Abstract
Karen E Carter, Creating Catholics: Catechism and Primary Education in Early Modern France, University of Notre Dame Press: Notre Dame, IN, 2011; ix + 314 pp.; 9780268023041, $40.00 (pbk)
Reviewed by: Laurence Brockliss, Magdalen College, Oxford, UK
This book is a contribution to our growing understanding of the spread of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation on the ground. Its subject is principally the religious education of the young through a study of the content, level of provision and take-up of catechetical instruction and elementary education. Both, according to the author, need to be studied together, as the village schoolmaster not only supplemented in his lessons the doctrinal and moral instruction inculcated through the catechism, but he was the priest’s assistant: although appointed and largely paid for by the community, the schoolmaster ensured the good behaviour of his charges in church, helped the priest in his various religious duties, and often acted as the parish clerk.
The meat of the book consists of a study of lay religiosity in the eighteenth century in three adjacent French dioceses – two in the Champagne (Rheims and Châlons-sur-Marne) and one in Burgundy (Auxerre). Using a wealth of information in surviving episcopal archives, especially visitation records, the author paints a much more positive picture of the ‘catholicization’ of the French population in the century before the Revolution than has been the custom hitherto. Delumeau in his overview of the Catholic Reformation that appeared in the 1970s claimed that it was only in the nineteenth century that the church finally got its message through to the majority of the population. In the eighteenth century, particularly in the countryside, ordinary French men and women remained immured in superstitious and unorthodox religious rituals and practices. Carter in contrast shows that in the three dioceses in question the French were good and orthodox Counter-Reformation Catholics in the eighteenth century, if not before. Most children between five and 13 attended catechetical classes in the country as well as town, while adults attended mass on Sundays and took communion at Easter following confessions. Far more of the population, moreover, was literate than previously thought. Anyone who wanted to learn to read, if not to write, both boys and girls, had the opportunity to do so: schoolmasters and mistresses were ubiquitous, and where none was appointed (as in many parts of Auxerre), the priest would step in to fill the gap. At the same time, the author is careful not to present her findings as a top-down victory for the church authorities. Although she depicts an adult population that for the most part willingly sent its children to receive religious instruction and saw the value of limited schooling, she also emphasizes its autonomy. If the church had had its way, adults as well as children would have attended catechetical classes and there would have been an end to many traditional leisure activities such as drinking and playing cards. At this, though, adults drew the line: they accepted the Counter-Reformation but on their own terms. They were even perfectly happy for boys and girls to be instructed together despite the strictures of the bishops.
This is a well written and entertaining study that is to be commended for treating lay Catholics as active rather than passive consumers of the Counter Reformation. Yet the book is not completely satisfying for it never engages with one important strand of the historiography of the French church in the eighteenth century. In the 1970s a number of historians on both sides of the Channel concluded that the hold of the church over the laity was declining on the eve of the Revolution: they pointed to testamentary evidence, the decline in the number of vocations, and the rapid rise in illegitimate births. Although there was no agreement as to the cause of the phenomenon: out and out ‘dechristianization’ through the spread of Enlightenment, a rejection of Baroque Christianity in favour of a more restrained Jansenist piety, or simply the fall-out from adverse economic developments, there seemed no doubting the evidence. Carter, however, makes no reference to this literature: indeed, historians such as Vovelle, Hufton and McManners do not even appear in her bibliography. To the extent that her own work at the very least raises questions about the traditional historiography, it is unfortunate that she has chosen not to discuss the implications of her findings more deeply. It would have been interesting too to hear her thoughts on the view expressed by Le Goff and Sutherland, again in the 1970s, that the peasants in the west of France remained loyal to the church during the Revolution because the clergy had made little attempt to introduce Counter-Reformation Christianity, which remained an urban phenomenon. The conclusion does move us on to the Revolution, but is very short and merely refers to the work of Desan and Tackett on popular religion. It is hard not to feel that this is an opportunity lost.