War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850

Series Editors Rafe Blaufarb Florida State University Tallahassee, United States

Alan Forrest University of York United Kingdom

Karen Hagemann University of North Carolina Chapel Hill United States More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14390 Bryan A. Banks · Erica Johnson Editors The French Revolution and Religion in Global Perspective

Freedom and Faith Editors Bryan A. Banks Erica Johnson SUNY Adirondack Francis Marion University Queensbury Florence NY, USA SC, USA

War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850 ISBN 978-3-319-59682-2 ISBN 978-3-319-59683-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-59683-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017944572

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifcally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microflms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifc statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affliations.

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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Series Editors’ Preface

The century from 1750 to 1850 was a seminal period of change, not just in Europe but across the globe. The political landscape was transformed by a series of revolutions fought in the name of liberty—most notably in the Americas and France, of course, but elsewhere, too: in Holland and Geneva during the eighteenth century and across much of mainland Europe by 1848. Nor was change confned to the European world. New ideas of freedom, equality and human rights were carried to the furthest outposts of empire, to Egypt, India and the Caribbean, which saw the creation in 1801 of the frst black republic in Haiti, the former French colony of Saint-Domingue. And in the early part of the nineteenth century they continued to inspire anti-colonial and liberation movements throughout Central and Latin America. If political and social institutions were transformed by revolution in these years, so, too, was warfare. During the quarter-century of the French Revolutionary Wars, in particular, Europe was faced with the prospect of ‘total’ war, on a scale unprecedented before the twentieth century. Military hardware, it is true, evolved only gradually, and battles were not necessarily any bloodier than they had been during the Seven Years War. But in other ways these can legitimately be described as the frst modern wars, fought by mass armies mobilized by national and patriotic propaganda, leading to the displacement of millions of people throughout Europe and beyond, as soldiers, prisoners of war, civilians and refugees. For those who lived through the period these wars would

v vi Series Editors’ Preface be a formative experience that shaped the ambitions and the identities of a generation. The aims of the series are necessarily ambitious. In its various vol- umes, whether single-authored monographs or themed collections, it seeks to extend the scope of more traditional historiography. It will study warfare during this formative century not just in Europe, but in the Americas, in colonial societies, and across the world. It will analyse the construction of identities and power relations by integrating the prin- cipal categories of difference, most notably class and religion, generation and gender, race and ethnicity. It will adopt a multi-faceted approach to the period, and turn to methods of political, cultural, social, military, and gender history, in order to develop a challenging and multidisciplinary analysis. Finally, it will examine elements of comparison and transfer and so tease out the complexities of regional, national and global history. Foreword

In many respects, the frst half of the nineteenth century was an age of religious fervor comparable only to the Reformation and its Catholic response. A wave of church building and missionary activity, the founding of seminaries and Bible societies, and the creative expression of popular piety—from pilgrimages and apparitions, to reading groups and revivals—all attest to the vitality of faith in this period and for much of the succeeding century. It is one of the virtues of this fne collection that it helps to more fully explain and contextualize this phenomenon, accounting for religion’s reinvention and reinvigoration in the nineteenth century and beyond. If religion, to take Dale Van Kley’s terms, was a “casualty” of modernity, it was also a “chrysalis.”1 And as the essays in this volume make abun- dantly clear, the Revolution helped to incubate and hatch its new forms. Indeed, the very same period that witnessed the ravages of dechristianization was also an age of religious creativity and invention, preparing the re-awakening that ensued, and in the process ensuring that religion, which was present at the founding, would retain a central place in the subsequent construction of the modern world. That this process was global in its dimensions is another novel feature emphasized in this volume, which effectively brings together two vital strands of recent historiography that have not been suffciently connected. On the one hand is the rich study of religion and religious Enlightenment in the long eighteenth century, which over the last several decades has complicated facile understandings of secularization and

vii viii Foreword disenchantment, and demonstrated the degree to which the various confessions showed themselves to be both accommodating and creative in the face of modern developments. On the other hand is the “global turn” in the eighteenth century and Revolutionary studies, which has succeeded in demonstrating Europe’s inextricable links to forces and peoples beyond its frontiers, while at the same time correcting for a certain provincialism in the study of the Revolution itself. That these two developments should have overlapped and reinforced each other stands to reason, and the essays in this volume make clear that they did. From those Huguenots dispersed throughout the Atlantic world who claimed the right of revolutionary return in the 1790s to the radical monks and missionaries who sided with formerly enslaved Africans in their upris- ing in Saint-Domingue to the disbanded nuns and imperial administra- tors who took their ignited devotion overseas in the nineteenth century, the Revolution proved a germinating source of religious life, spreading its energies abroad and drawing those of the world back to European soil. Well into the twentieth century, moreover, and arguably still today, the Revolution served a critical function for religious actors all over the world, who no less than their anti-clerical counterparts, saw in this world-historical event both promise and pitfall, making it a critical refer- ence point for assessing the place of religion in modern life. In all of these ways, as the editors note, Alexis de Tocqueville was even more right than he knew when he described the French Revolution as a “religious revolution.” Once viewed as a place of termination, the French Revolution in this account becomes a place of rebirth and reinvention, which opened new chapters in the story of religion’s place in the modern world.

Darrin M. McMahon Dartmouth College

Note 1. Dale Van Kley, “Christianity as Casualty and Chrysalis of Modernity: The Problem of dechristianization in the French Revolution,” America Historical Review, vol. 108, no. 4 (October 2003): 1081–1104. Foreword ix

Darrin M. McMahon is the Mary Brinsmead Wheelock Professor at Dartmouth College. He is the author, most recently, of Divine Fury: A History of Genius and the editor, with Joyce Chaplin, of Genealogies of Genius (Palgrave, 2015). Acknowledgements

Several of the chapters in this volume were frst presented at the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era annual meeting at High Point University in 2014. We would like to thank those in attendance for their insightful commentary and criticism, as well as Carol Harrison, who encouraged the creation of this volume. The anonymous reviewers at Palgrave provided thoughtful feedback on the following collection. The editorial team at Palgrave had faith in this volume. We greatly appreciate their efforts.

xi Contents

Part I Religion and Revolution in Global Perspective

The Huguenot Diaspora and the Politics of Religion in Revolutionary France 3 Bryan A. Banks

Counter-Revolution and Cosmopolitan Spirituality: Anquetil Duperron’s Translation of the Upanishads 25 Blake Smith

Religion and the Atlantic World: The Case of Saint-Domingue and French Guiana 49 Erica Johnson

Secularization by Stealth? Émigrés in Britain During the French Revolution 73 Kirsty Carpenter

Part II Global Legacies of Religion and the French Revolution

Alexis de Tocqueville: Civil Religion, Race, and the Roots of French Universalism, 1830–1857 97 Whitney Abernathy Barnes xiii xiv Contents

Out of the Cloister and into the World: Catholic Nuns in the Aftermath of the Revolution 121 Sarah A. Curtis

Lamennais’ Dilemma: Reconciling Religion and Revolution 145 Thomas Kselman

Religion and Secularization in Bavaria in the Age of Revolution, 1777–1817 173 Morten Nordhagen Ottosen

Comparative Republican Religion: Eighteenth-Century France and Twentieth-Century Turkey 203 Hakan Gungor

Epilogue 221

Index 227 Editors and Contributors

About the Editors

Bryan A. Banks is Assistant Professor of History at SUNY Adirondack. He specializes in the religious history of France and the Atlantic World and has published works on the history of Protestantism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Erica Johnson is Assistant Professor of History at Francis Marion University. She specializes in the French Atlantic world and has published on memory in the founding of Haiti.

Contributors

Whitney Abernathy Barnes is a doctoral candidate at Boston College. Her work focuses on the connections between race, religion, and capital- ism in the early decades of France’s post-Revolutionary empires.

Kirsty Carpenter Associate Professor of History at Massey University, New Zealand, is a specialist on the émigrés (refugees) who left France during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars returning in the frst two decades of the nineteenth century. Her research involves work on minor- ity cultures and European literature. An edition of the novel Eugénie et Mathilde by Madame de Souza was published by the MHRA: Critical

xv xvi Editors and Contributors

Texts, Vol. 26 in 2014. She is the author of: The Novels of Madame de Souza in Social and Political Perspective (2007), Refugees of the French Revolution, Émigrés in London 1789–1802 (1999), and The French Émigrés in Europe and the Struggle against Revolution 1789–1814 edited with independent scholar, Philip Mansel. She is currently writing a book on Exiles and Activism in the Revolutionary Era.

Sarah A. Curtis is Professor of History at San Francisco State University. She is the author of Educating the Faithful: Religion, Schooling, and Society in Nineteenth-Century France and Civilizing Habits: Women Missionaries and the Revival of French Empire, and numerous articles.

Hakan Gungor is Assistant Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at Ordu University in Turkey. After he completed his Doctorate Degree at the Florida State University in the United States, he has been working on Turkish Neutrality in International Law. He is currently working on Modern Turkish and Middle Eastern History and as well as the U.S.-Turkish Relations.

Thomas Kselman is Professor Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame. He has published Miracles and Prophecies in Nineteenth-Century France, Death and the Afterlife in Modern France, and Conscience and Conversion: Religious Liberty in Post-Revolutionary France.

Morten Nordhagen Ottosen is Associate Professor of History and Strategy at the Norwegian Military Academy in Oslo and has also taught as a visiting scholar at Florida State University. His publications include Experiences of War and Nationality in Denmark and Norway, 1807– 1815 (2014, co-authored with Rasmus Glenthøj), Popular Responses to Unpopular Wars: Resistance, Collaboration and Experiences in Norwegian Borderlands (2012), and the forthcoming Scandinavia between Napoleon and Bismarck: Scandinavianism as a Pan-National Movement, 1814– 1870 (co-authored with Rasmus Glenthøj). He has also published several articles and book chapters on nationalism, constitutionalism, and popular war experiences in Scandinavia and Continental Europe during and after the Napoleonic period and is currently completing a monograph on the Napoleonic Empire for the Scandinavian market. Editors and Contributors xvii

Blake Smith is a Max Weber postdoctoral fellow at the European University Institute. He holds a Ph.D. in History from Northwestern University and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. His research on European interactions with Asia has been published in jour- nals, such as History of European Ideas, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, French Cultural History, and Outre-mers: revue d’histoire. Introduction

The French Revolution, though political, assumed the guise and tactics of a religious revolution. Some further points of resemblance between the two may be noticed. The former not only spread beyond the limits of France, but, like religious revolutions, spread by preaching and propaganda.1

It is easy to read the nineteenth-century politician and political sci- entist Alexis de Tocqueville’s allusion to France’s religious revolution in 1789 in strictly metaphorical terms—French revolutionaries proselytized beyond France’s borders, sending secular preachers of modernity throughout the world, waging secular warfare, and ritualizing their own political ideals through revolutionary festivals. Yet, Tocqueville’s charac- terization of the French Revolution as a “religious revolution” may sit uncomfortably with contemporary readers who have even the slight- est knowledge of the breakdown of the Catholic Church’s hierarchy in France, the refractory priests who turned to clandestine worship and renegade counter-revolution, and what became known as the “dechristianization” campaign at the height of the Terror. How could a “religious revolution” manifest itself through anti-religious violence? The chapters in this volume interpret Tocqueville’s assertion in a different way, envisaging a revolutionary experience and modernity deeply indebted to religion rather than opposed to it. Like Tocqueville, Edmund Burke was an astute interpreter of the French Revolution in religious terms. Burke recognized that the revolutionary leaders, who

xix xx Introduction he called “atheistical fathers … learned to talk against monks with the spirit of a monk.”2 The “secular” language of the French Revolution was a recalibration of the religious in the modern world, rather than its death knell. According to theorists like Charles Taylor, the secular is better understood as the ever-changing boundary between religious and non-religious belief and identity.3 In short, this collection explores how the balance between the profane and the sacred changed during the French Revolution, while avoiding teleological understandings of an anti-religious modern world. By latching onto varied experiences and discourses both during the Revolution and afterwards, we are able to call into question the Revolution’s place in the larger narrative of the rise of secularization. The “disenchantment of the world” did not set in as Max Weber once posited, nor did a complete and total Durkheimian “transfer of sacrality” occur during the French Revolution.4 Similarly, what some have called the “privatization of religion,” or the increased separation of rights of the public citizen and the private believer, was not wholesale.5 Many were driven to act publicly because of “private,” personal religious refection. Rather than propagate the classical secular thesis then, the chapters included in this volume examine how both profane and sacred spheres shifted. “Dechristianization” coincided with “rechristianization.” Anti-clericalism gave way to new republican faiths, like the Cult of the Supreme Being and Theophilanthropy, but more often, people simply returned to or revamped their traditional, predominantly Catholic faith. For the frst half of the twentieth century, scholars of the Revolution sided with Karl Marx’s focus on class struggle over Tocqueville and religion as a category of historical analysis largely fell by the wayside. The revolutionary rejection of Catholicism was symptomatic, not systemic, of the ascendency of the bourgeoisie to power in 1789 according to Marxist historians.6 Yet, following the Revisionist turn’s rejection of the orthodox Marxist model and Post-Revisionist turn to political culture, a sizable body of scholarship has emerged on the French Revolution and religion in the recent years.7 Archival work done to further contextualize the Old Regime and the Revolution encouraged historians to pull religion from the dustbin of history. “Those who dissented from received culture and creed,” Alan Charles Kors aptly notes, “had been formed by received culture and creed.”8 Dale Van Kley pioneered an approach to the Old Regime in his The Religious Origins of the French Revolution, which returned weight to theological controversy. For Van Kley, the dis- sent of the French Catholic sect, Jansenism issued the greatest challenge Introduction xxi to Catholic tradition. Jansenists expounded on God’s divine will and predestination, challenging the normative, Gallican claims of man’s free will. This religious debate undermined the Catholic institution, erod- ing the theological structure that elevated the priest above the lay individual.9 Jansenist ecclesiology also imagined God to be distant as well as enigmatic—an image conducive to a sphere of political power sepa- rate from the church with mirrored rites, rituals, and modes of identifca- tion, namely nationalism.10 Such an argument was fairly typical to Marx’s contemporary historians, except Protestants were often depicted as the champions or culprits of secularization.11 Like Van Kley, Suzanne Desan, Ronald Schechter, Nigel Aston, Timothy Tackett, and Joseph F. Byrnes in the Anglophone world have challenged the dialectic between secular and sacred during the French Revolution.12 They have shown how religious groups and ideas about religion played a fundamental role in the shaping of the revolutionary experience and the political culture of the Revolution itself. They have also shown how the Revolution rejected religious tradition. Religious and sociological factors prompted a veritable civil war in the Vendée, while women in the Yonne transformed their Catholic conventions, mar- rying their piety with political principle. An entire Constitutional Church formed, while runaway refractory priests led rogue attacks in the coun- tryside bearing crucifxes and the white Bourbon fag. Yet, in all of these works, the scope is limited to the French hexagon, or even solely to a single province. Many of these works focus on how individuals used departmental boundaries to their advantage, but have neglected larger national and international spaces. This collection flls this rather noticeable lacuna by examining the French Revolution and religion in a global perspective. Alphonse Aulard, arguably the frst professional historian of the French Revolution and Napoleon asserted that “the French Revolution differed from other revolutions in being not merely national, for it aimed at benefting all humanity.”13 The nineteenth-century German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel also noted the “World-Historical” character of the Revolution.14 The more recent The French Revolution in Global Perspective takes up the problem of globalization and the global origins of the French Revolution; however, with the exception of one chapter, religion remains missing.15 This turn to the transnational and global was inherent in Tocqueville’s original understanding of the Revolution. Looking back on the last decade of the eighteenth century and having lived through the xxii Introduction tumultuous 1848 revolutions, Tocqueville understood “political and civil revolutions” as movements “confned to a single country. The French Revolution had no country; one of its leading effects appeared to be to efface national boundaries from the map.” He continued: “No similar feature can be discovered in any other political revolution recorded in history. But it occurs in certain religious revolutions.”16 Tocqueville’s defnition of religion mirrored his notion of the Revolution’s aims— “affecting mankind in the abstract,” regulating the “reciprocal duties of men toward each other, independently of social institutions.”17 The socially transcendent nature of religious revolutions naturally tran- scended real and imagined boundaries. Using religion as a lens by which to bring the French Revolution into global perspective reveals the multi-directional approaches available to scholars. As David Bell notes in his “Questioning the Global Turn,” globalization can refer to “outward,” “integrated, transnational,” and “inward processes.”18 As such, in this volume, globalization examines the impacts of the French Revolution abroad, the role the Revolution played in broader transnational shifts, and the impact other peoples, cultures, and events had on the French Revolution. As Bell warns, such a focus on global connections and trajectories threatens to overtake the particular and location-specifc. It is, therefore, necessary, in examining the global, to not lose sight of the local. Many of our chapters emphasize both the particularity of “place” and as well as the traversal of “space” as themes. The French Revolution’s political culture and the politics of religion are thus central themes. Two themes divide the collection. Part I of this collection, entitled “Religion and Revolution in Global Perspective,” examines the ways in which religious rhetoric evolved from 1789 to 1799, with particular emphasis on the ways “foreign” faiths and religious peoples impacted the political culture of the French Revolution. Part I also explores the religious lives of individuals during the French Revolution who were forced from France for religious, social, and political reasons. Bryan Banks’ chapter explores the role of the Huguenot diaspora in the Revolution’s political culture. Rather than focus on the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) as augur of the Revolution, Banks examines the discourse used by members of the revolutionary government in shaping a peculiar policy in September 1792 that granted citizenship to Huguenot émigrés. This same law also theoretically returned ancestral Introduction xxiii lands still held in the monarchy’s domains to the descendants of their previous Huguenot owners upon their return to France. These efforts resulted in the return of an important cadre of Huguenots including the politician and author Benjamin Constant, the sculptor James Pradier, the writer Paul-Jérémie Bitaubé, and the diplomat Charles Guillaume Théremin. A study of rappel des religionnaires fugitifs untangles the fraught relationship between religion and citizenship, while exploring the state’s memory of the Revocation and their efforts to make reparations. Blake Smith analyzes the impact of the French Revolution on the work of eighteenth-century France’s most eminent scholar of Asian religions, Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil Duperron. Considered by scholars to be a cosmopolitan liberal and “enlightened” fgure, Anquetil, in fact, was an opponent of the French Revolution. Through an examina- tion of Duperron’s pioneering translation of the Sanskrit Upanishads, Smith shows how Orientalism could critique the Revolution and the Enlightenment. Synthesizing Christian theology, Neo-Platonism, Kabbalah, and the Upanishads, Anquetil appealed to non-European tra- ditions in his criticism of the Enlightenment thought and established a pattern later used by mystics and right-wing intellectuals, such as Réné Guénon and Julius Evola. In a surprising move, Duperron’s text pro- moted a universal spirituality (common to Hinduism and Catholicism alike), which shored up his counter-revolutionary politics in a decidedly modern, cosmopolitan, and “radical” way. Erica Johnson focuses on the rather resolute character of religious orders in the Caribbean World at a time when France faced a slave revolt in Saint Domingue, led in part by French clergy, and an insurgent, counter-revolutionary movement led by renegade refractory priests, who rebuked the Revolution’s Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Many of les religieux supported philanthropic, anti-slavery positions and played key roles in the revolt. At the same time, the French Revolution deported priests to French Guiana for rehabilitation. Deportations overloaded an already strained colonial structure, so Guiana, in turn, ordered the deportation of priests already in the colony to the United States and other French colonies. Johnson compares and contrasts the experience of the Church in both Saint-Domingue and French Guiana. Both parts of the Caribbean World were extensions of and responded to the French Revolution. Therefore, Johnson shows how the Caribbean became a xxiv Introduction space occupied and shaped by les religieux at the onset of the nineteenth century’s wave of imperialism. Kirsty Carpenter examines another castaway community—the counter-revolutionary of French Catholic émigrés in London. Carpenter focuses on their emigration experience, in order to emphasize how distance and the turmoil of forced relocation could transform religious communities. Unlike Johnson’s chapter, which focuses on the creation of Atlantic and Caribbean networks, Carpenter’s chapter explores the ways distance denigrated connections and culture. Physical distance from Catholic churches damaged the Catholic belief and practice of many French émigrés. The fnancial and social constraints incurred by their exile caused many to abandon their former institutional church, taking up membership at those churches available to them in exile. Carpenter argues that these small religious enclaves can be understood as micro- cosms of unintentional acculturation and secularization, or the shifting nature between sacred and profane concerns. Part II—“Global Legacies of Religion and the French Revolution”— examines the legacies of the French Revolution in both physical and political terms over the course of the long nineteenth century. We remove another imaginary boundary the Revolution crossed and affected people’s religious lives—the temporal. The authors move beyond the confnes of the eighteenth century to examine the impact the Revolution had on religion into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The chapters in this section demonstrate how the French Revolution became a turning point for the religious history of the world in so much that it inspired religious policy in the French empire, affected the religious conscience of French thinkers, and challenged the secular developments of foreign nations. By examining the function of religion within Tocqueville’s varied writings, Whitney Abernathy Barnes postulates that Christianity, far from becoming less central to French identity and political life after the revolutionary period, is a critical element in understanding French identity formation in the nineteenth century. Christianity’s civic infuences proved to be multifaceted and contradictory in Tocqueville’s writings. When regarding the metropole, he invoked France’s Christian heritage to propagate moderation, equality, and liberty in civil society. When dis- cussing the colonies, Tocqueville employed France’s Christian identity to discursively justify French political and military intervention in Algeria. Introduction xxv

Ultimately, Tocqueville’s constant references to France’s Christian identity in his discussions of the “secular” areas of politics and imperial policy reveal the ways in which religion infuenced French colonial policy and contemporary understandings of French universalism. Tocqueville employed religious language to universalize France’s noble appeal to the enslaved and barbaric even as he utilized France’s Christian identity to reinforce religious and cultural difference in French Algeria. Focusing her attention on the Revolution’s displacement of nuns, Sarah A. Curtis shows how the closing of convents birthed missionary activities in the nineteenth century. She argues that the expansion of French Catholicism inside and outside of France would not have been possible without the transformations in women’s religious life initiated by the French Revolution—thus revealing the rather unexpected legacy of the anti-Catholic measures taken by revolutionaries. By destroy- ing an old system with limited energy and little potential for expansion and by creating an existential threat to the church itself, the Revolution inspired and empowered Catholic women to recreate religious life on their own terms to new, global ends. While Carpenter’s lay Catholics lost their faith, Curtis’ nuns fnd their faith reinvigorated abroad. In Curtis’ chapter, distance provided a safe haven from the long arm of French Revolutionary law. Thomas Kselmen emphasizes the ways in which the globalization of religion infuenced individual belief through a biographical sketch of the priest, philosopher, and political theorist Felicité Lamennais. Lamennais grew up in the turbulent political and religious atmosphere of the French Revolution. The assault on Catholicism in the 1790s interrupted his religious formation, but Lamennais decided as a young man that both his personal salvation and the future of France could be secured only by a return to Catholicism. During the Restoration, Lamennais referred to the Revolution in a series of polemical writings that made him one of the most effective defenders of ultramontanism. However, after an extended period of painful soul-searching, Lamennais left the Church, insisting to his friends that to act otherwise would be to violate his individual conscience. This fnal step in Lamennais’ career as a Catholic suggests the larger problems posed by the Revolution to the Catholic Church. Could the Church accommodate itself to liberal political regimes and the enhanced claims of the rights of the individual conscience? The struggle xxvi Introduction within the Church to answer these questions constitutes an important legacy of the French Revolution, mirrored in the Lamennais’ career. The last two chapters in this collection refect on the political legacy of the French Revolution in regimes directly and indirectly affected by the revolutionary tumult. Morten Nordhagen Ottosen’s contribution examines the process and impact of secularization and religious reforms in Bavaria across three decades of revolution and upheaval. He traces the origins and implementation of the reforms. In doing so, his chapter questions whether the French Revolution marked a point of depar- ture for Bavarian reformers or provided a context in which Bavarian reforms that predated the revolution could be successfully implemented. Moreover, Ottosen assesses the relationship between spiritual and political, legal and social considerations on the part of the Bavarian government in implementing the reforms, as well as how the common people experienced secularization and religious reform. His conclusions hint at a larger thesis wherein the French Revolution’s disruption, in fact, slowed the development of religious tolerance rather than expedited it. Hakan Gungor takes a step a little further afeld to show how the leaders of the Turkish War of Independence in 1919 legitimated their own secular designs based on the republican legacy of the French Revolution. Gungor then explores the similarities and differences between the French and Turkish republican experience in terms of political and material culture. He explains how, similar to Old Regime France, the clergy were also royal subjects in the Ottoman Empire and had more or less extensive authority over the middle class and the peas- ants. Further, while revolutionaries challenged Catholic authority in eighteenth-century France, in the twentieth century, the Turkish clergy was suppressed, exiled, and sometimes even executed. Gungor contends that while Turkey seems to be secular, it constantly blurs together religion and politics, giving rise to continual confict, raising questions as to whether or not the French Revolutionary concept of secularism is applicable to Turkey or other Muslim states. In tackling the issue of the global religious question in the French Revolution, this volume inevitably focuses on the dominant religion of France and the French Empire—Catholicism. As Jules Michelet once noted, the “Revolution continues Christianity, and it contradicts it. It is, at the same time, its heir and its adversary.”19 As Smith’s chapter shows particularly well though, the French Revolution extended to non-Chris- tian parts of the world. French Orientalism was shaped by the French Introduction xxvii

Revolution, and as such French ideas of eastern religions and their sub- sects were cast at a moment of radical ideas concerning religion. French men and women found confrmation of their ideals or their biases in these cultes’ alterity. Smith uncovered a vision of Hinduism, which cri- tiqued the French Revolution’s rejection of religion and bolstered a sense of universal spirituality. Gungor also examines the ways in which French Revolutionary ideas applied to Islam in Turkey. Similarly, the Jewish population fgured prominently in the imaginations of French men and women during the French Revolution, but they played a role in France as well. Abbé Grégoire, like many of his revolutionary con- temporaries, found the Jewish population paradoxical. They were clan- nish, insular, as well as degenerated from the earliest Talmudic, Jewish communities; yet, they were also capable of regeneration. Alsatian, Portuguese, Ashkenazi, and Avignonese Jews fgured signifcantly in debates over public offce and the rather lackluster decree in 1791 that amounted to a “revocation of restrictions” more than a clarion call for full religious equality.20 Muslims would fgure more prominently in 1798 during Napoleon Bonaparte’s Egyptian expedition.21 Entangled with the transnational and the French Revolution’s legacy, gender is another focus in this collection. Women had unique experiences with religion and the French Revolution. Yet, far from being monolithic, their encounters varied based, among other factors, on their geographic locations. Curtis examines how revolutionary religious transformations in France emancipated nuns from their cloisters, making it possible for them to evangelize globally. Johnson reveals how nuns asso- ciated with the Constitutional priests of the Capuchin order took up the cause of equality for their female pupils of color in revolutionary Saint- Domingue. While the French Revolution empowered these Catholic women, émigré women in Britain struggled to practice their Catholic faith. Carpenter explores the social, fnancial, and logistical obstacles these women had to overcome to attend mass, eventually reducing its importance among the priorities for the French in Britain during the Revolution. Confict and war act as both agent and specter in this collection. The counter-revolutionary confict, what some historians refer to as the French Civil War, forced French aristocrats abroad as seen in Carpenter’s chapter. The Vendée and other rural conficts called into question the position of Catholicism in the French society. Smith’s chapter examines xxviii Introduction how the French Civil War caused one Frenchman to look to Hinduism in order to come to terms with the confict over religion during the Revolution. Johnson’s chapter too shows how the French Revolutionary Wars spilled over into the Atlantic and Caribbean worlds. In the second section, Ottosen explores how the French Revolutionary Wars spread to the German lands and disrupted a much longer process of secularization, while in Turkey, Gungor shows that the Revolutionary Wars provided a model for the Turks. Considerations of outright war and serious confict in both obvious and unexpected ways shape the content of each chapter in this volume. In sum, this volume reveals some of the ways that religion and a critical, historical refection on secularity can open up new avenues to think about the French Revolution in a global perspective. In doing so, we take Tocqueville’s insistence on the religious character of the French Revolution seriously, while testing his thoughts with our current historical tools. The French Revolution crafted new political forms that sought to replace Old Regime power politics guided by impulses simultaneously democratic and dominating. This schism, which may have invented our modern notion of “human rights,” felt like the abandonment of an individual’s claim to religious autonomy, the thrashing of religious community in favor of nationalistic forms of identity. Such a paradox sat at the heart of the French Revolution’s quintessential expression of religious equality.22 “No one should be disturbed for his opinions, even in religion, provided that their manifestation does not trouble public order as established by law.” A protection of religious opinion and public security remained incongruous. This incongruity liberated persecuted religious minorities and persecuted those with religious privilege, thus casting a fraught legacy of secularization with which individuals, communities, and states would have to contend.

Bryan A. Banks Erica Johnson

Notes 1. Alexis de Tocqueville, L’Ancien régime et la Révolution (Paris, 1856), 40. 2. Edmund Burke, Refections on the Revolution in France (London, 1821), 155. Introduction xxix

3. Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 4. Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion (1922) (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 270; Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 239; Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution [1976] (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 262–282. 5. On the privatization of religious thesis, see Jeffrey Merrick, The Desacralization of the French Monarchy in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1990). 6. There are a couple notable exceptions. See, Francois-Alphonse Aulard, Le culte de la raison et le culte de l’etre supreme: 1793– 1794: essai historique (Paris: F. Alcan, 1892); Michelle Vovelle, Piété baroque et déchristianisation en Provence au XVIIIe siecle; les attitudes devant la mort d’apres les clauses des testaments (Paris: Plon, 1973). 7. Michelle Vovelle, Timothy Tackett, and Elisabeth Tuttle, “Refections on the Revisionist Interpretation of the French Revolution,” French Historical Studies, vol. 16, no. 4 (Autumn, 1990); 749–755. See also Suzanne Desan, “What’s After Political Culture? Recent French Revolutionary Historiography,” French Historical Studies vol. 23, no. 1 (2000): 163–196. 8. Alan Charles Kors, Atheism in France, 1650–1729 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 288. 9. Dale Van Kely, The Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, 1560–1791 (Yale University Press, 1996). See also Catherine Maire, De la cause de Dieu à la cause de la nation: Le Jansénisme au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1998). 10. See David Bell, The Cult of the Nation: Inventing Nationalism in France, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), esp. Ch 1; Charly Coleman, “Resacralizing the World: The Fate of Secularization in Enlightenment Historiography,” The Journal of Modern History, vol. 82, no. 2 (2010): 368–395; Charly Coleman, The Virtues of Abandon: An Anti-Individualist History of the French Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), esp. Part I. xxx Introduction

11. Bryan A. Banks, “The Protestant Origins of the French Revolution: Contextualizing Edgar Quinet in the Historiography of the Revolution, 1789–1865,” in Proceedings of the Western Society for French History, vol. 42, (2016). 12. Suzanne Desan, Reclaiming the Sacred: Lay Religion and Popular Politics in Revolutionary France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990); Ronald Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews: Representations of Jews in France, 1715–1815 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003); Nigel Aston, Religion and Revolution in France, 1780–1804 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2000); Timothy Tackett, Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture in Eighteenth- Century France: The Ecclesiastical Oat of 1791 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); Joseph F. Byrnes, Priests of the French Revolution: Saints and Renegades in a New Political Era (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014). 13. Francois-Alphonse Aulard, “The French Revolution and Napoleon” in Arthur Tilley, ed. (1922), Modern France. A Companion to French Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), 115. 14. G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. by J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), 285. 15. See Suzanne Desan, Lynn Hunt, and William Max Nelson, eds., The French Revolution in Global Perspective. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013). Andrew Jainchill’s chapter entitled “1685 and the French Revolution” focuses on Louis XIV’s Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the persecution and expul- sion of the Huguenot population. 16. Tocqueville , L’Ancien régime et la Révolution, 39. 17. Ibid., 40–41. 18. David A. Bell, “Questioning the Global Turn: The Case of the French Revolution,” French Historical Studies, vol. 37, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 4. See also Lynn Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era (New York: W.W. Norton, 2015). Introduction xxxi

19. Jules Michelet, History of the French Revolution, trans. by C. Cocks (London, 1857), 18. 20. Schechter, 151. 21. Ian Coller, Arab France: Islam and the Making of Modern Europe, 1798–1831 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 31. 22. See the tenth article of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.