that in the 1860s the empress regularly “made known her desires—often mere impulses”—among which was her determination “to see her husband justify his title of Most Christian King.”17 Charles Faucon’s research for his biography of nineteenth-century empresses led him to talk to Eugénie’s servants, who informed him that a “triumphant” empress watched Napoleon III weep as he signed the declaration of war with Prussia.18 The count

14. Quoted in Jean des Cars, Eugénie, la dernière impératrice ou les larmes de la gloire (Paris, 2000), 201–3; see also 392, 452–53. 15. McQueen, Empress Eugénie and the Arts, 50–54, 190–92. 16. Pierre de Lano, The Empress Eugénie: The Secret of an Empire, trans. Ethelred Taylor (New York, 1894), 15, 266–67. 17. Frédéric Loliée, Women of the Second Empire, trans. Alice Ivimy (New York, 1907), 277. 18. Charles Faucon, Trois malheureuses impératrices de notre siècle. L’ex-Impératrice Eugénie des Français, l’Impératrice Elisabeth d’Autriche, l’Impératrice Frédéric d’Allemagne (Paris, 1890), 12–13.

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d’Hérisson was unambiguous in his account of the Franco-Prussian War: the four mistakes of the empire had been “a marriage without alliances, the war in Italy, the Mexican campaign, and the minister Ollivier,” and, after profiting from the first, the empress played “an almost preponderating part” in the last three.19 The obstinately Catholic Eugénie of petite histoire also features in scholarly works of the period. Taxile Delord’s six-volume history of the empire, which he began publishing in 1869, emphasized Eugénie’s excessive piety: once raised to the imperial throne, she seized on religious questions with all the “maladroit zeal of an ill-educated woman and a Spaniard” and acted as an auxiliary to the “intolerant, hateful, [and] petty” clerical party.20 Eugénie was also vulgar, Delord concluded, and the ready availability of her photograph in the window of every Paris shop—always in a different dress—ensured that she was “used up by fame and publicity long before age withered her.”21 Her ambition, however, extended far beyond her status as fashion icon, and she was always present in her husband’s cabinet meetings. Whether the subject was France, Mexico, or Italy, the Catholic Church always had a representative at the table. Eugénie appears relatively little in Pierre de la Gorce’s magisterial sevenvolume history of the empire; except for her brief introduction at the moment of her marriage, she remains offstage until the empire enters its final crisis. Nonetheless, she bears a considerable share of the blame for national decline. De la Gorce claims that Eugénie’s religious devotion increased as her beauty faded: the first signs of age warned Eugénie that she should “seek other forms of success than grace and beauty,” and she chose meddling in politics. Unfortunately, not boasting much in the way of an education, Eugénie was subject to “inspirations” that were often religious in nature. She quieted her conscience, de la Gorce tells his readers, by reminding herself of her husband’s philandering and her wounded virtue.22 Delord and de la Gorce were both critics of the empire, but Bonapartist historians also found their depiction of the empress useful. Jacques-Melchior Villefranche, whose two volumes on the empire appeared in 1897, maintained that Eugénie’s combination of Catholic piety and superstition made the court look like “an assembly of convulsionaries.” In this very Bonapartist

19. Comte d’Hérisson, Journal of a Staff Officer in Paris during the Events of 1870 and 1871 (London, 1885), 61. 20. Taxile Delord, Histoire du Second Empire, 6 vols. (Paris, 1869–76), 2:20. 21. Ibid., 5:131. 22. Pierre de la Gorce, Histoire du Second Empire, 7 vols. (Paris, 1895–1905), 5:499; 7:172.

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history, Eugénie is Napoleon III’s only weakness: confronted with examples of his wife’s poor judgment, he merely “raises his hands to heaven and smiles enigmatically.”23 Other Bonapartist writers contrasted Eugénie with the emperor’s cousin, Princess Mathilde, the anticlerical leader of a brilliant Parisian salon. The princess—Our Lady of the Arts, as the historian A. AugustinThierry described her—possessed all the independence of mind that the Second Empire needed in its womenfolk and that Eugénie lacked.24 Stories of Eugénie’s sins became increasingly outrageous. Aware of the approaching disaster, she was coolly sending her jewels to her mother in Spain as French armies suffered defeat, according to one writer.25 Pierre de Lano blamed her for the prince imperial’s death: Eugenie’s piety left no room in her heart even for maternal affection, and her son suffered from “the dearth of home life and the tyranny of the empress.” Fleeing his cold mother, he left Europe for southern Africa, where he died in the Zulu Wars.26 Irénée Mauget’s 1909 biography has the empress claiming absurdly to be a direct descendant of Saint Teresa of Avila. Mauget’s Eugénie experiments with table turning, but she panics and hauls her entourage off to Mass when the spirits ask why she is not in church one Sunday.27 By the time of Eugénie’s death in 1920, even her champions had adopted the argument that her excessive religiosity had led France to disaster. Maurice Paléologue, a republican friend and defender of the empress, felt obliged to agree with Prince Napoleon that her support for papal Rome had been fatal for France. Paléologue reported Eugénie’s assertion that she was pious without being a clerical extremist, but he undercut her words by including a photograph of a copy of The Imitation of Christ along with a scapular representing the Sacred Heart of Christ, inscribed by Eugénie to the prince imperial. The Sacred Heart had become a symbol of ultramontane intransigence, and for Eugénie to recommend it to her son suggested that her allegiance remained in Rome rather than in France.28 Similarly, the Bonapartist count

23. Jacques Melchior de Villefranche, Histoire de Napoléon III, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (Paris, 1898), 2:338. 24. A. Augustin-Thierry, La Princesse Mathilde: Notre Dame des Arts (Paris, 1950), 139; Loliée, Women of the Second Empire, 97–101; Comte de Fleury, Memoirs of the Empress Eugénie, 2 vols. (New York, 1920), 1:58–80. 25. Donatien Yvonneau, Contribution à l’histoire de l’Année terrible. Collision de trains près Tours en 1870; curieuse découverte dans un cimetière douze ans après; le dernier jour d’un empire; les courriers de l’impératrice Eugénie; les bijoux de Sa Majesté (Bordeaux, 1910). 26. Lano, Empress Eugénie, 141. Melchior de Villefranche also repeats the assertion that Eugénie’s coldness drove her son to his African death. 27. Mauget, L’Impératrice Eugénie, 164, 170. 28. Paléologue, Tragic Empress, 46–57, photograph opposite p. 41. See also Raymond Jonas, France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart: An Epic Tale for Modern Times (Berkeley, 2000).

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de Fleury excused Eugénie’s “natural” impulse to “cling to the Vatican.”29 By the turn of the century, women’s essential religiosity had become an article of republican faith; indeed, the French Senate repeatedly rejected women’s suffrage bills on the ground that voting women would hand the republic over to their priests. Eugénie’s attachment to the church was not so much a personal failing as a characteristic of women and a cautionary tale against trusting them with political power. The idea that Eugénie’s Catholicism was responsible for the political and diplomatic mistakes of the Second Empire persists in the historiography through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. The story of a fanatical woman who submits to the dictates of her church yet dominates her husband remains as compelling to some contemporary historians as to their predecessors under the Third Republic. Many writers follow La Gorce’s pattern of introducing her at the time of her marriage, then ignoring her until things begin to go sour because of her alleged interference. Eugénie is never a major figure in historical works on the Second Empire; her actions, though consequential, require little analysis. Irrational faith, jealousy, and wifely nagging need little explanation, even when they contribute to the collapse of empire. In biographies of Napoleon III and histories of the empire, Eugénie comes into her own in the final chapters when her “unquestioning attachment to her religion” and her husband’s fear of rupturing “the domestic truce at the Tuileries” lead France to disaster.30 The real downfall of the Second Empire was, in the words of Theodore Zeldin, “that special evil of despotism, the back-stairs influence of courtiers and women.”31 The Third Republic’s meddling, superstitious Eugénie survived second-wave feminism, and her irrational Catholicism continues to explain the demise of the empire.32

29. Fleury, Memoirs of the Empress Eugénie, 1:88. 30. Albert Guérard, Napoleon III (Cambridge, MA, 1943), 166; J. M. Thompson, Louis-Napoleon and the Second Empire (Oxford, 1954), 209. 31. Theodore Zeldin, Emile Ollivier and the Liberal Empire of Napoleon III (Oxford, 1963), 183. 32. Octave Aubry, The Second Empire, trans. Arthur Livingstone (Philadelphia, 1940), 103, 183, 565; Georges Roux, Napoléon III (Paris, 1969), 268; Nancy Nichols Barker, Distaff Diplomacy: The Empress Eugénie and the Foreign Policy of the Second Empire (Austin, 1967), 211, 212; Louis Girard, Napoléon III (Paris, 1986), 473; David Baguley, Napoleon III and His Regime: An Extravaganza (Baton Rouge, 2000), 176–77; Marguerite Castillon du Perron, Montalembert et l’Europe de son temps (Paris, 2009), 570. Not all historians of the Second Empire rely on snide remarks about Eugénie’s Catholicism. W. H. C. Smith, for instance, dedicates considerable effort to demonstrating that the Mexican expedition was not the result of Eugénie’s weakness for Catholic Mexican monarchists in Napoleon III (London, 1972), 168–72. Philip Guedalla, The Second Empire (London, 1946), 285–87, notes that Eugénie’s growing role in the 1860s was a response to the near certainty that the emperor would die before his son was of age, and William E. Echard, Napoleon III and the Concert of Europe (Baton Rouge, 1983), 268, suggests that Eugénie, much like Pauline Craven, favored a solution that would conciliate papal and Italian interests.

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The blame heaped on Eugénie for the collapse of the Second Empire is reminiscent of the scandalous pamphlet literature that focused on Marie Antoinette at the end of the Old Regime, and some writers did refer to the empress as “the Spanish woman,” creating a deliberate parallel with “the Austrian woman” of a century earlier.33 Eugénie’s own interest in Marie Antoinette made the analogy irresistible. The empress collected items that had belonged to the executed queen, and Franz-Xaver Winterhalter painted her in eighteenth-century costume in 1854; allegedly, she suffered from an obsessive fear that her fate would mirror Marie Antoinette’s. Many of the anti-Eugénie pamphlets published before the end of the empire drew on the same scandalous tropes as the Marie Antoinette literature: primarily sexual escapades and illegitimate births. Eugénie was alleged to be the daughter of a grocer, possibly illegitimate, and to possess voracious sexual appetites. Writers claimed that she was pregnant by an unknown lover at the time of her marriage, that she and her husband shared an equerry as lover, that bullfighting thrilled her nearly as much as sex with toreadors.34 The accusation of Catholicism distinguishes the Eugénie libels from their Marie Antoinette predecessors; a form of female virtue becomes Eugénie’s greatest shortcoming. Bizarrely, the charge even appears in some of the most titillating of the anti-Eugénie pamphlet literature; she turns to religion out of anger with her persistently unfaithful husband, and in one case she seduces a cardinal during a sham confession.35 The allegation in its more political form, however—that Eugénie’s Catholic devotion led her to disregard France’s best interests and nag her husband to keep an army tied down in Rome—has been remarkably persistent and persuasive. Sexy toreadors and the unloved son seeking adventure in Africa have disappeared from Eugénie’s historical record, but her piety continues to have explanatory force for historians. Her Catholicism still disqualifies her political judgment, while at the same time it seems natural for her, as a woman, to practice her faith. Marguerite and Eugénie—one created by a devout novelist, the other by republican anticlericals—became archetypical Catholics at the end of the 33. McQueen, Empress Eugénie and the Arts, 271–87; Dena Goodman and Thomas E. Kaiser, eds., Marie Antoinette: Writings on the Body of a Queen (New York, 2003). 34. Les Amours d’Eugénie Kirpatrik Théba de Montijo, impératrice des français, depuis sa haute naissance, jusqu’avant, pendant, et après son mariage (London, 1871); Hippolyte Magen, La Femme de César, biographie d’Eugénie Kirpatrik Théba de Montijo, impératrice des Français (London, 1865); Procès Montijo— Généalogie épicière de l’Impératrice Eugénie—Satire sur Jérôme Bonaparte (Paris, 1868); Marfori, Biographie d’Eugénie de Montijo, impératrice des Français (Paris, 1870). 35. Marfori, Biographie de Eugénie de Montijo, 23–24; Les Amours d’Eugénie Kirpatrik Théba de Montijo, 27–30.

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nineteenth century. They both emerged out of the anger and anguish of the Roman Question, although they represented a radically simplified, flattened version of Catholic reaction to the Risorgimento. The complexity of lay responses to the Roman Question disappeared behind the assertion that the pope’s defenders were primarily women. Ironically, Catholic polemicists and republican anticlericals agreed that devout women like Sister Marie Elisabeth and the Empress Eugénie rejected the pleasures of heterosexual attraction, marriage, and maternity. Their love for the Roman church and for its representative the pope was all-consuming, and it left them no resources to invest in the ordinary life of the modern world. The devout woman of the Third Republic and the conflict between the “two Frances” largely erased the aspirations and experiences of the romantic Catholic generation. As the battle between republicans and Catholics came to define the Third Republic, it was difficult to remember that an earlier generation of Catholics had believed that they would shape a religion that would move with the century, allowing them to be both devout and modern. Women’s religiosity, in particular, appeared by the turn of the century as an unchanging, ahistorical phenomenon, an impression that negated romantic efforts to invent a modern female self that could be both fully individualized and devoutly Catholic. Both anticlerical republicans and intransigent Catholics preferred to believe that women’s allegiance to their church and their hostility to the republic, initiated in the 1790s, had not changed over the course of the following century. Forgetting romantic Catholicism allowed the fin de siècle simultaneously to naturalize and vilify women’s faith. In the place of the romantic Catholic family, bound by love and sacrament, republicans preferred to imagine families riven by religious conflict—rational men and pious women struggling over their children’s future. Without the romantic Catholics, the battle lines between faith and progress, reason and belief, and women and men appeared immutable, and the two Frances, locked in combat, emerged as the dominant figures of modern French history. Restoring romantic Catholics to the story of modern France reminds us that French women and men of the postrevolutionary period saw possibilities other than inflexible church-state conflict. These children of the nineteenth century believed that Catholicism was a model for a society that aspired to be more than an aggregation of atomized individuals. They were eager to demonstrate that Christians tied indissolubly to each other by sacramental bonds constituted a more resilient society than liberal individuals who might occasionally and temporarily enter into contracts with one another. They believed that they could offer this lesson to their fellow French men and women, and willingness to engage with French society as a whole was

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the hallmark of Catholic romanticism. Romantic confidence in a dynamic, modern religious faith was not merely a strategy to protect Catholic communities by isolating them from the rest of society and defending them from the rise of secularism. Catholic romanticism also demonstrates that the nineteenth century’s concern for the individual was not necessarily a step toward secularization. At the same time that romantic individuals celebrated personal autonomy, they also mourned their isolation and the loss of human ties that they imagined to have existed naturally in the prerevolutionary world. The romantic hero’s disaffection from his era—mal de siècle, in Musset’s famous formulation—was a calamity, not an aspiration. Men like Maurice de Guérin and Charles de Montalembert, acutely concerned that they could never fully realize their potential as individual selves in their atomizing, liberal society, experienced this dilemma fully. Catholicism seemed like their best chance for recovering lost community and restoring a society of individuals bound to one another rather than merely passing through the world in sovereign isolation. Catholic sacraments like communion and marriage generated and confirmed the human ties that made society more durable than the relationship between the liberal state and its individual citizens. The love between husbands, wives, children, and siblings—including the fictive brothers who knelt at the altar together as members of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul and the community at La Chênaie—integrated the romantic individual into society and cured his mal de siècle. Paying attention to romantic Catholicism especially allows us to understand female religiosity as something other than a stubborn refusal to accept the secular trajectory of the modern world. As feminist scholarship of recent decades has demonstrated, the liberal promises of the French Revolution were not available to women, who never fully qualified as autonomous individuals suitable for citizenship. In embracing the Catholic critique of the Revolution, young men like Montalembert and Ozanam were demanding more than what the liberal state promised them. Their female counterparts—women like Pauline Craven, Victorine Monniot, and Amélie Ozanam—faced a different calculus in their choice of romantic Catholicism. They were not turning their backs on the benefits of the secular world because those benefits were never extended to them in the first place. For women, embracing romantic Catholicism was a rejection of the untenable position that liberalism offered them. Women could never fully measure up to liberal standards of individual autonomy, but the Catholic ideal of an affectionate community anchored by loving women seemed within their reach. Of course, the Catholic Church did not promise women—or,

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for that matter, men—rights or equality. Catholicism did, however, open the scope of women’s lives beyond the walls of the home and define their roles in the world more broadly than ideologies of republican motherhood. Devout women like Pauline Craven and Amélie Ozanam found ways of combining romantic selfhood with pious self-abnegation. Their obligations to others did not end at the doors of their home, as the family of Catholics was global. Like Marguerite preparing for her first communion, Catholic women believed that they had obligations that extended beyond the domestic sphere or even the nation-state. The experience of France’s romantic Catholics indicates that we should be wary of mapping gender dichotomies onto religious belief in an effort to understand the role of faith in the modern world. The assumption that masculinity corresponded to skepticism and that women were intrinsically susceptible to religious ideas allowed French republicans to explain the “persistence” of Catholic belief as a function of female weakness. This notion that gender determined an individual’s religious faith seemed absurd to the romantic Catholic generation, however. Certainly their Catholicism inflected their sense of themselves as men and women, mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, sisters, and brothers, and becoming a fully realized Catholic self required attention and effort. Religious devotion was never a mere consequence of sex—rather, it was, and is, a layer of selfhood that articulates with other elements of identity and thus functions much like gender. The men and women who constituted the generation of romantic Catholics demonstrated that the two Frances were not the inevitable product of the Revolution but rather the result of nineteenth-century choices, circumstances, and pressures. The revolutions of 1830 and 1848, the industrial economy, and democratic politics all struck romantics as opportunities to explore their faith’s potential to respond to the modern world. Other Catholics, of course, saw these events as nails in the coffin of their traditional beliefs, but that conservative, pessimistic view was not universal. Romantic confidence that men and women of the postrevolutionary generation could make a modern Catholicism that would put the losses of the Revolution behind it and look forward to a vibrant future was resilient, and it only gradually faded over the course of the century. Church and state interests did not appear truly irreconcilable until the Third Republic. In spite of romantic Catholics’ disappointment, their aspirations did not disappear entirely during the Third Republic—indeed, they became an inspiration for succeeding waves of Catholic innovation. After the death of Pius IX, the reforming papacy of Leo XIII articulated a political and social agenda that engaged the church with modern republicanism and the social

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question. French Catholics’ acceptance of the republic with Leo’s blessing and the encyclical Rerum novarum (1891) both drew on the romantic Catholic tradition. Leading figures of fin de siècle France’s social Catholic movement had personal connections to the romantic generation: Camille de Meaux, a prominent Catholic writer and statesman, was Charles de Montalembert’s son-in-law, and Albert de Mun, a leading figure in the creation of Catholic workers’ circles, was Pauline Craven’s nephew. Even though by the 1890s the stereotypical Catholic was a woman, we know remarkably little about the women who joined forces with social Catholics like Albert de Mun and Camille de Meaux to elaborate a Catholic response to modern social and economic injustice.36 Scholars often refer to this turn-of-the-century social Catholicism as an element of a “Catholic renewal” (renouveau catholique) that encompassed art and literature of the fin de siècle and interwar periods. Romantic Catholicism of the early nineteenth century often attracts the same label, and this recurrence of “renewals” should lead us to question the assumptions about decline, resistance, and revival that undergird modern religious history. Scholars find evidence of Catholic renewal in the immediate postrevolutionary romanticism of the writers of this book, in social Catholic thought inspired by Rerum novarum, in the fin de siècle literature of Charles Péguy and Paul Claudel, and in interwar modernist figures like Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, Georges Bernanos, and Georges Rouault. In the years since the Second Vatican Council, French Catholics have participated in what scholars refer to as a charismatic Catholic renewal.37 So much renewal in such a relatively short time frame ought to arouse our suspicions. How should we understand a narrative of secularization that coexists with nearly constant religious revival? Catholic renewal implies resistance to the forces of secularization, but the frequency with which French Catholics have experienced renewal suggests an ongoing dynamic between the secular and the religious rather than inexorable progress toward a secular goal. There is no end point to this process, and we should not expect it to result in the victory either of the secular or of the religious. Catholicism renews itself regularly, and romanticism was the first

36. But see Laurence H. Winnie, Family Dynasty, Revolutionary Society: The Cochins of Paris, 1750– 1922 (Westport, CT, 2002), which explores one prominent social Catholic family with attention to women’s activism. 37. Jean Calvet, Le Renouveau catholique dans la littérature contemporaine (Paris, 1927); Richard Griffiths, The Reactionary Revolution: The Catholic Revival in French Literature, 1870–1914 (London, 1966); Hervé Serry, “Déclin social et revendication identitaire: La ‘renaissance littéraire catholique’ de la première moitié du XXe siècle,” Sociétés contemporaines 44, no. 4 (2001): 91–109; Stephen Schloesser, Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar France, 1919–1933 (Toronto, 2005).

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in a series of postrevolutionary revivals by men and women remaking their church for the modern world. The members of France’s romantic Catholic generation were undoubtedly disappointed by the time they reached old age because their youthful enthusiasm had exhausted itself against the entrenched hostility of both the Roman church and the French republican state. The romantic conviction that the church could adapt to secular change and that the Catholic critique of liberalism could expand the possibilities of French democracy was not a quixotic or misguided refusal to acknowledge modern realities, however. Disappointment was not the same as defeat, and the romantic impulse toward a renewal of faith did not disappear with the first postrevolutionary generation to embrace it.

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 Index Abelard, Peter, 16 abolitionism, 59 – 60, 185 Academy, 150 Affre, Denys-Auguste, archbishop of Paris, 225, 231 Agency for the Defense of Religious Liberty, 122, 126, 128, 130 Ampère family, 195 anticlericalism, 17, 92, 219 See also French Revolution: deChristianization; Third Republic: anticlericalism of Antonelli, Giacomo (cardinal), 241 – 42, 267 Ara Coeli, 232, 273 Augé, abbé, 78 – 80, 86 Avenir L’, 22 – 23, 89, 106, 114 – 15, 137, 194, 257, 268 editorial position of, 104, 122 – 26 financial difficulty and closure, 128 – 30 papal condemnation of, 131, 133 – 34 plans to resume publication, 132, 134 as precursor to L’Ere nouvelle, 225 – 26 Bailly, Emmanuel, 199, 204, 234 Barbey, Léon, 79, 83 Barbey d’Aurevilly, Jules, 70, 83, 100 Bayne, Louise de, 89, 97 – 98 Belgium, 12, 124, 154, 266 Benedictine order, 5 Berry, duke de, 153 Bishop, Maria Catherine, 185 Bonald, Louis de, 228 – 29 Bonaparte, Louis-Napoleon (Napoleon III), 232, 257, 265, 268, 270, 278 Empress Eugénie and, 26, 286, 288, 290 – 91 Italian affairs and, 240 – 43, 251 – 52, 255 – 56, 278 Book of Tobit, 215 Boré, Eugène, 84, 89 – 90, 93 – 94

Bourbon, île de (Réunion), 11, 51, 54, 56 – 59, 280, 285 Boury, 158, 176, 179 Buchez, Philippe, 5 Buquet, abbé Charles-Louis, 85 – 88 Byron, Lord, 71, 83, 96, 117 Castelfidardo, battle of, 241 – 42, 262, 265, 278 catechism. See first communion Catholic science, 89, 111 – 12 See also Chênaie, La; Lamennais, Félicité de Cavour, Camillo di, 242, 254 – 56, 267 charity, 46 – 49, 185, 187, 199 – 202, 217 associated with women, 202 – 5 compatibility with marriage, 207 home visits, 202 – 5 See also philanthropy; social Catholicism; Society of Saint Vincent de Paul Charles X, 153 Chateaubriand, 71, 96, 195, 197 Châtillon, Auguste de, 28 – 29, 32 – 34 Chênaie, La, 22, 88, 104, 112, 114, 116, 134, 197, 294 absence of women, 98 dissolution of, 70, 100 – 101, 146 influence on Ere nouvelle, 225 life at, 94 – 99 Stanislas graduates resident at, 89 – 90, 93, 102 See also Guérin, Maurice de; Lamennais, Félicité de childhood, 20 See also children’s fiction; first communion children’s fiction Catholic authors, 50 – 51 charity in, 47 – 49 French Revolution in, 44 – 45

321

322

INDEX

children’s fiction (cont.) greed in, 48 – 49 market for, 42 – 43 moral tales, 43, 153 realism in, 50, 52 See also first communion: in children’s fiction; Journal de Marguerite; Marguerite à vingt ans church – state relations, 20, 295 separation of, 114, 124 – 25, 130, 254 citizenship, 126 Catholic, 104 – 5, 115, 122, 135 – 36, 141 – 42 Colas de la Noue, Gustave, 83 – 84, 200 – 201 Collège Stanislas, 21, 66, 72, 102, 107, 200, 218 discipline at, 82, 84 – 86 fees, 79 first communion in, 38, 40, 42 Lacordaire’s lectures at, 197 as substitute family, 79 – 80 suicides at, 87 surveillance of pupils, 81 – 83 See also Guérin, Maurice de; Liautard, abbé Claude Rosalie Commune, Paris, 274 – 74 Concordat, 124 – 25 confraternity, 201 Considérant, Victor, 196 Constant, Benjamin, 92 conversion, 108, 139, 141, 154, 160 – 62, 167, 176, 181, 185, 221 Cornudet, Léon, 118 Correspondant, Le, 224 cosmopolitanism, 11, 12, 275 – 76 Cousin, Victor, 92, 93, 219 Coux, Charles de, 124, 127 Craven, Augustus, 154, 244 Craven, Pauline (née de la Ferronnays), 2, 6, 8, 23, 187, 237, 294 – 96 as biographer, 9, 11, 150, 184 – 85, 276 correspondence with Lacordaire, 249 – 52 decision to publish, 149 – 51, 162 – 65 as Italian nationalist, 154, 238, 244 – 51, 255 on modern sanctity, 169 – 70, 172 – 75 opposition to papal infallibility, 239, 270 – 74

relationship with readers, 151, 155, 172 – 84 response to deaths of Olga and Lina, 62 – 65 as salon hostess, 244 self-effacement of, 167, 182 views on the Roman Question, 24, 237 – 39, 248, 256 – 58, 263 – 64, 266, 268 – 69 violation of family privacy, 150, 168 – 69, 183 – 84 youth, 11, 151 – 54 See also Récit d’une sœur, Le Crémieux, Adolphe, 227 dancing, 77, 211 – 12 Dante, 9 – 10, 208, 218, 232 – 34 Daughters of the Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul, 64, 160–61, 184, 204, 244, 277 Dominican order, 193, 208, 225 – 26, 252 education, 36 – 37, 65 – 69, 106 – 9 liberté d’enseignement, 103 – 4, 124 – 27, 129, 142, 217 – 21 See also Collège Stanislas; University, Napoleonic Elizabeth, Saint, 8 – 10, 146, 170 – 72 See also Montalembert, Charles de: Histoire de Sainte Elisabeth enfant du siècle, 1 – 2, 22 – 23, 84, 102, 110, 153, 192, 293 – 94 See also generation Enlightenment, 9, 10, 31, 91, 93, 111, 203 Ere nouvelle L’, 225 – 27, 231 – 32, 234, 252 Eugénie, Empress, 26, 277 – 78, 285 287 accused of excessive religiosity, 288 – 93 marriage to Napoleon III, 286 Fauriel, Claude, 210, 213, 218 feminization of Catholicism. See women: feminization of religion and Filangieri, Carlo, 244 – 45 first communion, 20, 141, 157, 167, 188, 193, 200, 295 age at, 37, 39 in children’s fiction, 30, 43 – 47 commemoration of, 41 – 42 dress for, 21, 40, 45 – 48, 62 early death after, 21, 30, 55, 61 – 62 entry into labor market and, 37, 40 girls and, 21, 30

INDEX as marker of adulthood, 40 persistent popularity of, 30, 35 – 36 possibility of sacrilege, 38 – 39 preparation for, 31 – 32, 37 – 38 replaced by schooling, 36 – 37 at school, 21, 40 – 42 social equality of, 42 See also Hugo, Léopoldine; Journal de Marguerite, Le First Vatican Council, 25, 239, 268 – 73 See also infallibility, papal Flaubert, Gustave, 42 Florence, 248 Foisset, Théophile, 107 Fourier, Charles, 4 Francesco II, king of the Two Sicilies, 241, 244, 246, 250 Franco-Prussian War, 243, 270, 288 – 89 fraternity, Catholic, 25, 72, 101 – 2, 117, 122, 137, 191, 209, 234, 294 charity and, 205 – 6 across classes, 224, 231 among mennaisians, 69, 94, 98 as model for civil society, 104 – 5, 113 at school, 67, 83 – 86 Society of Saint Vincent de Paul and, 199 – 200, 209 among university students, 196 – 98 friendship, 71 – 72, 110, 194, 200 – 201 and homosociality, 98, 121, 206 – 8 imperiled by marriage, 207 – 8 romantic, 97 – 98, 100 – 101, 115 – 22 solidarity and, 147 – 48 See also fraternity, Catholic; Montalembert, Charles de: friendship with Lacordaire French Revolution, 11, 91, 103, 141, 294 – 95 de-Christianization, 13, 20, 22, 27, 202 divorce during, 227 – 29 as evil force, 93 generational identity and, 1 – 3, 11, 31, 44 – 45, 70, 103 re-establishment of religious practice after, 35 – 36 romanticism and, 31 secularization and, 14 Fullerton, Lady Georgiana, 184, 277 Gallicanism, 13, 237, 268 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 241 – 42, 244 – 47, 258 – 59, 269

323

generation postromantic, 238 – 39 romantic, 1–2, 22–23, 84, 102, 110, 153, 192, 236–37, 239, 276, 287, 293–94, 297 Gerbet, Philippe, 7, 95, 97, 158, 160 Gibbon, Edward, 232 gothic revival. See medieval revival Great Britain, 108, 110, 114, 153 – 54, 223 Catholicism in, 11 – 12, 250 Gregory XVI (pope), 23, 100, 105, 128 – 31 condemnation of mennaisianism 133 – 36, 138 – 39, 142, 145, 198, 237, 267 Guéranger, Prosper, 5 Guérin, Eugénie de, 67, 70 – 71, 88 – 90, 94, 100 – 101 poetry, 96 – 97 possible vocation, 7 – 8 posthumous publication of, 101, 163 – 64 Guérin, Joseph de, 66 – 67, 72 – 73, 75, 77, 79, 81, 88 – 89 Guérin, Joseph-Louis, 262 – 64 Guérin, Maurice de, 2, 7 – 9, 11, 24, 104, 111 – 12, 126 – 27, 192, 294 clerical vocation, 21, 66 – 67, 77 – 78, 87 – 88, 90, 94 first communion, 69, 88 at La Chênaie, 89 – 90, 92, 94 – 100 marriage, 72, 89, 98 poetry, 69 – 71, 83 – 84, 96 – 98 relationship with siblings, 85, 88 – 89, 100 – 101 school days, 4, 21, 66 – 69, 77 – 89 Hugo, Adèle (née Foucher), 28, 31 – 32, 40 – 41 relationship with Sainte-Beuve, 34 Hugo, Léopoldine, 2, 21, 34, 61 catechism, 31, 34 – 35, 37 communion ceremony, 35 death, 11, 29, 41 end of schooling, 40 – 41 paintings of, 28, 29, 32, 33, 34 Hugo, Victor, 3, 28, 31 – 32, 96, 196 – 97 “La Prière pour tous,” 32, 34 – 35, 60 – 61, 65 relationship with Juliette Drouet, 31 Imitation of Christ, The, 144, 281 – 82, 290 Index of Prohibited Books, 220, 267 infallibility, papal, 25, 236, 239, 270 – 74 See also First Vatican Council

324

INDEX

Ireland, 12, 115, 124, 130, 223, 251 Isaac, Abraham’s sacrifice of, 140 – 41, 144 Italian War of 1859, 241, 278, 289 Italy, Kingdom of, 242, 244, 255, 259, 264, 274, 278 James, Henry, 71 Jansenism, 39, 43, 92 Jaurès, Jean, 36 Jesuit order, 193 John Paul II (pope), 187 – 88 Jouffroy, Théodore, 197 Journal de Marguerite, Le, 21, 26, 30, 49, 66 as adventure story, 55 – 57 as best seller, 8, 30, 51, 278 – 79, 285 colonial setting, 56 – 57 early death in, 54 – 55 first communion ceremony in, 50, 52, 54 – 55, 285 governess in, 52 – 53, 280 journal format, 52, 61 men in, 51, 52 – 54, 57 slavery and abolitionism in, 58 – 60 See also Marguerite à vingt ans journal writing, 52 – 53, 55, 61, 118, 162 – 63, 167 – 69, 171, 185 See also Journal de Marguerite, Le July monarchy, 104, 128, 155, 209, 218, 224 – 25, 257 Development of feminism during, 227 See also Revolution of 1830 June Days, 25, 231 Keppel Craven, Sir Richard, 154 Lacordaire, Henri Dominique, 7, 104 – 5, 155, 254, 276 break with Lamennais, 132 – 34 correspondence with Craven, 249 – 52 final illness, 252 friendship with Montalembert, 113, 115 – 22, 131 – 33, 137 – 38, 147 – 48, 252, 266 friendship with Ozanam, 188 joins mennaisian movement, 111, 114 in mennaisian crisis, 135 – 42, 144 – 47 new theology of salvation, 230 opens a school, 127 – 28 re-establishes Dominicans, 208 – 9 Revolution of 1830 and, 110 – 15 Revolution of 1848 and, 225 – 26, 252

sermons at Notre Dame, 197 – 98, 209 trip to Rome, 129 – 32, 155 views of America, 108, 113 – 14, 116, 130 work for L’Avenir, 124 – 26, 128 – 29 youth, 106 – 8 La Ferronnays, Albert de, 62 – 63, 155 – 58, 161 – 62, 167 – 69, 173, 182, 251 La Ferronnays, Alexandrine de (née d’Alopeus), 154, 158 – 59, 161 – 63, 165, 167 – 69 first communion, 157 – 58 marriage, 156 – 57 readers’ attachment to, 173 – 78, 180 – 81 widowhood, 158 – 59, 161, 215 La Ferronnays, count de, 153, 159 – 60, 168, 181 La Ferronays, countess de, 159, 161, 167, 181 La Ferronnays, Eugénie de (Mme Adrien de Mun), 153, 159 – 60, 162 – 63, 167 – 69, 173, 175 – 76, 181 La Ferronnays, Fernand de, 161, 164, 168, 176, 183 La Ferronnays, Olga, 61 – 65, 160 – 63, 167, 181, 184 laity, 6 – 7, 26, 76 – 77, 88, 187 – 90, 219 Society of Saint Vincent de Paul and, 201 – 2 Lallier, François, 199 – 201, 207 – 8, 216 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 164, 197 Lamennais, Félicité de, 7, 13, 22, 84, 118, 142, 155, 158, 195, 254, 267 articles for L’Avenir, 125 Catholicizing liberty, 122 Catholic science of, 92, 111 – 12, 194 – 95 charisma of, 95, 98 – 99, 104, 114, 116, 131, 147 concept of sens commun, 91, 111, 13, 130, 145 conflict with the papacy, 133 – 46 dissolution of La Chênaie, 100 – 101 in 1848, 225 as father figure, 98 – 99, 118, 145 friendship with Victor Hugo, 31 as inspiration for romantic generation, 24, 90 – 94, 106, 111 – 12, 153 – 54, 194 – 95, 197 – 98 Maurice de Guérin’s encounter with, 69, 89 Paroles d’un croyant, 135, 143 – 46, 198 – 99 trip to Rome, 128 – 32, 155

INDEX Lamennais, Jean-Marie de, 146 Lamoricière, Léon Juchault de, 264 – 65 Langlois, Claude, 17 legitimism, 21 – 22, 73, 78, 153 – 54, 194, 98, 194, 218, 251 Leo XIII (pope), 295 – 96 Lessing, Gotthold, 92 Leszczynski, Stanislas, 78 Liautard, abbé Claude Rosalie, 107, 93 educational philosophy of, 72 – 78, 81, 84 – 85 as father figure, 86 See also Collège Stanislas liberal Catholicism, 3 liberalism, 3, 110, 194, 220, 237, 297 individualism and, 5, 14, 104, 147 – 48, 206, 213, 294 religion as private matter and, 104 – 5, 112, 136, 139 – 40 Lubomirska, Hedwige, 132 – 33, 137, 146, 170 Lyon, 192 – 94, 199, 206, 208, 210, 213 – 14 Maine de Biran, 93 Maistre, Joseph de, 270 Malines Congress, 266 – 67 Maret, Henri, 7, 225 – 26 Marguerite à vingt ans, 21, 26, 277, 279 – 85, 293 Marie Antoinette, 292 marriage, 21, 34 – 35, 41 – 42, 72, 89, 98, 153 – 54, 156 – 59, 279, 282, 294 See also Ozanam, Amélie; Ozanam, Frédéric Martin, Thérèse (St. Thérèse of Lisieux,) 171 – 72 martyrdom, 144, 238, 259 – 60, 264 – 65 Meaux, Camille de, 296 medieval revival, 9 – 11, 14 – 15, 28, 142, 146, 169 – 72, 232 – 34 Mentana, battle of, 242, 259, 268 – 69 Mérode, Xavier de, 241, 263, 265, 267, 271, 273 Mexico, 289 Michelet, Jules, 13 – 19, 36, 277 Mickiewicz, Adam, 142 – 43, 196 Minutolo, Adelaïde Capece, 277 miracles, 23, 160, 168, 181, 262 – 63 Mirari vos, 133 – 36, 138 – 40, 267 missionaries, 12, 84, 94, 285

325

Monniot, Victorine, 2, 6 – 8, 21, 26, 49 – 50, 54, 66, 150, 294 abolitionism of, 60 anger over Roman Question, 277 – 85 early life, 11, 51 See also Journal de Marguerite, Le; Marguerite à vingt ans Montalembert, Anna de (née de Mérode), 170, 272 Montalembert, Charles de, 2, 22, 153, 192, 195 – 96, 151, 199, 202, 241, 254, 276, 294, 296 abolitionist views of, 60 death of, 239 – 40, 269, 272 – 73 in 1848, 231 – 32 father’s death, 116, 119, 121, 127 first communion, 41 – 42, 108 – 9 first trip to Rome, 129 – 32, 155 friendship with Lacordaire, 113, 115 – 22, 131 – 33, 137 – 38, 147 – 48, 250 – 53 friendship with the La Ferronnays family, 155, 166, 167, 250 – 51, 253 Histoire de la vie de Sainte Elisabeth, 169 – 71 interest in Polish affairs, 132, 142 – 43, 170 interest in western monasticism, 9 joins mennaisian movement, 24, 111, 114 last years of, 265 – 69 marriage of, 170 membership in the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, 200 mennaisian crisis and, 135 – 47 opens a school, 127 – 28 opposition to papal infallibility, 239 – 40, 270 – 72 parliamentary role, 103, 217 – 20 possible vocation, 7 promotion of Roman expedition, 240, 273 Revolution of 1830 and, 110 – 15 “sons of the crusaders” speech, 103 – 4, 148 submission to the papacy 134 – 35, 138, 144 – 47, 272 – 73 views on the Roman Question 24, 237 – 39, 251 – 58, 263 work for L’Avenir, 122 – 26, 128 – 29 youth, 4, 11, 108 – 11 Montégut, Emile, 165 Mortara, Edgardo, 241

326

INDEX

Mun, Adrien de, 159, 164, 166, 177 – 78 Mun, Albert de, 296 Musset, Alfred de, 1 – 3, 96, 105, 294 Naples, 153 – 56, 174, 185, 242, 244, 247 – 48, 264, 274 – 75 Napoleon III. See Bonaparte, Louis-Napoleon Narischkin, Natalie, 64, 160 – 61, 184, 277 Nazarenes, 10, 11, 69 – 61 O’Connell, Daniel, 115 Old Regime, 44, 103 – 4, 115, 228 as model for papal infallibility, 24, 239, 271 nostalgia for, 3, 7, 14, 10, 22, 70 – 71, 84, 104, 111, 153, 237, 266 orientalism, 84, 92 – 94 Oudinot, Victor, 240, 278 Ozanam, Alphonse, 192 – 94, 208, 213 – 14 Ozanam, Amélie (née Soulacroix), 2 – 3, 6, 24, 192, 229, 236, 294 – 95 courtship by Frédéric, 206 – 16 dedication to Frédéric’s memory, 187 – 91, 195, 234 as model Christian woman, 215 – 16, 233, 235 motherhood, 221 – 22 visit to Rome, 222 See also Ozanam, Frédéric Ozanam, Charles, 193, 208, 259 Ozanam, Frédéric, 2, 24, 237, 259, 276, 294 academic career 9 – 10, 208 – 10, 214, 216, 218 – 21 beatification of, 187 – 90 Civilisation au Ve siècle, 232 – 34, 236 courtship of Amélie, 206 – 16 in 1848, 25, 224 – 32 fatherhood, 221 – 22 inspired by Lamennais, 192, 194 – 95, 197 – 98 marital vocation of, 191 – 92, 215, 229 – 30, 235 marriage and social Catholicism, 230 – 31 negative view of marriage, 207 – 8 opinion of Pius IX, 223 – 32, 236, 240 possible vocation, 7, 208 – 9 sexual anxieties, 208 Society of Saint Vincent de Paul and, 199 – 206 student years, 4 – 5, 195 – 98 views on divorce, 227 – 31

visit to Rome, 222 – 23 work for the Ere nouvelle, 225 – 27 youth, 11, 192 – 95 See also Ozanam, Amélie Ozanam, Marie, 188, 221 – 23 papacy. See entries for individual popes; Roman Question; ultramontanism Papal States. See Roman Question Paroles d’un croyant, 135, 143 – 46, 198 – 99 See also Lamennais, Félicité de Peter’s Pence, 261, 265 philanthropy, 203 – 4 Piedmont, 241, 253, 255 – 56, 278 Pius IX (pope), 245, 254, 256, 278, 286, 288, 295 charisma of 255 – 58, 260 – 61, 265 – 66, 281 intransigence of 24 – 25, 239 – 42, 264, 266 – 69, 272 – 73 Montalembert’s funeral and, 273 as prisoner of the Vatican 243, 277 reforms of 222 – 24, 236, 243 spiritual vs. territorial power of 248 – 49 Vatican Council and, 272 Pius X (pope), 36 – 37 plebiscite, 242, 255 – 56 Poland, 12, 124, 132, 139, 142 – 43, 223, 251 Polytechnique, 73 – 74, 93, 221 Prince imperial, 286, 290, 292 Protestantism, 108, 156 – 58, 181 Quam singulari, 36 – 37, 39, 52 Quanta cura. See Syllabus of Errors Quélen, Hyacinthe de, archbishop of Paris, 197 Ratisbonne, Alphonse, 160 – 61, 181 Ravaschieri, Lina, 61 – 65, 185, 244 – 45 Ravaschieri, Teresa Filangieri, 62 – 65, 185, 244 – 45, 248, 269, 274 Récit d’une sœur, Le, 23, 62, 244, 250, 258, 264 as best seller, 8, 150, 275 composition process, 162 – 64, 185 encouraging pilgrimage, 179 as model for Catholic women, 150 – 51, 185 – 86 plot of, 155 – 61 publication of, 165 – 66 as novel, 169 – 70, 172 – 77 as devotional text, 179 – 82

INDEX as relic, 166 – 68, 177, 183 sanctity in, 150, 167 – 68, 172 – 76, 181 theme of the good death in, 155 – 56, 158, 166, 180 See also Craven, Pauline; La Ferronnays, Alexandrine de relics. See Récit d’une sœur, Le: as relic Rendu, Rosalie, 204 renewal, Catholic, 296 – 97 Rerum novarum, 296 Restoration, 2, 77, 129, 143, 153, 221 maintenance of the University and, 74 – 75, 107 – 8, 127 throne – altar alliance during, 13, 23, 106 Réunion, île de. See Bourbon, île de Revolution of 1830 ( July Revolution), 22 – 23, 104, 153, 194 – 95, 218 Charter, 125 – 28 development of mennaisianism and, 108, 110 – 12, 114, 117, 129 Revolution of 1848, 14, 217, 234, 238, 295 abolition of slavery and, 60 Catholic republicanism and, 7, 224 – 26 divorce and, 227 June Days, 25, 231 social Catholicism and, 24 – 25, 217, 224 – 26 Revue des deux mondes, 165 Risorgimento, 24 – 25, 154, 223, 237, 240 – 41, 257, 277, 293 counter-Risorgimento sentiment and, 243, 251, 253 – 56 nationalist sentiment, 244 – 51 See also Roman Question Roman Question, 24 – 26, 236 – 39, 243, 264, 267, 279, 288 Craven’s views on, 244 – 49, 253, 255, 268 as diplomatic issue, 256, 264 – 67 in 1870, 269 – 71 feminization of the church and, 239 French Second Empire and, 240 – 43 Montalembert’s views on, 250 – 56, 267 as spiritual issue, 243 – 44, 256 – 63, 266, 270 See also Risorgimento; Zouaves Roman Republic, 240, 278 romanticism, 7 – 8, 10 incest trope and, 71 – 72 romantic socialism, 4 – 5 women and, 5 – 6, 8 Rome, 13, 24, 104, 222 – 23, 238, 247, 249, 263

327

exclusion from Kingdom of Italy, 242 fall of, 243, 276 French expedition to, 236, 242, 278, 286 as homeland for all Catholics, 273, 275 Lamennais’s visit to, 129 – 33 Ozanam family visit to, 222 – 23 pilgrimage sites in, 156, 237 as site of Ratisbonne conversion, 160 See also Roman Question; ultramontanism Rossi, Pellegrino, 240 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 74, 86, 91, 106 – 7, 114 Royer Collard, Pierre Paul, 93 Russia, 12, 62, 138 – 39, 153 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, 34, 96, 196 Saint-Marc Girardin, 197 Saints, 171 – 72 lives of 155, 166, 169 – 71 relics of 166 – 68, 171, 177 – 78, 183 Zouave, 262 – 64 See also Récit d’une sœur, Le: sanctity in Saint-Simon, Henri de, 4 Sand, George, 2, 70, 101, 165 – 66 Schlegel, Friedrich, 92 Scott, Walter, 83, 96 Second Empire, 3, 240, 251, 257 – 58, 268, 287, 291 Second Republic. See Revolution of 1848 Secularization, 14, 16 – 19, 296 – 97 Ségur, Gaston de, 39 Ségur, Sophie de, 39, 50 – 51 seminary, 73 – 74, 76 – 79, 83, 87 – 88, 95, 100, 107, 192 – 93 September Convention, 242 Singulari nos, 145 – 46 slavery, 58 – 60 social Catholicism, 25, 221, 227, 231 – 32, 234 – 35, 296 women and, 191 – 92 See also Ozanam, Frédéric; Society of Saint Vincent de Paul socialism, 237 See also romantic socialism Society for Maternal Charity, 203 – 5 Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, 24, 83, 191, 206 – 7, 216 – 18, 234, 294 charitable practice of, 201 – 6, 221 foundation of, 199 – 200 transformation of France’s elite and, 220–21 See also, charity; Ozanam, Frédéric

328

INDEX

Sorbonne, 8, 187, 210, 214, 216, 218, 221, 225, 232 Soubirous, Bernadette, 38, 261 Soulacroix, Jean-Baptiste, 218 – 19 Staël, Germaine de, 92 Stendhal, 1, 76 – 77, 95 Syllabus of Errors, 25, 236 – 37, 241, 266, 268 Tisserand, Anna, 63 – 65 Third Republic, 14, 235, 285 anticlericalism of, 14, 27, 36, 51, 295 Second Empire, histories of, 288 – 91 female Catholics, stereotyping of, 25 – 26, 277, 293 Thorez, Maurice, 36 Tobias. See Book of Tobit “two Frances,” 13, 20, 27, 293, 295 Two Sicilies, Kingdom of, 240 – 41, 245 – 46, 253, 255, 266 See also Naples ultramontanism, 13, 237, 254, 263 emotive piety and, 238 – 39, 243 Lamennais’s, 104 – 5, 112, 131 late nineteenth-century, 238, 257, 263 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 60 University, Napoleonic, 73 – 79, 92 – 93, 107, 126 – 28, 216 – 21 Catholic students’ isolation in, 196 – 97 See also Liautard, abbé Claude Rosalie Univers L’, 219, 232, 258 Veuillot, Louis, 165, 219, 231, 251, 258, 273 – 74 Victor Emmanuel, king of Italy, 241 – 42, 252, 254, 256, 278

Villemain, Minister of Public Instruction, 218 – 19 vocation, 6 – 8, 21, 66 – 67, 77 – 78, 87 – 88, 90, 94, 208 – 9, 231, 281 – 85 Voltaire, 74, 91, 93, 103 – 4, 148 widowhood, 158, 161, 170, 173, 180, 182, 187 Winterhalter, Franz-Xaver, 292 women charity and, 202 – 5, 215 – 16, 234 – 35 citizenship and, 5 – 6, 8, 291, 294 – 95 divorce and, 228 – 29 as exemplars of virtue, 212, 216 – 17, 230, 235 feminization of religion and, 15 – 19, 25, 238 – 39, 275, 277 – 78, 293 – 95 during the late Roman Empire, 233 – 34 modesty and, 150 – 51, 154, 182, 185 – 86 religious congregations and, 12, 18, 282 – 85 saints 23, 169 – 71 sexual temptation and, 205 – 6 socialism and, 5 – 6, 8 victim spirituality and, 171 – 72 as weaker sex, 228, 233, 235 writers, 7 – 9, 21, 23, 165 – 66, 185 – 86 See also Craven, Pauline; Monniot, Victorine; Ozanam, Amélie working class, 36, 45, 199, 224, 229, 231, 234 World Youth Day, 187 Zouaves, 238 – 39, 256 – 58, 263 – 64, 266 sacrifice and, 242, 259 – 60 sanctity and, 262 – 63 uniform, 241, 257 women and, 260 – 61