Religion and the Politics of Time: Holidays in France from Louis XIV Through Napoleon

320 Pages·2010·2.077 MB·English

by  Noah Shusterman

Religion and
the Politics of t ime

Religion and
the Politics of time
Holidays in France from Louis XIV
through Napoleon
noah shusteRman
The Catholic University of America Press
Washington, D.C.
copyright © 2010
the catholic University of america Press
all rights reserved
the paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of american
national standards for information science—Permanence
of Paper for Printed library materials, ansi Z39.48-1984.
∞
library of congress cataloging-in-Publication data
shusterman, noah.
Religion and the politics of time : holidays in france from louis XiV through
napoleon / noah shusterman.
p. cm.
includes bibliographical references and index.
isBn 978-0-8132-1725-3 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. calendar—Political aspects—
france—history. 2. church calendar—france—history.
3. holidays—france—history. 4. time—Political aspects—
france—history. 5. church and state—france—history.
6. Political culture—france—history. 7. france—Politics and government—
1643–1715. 8. france—Politics and government—
1715–1774. 9. france—Politics and government—1774–1793.
10. france—Politics and government—1789–1815. i. title.
ce61.f8s56 2010
944�.033—dc22 2009030747
contents
list of maps and figures vii
acknowledgments ix
abbreviations xiii
introduction 1
1. Religious holidays and temporal authority
in old Regime france 12
2. Politics of time and the Politics of the times,
1642–1695 38
3. centralization without the state: Religious
holidays in the eighteenth century 67
4. Which time for the future? Utility,
anti-clericalism, and the calendar 98
5. seeing like a church: Religious time and
Republican Politics, 1789–Vi 116
6. Reluctant missionaries: enforcement of
the Republican calendar, Vi–Vii 161
7. Une Loi de l’Eglise et de l’Etat: napoleon and the
central administration of Religious life,
1800–1815 206
conclusion 237
appendix a. estimating the number of Religious
holidays in old Regime france 247
appendix B. the Republican calendar 265
Bibliography 267
index 293

list of maPs and figURes
Map 1. the dioceses of old Regime france xv
Map 2. calendar Reforms, 1642–1695 44
Map 3. the ecclesiastical Provinces of
Rouen and tours 79
Map 4. calendar Reforms, 1695–1759 259
Map 5. calendar Reforms, 1760–1789 260
Figure 1. average number of Potential Workdays,
1642–1789 252
Figure 2. Weekday holidays by diocese in the
seventeenth century 254
Figure 3. incidence of Fêtes in the
seventeenth century 257
Figure 4. Weekday holidays in the
late eighteenth century 261
Figure 5. incidence of Fêtes in the
late eighteenth century 263
vii

acknoWledgments
in late december 1999, on the eve of the millennium, i was on a plane
headed back to Paris. three months earlier i had begun full-time re-
search into my dissertation, which was at that time going to be a ge-
nealogy of leisure as a modern category—a topic about which i had
managed to write a passable proposal, but had never quite figured
out. the whole world was focused on the calendar then. the “19”s
were about to disappear. People were ready to celebrate the coming of
the new millennium. i was about to turn thirty. and the world was
about to end, with the arrival of the Y2k bug. While i was not con-
vinced that the most dire of predictions would come true, i had nev-
ertheless made sure that all of my flights would be before the calen-
dar changed. it was on that flight that i made up my mind to jettison
most of my project on leisure, take the one chapter i had planned on
the calendar, and expand it into a whole dissertation. that disserta-
tion would eventually become this book.
i had been aware of my interest in calendars and in the reforms
of religious holidays for several years at that point. my first contact
with the issues involved in the history of religious holidays came dur-
ing a summer research trip to Paris in 1997. it was then that i came
across faiguet de Villeneuve’s article on christian holidays, the abbé
thiers’s book on the right of bishops to eliminate holidays, and the
1778 pastoral letter from the archbishop of Paris eliminating the ob-
ix
x acknowledgments
servation of roughly one-third of the religious holidays in his dio-
cese. those documents fascinated me in a way i could not under-
stand then. it took some digging before i found out that those sources
were just the tip of the iceberg, that there was other related material
out there. But the point when i realized that there was enough there
to support an entire dissertation only came when i realized that reli-
gious holidays would again become an issue under napoleon, albeit a
very different one. this realization highlighted the way that the his-
tory of the republican calendar was part of a much longer story. the
resulting project was risky; it was uncharted waters in many ways, not
least because of its 175-year time span. But once the project had got its
hooks into me, i knew that it was a risk i was going to take.
any project this long in the making arrives only with the help of
countless people. my first thanks go to my advisor, Peter sahlins, for
his help with both practical and intellectual matters. his advice, and
the standards to which he held my work, made my dissertation and
this book far stronger than they would have otherwise been. as a mas-
ter’s student at the University of chicago i profited greatly from the
presence of dale Van kley and his seminar on Jansenism and the en-
lightenment. William sewell was a constant source of inspiration, and
the workshops on modern france and on social theory provided an
intense intellectual environment. at Berkeley i was lucky enough to
study with tom Brady and martin Jay, both of whom provided consis-
tent support and encouragement. at temple University my colleagues
in the intellectual heritage program and at the center for the human-
ities have been consistently supportive of my work, as different as it
is from theirs. Richard immerman, dan tompkins, and Peter logan
have all been valuable mentors to me. Rick libowitz has been more
than i could have hoped for in an officemate and colleague. kathy Bid-
dick and the rest of the pre-modern colloquium have given invaluable
analysis and encouragement. audra Wolfe, along with reading over
much of the manuscript in various states of preparedness, was more
than generous with her advice about all facets of the writing process.