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The Sacred, Secular Regime: Catholic Ritual and Revolutionary Politics in Avignon, 1789–1791 Eric F. Johnson One hallmark of the Enlightenment is the transition from a traditional cosmology in which the physical world had an intimate, reciprocal rela- tionship with supernatural forces that one could persuade and nego- tiate with to a Newtonian model that operated according to the fixed and knowable laws of nature, without the need for divine interven- tion. The consequences of this mental shift had cultural, political, and social implications. As people increasingly perceived God as (in Vol- taire’s metaphor) a celestial watchmaker, who after setting the uni- verse in motion assumed a place distant from the realm of everyday human affairs, political and social institutions became demystified or ‘‘disenchanted,’’ seen as founded on changeable human convention rather than the eternal will of God. 1 This perspective was an important precondition for the French Revolution, because it provided an alterna- tive to the traditional model for the political order, which linked tem- Eric F. Johnson is assistant professor of history at Kutztown University. He is working on a book about religious culture in Avignon at the end of the eighteenth century. His essay ‘‘La Ville Sonnant: The Politics of Sacred Space in Avignon on the Eve of the French Revolution’’ appeared in Defining the Holy: Sacred Space in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Andrew Spicer and Sarah Hamilton (Burlington, VT, 2005). The author wishes to thank Lynn Hunt, Gail Kligman, Kathryn Norberg, Teofilo Ruiz, and April Shelford for their generous assistance with early drafts of this essay, as well as the Camargo Foundation for providing material support during the final stages of writing. Finally, the author gives special thanks to the anonymous reviewers and the editors of French Historical Studies, whose suggestions were enlightening and invaluable. 1 The notion of disenchantment or Entzauberung comes from Max Weber’s lecture ‘‘Science as aVocation,’’ presented on Nov. 7, 1917. See Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York, 1946), 129–56. For a more recent discussion see Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton, NJ, 1998). On secularization as it pertains to French politics see David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, MA, 2001), esp. 22–49; Colin Jones, The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon, 1715–1799 (New York, 2002), 171–225; and Jeffrey W. Merrick, The Desacralization of the French Monarchy in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge, LA, 1990). French Historical Studies, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Winter 2007) 10.1215/00161071-2006-019 Copyright 2007 by Society for French Historical Studies

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The Sacred, Secular Regime: Catholic Ritual andRevolutionary Politics in Avignon, 1789–1791

Eric F. Johnson

One hallmark of the Enlightenment is the transition from a traditionalcosmology in which the physical world had an intimate, reciprocal rela-tionship with supernatural forces that one could persuade and nego-tiate with to a Newtonian model that operated according to the fixedand knowable laws of nature, without the need for divine interven-tion. The consequences of this mental shift had cultural, political, andsocial implications. As people increasingly perceived God as (in Vol-taire’s metaphor) a celestial watchmaker, who after setting the uni-verse in motion assumed a place distant from the realm of everydayhuman affairs, political and social institutions became demystified or‘‘disenchanted,’’ seen as founded on changeable human conventionrather than the eternal will of God.1 This perspective was an importantprecondition for the French Revolution, because it provided an alterna-tive to the traditional model for the political order, which linked tem-

Eric F. Johnson is assistant professor of history at Kutztown University. He is working on a bookabout religious culture in Avignon at the end of the eighteenth century. His essay ‘‘La Ville Sonnant:The Politics of Sacred Space in Avignon on the Eve of the French Revolution’’ appeared in Definingthe Holy: Sacred Space in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Andrew Spicer and Sarah Hamilton(Burlington, VT, 2005).

The author wishes to thank Lynn Hunt, Gail Kligman, Kathryn Norberg, Teofilo Ruiz, andApril Shelford for their generous assistance with early drafts of this essay, as well as the CamargoFoundation for providing material support during the final stages of writing. Finally, the authorgives special thanks to the anonymous reviewers and the editors of French Historical Studies, whosesuggestions were enlightening and invaluable.

1 The notion of disenchantment or Entzauberung comes from Max Weber’s lecture ‘‘Scienceas a Vocation,’’ presented on Nov. 7, 1917. See Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. Hans H. Gerthand C. Wright Mills (New York, 1946), 129–56. For a more recent discussion see Marcel Gauchet,The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton, NJ,1998). On secularization as it pertains to French politics see David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nationin France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, MA, 2001), esp. 22–49; Colin Jones, TheGreat Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon, 1715–1799 (New York, 2002), 171–225; and Jeffrey W.Merrick, The Desacralization of the French Monarchy in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge, LA, 1990).

French Historical Studies, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Winter 2007) 10.1215/00161071-2006-019Copyright 2007 by Society for French Historical Studies

50 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

poral authority to a divinely ordained cosmological hierarchy. Enlight-ened thinkers came to view politics and society not as divine but ashuman institutions that one could alter and improve through rationalintervention.

In light of this shift and of the eventual fate of the church dur-ing the Revolution, it is easy to underestimate the importance of reli-gious belief in France at the twilight of the ancien régime. The classicinterpretation holds that France in general and Provence in particu-lar grew more secular or ‘‘de-Christianized’’ during the second half ofthe eighteenth century and that religious belief had lost much of itsrelevance in everyday life, especially in urban society.2 However, morerecent scholarship offers an alternative explanation for the apparentdecline in French piety from its zenith in the late seventeenth and earlyeighteenth centuries: a system of religious belief continued to thrivebeneath the secular, enlightened worldview that came to characterizemodern thought.3 It is becoming clear that one cannot measure beliefin an interactive relationship between the physical world and the divinesimply in terms of participation in the institutional church. In exam-ining the changing relationship among religion, politics, and societyin the eighteenth century, historians must look beyond the usual sta-tistical evidence, such as wills, masses for the dead, and enrollment inreligious orders.

Medievalists have indicated promising directions for handling theproblems inherent in reifying and categorizing systems of religiousbelief, and some of their conclusions can guide us toward a betterunderstanding of the secularizing trends of the late eighteenth century.Speaking of Merovingian France, Patrick J. Geary suggests that ‘‘theidentification of pagan versus Christian elements is futile. Instead ofattaching labels, scholars must attempt to understand how various ele-ments—actions, objects, practices, articulations—form a unity or, con-

2 The classic work on this subject is Michel Vovelle, Piété baroque et déchristianisation en Pro-vence au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1973). See also Bernard Cousin, Monique Cubells, and René Moulinas,La pique et la croix: Histoire religieuse de la Révolution française (Paris, 1989).

3 Nigel Aston states that ‘‘what might be called the Gay/Aries/Vovelle model of enlighten-ment predicated on overt hostility to institutional Christianity has fallen out of favor’’ (Christianityand Revolutionary Europe, c. 1750–1830 [Cambridge, 2002], 3–4). The case of France is best repre-sented by John McManners, Church and Society in Eighteenth-Century France, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1998).Bernard Cousin’s work on ex voto paintings also provides convincing evidence for the continuedvitality of a supernatural worldview at the end of the eighteenth century and beyond: Le miracle et lequotidien: Les ex-voto provençaux, images d’une société (Aix-en-Provence, 1983).Two recent review essayspose new questions about the interrelationship of modernity, secularization, the Enlightenment,and religion: Jonathan Sheehan, ‘‘Enlightenment, Religion, and the Enigma of Secularization,’’American Historical Review 108 (2003): 1061–1080; Dale K. Van Kley, ‘‘Christianity as Casualty andChrysalis of Modernity: The Problem of Dechristianization in the French Revolution,’’ AmericanHistorical Review 108 (2003): 1081–1104.

REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS IN AVIGNON 51

versely, co-exist in a state of dissonance.’’4 The idea of ‘‘co-exist[ence]in a state of dissonance’’ can also describe the Enlightenment and theRevolution, during which overlapping systems of religious and secularbeliefs likewise formed a unity.

Defining belief as an active process rather than a static body of doc-trine, Jean-Claude Schmitt argues that ‘‘ ‘mentalities’ consist not onlyof the ancient layers that survive from earlier thoughts and behaviorsbut also of the beliefs and the images, the words and the gestures, thatfully find their meaning in the contemporary social relations and ideol-ogy of a given age.’’5 In considering religious belief during the Enlight-enment and the Revolution, it is helpful to emphasize the dynamicway in which older thoughts and gestures yield new meanings in thecontext of eighteenth-century ideologies. Public rituals provide excel-lent evidence for this approach, because by nature they are constantlyrescripted to accommodate ever-changing social and political contexts.

This essay examines the relationship between religious belief andpolitical authority in Avignon during the first three years of the Revo-lution. This relationship was atypical because Avignon, together withmost of the modern department of Vaucluse, was a papal enclave untilwell after the start of the Revolution (fig. 1), and this fact had manyimplications for the city’s ritual framework.6 First, Avignon’s liturgicalcycle was a mixture of Gallican, Roman, and local traditions. As an out-post of papal authority, Avignon was a point of entry into France forreligious orders and devotional practices that had originated in Rome,especially during the Catholic Reformation.7 Yet because it had suchclose ties with France, it also adopted many festivals associated withthe Gallican Church, such as the feasts of Saint Louis and the Assump-tion.8 However, Avignon also had strong local traditions that were an

4 Patrick J. Geary, ‘‘The Uses of Archaeological Sources for Religious and Cultural History,’’in Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, 1994), 33.

5 Jean-Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society,trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago, 1998), 3.

6 There were two papal states in France: the Comtat Venaissin, which came under papal ruleas a result of the Albigensian Crusades, and Avignon, which the papacy purchased from the Ange-vins in the fourteenth century. Technically, they were governed separately by different officials;however, by the eighteenth century a vice legate who resided in the old papal palace in Avignongoverned both. On the history of Avignon before the Revolution see R. L. Mouliérac-Lamoureux,Le Comtat venaissin pontifical, 1229–1791 (Vedène, 1977); Hervé Aliquot, Avignon pas à pas: Ses rues,ses monuments, ses hommes célèbres (Le Coteau, 1985); and Christiane Spill and Jean-Michel Spill,Avignon (Paris, 1977).

7 On Avignon’s importance during the Catholic Reformation see R. Po-Chia Hsia, The Worldof Catholic Renewal, 1549–1770 (Cambridge, 1998), 69–71. Avignon’s status as a papal outpost wasalso important during the Jesuit controversy of the 1760s. Many Jesuits who fled France and Bour-bon Spain took refuge in Avignon, and as a result Louis XV sent troops to occupy the city from1768 to 1774.

8 Louis XIII had decreed that every diocese in France hold a procession on the feast of

52 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

Figure 1 Avignon at the start of the French Revolution

important part of its urban identity. Because the city was beyond thedirect control of the Gallican Church and was governed by papal rep-resentatives who were content to interfere only minimally with localtraditions, its urban saint cults remained vital at a time when local cultswere eclipsed elsewhere by official cults associated with the CatholicReformation.9

Finally, there was a very different relationship between politicaland religious authority in Avignon than in France, and it was articulatedin its urban rituals. While the sacral nature of royal and urban power inpremodern France is well documented, Avignon presents a special case,because ultimate political and ecclesiastical authority were united in asingle person, the pope.10 While people referred to the king of France as

the Assumption in recognition of the special protection the Virgin had extended to France andthe royal family. Inaugurated in Avignon in 1768 during the royal occupation, the processioncontinued to be staged there after the town was restored to the papacy in 1774. The feast of theAssumption occurs on August 15, ten days before the feast of Saint Louis, and so the two can beregarded together as an extended festival to honor the French monarchy.

9 On Provence, whose saint cults were eclipsed by devotions to the Virgin, the Trinity, theHoly Family, and the souls in purgatory, see Marie-Hélène Froeschlé-Chopard, La religion populaireen Provence orientale au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1980); and Froeschlé-Chopard, Espace et sacré en Provence(Paris, 1994).

10 On the sacred nature of royal authority see Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy

REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS IN AVIGNON 53

‘‘the oldest son of the church’’ or the ‘‘most Christian king’’ in Catholicritual, the pope represented himself as ‘‘the visible head’’ of the church,emphasizing the belief that his authority came from Christ himself.Theproblem of representing itself as a Catholic city while rebelling againstthe vicar of Christ in his capacity as its temporal lord was peculiar to Avi-gnon, and its inhabitants initially worked it out through public ritual.

The transition from papal to royal authority was neither smoothnor peaceful. In the midst of political uncertainty, violence, and nearanarchy, the revolutionary government in Avignon relied heavily onCatholic ritual to legitimize its authority, smooth over political ten-sions, maintain continuity with the past, ensure social stability, andreshape urban identity under their new regime. Yet while Avignon’spatriots sought to sustain local religious traditions, they also legitimizedthe overthrow of papal authority by adopting secular principles bor-rowed from the political rhetoric of the Enlightenment. In this sensethe Revolution took a radical turn in Avignon earlier than in France,because while the National Assembly in Paris worked to reconcile socialand political reform with a monarchical framework, Avignon’s revo-lutionaries had already cast off the political institutions of the ancienrégime, claiming as they did so to represent the ‘‘will of the people.’’Thus they drew both on religious ritual and on the most radical rhetoricof the Revolution to sustain their regime, and this suggests that the twowere not necessarily mutually exclusive. Rather than view religion as anobstruction to their secular political agenda, Avignon’s revolutionariessaw it as a useful and even essential component of the new regime theywere creating.

Avignon and the Revolution

We can divide the early years of the Revolution in Avignon into twophases.11 The first began in the summer of 1789 and lasted until theexpulsion of papal officials on June 12, 1790. During this phase therevolutionary movement was still one of reform rather than revolt, and

and Scrofula in England and France, trans. J. E. Anderson (London, 1973); and Ernst Kantorowicz,The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ, 1957). On the sacrednature of urban authority in late-eighteenth-century France see Robert Schneider, The Ceremo-nial City: Toulouse Observed, 1738–1780 (Princeton, NJ, 1995). The papacy had its own variation onthe tradition of ‘‘two bodies’’: the person of the pope was a physical manifestation of Christ. SeeAgostino Paravicini Bagliani, The Pope’s Body, trans. David S. Peterson (Chicago, 2000).

11 Two of the most current comprehensive works on the Revolution in Avignon are RenéMoulinas, Histoire de la Révolution d’Avignon (Avignon, 1986); and Martine Lapied, Le Comtat et laRévolution française: Naissance des options collectives (Aix-en-Provence, 1996). See also Pierre Char-penne, Histoire de la Révolution dans Avignon et le Comtat et de leur réunion définitive à la France(Paris, 1892).

54 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

religious rituals were a public forum in which patriot and papal officialsnegotiated and redefined the structures of urban authority.The secondphase lasted from the summer of 1790 until the annexation of the cityby France in November 1791. During this phase a succession of patriotfactions with increasingly radical ideologies governed the city. As Avi-gnon’s revolutionaries lobbied for the city’s admission into the Frenchnation, they used religious rituals to legitimize the Revolution and toconstruct a sense of French identity in the city.

At its outset the Revolution in Avignon was a separate movementfrom the French Revolution, with different challenges and objectives.However, there was an intricate relationship between the two.The revo-lutionary movement in Avignon was a complex interplay of local, na-tional, and international events of much greater historical significancethan the city’s size or importance would suggest. While events in Parisinspired the revolutionary movement in Avignon and provided thepolitical rhetoric to legitimize it, the Revolution in Avignon had a localmomentum, which in turn helped propel the Revolution in France.Developments in Avignon influenced the course of the French Revolu-tion as the ‘‘Avignon affair’’ became intertwined with the negotiationsbetween Paris and Rome over the Civil Constitution of the Clergy.12

On the one hand, events in Avignon pushed the hesitant papacy asit tried to deal with its rebellious subjects there without jeopardiz-ing church interests in France; on the other, circumstances gave theNational Assembly leverage to seek concessions from Rome for churchreform.

By 1789 Avignon had been under papal rule for nearly four and ahalf centuries. Apart from the usual problems of an archaic and ineffec-tive administration, Avignon faced an economic recession brought onby protective tariffs that the French monarchy had imposed on goodsproduced in the papal states. Avignon’s once-thriving silk, calico, print-ing, and tobacco industries had declined sharply during the eighteenthcentury, creating high unemployment and a mounting municipal debt.Although papal rule had its advantages, most notably a negligible taxburden compared to that of France, a growing number of lawyers,financiers, and merchants, whose professions were hampered by Avi-gnon’s alien status, argued that Avignon would be better off as part ofFrance.13 As the Estates General gathered in Paris, Avignon formed a

12 On the political controversy surrounding the union of the papal states with France seeAlbert Mathiez, Rome et le clergé français sous la constituante: La constitution civile du clergé; L’affaired’Avignon (Paris, 1911).

13 See Moulinas, Histoire de la Révolution d’Avignon, chap. 1; and Aira Keniläinen, ‘‘L’Affaired’Avignon’’ (1789–1791) from the Viewpoint of Nationalism (Helsinki, 1971).

REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS IN AVIGNON 55

similar assembly with other towns in the papal states to promote politi-cal and social reform. The assemblée générale of Avignon and the Com-tat Venaissin was a fragile alliance of factions that had some interestsin common but very different objectives and worldviews. As the Revo-lution progressed, the most radical faction, which called for the over-throw of papal rule and the union of the papal states with France,gained the initiative and forced the papacy to take action.

The papacy’s initial response to the Revolution in its French papalstates was slow. Historians describe Pius VI (ruled 1775–99) as a greatpatron of the arts who surrounded himself with pomp and ceremony,in the tradition of the great Renaissance popes, but also as a man ofmediocre intelligence who failed to grasp the significance of events inFrance.14 His chief concern was to protect papal prestige, which hadsuffered greatly at the hands of the enlightened despots of the eigh-teenth century, especially with the Jesuit controversy.15 However, theAvignon affair was precisely where papal interests were most conflicted,since Pius was both temporal prince of a rebellious province and spiri-tual head of the Catholic Church in France. Responding too harshly tothe Revolution in Avignon risked alienating the National Assembly andjeopardizing the status of the French church; therefore Pius bided histime, ultimately allowing events in Avignon to spin beyond his control.

Lacking clear direction from Rome, Vice Legate Philippe Casoni,who governed Avignon in the papacy’s name, initially granted the revo-lutionaries several concessions, such as an urban militia and a newmunicipal government, elected in the last week of March 1790. Thisnew municipality, based on the model that the National Assembly hadadopted in December 1789, replaced the consular administration ofthe ancien régime. The militia was organized by parish and reflectedthe social geography of Avignon, with some divisions filled primarilyfrom the aristocracy and others from the working classes. Frequent andoccasionally fatal clashes between these rival divisions heightened fac-tionalism and suspicion in the city. Aristocrats lived in constant fear ofa popular uprising, while those in favor of reform worried about anaristocratic coup.

On April 21, 1790, only a few days after Colonel d’Armand of Avi-gnon’s National Guard had taken the oath as the city’s first mayor,

14 Mathiez, Rome et le clergé français, 45–50. See also Owen Chadwick, The Popes and EuropeanRevolution (Oxford, 1981); and Jeffrey Collins, Papacy and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Rome: Pius VIand the Arts (Cambridge, 2004).

15 Pius VI was elected in 1775, shortly after the suppression of the Jesuits in 1773 in a com-promise between pro- and anti-Jesuit factions. He was a moderate pro-Jesuit; therefore his candi-dacy was acceptable to all parties.

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Pius VI declared null and void all changes made to the government ofthe French papal states, including d’Armand’s election. This act rup-tured the fragile alliance that made up the reform movement, causedan upsurge in violence as competing factions asserted their politicalagendas, and created an opening for the most radical revolutionaries,who had been in the minority, to agitate for a break with the papacy.Tensions came to a head on June 10, when a skirmish at the Hôtel-de-Ville between militia factions led to a standoff between the troops fromthe aristocratic districts and those from the working-class district ofSaint Symphorien. Although municipal officials defused the situation,mob violence broke out that night amid rumors of an impending aristo-cratic coup. On the morning of June 11 a mob lynched two marquises,a priest, and a cloth worker, who were suspected of plotting against theRevolution, in the square before the papal palace as Casoni watchedhelplessly from a window. The following day he fled the city, along withmuch of the aristocracy and ecclesiastical leadership, essentially leavingAvignon to the revolutionaries. That same day an emergency session ofAvignon’s assemblée générale voted to unite the papal states with France.

In the months that followed, a civil war broke out in the papal statesbetween Avignon and a coalition of papal loyalists led by Avignon’s long-standing rival Carpentras.16 Avignon petitioned the National Assemblyto annex the papal states and form a department to be named Vau-cluse. However, the National Assembly was still seeking papal coopera-tion with ecclesiastical reform and was reluctant to alienate Pius VI byseizing his French territories. In the meantime, the patriot movementin Avignon split into two factions: the moderates, who sought a peacefulresolution with Carpentras, and the radicals, who allied themselves withthe Jacobins in Paris and advocated violence in support of the Revo-lution.17 The most unpredictable element was Avignon’s peasants andlower-class citizens, who supported many social reforms promised bythe Revolution but did not always agree with the policies and tactics ofeither faction, particularly as they pertained to religion. Many believedin a close tie between the natural and supernatural worlds and were

16 Carpentras was the medieval capital of the Comtat Venaissin. By the eighteenth centurythe vicar of Carpentras was a largely ceremonial position; the vice legate in Avignon held all realauthority in the papal states. Apart from this urban rivalry, and Carpentras’s unwillingness to seeAvignon become the prefecture of a new department, Carpentras represented the more conser-vative views of the rural parts of the papal states.

17 One of the most vocal advocates for the annexation of the papal states was Robespierre.In correspondence with Avignon’s Société patriotique that Sabin Tournal, editor of the Courrierd’Avignon, published in his own newspaper on Feb. 21, 1791, Robespierre stated that Avignon’scause was ‘‘that of liberty and of the French people itself.’’

REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS IN AVIGNON 57

deeply concerned over the Revolution’s consequences for the relation-ship between the city and the divine forces that protected it.

Ritual and the Early Revolution

Avignon’s religious culture, long a great source of urban pride, hadenabled the city to retain its prestige in the eighteenth century evenas more prosperous cities like Nîmes, Marseille, and Lyon eclipsed it.18

Visitors were impressed by the sheer number, size, and grandeur of thecity’s religious establishments, the result of centuries of patronage fromthe papal court.19 The townspeople called their city ‘‘a second Rome,’’ atitle that evoked its historical importance as the former capital of Chris-tendom and its renown as a vibrant center of Catholic culture. Avignonwas particularly famous for the hundreds of bells that rang from itsseven parish churches (five of them collegial), seven penitential con-fraternities, seven almonries, forty-eight chapels, forty convents, andfive hospitals, all for a population of twenty-six thousand.20 With somany religious institutions within its walls, it is not surprising that Avi-gnon held a vast number of public observances. Madame de Sévignédescribed the city as ‘‘a perpetual festival’’—hardly an exaggeration,given the 264 religious holidays, feast days, and festivals that took placethere during the liturgical year.21

18 On Avignon’s attachment to its urban rituals see Marc Venard, Réforme protestante, Réformecatholique dans la province d’Avignon au XVIe siècle (Paris, 1993), esp. chap. 1, ‘‘Le mythe et la ville,’’which also draws on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources. Evidence for the sense of com-petition between Avignon and nearby cities can be found in a published account of the festival heldto celebrate the elevation of Pius VI, in which the writer claims that, counting all of the spectatorswho came to the city for the festivities, Avignon’s population was as great as Marseille’s (Relationdes fêtes données par la ville d’Avignon les 7, 8, 9, 10 mai 1775 pour l’exaltation de notre Saint Père le PapePie VI [Avignon, 1775]).

19 André Viala, ‘‘Les Avignonnais vus par des étrangers au XVIIIème siècle,’’ Mémoires del’Académie de Vaucluse, 6th ser., 2 (1968): 113–22. Two illuminating traveler’s accounts of Avignonon the eve of the Revolution are M. Bérenger, Les soirées provençales, ou lettres de M Bérenger, écrites àses amis pendant ses voyages dans sa Patrie (Paris, 1786); and M. Van de Brande, Voyage de Languedoc,Provence, et Comtat d’Avignon (Paris, 1774).

20 Bérenger, who in the early 1780s arrived in town on ‘‘the eve of a holiday, I do not knowwhich,’’ was ‘‘convinced that Rabelais had good reason to call Avignon ‘the chiming city’ [la villesonnante]. The interminable and boisterous ringing deafened my ears and inspired me to find aheight above the noise.’’ The sky ‘‘bristled,’’ he claimed, with spires, towers, and belfries (Soiréesprovençales, letter 5). The tally of religious institutions comes from Leopold Duhamel, ‘‘Avignon auXVIIIe siècle,’’ Annuaire de Vaucluse, 1911. The recurrence of the number seven in Avignon’s geog-raphy was another allusion to Rome, which had been built on seven hills, and also to Catholicritual, since seven was a prominent number in the Catholic liturgy.

21 Madame de Sévigné, Correspondance, ed. Roger Duchêne (Paris, 1978), 615. The tally ofreligious festivals held annually is compiled from the Journal spirituel où sont annoncées les fêtessolemnelles et particulières qui se célébrant dans toutes les églises d’Avignon (Avignon, 1781). This numberincludes only observances open to the general public. If one included observances limited to aparticular group, such as a confraternity or religious association, and extraordinary celebrations,

58 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

Not all of these holidays were grand public events, but the mostimportant festivals were dazzling spectacles for locals and visitors alike,with fireworks, bells, artillery salvos, garlands, tapestries, and streetsfilled with clergy and members of guilds and confraternities in cere-monial attire.22 The highlight of Avignon’s cycle of liturgical festivalswas its four annual processions, to which the townspeople were stillvery attached at the end of the eighteenth century.23 Like communalfestivals elsewhere, they articulated the concurrent stability and muta-bility of the urban hierarchy; however, they were more than mere mani-festations of papal authority. Most of these processions predated thearrival of the papacy in the fourteenth century and followed routes thatreflected the early medieval city’s geography. They bore a strong ele-ment of local culture and expressed local identity and history as muchas they did papal sovereignty. During the first phase of the Revolu-tion, they provided a public forum in which the papacy and the patriotsnegotiated the changing structure of urban authority.

On April 25, 1790, during the same week that d’Armand and hiscolleagues took their oaths of office, and only a few days after Pius VIhad tried to overturn their election, Avignon observed one of its oldestrites, the feast of Saint Marc, venerated as patron of vineyards. Thisfeast was descended from the Roman festival of Robigalia, held onthat day in classical times.24 The procession began at the cathedral andwent to where the city walls had stood until 1226.25 There the officiantblessed the fields to inaugurate the new agrarian cycle. The vice legatecustomarily had the position of honor at the end of the procession,but that morning Casoni left the city with his court and spent the dayin Villeneuve-les-Avignon, which lay in French territory on the oppo-site side of the Rhône. Rather than leave Casoni’s place in the proces-

such as the commemoration of events relating to the papacy or the royal family, the number wouldbe much higher.

22 The use of artillery in Avignon’s festivals anticipated its use in French revolutionary fes-tivals by several decades.

23 These processions were for the feast of Saint Marc on April 25; Ascension Thursday andCorpus Christi, movable feasts connected with the Easter calendar; and the feast of the Assump-tion of the Virgin on August 15. For a detailed description of these processions, three of whichhad changed little in the centuries preceding the Revolution, see Marc Venard, ‘‘Itinéraires deprocessions dans la ville d’Avignon,’’ in Le catholicisme à l’épreuve dans la France du XVIe siècle (Paris,2000), 269–84. See also Eric F. Johnson, ‘‘ ‘The Chiming City’: Catholic Ritual and French Identityin Avignon on the Eve of the French Revolution, 1768–1791’’ (PhD diss., University of California,Los Angeles, 2003).

24 The veneration of Saint Marc as patron of vineyards was unusual; most communities ven-erated Saint Vincent instead (Venard, ‘‘Itinéraires’’). See Marcel Provence, Calendrier des fêtes auxpays de Provence (Marseille, 1942); and C. Seignolle, Traditions populaires de Provence: Les fêtes et lescroyances (Paris, 1996).

25 Avignon’s original walls were torn down during the Albigensian crusades. The new walls,which still stand, were built in the fourteenth century as part of the rapid urban growth duringthe Avignon papacy (Spill and Spill, Avignon).

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sion vacant, d’Armand and the other municipal officials, wearing theirsashes of office, stood in for him, accompanied by an escort of twoNational Guard detachments.26

The next procession took place on the eve of Ascension Thursday,a movable feast that in 1790 fell on May 12. Another ritual with ancientorigins, it was connected to the rite of Rogations, which marked parishboundaries. In the more distant past the townspeople had immersedthe city’s most important relics in the Rhône to ensure plentiful rainand to protect the city and fields from flooding; however, this practicehad fallen out of use by the eighteenth century.27 The archbishop cus-tomarily presided over Ascension Thursday, and in anticipation of hisrecalcitrance the municipality held an audience with Archbishop Gio-vio to warn him that if he did not participate, he would be forced toleave town.28 Giovio left voluntarily and spent the day in Villeneuve-les-Avignon. As they had done for Casoni, d’Armand and the municipalofficers stood in for him in the procession. Giovio and Casoni were like-wise absent from the Fête-Dieu (Corpus Christi) on June 3.

There was a correlation between the timing of liturgical and thatof political events in Avignon. On June 7, four days after the Fête-Dieu, hundreds of peasants from the nearby villages of Montfavet andMorières began a two-day demonstration in the city. There was littleviolence, although there was some property damage and many shopsclosed their doors out of fear of looting. More than a year after theRevolution had begun, conditions for the peasantry and urban poorhad not improved. Promised reforms, especially the end of feudal privi-leges, had been slow in coming, and with the April 21 papal briefoverturning the reforms of the Revolution, immediate relief for thepeasantry seemed unlikely.The absence of the vice legate and the arch-bishop from the Fête-Dieu, the most important procession of the year,underscored the impasse between patriot and papal officials.

The demonstration of June 7–8, which also included many un-employed townspeople, exacerbated social tensions in Avignon, espe-cially among aristocrats alarmed by the prospect of a massive popularuprising. During the standoff at the Hôtel-de-Ville on June 10, fear of

26 M. Chambaud, journal, Bibliothèque Municipale d’Avignon (henceforth BMA), MS 2494,fol. 10.

27 See Fernand Benoit, ‘‘L’immersion des reliques: Les processions riveraines et le rite dela ‘barque culturelle’ en Provence,’’ Revue de folklore française et de folklore colonial 6, no. 2 (1935):75–109; and J. F. Cerquand, ‘‘La procession des Rogations sur le Rhône à Avignon,’’ Mémoires del’Académie de Vaucluse, 1st ser., 6 (1887): 70–84.The practice of immersing sacred objects survives infishing villages throughout Provence. Perhaps the best-known example is the feast of Saint Sarah,patroness of Gypsies, on Aug. 19 at Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.

28 Chambaud, journal, BMA, MS 2494, fol. 11.

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such an uprising led the aristocratic districts to dispatch their militiasto the city hall. The aristocrats’ demand that martial law be invoked tomaintain order and protect property fanned rumors of a counterrevo-lutionary coup and led to further rioting and the lynchings of June 11.29

How significant was the refusal of the vice legate and the arch-bishop to participate in Avignon’s public rituals, and how did it influ-ence the outcome of the nascent Revolution? Although it did notdirectly cause the permanent break with Rome, since by that time revo-lutionary and papal officials were already deadlocked, Casoni and Gio-vio’s action was certainly a contributing factor. Through such ritualspatriot and papal officials battled on the streets for control of publicopinion. Casoni and Giovio’s refusal to participate sent a clear messageto the patriot regime, and the response, both from the patriots andfrom the public, helped bring political tensions to a head.

First, Casoni and Giovio were challenging the legitimacy of therevolutionary government, which had only a weak public mandate be-cause of the low turnout at the elections that had brought them intooffice.30 An essential function of public ritual is to cover over social andpolitical tensions and present a sense of communal harmony.31 Throughtheir conspicuous absence, Casoni and Giovio created an antiritual thatarticulated disharmony. Without military means of turning events intheir favor, they could at least influence public opinion by highlight-ing, through their absence, that d’Armand and other municipal officersgoverned in defiance of the city’s papal sovereign and were in essenceusurpers. During this period of great uncertainty, when factional skir-mishes between aristocrats and patriots were common and the revolu-tionaries lived under the anxiety of a counterrevolutionary coup, thiswas not a trivial gesture.

Casoni and Giovio’s choice of Villeneuve-les-Avignon as a retreatwas also significant. Situated on the opposite bank of the Rhône, it wasin the royal domain but also in the archdiocese of Avignon.There was acenturies-old rivalry between the inhabitants of Villeneuve-les-Avignonand Avignon.32 Youths from Villeneuve-les-Avignon would often ‘‘in-vade’’ Avignon during religious festivals, armed with sticks and stones

29 For a detailed account of the summer of 1790, with special emphasis on the events ofJune 10–11, see René Moulinas, Journées révolutionnaires à Avignon (Nîmes, 1988).

30 Only 2,067 votes were cast out of an estimated electorate of 5,000–6,000 (Moulinas, His-toire de la Révolution d’Avignon, 50–55).

31 See Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997), esp. chap. 7, ‘‘Govern-ment as a Ritual Process.’’

32 The Rhône has a long history as a frontier in France. It had been the border betweenthe Ostrogoth and Visigoth kingdoms and later between the kingdom of France and the HolyRoman Empire. Philip IV built Villeneuve-les-Avignon in the early fourteenth century to guardthe border and to serve as a demonstration of French power while the papacy resided in Avignon.

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and beating drums in a form of ritualized violence akin to ‘‘beatingthe boundaries.’’33 Townspeople from Avignon occasionally set up sen-tries on religious holidays at the crossing between the two towns anddemanded that inhabitants of Villeneuve-les-Avignon who wanted tosee the festivities pay a toll. It added insult to injury when Casoni andGiovio spent the days of these festivals in Villeneuve-les-Avignon.

One must also bear in mind that many people considered theserituals essential for maintaining the reciprocal ties between the city andthe divine forces that protected it. Casoni and Giovio’s boycott enacteda centuries-old practice in which the clergy disrupted normal relationswith the supernatural to influence public opinion during their disputeswith secular powers.34 Like the ritual of the clamor or the humiliationof relics, in which the clergy suspended the normal performance of reli-gious rites and projected perceived injuries onto sacred objects, Casoniand Giovio resorted to a ‘‘spiritual arsenal’’ to express their grievancesagainst the patriot government. The effectiveness of this tactic ‘‘restedon a universally shared sense of the importance of supernatural inter-vention in human affairs.’’35 For these men to disrupt rites thought toensure good weather and divine protection of the harvests was a seriousmatter. Casoni and Giovio were not entirely successful, though, sincethe rituals and the Revolution proceeded without them. However, therevolutionary government also met with limited success by taking con-trol of the ritual cycle.

Many peasants involved in the unrest of June 7–8 would have beenin Avignon for the Fête-Dieu and would have witnessed the rupturebetween the municipal and papal governments that was articulated inthis urban procession. Montfavet and Morières were close to Avignon,and urban festivals always attracted local villagers. The conspicuousabsence of Casoni and Giovio underscored the breakdown in relationsbetween patriot and papal officials and the unlikelihood that conditionswould soon improve for the peasantry.The circumstances illustrate howunstable the political situation in Avignon was and how volatile the city’speasants and lower-class inhabitants could be.

That patriot officials stood in for the vice legate and the archbishopduring these processions did not necessarily indicate an arrogation ofsovereign authority, for it was not an unprecedented act. In the 1770s

33 The journal of the abbé de Soumille of Villeneuve-les-Avignon describes one such in-vasion on the feast of Saint Roch (Aug. 16) in 1773 in which the children from Villeneuve-les-Avignon were badly beaten (BMA, 8o 15,119). See also Natalie Davis, ‘‘The Rites of Violence,’’ inSociety and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, CA, 1975), 97–123.

34 See Patrick Geary, ‘‘Humiliation of Saints,’’ in Living with the Dead, 95–115.35 Ibid., 110.

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the consuls stood in for Vice Legate Philomarino during several pro-cessions when gout prevented him from completing the circuit.36 As thenext ranking public officials, therefore, d’Armand and his colleaguesstood in for the vice legate and the archbishop as they would have doneif Casoni and Giovio had been absent for any other reason.There is evi-dence that the patriot government continued to acknowledge, at leastpublicly, the authority of the papacy. For the Fête-Dieu the patriotscarried a banner displaying the papal arms, just as the consuls had donein the past, as a gesture of subordination to sovereign power.37 In doingso, d’Armand and the municipal officers preserved at least a sense ofcontinuity with the past.They also represented themselves as loyal sub-jects of the pope, perhaps playing with the ambiguity of the pope asa figure of both religious and temporal authority. This cast Casoni inan unfavorable light, because it was he, not the patriots, who had dis-rupted the normal performance of public rituals by refusing to partici-pate in them.

Although d’Armand and his colleagues attempted to maintainritual decorum, to counterbalance with a sense of normalcy the politi-cal changes they were putting into effect, and to respond affirmativelyto Casoni and Giovio’s antiritual, the processional cycle of 1790 didpresent an Avignon without a papal government. By absenting them-selves from the processions, the vice legate and the archbishop cededcontrol of Avignon’s ritual cycle and gave patriot officials the chanceto rescript it the following year to legitimize the Revolution and theirbreak with the papacy.

Avignon after the Expulsion of the Papacy

The patriots showed great concern for maintaining Avignon’s ritualframework after the expulsion of the papal government. But doing sowas increasingly difficult for them in the aftermath of June 11, as hun-dreds of townspeople fled the city. The émigrés included a great num-ber of clergy who opposed the break with Rome and dissented fromthe Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which municipal officials put intoeffect in early 1791.38 Many exiles, including Archbishop Giovio, crossed

36 Anonymous journal, BMA, MS 2818, fol. 284.37 Père Joseph-François-Agricol Arnavon, journal, BMA, MS 1520, fol. 414.38 Although Avignon’s patriot officials were under no legal obligation to implement the Civil

Constitution of the Clergy, they did it to strengthen their case for annexation, much as they hadreorganized the municipal government according to the model established by revolutionaries inParis. Many institutions that were closed, such as the Celestine monastery, belonged to orders thathad been dissolved in France under Louis XVI’s ecclesiastical reforms the decade before but thatcontinued to exist in the papal states. Later in 1791, after seizing control of the city, the radicalpatriot faction intensified the liquidation of church property to fund its militia.

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the Rhône into France and settled in Villeneuve-les-Avignon, whichbecame a virtual colony for refugees from Avignon. In February thecity council finally declared Giovio’s see vacant, since he had ‘‘refusedto return to occupy his episcopal seat and to take the civic oath,’’ andordered the cathedral chapter to appoint a vicar general to performadministrative functions for the archdiocese in his place.39 The chap-ter selected Benoit Jean François Malière, described by the Courrierd’Avignon as a man with a burning sense of civic duty who ‘‘enjoyed theveneration of the public.’’40 The municipal officers took Malière’s elec-tion as an occasion to solicit the oath from the cathedral chapter. Allbut Malière and another canon refused and were stripped of their bene-fices and functions. Malière took the oath on March 8, 1791, in a largepublic ceremony followed by a Te Deum.41

When the annual processional cycle began anew with the feast ofSaint Marc on April 25, 1791, there were no longer enough clergy inthe city to hold this procession in the same manner as in the past.The briefs in which Malière announced these processions to the clergydemonstrate that the patriots collaborated with ecclesiastical officialsactively to sustain Avignon’s ritual framework and convince the refrac-tory clergy still living in the city to participate. Malière’s announce-ment for the procession of Saint Marc began with a reminder that theclergy’s spiritual responsibilities outweighed political considerations:‘‘Our offenses before God and the hereafter, our needs and basic grati-tude, give us the indispensable duty to pray. That we might keep thisin mind, the church has established general processions during the dif-ferent times of the year that it counts as major litanies, notably thatof April 25, the feast of Saint Marc.’’42 Because there were not enoughconstitutional clergy to perform a general procession, Malière orderedAvignon’s seven parishes to hold individual processions instead. He alsoordered verses from Psalm 69, concerning divine deliverance from per-secution and the punishment of one’s enemies, to be sung at the end ofthe procession, followed by the orison Domine salvam fac gentem, et legem,salvam fac regem nostrum Ludouicum (God save the people, the law, andour king Louis).43

39 Courrier d’Avignon, Mar. 1, 1791; register of edicts from the archbishop of Avignon,Archives Départemental de Vaucluse (henceforth ADV), G299, fol. 90.

40 Malière had performed the functions of head vicar of the archdiocese before but hadbeen displaced by Giovio in 1775, which suggests a personal motive for Malière’s support of thepatriot regime.

41 Courrier d’Avignon, Mar. 10, 1791.42 ADV, G299, fols. 91–92.43 Ibid.The psalm begins: ‘‘Save me, God, for the waters have reached my neck. I have sunk

into the mire of the deep, where there is no foothold. I have gone down to the watery depths; theflood overwhelms me’’ (Ps. 69:2–3, New American Bible).

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But these small-scale processions were a poor substitute for whathad previously been one of Avignon’s most important annual festivals,so for the eve of Ascension Thursday patriot officials intervened toensure a more impressive spectacle. Malière’s brief stated that ‘‘at therequest of the municipality’’ (i.e., the patriot officials) the regular andsecular clergy were to meet at the cathedral for the procession. In addi-tion, Avignon’s seven penitential confraternities were ‘‘entreated to fol-low the said clergy immediately in the place of the regular clergy, whoare in large part lacking in this town.’’44 The brief mentions an orisonfor ‘‘the visible head of the Church’’ (i.e., the pope), which suggests thatAvignon was trying to reconcile its identity as a Catholic city with itsrebellion against the papacy by creating a distinction between the popeas a temporal prince, on the one hand, and as the vicar of Christ, towhom the city remained loyal, on the other.The inclusion of this prayerfor the pope was probably meant to convince the recalcitrant clergy toparticipate in the procession by showing them that the city still recog-nized the authority of the papacy in spiritual matters.

For the Fête-Dieu on June 23, Malière again reminded the clergyof their obligations to the divine: ‘‘It is our essential duty to contributeas much as possible in rendering our Savior Jesus Christ all the respectsand honors that are due to his divine majesty in the Holy Sacrament ofour altars.’’ He also requested that the penitential confraternities takethe place of the missing clergy, ‘‘just as they did for the procession ofthe Ascension, at which they gave evidence of their religion that edi-fied the entire city and that can only be increased by the presence ofthe most holy Eucharist.’’ Finally, Malière declared that ‘‘in the absenceof the bodies of secular clergy, all priests of this town and its surround-ings, both secular and regular, are invited to give unequivocal proof oftheir religion.’’45

The processional cycle for 1791 concluded with the feast of theAssumption on August 15. Stating that it was ‘‘essential and indispens-able’’ for the procession to take place as in previous years, Malière askedthe regular clergy ‘‘to be so good as to join in to enlarge the numberof clergy and to give this proof of their devotion to the Holy Virgin . . .regardless of rank.’’ This brief also stated that ‘‘we are assured by themunicipality itself that all are required to participate and to take theirassigned place.’’46 Three days after the procession he ordered the clergywho had not attended to ‘‘close the exterior doors of their churches,

44 ADV, G299, fols. 94–96.45 ADV, G299, fols. 97–98.46 ADV, G299, fols. 99–100.

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except to say their masses and offices in a private manner, and not to callthe faithful with the sound of bells,’’ which effectively cut these clergyoff from the urban community.47

Victor Turner and others have demonstrated how one of the mostimportant functions of public rituals is to present a sense of commu-nitas.48 While emphasizing hierarchy through the clearly delineatedarrangement of the participants, these ceremonies also articulated anidealized sense of communal unity before God, or the ‘‘essence ofsociety’’ that transcended the social divisions and political tensions thatwere part of daily life.49 Ritual representations of a community did notalways reflect everyday reality; for example, Protestants did not takepart in Catholic processions even when they made up a significant pro-portion of the population, but the ‘‘essential’’ model they representedlinked the community with the eternal structure of the cosmos.50 Bylinking daily or profane reality to the sacred and eternal in this way, ritu-als provided a way to reconstitute the community so as to reflect socialand political change.51

That Malière specifically mentioned the municipal government inhis edicts suggests that patriot officials understood ritual’s functionsand tried to co-opt them to create a new sense of communitas. The pro-cessional cycle of 1791 presented a new Avignon without the papal gov-ernment and the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the ancien régime.The newcommunitas was based on public support for the Revolution but wasarticulated in the same way as the old. The city’s public rituals gener-ally predated the arrival of the papacy in the fourteenth century andthus were a tangible connection with a more distant past. Thereforethey provided a backdrop of continuity before which the revolution-aries implemented social and political change, and the efforts of thepatriot government to maintain them show an attempt to reconcile thenew regime with the older framework of Catholic ritual.

By playing a proactive role in maintaining the traditional frame-

47 ADV, G299, fols. 101–2.48 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure (London, 1969), 94–130;

Turner, Celebration: Studies in Festivity and Ritual (Washington, DC, 1982). See also Gábor Klaniczay,‘‘The Carnival Spirit: Bakhtin’s Theory on the Culture of Popular Laughter,’’ in The Uses of Super-natural Power: The Transformation of Popular Religion in Medieval and Early-Modern Europe (Princeton,NJ, 1990), 10–27.

49 Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (NewYork, 1984), 123. See esp. chap. 3, ‘‘A Bourgeois Puts His World in Order: The City as Text.’’

50 See Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. William Trask(New York, 1959), esp. chap. 2, ‘‘Sacred Time and Myths.’’

51 On the use of ritual to represent social change in early modern communities see PeterClark, ed., Crisis and Order in English Towns, 1500–1700 (London, 1972); and Michael Berlin, ‘‘CivicCeremony in Early Modern London,’’ Urban History Yearbook 13 (1986): 17–25.

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work of religious ritual, the revolutionary government tried to presentthe political break with the papacy in a way that did not imply a breakwith the church. That Avignon remained a Catholic city even as itrebelled against the papacy was important for many of the townspeoplewhom the patriots now governed. A great number of those who stayedin the city after the mass emigrations of 1790 believed that a reciprocalrelationship with supernatural forces influenced the physical world andthat offending them carried serious consequences. Some policies of thepatriot government, particularly the confiscation of church propertybeginning in September 1790, proved unpopular. This perceived sac-rilege angered many townspeople to the point that municipal officialscould inventory the property of religious institutions only under armedescort. The presence of armed men in Avignon’s sanctuaries deepenedthe scandal.52

By attempting to maintain Avignon’s ritual framework, patriot offi-cials hoped to assuage public anxiety over their policies and actions.Doing so was crucial during the interim period between the expulsionof the papal government and the city’s annexation by France, whenthe regime faced a crisis of legitimacy and could rely on little outsidesupport to maintain civil order. The officials also sought to control thepious impulses of the townspeople. In October 1790 it came to theattention of the patriot administration that the people were formingassociations under names like Jésus Marie Joseph and Saint Pierre deLuxembourg to provide religious education for children in the absenceof sufficient clergy.53 The patriots were suspicious of these associations,but rather than suppress local religious beliefs and practices or imposenational ones, they accommodated them and even tried to co-opt themto support their rule.

This approach was most apparent with respect to the city’s patronsaint, Agricol, whose cult saw an increase in public devotion early inthe patriot regime. A late-seventh-century bishop of Avignon, Agricolwas credited with organizing the city’s ecclesiastical government andconverting the populace of the surrounding countryside.54 His cult wasof minor importance until the fifteenth century, after the papacy haddefinitively returned to Rome and a papal legation had been estab-

52 Moulinas, Histoire de la Révolution d’Avignon, 116–17.53 Minutes of the Conseil Municipal, Oct. 10, 1790, cited in Moulinas, Histoire de la Révolution

d’Avignon, 115.54 Notable hagiographies of Agricol include an anonymous Vie de Saint Agricole, evesque et

patrone d’Avignon, dedicated to Dominique de Marinis, archbishop of Avignon (Avignon, 1651),ADV, 16J9; and Abbé Clément’s biography, dedicated to the viguier (a local noble appointed bythe papal government to preside over sessions of the city council) and consuls of Avignon in 1771(BMA, 8o 13.496).

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lished in Avignon to govern it. During this time the consuls moved themaison de la commune from its original location next to the papal palaceto a vacant palace adjacent to the Church of Saint Agricol. The citymagistrates became the primary patrons of this cult, which they usedto counterbalance papal authority by providing a divine protector forthe city with local origins.55

Locals venerated Agricol as a saint who could influence theweather. One of the most important rituals associated with his cult wasthe exposition of his relics during storms, droughts, or floods. At suchtimes the city magistrates would make a formal request to the arch-bishop that the relics be exposed in the Church of Saint Agricol, wherethe townspeople prayed for his intercession. This practice continuedinto the early years of the Revolution during the administration of thepatriots and Malière. A register of edicts from the office of the arch-bishop shows an intensification in public devotion to Agricol’s cult in1791 (fig. 2).56

The numbers suggest that the exposition of Agricol’s relics was notan overused means of appealing for divine intervention. From 1768 to1792 they were exposed seventeen times, rarely more than once in ayear, and it was not uncommon for several years to pass between expo-sitions. However, the relics were exposed more frequently during theRevolution than before: five times between January 1790 and May 1792,more than in any comparable period, and three times in 1791 alone.This was no coincidence. Drought was not unusual in Provence, andit did not always elicit appeals for divine intervention. Moreover, therelics were not exposed during the devastating winter of 1788–89.Whatmade the drought of 1791 different was that it coincided with politicalevents that provoked anxieties of divine punishment.

Indeed, the most tumultuous year of the Revolution for Avignonwas 1791. The city was engaged in a war against a coalition of loyalist

55 During the ancien régime the magistrates appeared in general processions with theChapter of Saint Agricol and regularly contributed to the maintenance of the parish church andits titular cult. For example, they refurbished a statue of the saint at the north entrance of the cityin 1763 (Abbé Franque, journal, BMA, MS 1516), paid to have the church’s interior whitewashedin 1783 (published budget of the municipal council of Avignon, BMA, MS 2937, no. 1), and paidfor fireworks every year to celebrate his feast day on Sept. 2 (BMA, MSS 2936–37). There was aregional tradition in the Midi of using religious history to articulate local identity and autonomyfrom both the Roman and the Gallican Churches. According to local legend, the region was con-verted by Saints Mary Magdalene and Martha, who arrived on the shores of Provence soon afterthe death of Christ.This legend linked Avignon and the surrounding region to the original church,since it was the very companions of Christ, not mere missionaries sent from Rome, who had firstproselytized there. On saints and urban politics see Diana Webb, Patrons and Defenders: The Saintsin the Italian City-States (New York, 1996); and Richard C. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence(New York, 1980).

56 ADV, G298, G299. The last entry in G299 is on May 26, 1792.

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Figure 2 Expositions of the relics of Saint Agricol between 1768 and 1792

cities in the papal enclave, and a rift developed in the patriot leadershipbetween moderates, who controlled the municipal government, andradicals, who controlled the army. This period also witnessed growingresentment among the townspeople, who were scandalized by the con-fiscation of ecclesiastical property, particularly church bells. The briefsannouncing the exposition of Agricol’s relics mention that the munici-pal officers made the initial request. By arranging to have the relicsexposed so often during the early years of the Revolution, Avignon’spatriots tried to placate a public anxious about the consequences,supernatural and otherwise, of the course of action they were taking.They were also positioning themselves as mediators between the cityand its divine protectors.

Making Avignon French

As much as the patriots sought to maintain and co-opt Avignon’s ritualframework to legitimize their new regime, they also altered it to redirecturban identity toward the French nation. Although a papal enclave,Avignon historically had a close relationship with France. During theancien régime many of Avignon’s nobles held titles in France, and localmerchants depended on royal privileges.57 Thus the monarchy had longbeen represented in Avignon’s rituals, but only obliquely, in a way thatdid not challenge the sovereignty of the popes. As M. d’Astier, themunicipal assessor, said in a speech dedicating a royal portrait that

57 See, e.g., Henry de Seguins-Cohorn, ‘‘Relations entre les noblesses comtadine et françaiseà la vielle de la Révolution,’’ Mémoires de l’Académie de Vaucluse, 7th ser., 9 (1989): 45–49.

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Louis XVI gave the city in 1783, ‘‘To serve the king and to be subjects ofthe pope have always been our primary goals. To cherish the two, butto cherish them in such a way that our attachment for one never harmsthe fidelity that we owe the other, this is our primary duty.’’58 Through-out the eighteenth century the city dutifully commemorated births anddeaths in the royal family with Te Deums and requiems, and it observedthe feast of Saint Louis every August 25 not in one of the main ritualcenters but in the former College of the Jesuits, near the south end ofthe city.

In 1790 and 1791 the feast of Saint Louis was celebrated with a highmass accompanied by an orchestra in the cathedral and followed thatnight by fireworks.The Courrier d’Avignon, under the editorship of SabinTournal, a radical patriot, published the following account of the 1790festival:

The feast of Saint Louis was celebrated in Avignon with pomp. Itwas announced on the evening before with a discharge of artilleryand the ringing of bells. The silver bell, heard only for the corona-tion of the popes, was rung for twenty-four hours. The municipalofficers, the staff of the city guard, the members of the foreign mili-tary committee in garrison at Avignon, all attended the mass, whichwas celebrated with music in the cathedral. At the exudiat there wassung, to the sound of artillery and of all the bells, Domine salvam facgentem, salvam fac legem, salvam fac regem. The cathedral of Avignon isperhaps the first in France to hold this prayer, which was newly putto music. Needless to say, the citizens of Avignon were compelledto attend this mass. They are demanding their reunion with France;how could they not pray for the king of the French?59

This festival was a mixture of local and national religious cultures. Thenew prayer on behalf of ‘‘the people, the law, and the king’’—a newtrinity that elevated the people and the law above their sovereign—waspresumably meant to be sung throughout France on this day. This syn-chronicity of ritual time was important in later revolutionary festivals,such as the Festival of the Federation, timed to begin precisely at noon,when the sun was at its zenith across the entire nation.60 Just as ritualtime united communities at the local level during the ancien régime, itunited the entire nation during revolutionary festivals. By participating

58 Discours prononcé par Mr d’Astier, actuellement assesseur et acteur de la ville d’Avignon à l’occasionde l’inauguration du portrait du roi Louis XVI, dont Sa Majesté a honoré cette ville, BMA, MS 2936, no. 38.

59 Courrier d’Avignon, Aug. 26, 1790, BMA, P1000, T5.60 On the uses of civic festivals as tools of social regeneration and nation building see Mona

Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, MA, 1988), esp. chap. 6,‘‘The Festival and Space,’’ and chap. 7, ‘‘The Festival and Time.’’ See also Michel Vovelle, Les méta-morphoses de la fête en Provence de 1750 à 1820 (Paris, 1976), esp. chap. 10.

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in royal festivals, such as the feast of Saint Louis, Avignon’s revolution-ary administrators tried to forge a sense of unity with the French beforethey were even part of France.

The silver bell or cloche d’argent, which rang for twenty-four hoursduring the festival, is another example of local symbols used to cre-ate national identity. The bell was housed in the papal palace’s para-pet overlooking the Place du Palais, where the townspeople gatheredduring important celebrations in the cathedral. John XXII, the firstpope to spend his entire reign (1316–34) in Avignon, had placed thebell there, where it rang only to announce the death of a pope andthe election of his successor. But it also had a local meaning that tran-scended its association with the papacy. Not long after the city’s breakwith Rome, all emblems of papal rule were removed from public view,a lengthy project that provided work for the city’s unemployed masonsand painters. In November 1790 a member of the Club des Amis de laConstitution proposed that the cloche d’argent be taken down because itwas the last remnant of papal rule in the city, but his motion was unani-mously rejected.61

Bells had, and indeed still have, a special meaning for commu-nities that maintain a close relationship between the secular and thesacred.62 That supernatural properties were attributed to them, suchas their ability to ward off malevolent spirits, storms, and the plague,is well documented. They linked the sacred and the profane in timeand space by apprising people outside a church of the progress of ritu-als inside it. Bells were part of a community’s personality. Each wasbaptized and named and had a distinctive sound that everyone in thecommunity knew intimately. The various combinations and patterns inwhich they were rung were a form of local dialect.Thus the cloche d’argentwas more a local than a papal symbol, readily redeployed to articulateFrench rather than papal sovereignty. Ringing this bell for twenty-fourhours made a powerful impression on the townspeople, who hithertohad heard it only once a decade or so, for it rechristened the city as partof the French nation and the bell itself as a symbol of French identity.

Sacred and Secular Violence

In the fall of 1791 Avignon experienced unprecedented violence thatwas largely political but had distinctly religious elements. During that

61 Chambaud, journal, BMA, MS 2494, fol. 46.62 See Percival Price, Bells and Man (Oxford, 1983). For an excellent account of the social

and religious importance of bells in the modern era see Richard L. Hernandez, ‘‘Sacred Sound andSacred Substance: Church Bells and the Auditory Culture of Russian Villages during the BolshevikVelikii Perelom,’’ American Historical Review 109 (2004): 1475–1504.

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year the war against the loyalist communes had brought a more radi-cal faction, which controlled the army, to the forefront of urban poli-tics. These ‘‘brigands,’’ as their detractors called them, were led bythe Duprat brothers, who were natives of Avignon, and several non-natives, including Tournal, a former schoolmaster from Grenoble aswell as editor of the Courrier d’Avignon; a notary from Picardy namedNicolas Lescuyer; and the infamous Mathieu Jourdan, a self-styled gen-eral nicknamed Coupe-tête because he bragged of having beheadedthe governor of the Bastille.63

The intervention of royal mediators ended the fighting betweenAvignon and the loyalist coalition in June, but with peace came new ten-sions between the now unemployed army and Avignon’s elected munici-pality. Agricol Richard, a moderate who had replaced d’Armand asmayor the previous October, was unable to pay the army because thecity was bankrupt. Believing that Richard and his colleagues were delib-erately withholding payment, Tournal, the Duprats, and other armyofficers stormed the Hôtel-de-Ville on August 21. Richard and most ofthe municipality fled the city, and the Duprats placed Avignon undermartial law. Lescuyer, who became secretary of the commune protem,began an aggressive campaign of liquidating ecclesiastical property toraise money for the army.This enraged many townspeople, particularlywhen he confiscated the Mont-de-Piété, which had provided supportfor the urban poor. Lescuyer added to the scandal by selling churchbells as scrap metal, allowing each parish to keep only one. For ‘‘thechiming city’’ the silencing of the bells was a profound change.

On September 14, after two previous motions had failed, the Na-tional Assembly finally voted to annex the papal states. Many delegateshad held out hope that they could win papal support for the Civil Con-stitution of the Clergy in exchange for helping the pope retain hisFrench territories, but the rupture between Paris and Rome opened theway for supporters of annexation to push it through. King Louis XVIappointed Clément Félix Champion de Villeneuve, Louis Alexandred’Albignac, and Joseph Lescène des Maisons royal commissioners onOctober 6, but they delayed their departure and would not arrive inAvignon until November 8. In the meantime, the city remained in thehands of the radical patriots, under martial law.

On October 16 a crowd mainly of peasant women gathered in the

63 It was an empty boast, since Jourdan does not appear to have been in Paris in July 1789.Nonetheless he distinguished himself with his brutality during the civil war. According to one story,he cut off the finger of a nobleman he had killed and carried it around in his mouth all day likea cigar (René Moulinas, ‘‘Le plus célèbre des révolutionnaires avignonnais: Jourdan Coupe-tête,histoire et légende,’’ Provence historique 36 [1987]: 275–86).

72 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

church of the Cordeliers, in the working-class parish of Saint Geneton the south side of the city.64 Although never a parish church, itwas one of the most important religious buildings during the ancienrégime and came to serve as a meeting hall for the assembly of thisparish during the Revolution. The women gossiped about an anony-mous placard found on the wall of the nearby chapel of the pénitentsgris, which warned the townspeople that they were governed by rogueslining their pockets with the proceeds of stolen church property.65 Thenone of the women noticed that a statue of the Virgin in a nearby chapelappeared to be weeping. News of the apparition spread quickly throughthe neighborhood, and before long the tocsin rang and a mob gatheredin the church.

In the context of recent events—a months-long drought had endedonly the previous day—people interpreted the apparition as a sign ofdivine anger brought on by the sacrileges and violence that the patriotadministrators had committed. Some of the men in the crowd set outand intercepted Lescuyer on his way to the Hôtel-de-Ville. They ledhim back to the Cordeliers, where he mounted a chair and attemptedto calm the crowd. However, his voice was drowned out by the angryshouts of the people, who then beat him with chairs and paving stonesand stabbed him in the face and eyes with scissors and knitting needles.A detachment of the city guard arrived, but too late to save Lescuyer.They carried him back to his home, where he died that evening.

After learning of the attack, Jourdan rounded up dozens of sus-pects, including several who were not in the Cordeliers church thatmorning but who were opponents of the so-called Brigand Regime,and imprisoned them in the papal palace. That night he and a groupof accomplices murdered more than sixty of them, including at leastsix municipal officials who had been confined there since the coupthe previous August, with sabers, iron bars, and rifle butts. Jourdanand his henchmen dumped the corpses in a latrine in the center of atower at the northeast corner of the palace called the Glacière, coveredthem with lime, then walled up the opening and concealed it with balesof hay.

The massacre instantly became a national issue.66 Because it ex-posed the potential for violence beneath the surface of the Revolution,

64 The events of Oct. 16–17 are described in detail in René Moulinas, Les massacres de laGlacière: Enquête sur un crime impuni, Avignon 16–17 octobre 1791 (Aix-en-Provence, 2003).

65 For the placard see Archives Nationales, D XXIV 3.66 Pierre Vaillandet, ‘‘Les massacres de la Glacière et l’opinion publique,’’ Mémoires de l’Aca-

démie de Vaucluse, 2nd ser., 33 (1932): 27–47; Claude Langlois, ‘‘Les massacres d’Avignon ou lapremière guerre des gravures,’’ Provence historique 36 (1987): 287–300.

REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS IN AVIGNON 73

conservatives exploited it to discredit revolutionaries. The revolution-aries, on the other hand, sought to distance themselves from the con-troversy; only Marat publicly defended the glacièristes. In Avignon thepatriots tried to exculpate themselves by claiming that the massacrehad been an act of self-defense against an aristocratic conspiracy. Theypreserved Lescuyer’s head in eau de vie to use as evidence of the mob’sbrutality and hired the painter Joseph Plat to examine the weepingstatue of the Virgin. Plat determined that the statue had been recentlyvarnished and that the apparent weeping had been an effect of candlelighting. In the Courrier d’Avignon Tournal implied that conspirators haddeliberately created the illusion to arouse the mob: ‘‘This report [ofPlat’s findings] leaves no doubt as to the deceit employed to make thepeople fanatical, and fanaticism always leads to barbarism.’’67

In his recent book describing the social and political context of themassacre, René Moulinas describes the statue as a ‘‘decisive’’ factor inprovoking the crowd in the Cordeliers.68 According to witnesses, Les-cuyer’s assailants had said that they had intended to free the city frommen whose conduct had offended the mother of God. Expanding onMoulinas’s assessment, one could argue that the crowd had projectedits anger over the confiscation of the Mont-de-Piété onto the statueand had used divine wrath to legitimize its violence against politicalauthority. If so, the townspeople had not reacted to as much as inter-acted with the statue. By turning the issue of the Mont-de-Piété intoa matter of protecting the city’s relationship with the divine, they hadexpressed their economic grievances in a language of the sacred. Thusthere were competing uses of the sacred in urban politics: the patriotofficials had sought to co-opt this language to strengthen their regime,and the townspeople had used it to articulate their dissent and justifytheir rebellion.

The incident of the statue reveals a disconnect between the towns-people and the patriot government. Tournal’s account expressed Vol-tairian contempt for a worldview in which a belief in the sacred drovepeople to violence. He scornfully described how ‘‘one woman, afteraddressing her prayers to the Virgin, [was] enlightened in this way [i.e.,by faith] and fell into a fit of fury, trampling with her feet and beat-ing with her clogs the unfortunate Lescuyer, who died from a thousandblows.’’69 By depicting the mob as simple-minded and easily manipu-lated by counterrevolutionaries preying on their credulity, however,

67 Courrier d’Avignon, Oct. 21, 1791, BMA, P1000, T6.68 Moulinas, Glacière, 22.69 Quoted ibid.

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Tournal ignored other factors that had sparked Lescuyer’s murder,namely, the confiscation of the Mont-de-Piété and other church prop-erty and the sacrilege it implied. Ascribing the massacre to religiousfanaticism allowed Tournal and the other patriots to overlook their owncomplicity and to delegitimize opposition to their regime.

Despite the efforts of patriot officials to co-opt urban rituals, reli-gion ultimately failed to provide a bridge in Avignon between the oldregime and the new.While it is clear that the revolutionary governmentmisjudged the importance of religious belief among the townspeople,another dynamic interconnected the radicalization of the Revolution inAvignon and in France. Events had presented an opportunity to bringpolitical reform to Avignon, but as the movement turned from reformto revolution, the Avignon affair gave the National Assembly additionalleverage vis-à-vis the papacy, allowing it to push for greater concessionson ecclesiastical reform. The adoption of the Civil Constitution of theClergy in France in turn enabled patriot officials in Avignon to confis-cate church property even before it had been annexed by France. Thefact that local officials enforced the oath helped ensure papal condem-nation of the Civil Constitution, making church property in Avignonmore inviolable than it might otherwise have been in the minds of manytownspeople. This factor incited the townspeople to rise up against thepatriot government, setting the stage for the murder of Lescuyer andthe Glacière massacre. The process of ‘‘reciprocal radicalization’’ madeit possible for revolutionaries in both Paris and Avignon to push reli-gious reforms farther than they might have been able to do otherwise,but in Avignon this process exceeded what the townspeople could tol-erate, which suggests that there were religious reasons for the failure ofreligion there.70

Conclusion

The royal commissioners from Paris finally arrived in Avignon on No-vember 8, 1791. One of their first acts after formally taking possession ofthe city was to establish a tribunal to investigate the Glacière massacre.Tournal, Jourdan, and other patriot leaders were arrested, while theDuprats fled the city.Workers removed the bodies of the massacre’s vic-tims from the Glacière tower, and after a civic funeral and procession onNovember 17, they were interred in the cemetery of Saint Roch, whichhad recently opened outside the city walls. However, efforts to bringthe glacièristes to justice were cut short in March 1792, when their allies

70 I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for French Historical Studies who helped clarifythis dynamic and suggested such an apt phrase to describe it.

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in the National Assembly successfully lobbied for a general amnestyfor the perpetrators of crimes connected with the Revolution in Avi-gnon before November 1791. Jacobin fédérées from Marseille, where theDuprats had taken refuge, entered Avignon and freed the glacièristesfrom prison, and on April 29 the Duprats returned to the city, wherethey received a triumphal welcome from their colleagues. In June theyounger Duprat was elected mayor amid reports from the royal com-missioners of voter intimidation.71

As Avignon became integrated into France, its religious institutionsshared the fate of the church throughout France. Most chapels, con-vents, and other religious institutions that had survived the early Revo-lution and annexation were closed and sold as national property. In1794 the Cult of the Supreme Being replaced Catholic worship, but thecampaign of radical de-Christianization had no lasting effect on thecity.72 After the fall of Robespierre, Catholicism in Avignon rebounded,not to its former level but well enough to suggest that religious senti-ment had not been greatly dampened by the turmoil of the mid-1790s.The relics of Saint Agricol, hidden during the Terror, were restoredto the main altar of the church.73 Six churches were reconsecratedbetween 1795, when the French were left to worship as they wished,and Napoléon’s Concordat of 1801. Two more churches, including thecathedral, would reopen in the early 1820s.74 This was a mere fractionof the prerevolutionary number, but by then Avignon’s population hadfallen by more than one-quarter, and the social and political factors thathad sustained the city’s vast complex of religious institutions no longerexisted.75 At the close of the eighteenth century, however, Avignon wasstill an intensely Catholic city, even if it was no longer ‘‘a second Rome.’’

Religious and political culture in Avignon during the early Revo-lution can aptly be described as a ‘‘multiplicity of relevant traditions.’’76

Discussing medieval beliefs in the afterlife, Nancy Caciola emphasizeshow different cultural milieus overlapped, weaving seemingly contra-

71 Moulinas, Histoire de la Révolution d’Avignon, 237–42.72 The plan for the Festival of the Supreme Being is at BMA, MS 2964, no. 149.73 Records of the inquest into the authenticity of the relics are in ADV, 16J12.74 Bernard Thomas, ‘‘Monuments et oeuvres d’art avignonnais à l’épreuve de la Révolution,’’

Mémoires de l’Académie de Vaucluse, 7th ser., 9 (1989): 113–51. Most of the destruction of religiousedifices occurred not during the Revolution but during the nineteenth century; they were demol-ished to furnish building materials or to make room for new construction. The primary targets ofrevolutionary vandalism were symbols of papal and royal authority and funerary sculptures of theold elite, rather than religious icons and symbols.

75 Avignon’s population in 1801 was 19,889, down from 26,000–27,000 before the Revolu-tion (William H. Sewell Jr., Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regimeto 1848 [Cambridge, 1980], 150).

76 Nancy Caciola, ‘‘Wraiths, Revenants, and Ritual in Medieval Culture,’’ Past and Present,no. 153 (1996): 4.

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dictory worldviews into a coherent system of belief.77 This insight helpsus understand the relationship between religion and secularization atthe end of the ancien régime, when Enlightenment principles wereapplied to the older substratum of a religious worldview. Even as thesocial and political matrix that had sustained Avignon’s ritual frame-work over the centuries deteriorated during the early Revolution, a fun-damental belief in a reciprocal relationship with supernatural forcesremained prevalent among much of the urban population. Seculariza-tion in Avignon did not entail a decline in religious belief; rather, reli-gious belief adapted to new circumstances.

The history of religious ritual and urban politics during the earlyRevolution in Avignon suggests that any definition of secularization inthe eighteenth century depends largely on how one defines religiousbelief.While statistical measurements of religious practices reveal muchabout the changing role of religion in society, they do not give a com-plete picture. If we define belief as the acknowledgment of an inter-active relationship between the physical and supernatural worlds, thensecular and religious worldviews become less contradictory. We canattribute the successes of anticlericalism and de-Christianization in Avi-gnon, and the decline of so many aspects of the city’s religious culture,not to a decline of belief itself but to changes in the political and socialorder. Religion was no longer the primary foundation of political legiti-macy. Thus the Revolution was not a conflict between secularizationand belief as much as it was a reformulation of the relationship betweenthem. Secularization and belief were not mutually exclusive but insteadcoexisted as part of a ‘‘multiplicity of relevant traditions.’’

77 In this case, Caciola examines how popular belief in ghosts was reconciled with the officialchurch doctrine that the dead cannot return to earth (ibid.).