Respectable Folly Garrett, Clarke Published by Johns Hopkins University Press Garrett, Clarke. Respectable Folly: Millenarians and the French Revolution in France and England. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975. Project MUSE. doi:10.1353/book.67841. https://muse.jhu.edu/. For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/67841 [ Access provided at 2 Oct 2021 03:07 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. HOPKINS OPEN PUBLISHING ENCORE EDITIONS Clarke Garrett Respectable Folly Millenarians and the French Revolution in France and England Open access edition supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities / Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program. © 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press Published 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 www.press.jhu.edu The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. CC BY-NC-ND ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-3177-2 (open access) ISBN-10: 1-4214-3177-7 (open access) ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-3175-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-4214-3175-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-3176-5 (electronic) ISBN-10: 1-4214-3176-9 (electronic) This page supersedes the copyright page included in the original publication of this work. Respectable Folly RESPECTABLE FOLLY M illenarians and the French Revolution in France and England 4- Clarke Garrett The Johns Hopkins University Press BALTIMORE & LONDON This book has been brought to publication with the generous assistance of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Copyright © 1975 by The Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in a ny form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, xerog­ raphy, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Manufactured in the United States of America The Johns Hopkins University Press. Baltimore, Maryland 21218 The Johns Hopkins University Press Ltd .. London Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 74-24378 ISBN 0-8018-1618-1 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data will be found on the last printed page of this book. To Peg Contents PREFACE INTRODUCTION Historians and the Millennium CHAPTER l Millenarian Currents in Eighteenth-Century France 17 CHAPTER 2 A Prophetess in Perigord 31 CHAPTER 3 A Respectable Folly 61 CHAPTER 4 The Popular Piety of Catherine Theot 77 CHAPTER 5 The Mystical International 97 CHAPTER 6 The Millenarian Tradition in English Dissent 121 CHAPTER 7 The Land of the Learned Pig 145 CHAPTER 8 A Methodical Madness 179 CHAPTER 9 Brothers, Southcott, and the "Chiliasm of Despair" 209 CONCLUSION 225 INDEX 231 Preface f oR OVER a decade, I had intended to make a study of millenarianism and the French Revolution. It was not until 1969-70, while serving as director of Dickinson College's Center for Interna­ tional Studies in Bologna, Italy, that I was able to launch the project in earnest and work in a number of European libraries and archives. I am grateful to Dickinson for that opportunity and for several re­ search grants. Earlier, a grant from Wake Forest University had en­ abled me to obtain pamphlets and the Journal prophetique on micro­ film. Following the year in Bologna, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities made possible a summer of research in London. A sabbatical year in Chicago (1970-71) was supported by grants from the Newberry Library and the Ford Foundation Hu­ manities Fund of Dickinson College. In a project as diffuse as this one, I have depended on friends and colleagues in a variety of fields for assistance. Among those at insti­ tutions other than the ones already mentioned, my thanks go to Louis Lekai, E. P. Thompson, Robert Kreiser, Stephen Marini, Natalie Z. Davis, and especially Elizabeth Eisenstein. While this study is only distantly related to my doctoral dissertation, I have received con­ tinued encouragement from my mentors at the University of Wiscon­ sin, Henry Hill and George Masse. Among my colleagues at Dickin­ son, the advice and criticism of George Allan, Daniel Bechtel, Michael Kline, Charles Sellers, Ralph and Martha Slatten, Stephen Weinberger, and Henry J. Young have been particularly valuable. Gladys Cashman typed the entire manuscript, with unfailing skill and good humor. I am grateful to the staffs of several libraries, especially the New­ berry Library and the Dickinson College Library. The Archives Nationales, the Bibliotheque de la ville de Lyon, and the Riksarkivet in Stockholm all kindly provided microfilm copies of manuscript materials in their possession. The University of Texas at Austin and Dr. Williams's Library in London gave me permission to quote from manuscripts in the Southcott Collection and the Walton Manuscripts, respectively. I wish to thank the editors of the journal of the History X PREFACE of Ideas and the Catholic Historical Review for permission to reprint in revised form the substance of articles that first appeared in their journals. All translations from the French, unless otherwise indicated, are my own. All quotations retain the capitalization of the original. Yates and Ida Forbis have lived with Suzette Labrousse and her compeers almost since the book's inception. They have read and com­ mented on most of it, to its great benefit. My deepest thanks go to my family-to my daughters, Amy, Susan, and Margaret, and above all to my wife, Peg-for making the whole process of research and writing a continually companionable and enjoyable one. Respectable Folly INTRODUCTION Historians and the Millennium THEhistorical phenomenon of millenarianism has been part of the human experience for several thousand years, but it is only within the last twenty that historians have come to regard millenar­ ianism as worthy of detailed research and analysis. Along with anthropologists and sociologists, they have also become interested in the way in which millenarian movements, "religious movements that expect imminent, total, ultimate, this-worldly collective salva­ tion, "1 seem to recur in times of social and political crisis. They have agreed with the insights of Ernst Troeltsch, Karl Mannheim, and Max Weber that there is a connection between millenarian or messianic ideas and the existence of individuals and groups who find them­ selves or believe themselves to be "deprived." In the late 1950s, this line of argument was taken somewhat further by several Marxist anthropologists and historians, among them Peter Worsley, Vittorio Lanternari, and Eric Hobsbawm. 2 For them, millenarianism was a pre-, political stage in the evolution of popular protest toward a modern} secular, revolutionary consciousness. It is Eric Hobsbawm who has developed this thesis most fully. In 1 Primitive Rebels, he examines three nineteenth-century proletarian movements: the Lazzaretti of Tuscany, the anarchists of Andalusia, and the Sicilian Fasci. While only the third, he admits, successfully made the transition from millenarian escapism to effective revolu­ tionary action, he holds that "millenarians can ... readily exchange I. Yonina Talmon, "Millenarian Movements," European Journal of Sociology 7 (1966): 200. Talmon's italics. 2. Peter Worsely, The Trumpet Shall Sound (London: Maggibon & Kee. 1957); Vittorio Lanternari, The Religions of the Oppressed: A Study of Modern Messianic Cults, trans. Lisa Sergio (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963); and Eric Hobsbawm. Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries, (reprint ed., New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1965); and Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1972), pp. 128-50, 389-432. 2 RESPECT ABLE FOLLY the primitive costume in which they dress their aspirations for the modern costume of Socialist and Communist politics." 3 The vision of a new moral order, a world purified and freed from conflict and hatred, is essential to both millenarians and secular revolutionaries. The "essence" of millenarianism, in Hobsbawm's view, is "the hope of a complete and radical change in the world." 4 To the oppressed, the millennium represents the world of their dreams, in which all men live in harmony and in which there are neither masters nor slaves. Like Engels and Kautsky before him, Hobsbawm sees the more ex­ treme religious movements of the Reformation era essentially as movements of social protest. He is far more careful than his prede­ cessors not to generalize beyond the evidence, but he does make the unexamined assumption that millenarianism was nothing but an at­ tempt on the part of the working classes to articulate their discontent. In Hobsbawm's definition of "the typical old-fashioned millenarian movement," its principal characteristics were "total rejection of the present, evil world," coupled with "a fundamental vagueness about the actual way in which the new society will be brought about" and "a fairly standardized 'ideology' of the chiliastic type." 5 Thus millenarianism might have had importance as an agent for social con­ sciousness and revolutionary action, but as a religious and intellec­ tual phenomenon it was without historical significance or develop­ ment. Hobsbawm draws many of his historical analogies from the period of the English Revolution, when millenarian ideas were perhaps more widely disseminated than at any other time or in any other place. The character of English Puritan millenarianism has been a subject of considerable interest for historians, notably for Christopher Hill and his students at Oxford. In numerous books and articles, they have followed a line of interpretation similar to Hobsbawm's, 6 viewing millenarianism essentially as a manifestation of the class conflict that was at the core of the English Revolution and as an expression of the new social and political order that the popular classes envisioned.