The French Revolution and religion in global perspective freedom and faith PDF
Preview The French Revolution and religion in global perspective freedom and faith
The French Revolution and Religion in Global Perspective Freedom and Faith Edited by Bryan A. Banks and Erica Johnson War, Culture and Society, 1750 –1850 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, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms 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 specific 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 affiliations. Cover credit: © De Luan/Alamy Stock Photo Printed on acid-free paper 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 S e ’ P erieS ditorS reface 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 confined 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 first black republic in Haiti, the former French colony of Saint-Domingue. And in the early part of the nineteenth cen- tury 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 first 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. f oreword In many respects, the first 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 found- ing 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 fine 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 dechristian- ization 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 fea- ture emphasized in this volume, which effectively brings together two vital strands of recent historiography that have not been sufficiently connected. On the one hand is the rich study of religion and religious Enlightenment in the long eighteenth century, which over the last sev- eral 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 cer- tain 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 rein- vention, 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).
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