La Asamblea Constituyente

Another axis of differentiation for religious practice that Gibson singles out is that of gender. In addition to Gibson, prominent French religious historians, including Cholvy, Hilaire and Claude Langlois, see a feminisation of religion stemming from the time of the Revolution. Cholvy and Hilaire note, for example, that women played a primary role in maintaining religious practice during the Revolution as religion moved from the public to the private sphere. Given that religious education was not taking place in the 1790s and the early 1800s, there

9 _{Gérard Cholvy and Yves-Marie Hilaire, Histoire religieuse de la France contemporaine, 3 vols (Toulouse: Privat, 1985-}

was a return to the transmission of religion within families, where mothers and grandmothers were usually the only teachers available (p. 23). After the Church was given back its official status in 1801, following Napoleon’s signing of a Concordat with Pope Pius VII, women were instrumental in restoring the faith. The men who resumed religious practice at this time were a distinct minority, and those who did restricted their practice to baptisms, weddings and funerals. By mid-century the proportion of men to women attending Easter mass varied from four to five for devout regions, to one man for every twenty women in some dechristianised urban neighbourhoods and rural areas where only three to five percent of the adult male population fulfilled their Easter duty (Chapter 9). The importance of the role of women is noted in religious works of the time; as Trappist priest P.C.J. Debreyne stated mid-century: ‘La génération naissante est entre les mains de la femme, l’avenir est à elle […]. Si la femme nous échappe, avec elle tout peut disparaître et s’abîmer dans le gouffre de l’athéisme, croyance, morale et toute notre civilisation, parce que dès lors il n’y aura plus de principes de morale, plus de frein religieux’.10

Beyond the specific practice of religion, Langlois lists a number of indices of nineteenth-century religion that point to its feminisation. With regard to ordinations, the female religious orders grew faster than male orders in the first half of the nineteenth century, as congregations began to focus on social work rather than the introspection and meditation of the monastic orders.11 Langlois

10 _{Debreyne, Essai de théologie morale, considérée dans ses rapports avec la physiologie et la médecine (Paris: Vanderborght,}

1844), cited in Claude Langlois, ‘Féminisation du catholicisme’, in Histoire de la France religieuse, ed. by Jacques Le Goff and René Rémond, 4 vols (Paris: Seuil, 1991), III, 292-309 (p. 303).

also sees a feminisation of religious art and architecture: a proliferation of feminised angels, for example, and overall the domination of the figure of Mary throughout the century. Mary was the most common devotion among the new female congregations, and the century of Mary was sealed with the proclamation of the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception in 1854.12

Recently, counter arguments have emerged emphasising the male role in nineteenth-century religion. Throughout the nineteenth century, devotion to the Sacred Heart, including the construction of the Sacré-Cœur basilica in Paris, generated and sustained a conservative Catholic counter-discourse in French society and politics.13 Raymond Jonas usefully questions the feminisation-of- religion thesis in his study of the cult of the Sacred Heart, which he views as the Church’s attempt to create a masculine religious devotion with popular appeal. Jonas explains how, during the revolt of the Vendée, men attached Sacred Heart emblems to their lapels, and fought under its banner; the Sacred Heart was also worn by thousands of French men who volunteered to fight for the Pope as Papal Zouaves, many of whom lost their lives at the Battle of Loigny during the Franco- Prussian war (p. x).

In a thought-provoking inquiry into the religious practice of bourgeois Catholic men during the nineteenth century, Paul Seeley similarly complicates the feminisation-of-religion thesis, by asking from whence bourgeois male religious activism in the late nineteenth century derived if religion had become a largely female domain. According to Seeley, nineteenth-century bourgeois mothers

12 _{Ibid., p. 298.}

13 _{Raymond Jonas, France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart: An Epic Tale for Modern Times (Berkeley: University of}

brought religious criteria to bear on their sons’ education, choice of profession and training, and choice of spouse, generating an ‘entire bourgeois Catholic habitus’, which constituted a system of practices within and yet opposed to the liberal bourgeois order. What is more, they did so with the approbation of their husbands. Seeley notes in particular that although bourgeois boys normally renounced the values of their initial maternal socialisation at secondary school, those with mothers who intensified their evangelisation during this period did not, and came to view aspects of their peers’ masculinity and irreligion as a negative identity. A strong support base at home could thus prevent bourgeois boys from losing their faith in the anticlerical colleges.14 Seeley’s thesis is interesting in Garin’s case because of the Garin family’s bourgeois origins and his attendance at a combined college and seminary.