Preferred Citation: Luria, Keith P. Territories of Grace: Cultural Change in the Seventeenth-Century Diocese of Grenoble. Berkeley:  University of California Press,  c1991 1991. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft6n39p11n/

Territories of Grace Cultural Change in the Seventeenth-Century Diocese of Grenoble Keith P. Luria UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford © 1991 The Regents of the University of California

Preferred Citation: Luria, Keith P. Territories of Grace: Cultural Change in the Seventeenth-Century Diocese of Grenoble. Berkeley:  University of California Press,  c1991 1991. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft6n39p11n/

To Harold J. Luria
and to the memory
of Shirley D. Luria

Acknowledgments

Montaigne wrote, in his essay "On Friendship," that true friends "banish from between them these words of separation and distinction: benefit, obligation, gratitude, request, thanks, and the like." At the risk of seeming a less than noble friend, I take this opportunity to acknowledge those who so willingly offered the "admonitions and corrections" that Montaigne thought "one of the chief duties of friendship." Much of what is good in this study is due to them.

I undertook most of the research for this book in the Archives dé-partementales de l'Isère and the Bibliothèque municipale de Grenoble, and I thank the fine staffs of both institutions. I am especially grateful to Vital Chomel, then the director of the Isère archives, who, through his administrative skills and his own scholarly work, shared and furthered the interests of many historians. At the archives I met Robert Chanaud, whose considerable knowledge of the Dauphiné's religious history has enriched this study and who, along with his wife, Florence Mirouse, has given me many years of intellectual partnership, warm hospitality, and treasured friendship. The same must be said for other friends in France: Jonathan Schur, Jean-Claude Nard, Angela Nard, Sarah Pervès, Jean-Pierre Pervès, Jean-Marc Fontaine, and Laurence Fontaine. Indeed this work is much indebted to Laurence Fontaine's historical investigations of the region; to our collaborations in archives and discussions; and to the support, hospitality, and forbearance of her family.

In this country I thank, first and foremost, my mentors, Lynn Hunt

and Natalie Z. Davis. They pointed me in the right direction, equipped me with the necessary training, and, most important of all, provided the constant and patient support that helped this project reach an end. I am indebted to friends in New Haven: John Merriman, Carol Payne, Celeste Brusati, Helen Siu, Susanne Wofford, Jim Scott, Louise Scott, William Kelly, Deborah Davis, and Jean-Christophe Agnew. They encouraged me and helped me formulate the concepts necessary for understanding the meanings of cultural change in rural society. I also thank Mary Schreck Glynn of the Yale Computer Center, whose painstaking efforts rescued the data for chapter 5 from computer oblivion. Other friends and colleagues—Steven Vincent, Jim Banker, David Gilmartin, and Sandy Freitag—read all or parts of the manuscript, sometimes repeatedly, and Mary Sheriff labored mightily to improve my writing. Thanks also to Jonathan Ocko for help with the tables. The extent of my gratitude to all of them impels me to disregard Montaigne's sage advice, even though my debt is greater than I can repay here.

Financial support for research came from the Regents of the University of California, the French Government, Yale University's Concilium on International and Area Studies, and the Whitney-Griswold Fund.

Introduction:
Village Religion and Cultural Change

Bishop Etienne Le Camus arrived in his new cathedral city of Grenoble on 4 November 1671, the fête of Saint Charles Borromeo.^[1] He chose this day for his formal entry to signal his intention of emulating Borromeo by bringing the Counter-Reformation to his flock. He was the first representative of the Catholic Church in Grenoble determined to reform the religious lives of people who lived in the remote mountain towns and villages of the diocese. Le Camus's task had been ordained at the Council of Trent a century before his arrival and defined by the work of other reformers, such as Borromeo, throughout Europe. But the diocese of Grenoble seemed to the new prelate barely touched by the reform and its spirituality. He would be the first religious leader to make a concerted effort to turn local religious practice from what the Counter-Reformation Church considered its indecent or superstitious traditions into paths that were more consistent with Church doctrine and more carefully controlled by the Church hierarchy.

Historians of early modern religious change and of popular culture have seen the efforts of reformers like Le Camus as part of a broad attempt to tame the traditional culture of rural people. According to this view, ecclesiastics allied with increasingly powerful centralized governments and urban elites sought to stamp out the disorderliness they saw in the rural world and to establish their control more forcefully

[1] Jean Godel, "Les visites pastorales de Le Camus," in Le cardinal des montagnes: Étienne Le Camus , ed. Jean Godel (Grenoble, 1974), p. 213.

over it. In following this program, religious reformers condemned and tried to suppress pre-Counter-Reformation religion, which combined attention to the sacraments of the universal Church with an equal attention to customs often outside the clergy's control. Reformers found many of these customs indecent. Clerics directed the faithful away from showy processions, raucous confraternity banquets, excessive zeal for relics and miracles, and other practices that combined what the Church considered the profane with the sacred. And reformers hoped to steer people toward a style of religion that emphasized the individual examination of conscience, dutiful participation in the sacraments, and a more exacting understanding of proper doctrine, all as defined by the clergy. The diversity of traditional religion in which customs varied greatly from locality to locality would be stripped away. New religious practice would be uniform, centered on the universal symbols of the Church, controlled by bishops, and exercised in parish churches under the watchful eyes of priests imbued with the Counter-Reformation's ideal of religion. Le Camus's entry into Grenoble would be a sign that the campaign, a battle for control of the sacred territory on which people worshiped and hence a battle for their souls, was beginning in the alpine diocese.

Here, however, the bishop's arrival does not indicate the beginning of religious change but only one important moment in a continuous transformation. For what is at issue in this study is neither an account of the Counter-Reformation in the diocese of Grenoble nor a catalogue of the region's popular cultural customs and beliefs; it is instead an examination of the nature of cultural change in early modern villages. The Church's attempt to alter the traditional religion in this diocese may have begun with Le Camus, but innovation in the religious lives of the people who lived there did not. The reformers's efforts to impose a new style of religious belief and practice on his flock were only one part of a more complicated process of local cultural change. The process was a two-way interaction between a reforming bishop and villagers. More accurately, it involved a variety of groups at different social levels, including those within villages, with interests that sometimes prompted alliances and, at other times, provoked competition in the pursuit of cultural change.

Religion gives us the means to examine this complex process. Even if cultural change in early modern society encompassed more than the Counter-Reformation, it was still a matter of religion. Culture—in the sense of the systems of actions, symbols, and meanings that embody

the ways in which people carry out their lives, order their existence, and interpret their world—was religious. Religion provided the primary symbolic form of cultural expression. It evoked a view of the way the world worked and taught people the values, beliefs, and customs necessary for living in the world in a proper fashion. Religion was not merely a discrete group of ceremonies and beliefs separate from work and play. It provided a model and a rationale for social and political relations, a justification for the world as it was, and an explanation of how it had come to be that way. Rulers reigned by virtue of being God's representatives. The political life of villages was, as we shall see, inextricably bound up with the religious life of parishes. A divine plan fixed the earthly social hierarchy, which resembled the hierarchy of heaven. Religious strictures, even if honored only in the breach, fixed the moral boundaries of economic activity—the exaction of usury, for instance, or the care of the poor. People measured time according to a religious calendar. Divine power, at least for Catholics, was immanent; God could intervene in the world at any moment through miracles to save crops, heal illnesses, or signal support for some human endeavor.

Under certain circumstances, religion could also provide the inspiration for changing the world, as was the case in millenarian movements and often in peasant revolts. It was, however, also the case in the less dramatic but continuous processes of cultural change operating within European society. Religious innovations therefore had political and social implications as well. The Catholic reformers, in promoting obedience to hierarchical ecclesiastical authority, promoted hierarchy and authority in all aspects. Villagers, in their reaction to the reformers, responded to the broader attempt by outsiders to impose control over their lives. And so I start with Le Camus's arrival in his diocese not to privilege it as the key moment in a transformation but to contrast his ambitions and expectations with those of his flock and to contrast my approach with those of other historians who have labored over similar terrain.

Le Camus did not recognize that his work represented a new stage in a cultural transformation rather than its beginning. All too frequently historians of early modern religion have not understood that either. In fact, they have often adopted a view similar to that of Catholic reformers: change, when it occurred, resulted from the more or less successful imposition of a new set of religious and moral standards on a superstitious people. The efforts of these historians have provided us, nonetheless, with a detailed view of the program of the Counter-

Reformation Church, of the direction in which it sought to turn religious life, and of how it thought that turn could be accomplished.^[2]

The program that bishops enacted through their curés followed a similar pattern everywhere.^[3] Catholic reformers often described their task as a vast educational undertaking. They could achieve their goals only by instructing the populace in proper doctrine, observance, and attitude. Le Camus echoed a common theme when he reminded his parish priests that "superstitions could slip into . . . parishes through ignorance or negligence."^[4] If the priests were attentive to their instructional duties, superstitions could be eradicated; proper observance would triumph. It was for this reason that reformers emphasized the importance of the Church's instructional tools such as confessions, better sermons, and new catechisms. More diligent teaching—by curés but also by schoolmasters and schoolmistresses in the petites écoles of villages—would produce better-instructed and more-obedient parishioners.^[5]

Obedience, authority, uniformity, decorum: these were the larger aims of the Catholic reformers. They wished to put their own Church in order as a response to their Protestant challengers and critics. But their desire for control also stemmed from a deeper desire on the part of European political and social elites to control and civilize an unruly population. Reforming prelates wanted to instill in their flocks a religion in which superstitions would be abolished, in which no ceremony

[2] Jean Delumeau presents an overview in Le catholicisme entre Luther et Voltaire , 2d ed. (Paris, 1979), pt. 3, chaps. 2, 4. See also Yves-Marie Bercé, Fête et révolte (Paris, 1976), chap. 4; and Robert Muchembled, Culture populaire et culture des élites dans la France moderne (XVe-XVIIIe siècles ) (Paris, 1978), pp. 255-272. Diocesan studies that contribute to our understanding of the Counter-Reformation include Louis Châtellier, Tradition chrétienne et renouveau catholique dans le cadre de l'ancien diocèse de Strasbourg (1650-1770) (Paris, 1981); Jeanne Ferté, La vie religieuse dans les compagnes parisiennes (1622-1695) (Paris, 1962); Louis Pérouas, Le diocèse de la Rochelle de 1648-1724 (Paris, 1964); Robert Sauzet, Contre-réforme et réforme catholique en bas Languedoc (Louvain, 1979); Thérèse-Jean Schmitt, L'organisation ecclésiastique et la pratique religieuse dans l'Archdiaconé d'Autun de 1650 a 1750 (Dijon, 1952); and Jean-François Soulet, Traditions et réformes religieuses dans les Pyrénées centrales au XVIIe siècle (Pau, 1974).

[3] For curés as agents of the Counter-Reformation, see Philip T. Hoffman, Church and Community in the Diocese of Lyon, 1500-1789 (New Haven, 1984), esp. chap. 4.

[4] Recueil des ordonnances synodales du diocèse de Grenoble publié dans le synode renu à Grenoble par Monseigneur l'Eminentissme et Reverendissme Cardinal Le Camus Evêque et Prince de Grenoble (Grenoble, 1687), p. 12. The passage continues, "especially in the minds of women and idiots."

[5] The subjects necessary to teach so that parishioners would understand the "horror of sin" and be awakened to "the desire for a true conversion" included an understanding of the sacrifice of the mass, the Trinity, the Incarnation, penitence, the commandments of God, the sacraments and the proper disposition to receive them, the obligations and sins that pertained to each estate or profession, and the good use of afflictions and illnesses to arrive at the proper spiritual attitude (as listed in ibid., pp. 174-175).

would obstruct the mass, and in which no devotion would attract more attention than the properly venerated Eucharist. They redefined festivity as sinful, ignorant, and dangerous to social order. Parishioners would perform the religious duties dictated by the curé, and they would lead more upright lives. Their immoral behavior (especially their sexual behavior) would be corrected.^[6] Religion would become more abstract, spiritual, and individualized, less tied to the collective practices of the past. The extra-parish religious landscape filled with sacred fountains, chapels, and pilgrimage sites would give way to the parish church through which the bishop and his priests could control religious activity.^[7] Here the faithful's attention would be focused on new altarpieces at the main altars, theaters of the Eucharistic service, rather than on the lateral saints' chapels. These altarpieces could also instruct the faithful in the devotions emphasized by the Counter-Reformation.

The new type of parishioners would understand their religion, want it taught to their children, and expect religious ceremonies, as well as the priest who performed them, to be dignified.^[8] They would no longer be so attached to confraternities whose celebrations seemed to the reformers little more than excuses for drunken feasts and whose services interfered with the parish mass. Instead new organizations such as those of the Blessed Sacrament or the Rosary would replace the old ones devoted to saints often associated with crafts. Processions and pilgrimages to sites distant enough to require people to spend nights on the road would be prohibited; they were sure occasions for sexual license. Reformers would refuse to permit such common superstitious and indecent beliefs as that church keys could cure rabid dogs, or that the words uttered in prayers or spells could, of themselves, cure the sick, or that certain herbs could be used to tap divine power. No longer would people have the audacity to treat the Eucharist, the central cultic symbol of the Church, as a magical instrument and use it to prevent storms, stop fires, or heal the sick.^[9]

[6] For the reformers' concern with sexual morality, see John Bossy, "The Social History of Confession in the Age of the Reformation," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , 5th s., 25 (1975): 29-38. On complaints about parishioners' behavior, see Pérouas, La Rochelle , pp. 171-176; Ferté, La vie religieuse , pp. 291-293; Schmitt, L'organisation ecclésiastique , pp. 210-216; Soulet, Traditions et réformes , pp. 288-294.

[7] The idea of the Counter-Reformation's promotion of parish-centered religion is drawn from John Bossy, "The Counter-Reformation and the People of Catholic Europe," Past and Present 47 (May 1970): 51-70.

[8] This description is adapted from Pérouas, La Rochelle , p. 429.

[9] These practices in the diocese of Grenoble were among many that Le Camus condemned and were typical of customs found throughout the country (Recueil des ordonnances , passim).

Hence the standard depiction of the encounter between the Counter-Reformation and village religion is one in which a clerical elite tried to impose its new religious conceptions on people with other beliefs and practices. Understanding the Church's program is not the same as understanding cultural change in early modern rural society, but this description does mirror the way historians have characterized the relationship between the culture of the learned, enlightened elite and the popular culture of the uneducated. The benefits derived from a model of culture that distinguishes elite from popular have been great. It has helped us restore to view the cultural life of the vast majority of early modern people in all its rich complexity. And yet it has left us with some troublesome problems of definition.^[10]

Ironically, our knowledge of popular culture is most complete for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, precisely the period during which, according to some scholars, it was the most endangered. At this time an increasingly self-conscious elite separated itself from the lower orders. The elite was educated, urban, and either more religiously stringent (as in the case of the religious reformers and lay dévots ) or else concerned with scientific knowledge and a rationalistic view of the world. It became preoccupied with maintaining order in society by enforcing morality and discipline; this, in turn, meant attacking many of the disorderly aspects of popular culture.

To carry out its destruction of popular culture, the elite first had to define it not by its intrinsic characteristics but rather by opposition to what the elite now found permissible. In terms of religion, the Church absorbed and brought under the control of the hierarchy popular practices such as the devotion to acceptable saints or pilgrimages to new shrines honoring the Virgin Mary, to mention only two.^[11] Other practices that had previously been proper, such as devotion at sanctuaires à répit (shrines where miracles revived babies who had died before bap-

[10] On problems inherent in dividing early modern cultures, see Natalie Z. Davis, "Some Tasks and Themes in the Study of Popular Religion," in The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion , ed. Charles Trinkhaus and Heiko Oberman (Leiden, 1974), pp. 307-336; and "From 'Popular Religion' to Religious Cultures," in Reformation Europe , ed. Steven Ozment (St. Louis, 1982), pp. 321-341; also Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms , trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore, 1980). On the issue among historians in general, see Ian McKay, "Historians, Anthropology, and the Concept of Culture," Labour/Le Travailleur 8-9 (Autumn 1981-Spring 1982): 185-241.

[11] For an example of this development with pilgrimage shrines, see Keith P. Luria, "Pilgrimage Shrines and Religious Change in the Seventeenth-Century Dauphiné" (Paper read at the Society for French Historical Studies, 13-14 March 1981, University of Indiana, Bloomington).

tism) now met with the suspicion of authorities.^[12] Church authors produced catalogues of superstitions for which the clergy was to be on the alert.^[13] Eventually the concern with repressing superstitious customs would turn into an interest in studying them scientifically. The erudite elite, by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was sufficiently removed from these customs to be able to treat them as folklore. And by the late nineteenth century, the elite could view the popular culture, which their forebears had tried so vigorously to stamp out, with a certain fond nostalgia.^[14]

This schema has its merits, particularly in its description of how the elite redefined culture into that which was or was not acceptable and in its description of the attack that early modern religious reformers (with political authorities and the urban patriciate) mounted on now unacceptable cultural practices. However, the model also has severe shortcomings. Religious reformers, political authorities, and the urban elite may have possessed a common educational background. But we should be wary of thinking that they necessarily shared a monolithic elite culture.^[15] Some followed Bérulle into a sort of mystical devotion; others preferred the skeptics and a rationalistic mode of thought. The two groups moved in the same seventeenth-century literary circles and partook of common intellectual preoccupations. They shared a contempt for the lower orders and a concern for making them more orderly.^[16] But the cultural divisions between them were growing. Even the clerical reformers did not present a united front, as the dispute between the Jesuits and the Jansenists, who held Le Camus's sympathy, demonstrates. So too, there was a world of difference between the Parisian intellectual milieu and that of provincial nobles and townspeople who still marched in confraternal processions (though now perhaps as members of Jesuit-sponsored organizations), but who also worried about

[12] Le Camus was critical of the miracles at one such popular medieval pilgrimage site in his diocese, the sanctuaire à répit at Tullins.

[13] The best-known catalogues in France were those of Jean-Baptiste Thiers: Traité des superstitions selon l'écriture sainte, les décrets des conciles et les sentimens des saints pères et des théologiens (Paris, 1679); and Traité des jeux et divertissments qui peuvent estre permis ou qui doivent estre défendus aux chrétiens selon les regles de l'Eglise et le sentiment des pères (Paris, 1686).

[14] This progression is described with some variations by W. Th. M. Frijhoff, "Official and Popular Religion in Christianity," in Official and Popular Religion (The Hague, 1979); Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York, 1978); and Muchembled, Culture populaire .

[15] Richard Trexler also points out imprecision in our notions of elite religion and culture in "Reverence and Profanity in the Study of Early Modern Religion," in Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800 , ed. Kaspar von Greyerz (London, 1984), pp. 245-269, esp. 245.

[16] I return to this point in discussing criticisms of the cult of saints in chapter 4.

distinguishing themselves from and establishing control over their less socially elevated neighbors. Furthermore, as we shall see, the elite that often proved crucial to village cultural change was inside the community, village notables, whose view of the world differed even more from that of people we usually associate with elite culture.

The cultural variety among the elite shows how difficult it is to establish solid connections between culture and social divisions. Such divisions are important in understanding cultural change, but culture does not correspond neatly with a position on the social ladder. Elite culture seems distinctive and homogeneous only in relation to popular culture. But since we, following the lead of the reformers, have defined popular culture in relation to elite, we are left with definitions that are fuzzy at best, if not tautological. With each examination of a particular practice, custom, value, or belief, the line separating elite from popular has to be redrawn. The boundary between the two camps becomes increasingly unclear. Indeed it is my suggestion that we are mistaken in drawing such lines at all. Cultures in early modern society were not distinct entities that groups possessed in opposition to one another.

If basing cultural divergences on social divisions proves difficult, perhaps a model patterned on the political course of centralizing monarchies would be more useful. William Christian, in his work on early modern Spain, has proposed a basic contrast between local religion and that of the central and centralizing Church. Local religion was particularistic and included all social groups but was distinct from the religion of the Church, which promoted universalist beliefs and practices.^[17] This approach has much to recommend it in the way it illuminates the reformers' concern with suppressing local diversity, even though, as Christian's subtle analysis shows, their campaign reinforced local religion by validating the authority of its priests and the authenticity of its saints, shrines, and relics.^[18]

But by distinguishing local from universal religion, we run the risk of emptying early modern Catholicism of its meaning. Catholics everywhere had common beliefs and symbols, though the local understanding or relative importance of such beliefs and symbols varied. Nor should we overestimate the uniformity of local religion. The inhabitants of particular communities had no single understanding of religion. The problem is to grasp the complexity of village religion —a term that is

[17] William A. Christian, Jr., Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton, 1981). This description of cultural difference and change also echoes the center-periphery model of European economic expansion.

[18] Ibid., p. 177.

more useful than local religion if we take it to describe the cultural differences among villagers as well as between their community and the outside. To do so we must analyze the local uses and meanings of Catholic beliefs and symbols and balance them against the universal content that the beliefs and symbols also contained. Then we must assess the extent to which villagers agreed or disagreed on these uses and meanings.

The attempt to delineate the boundary between two opposed cultures has hampered our efforts to understand how early modern people actually saw their cultural system at work. Where religious reformers created divisions between the sacred and the profane, modern historians have distinguished between the rational and the magical.^[19] The enormous differences between our technological capabilities and those of our early modern forebears encouraged this view, which was founded on the specific act of rejecting the former view of the world to construct the modern one. We have the rational heritage of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, and they were backward, emotional, and superstitious. People who had to struggle with a harsh natural world, an undeveloped economy, misunderstood diseases, and so forth without the benefit of scientific knowledge needed the rituals, customs, and beliefs of "primitive" popular culture to try to explain and control their environment. Of course, since such rituals, customs, and beliefs were unscientific, they could not really exert control over the natural world, but they could help ease the anxieties that threatened social cohesion. Popular culture, in this view, provided a means to allay anxiety through the belief that supernatural forces could control the environment and human behavior and that these forces could be propitiated through rituals.^[20] But since the rituals could not really be effective, anxieties and fears could never really be alleviated.^[21]

As Stuart Clark has pointed out, this view ignores both logic and empirical evidence.^[22] Anxieties are part of any cultural situation—we

[19] Two now classic variations on this theme are Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London, 1971); and Delumeau, Le catholicisme , pp. 266-271. Delumeau contends that the reformers gave true Christianity to people at best superficially christianized, who mixed pagan practices and beliefs with outward conformity to Catholic sacraments. For an overview of the functionalist sociological theory behind such views, see Thomas F. O'Dea, The Sociology of Religion (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1966), pp. 1-10.

[20] I draw here on the more detailed discussion of Stuart Clark, "French Historians and Early Modern Popular Culture," Past and Present 100 (1983): 62-99.

[21] Robert Mandrou argues to this effect in Introduction to Modern France, 1500-1640 , trans. R. E. Hallmark (New York, 1975), pp. 55-61, 70-72, 239-241. See Clark's critique of Mandrou (and of Jean Delumeau, La peur en occident [Paris, 1978] and Muchembled, Culture populaire ) in "French Historians," pp. 69-74.

[22] Clark, "French Historians," pp. 68, 82.

can hardly deny that they are part of our own—but they are relieved by the sense that people possess the resources to cope with their problems. We have no reason to doubt that early modern people believed they had such resources. Natural occurrences were not mysterious. Each one had its meaning. Eclipses, comets, and the birth of monsters had significance. The interpretation of natural signs might be an art not everyone could master, but it could be done.^[23] Propitiating a saint to save crops or heal illnesses might work one time and not the next, but both success and failure could be explained within the cultural framework that gave meaning to ritual acts. The failure of individual actions within the system did not destroy it. People did not think their explanations of the world fell short; they could not have thought so. Ascribing natural occurrences to supernatural causes was not a second-best means of describing the world, which thus left people fearful, but was, instead, exactly the explanation that allowed people to incorporate supernatural forces into their perception of the world. Admittedly this understanding of the mental world of early modern people can obscure processes of change. If the system of explanation was so flexible and all-encompassing, how did new habits of thought ever develop? Nonetheless Clark's critique is a useful corrective to the more dismissive view of early modern culture.

Historians such as Natalie Z. Davis and Carlo Ginzburg, who have worked from a similar understanding, have suggested that the religion of the people, whatever its relation to that of elites, provided for its adherents a complete religious experience. It was a cultural system that offered an entire range of religious satisfactions, meanings, and ways to order life.^[24] We need to remember, however, that although early modern culture was complete, it was not seamless. In our concern to correct the lopsided view of popular culture, we have sometimes leaned too heavily on a particular form of functionalism that overemphasized the culture's tendency toward equilibrium. Each element fit neatly into the whole and made its contribution to the smooth functioning of a "system."^[25] Early modern people certainly shared cultural practices

[23] Clark uses the interpretation of natural signs to show the "depth and enormous variety" of "popular mental resources" (ibid., p. 85).

[24] Davis, "Some Tasks and Themes," pp. 307-310; and Ginzburg, Cheese and Worms , pp. xiii-xxvi. See also Hoffman, Church and Community , pp. 3-4.

[25] O'Dea, Sociology of Religion , pp. 2-7. Although this description does not exactly characterize Geertz's model of religion as a cultural system, which has influenced historians such as Davis, Hoffman, and myself, it too stresses the overall coherency of a cultural system at the expense of explaining change or conflict within it.

that did function to provide them with a coherent understanding of reality.^[26] But their culture, like any other, also contained disagreements and tensions, experiences that posed questions for the system's operation and challenged it.

Cultural change issued from tensions at all social levels and disagreements among all groups, not simply from the acculturation of the lower orders by their social superiors.^[27] The current of change did not always flow from top to bottom. Certainly new religious conceptions often originated with ecclesiastical authorities, but the ideas promoted by reformers would never have taken hold if the laity had not accepted them.^[28] Change came from below in the form of numerous religious phenomena not promoted, and sometimes not even sanctioned, by authorities. The founding of new pilgrimage sites or the sudden increase of religious visions, such as happened not far from Grenoble in the southern Dauphiné during the second half of the seventeenth century, provide evidence of a creative impulse. Even if they were connected, in a complex way, to the Counter-Reformation, they came first and foremost from the religion of villagers. People at all social levels were continuously engaged in remaking culture to respond to social realities and to shape them. Hence, a new religious culture in villages could develop only out of a process in which both the clergy and villagers played dynamic roles. Even when villagers did so by accepting ideas from an elite, they modified or adapted those ideas for their own use. In order to describe accurately the nature of culture in early modern society, we must find a means of describing not two distinct camps, one active and one passive, but the more fluid situation of cultural change in which everyone borrowed, adapted, and, if need be, resisted, the contributions of others.

[26] I differ here somewhat from Clark, who denies the validity of functionalist interpretations because they describe rituals as fulfilling "needs which none of the performers could in principle have recognized as his own" (Clark, "French Historians," p. 91). Later chapters suggest that villagers could, in fact, recognize many such "needs." In the final analysis, probably neither early modern people nor we understand all the ramifications of our cultural systems. My disagreement with this functionalist interpretation concerns its stress on the cohesive force of culture rather than its possibilities for internal conflict.

[27] For an exchange on acculturation in early modern society, see Muchembled, "Lay Judges and the Acculturation of the Masses," and Jean Wirth, "Against the Acculturation Thesis," both in Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800 , ed. Kaspar yon Greyerz (London, 1984), pp. 56-78.

[28] On the active role of the laity, see Davis, "Some Tasks and Themes," p. 309; and Hoffman, Church and Community , p. 169.

A Different Approach to Early Modern Cultural Change

The partition of culture into halves proves troublesome because it creates an artificial boundary between artificial groups, and because it obscures the process of change. By using this model, we interpret early modern culture in our terms rather than in its own. But we cannot correct the problem by reverting to a view of a single, undifferentiated culture defined by the literate elite. What we need then is a more flexible and dynamic conception. We should describe this cultural interaction as a meeting in which all groups chose, adapted, and modified cultural conceptions.^[29] We must account for the collective creation of early modern culture by everyone but must also realize that it did not mean the same thing to everyone. Each symbol, practice, or belief could have different meanings for different people. In other words, the acts of creating meanings, and of adopting, adapting, or resisting those created by others, formed the culture of early modern people. Culture cannot be understood as a fixed entity that belonged to one group or another but must be seen as a continuous process. In any situation, this process could polarize into an encounter between just two opponents, a reforming bishop and a rural parish, for example. Or so it might appear to our eyes. We can, as a result, easily fall back into a description resembling the simple division between elite and popular. Such a bifurcated opposition is just the momentary outcome of a particular political circumstance, almost an optical illusion. Behind it the larger, more fluid process was always at work.

Religious change gives an example of the way this cultural palimpsest developed. First, we must note that all Catholics shared certain religious conceptions. They believed, for example, in the sacraments or the cult of saints. Yet the meanings imputed to these central conceptions could vary considerably in ways that cannot simply be divided into elite and popular. For a reformer like Bishop Le Camus, communion was one of the most important acts of Catholic worship, and the consecrated Host was an object to be treated with the utmost respect and

[29] On this point see the similar comments by David Hall, introduction, and Roger Chartier, "Culture and Appropriation," both in Understanding Popular Culture , ed. Steven Kaplan (New York, 1984), pp. 5-18, 229-253. See also Roger Chartier, introduction to The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France (Princeton, 1987), pp. 3-12. On religion more specifically, see Alphonse Dupront, the preface to M.-H. Froeschlé-Chopard, La religion populaire en Provence orientale au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1980), p. 23; Alain Lottin, "Contre-réforme et religion populaire," and M.-H. Froeschlé-Chopard, "Une définition de la religion populaire à travers les visites pastorales d'ancien régime," both in La religion populaire , ed. Guy Duboscq, Bernard Plongeron, and Daniel Robert (Paris, 1979), pp. 53-63, 185-192.

veneration. Villagers recognized the significance of communion but also saw the Host as an object imbued with divine power, which they could use for healing the sick or rescuing crops. Le Camus would not countenance such an understanding of the Eucharist's role. Here the division between elite and popular seems clear. But how are we to perceive the associates of Grenoble's chapter of the Company of the Blessed Sacrament—members of the urban patriciate and enforcers of Counter-Reformation piety—who recounted to each other the story of a miracle concerning the Host in the nearby village of Saint-Ismier? In 1658, a woman of the village left the parish church after communion with the wafer hidden in her breast, perhaps so that she could put it to some religious use of her own. Profanity was avoided when the wafer dropped to the floor, three times, and finally rolled back to the main altar and the priest.^[30] The attitude of the brethren of the Blessed Sacrament mixed the reformers' concern for the proper veneration and treatment of the Eucharist with a more popular desire to find a miracle that reinforced its status as the central object in Catholic worship. The incident happened before Le Camus's arrival in the diocese, but he would likely have considered it a very dubious miracle and would certainly have been appalled by the thought of the Host touching the floor. The point is that all involved shared a belief in the importance of the religious symbol but had different ideas about why it was important, on how that importance was to be demonstrated, and on how it was to be employed in the world. All shared the symbol but not each of its meanings.

Understanding the variety of meanings that the central core of beliefs, practices, and symbols could assume is one of several necessary steps in the explanation of cultural and religious change. We must describe, as fully as possible, the way in which the meanings—those that belonged only to village religion, those that were more universal, and those that belonged to various levels in between—combined to produce and reproduce culture. And we must recognize that the combination was not static but underwent constant change as people shared, adapted, and contested cultural meanings.

The second major component in the explanation of village cultural change is an examination of how the village cultural system actually operated or, more particularly, what role village religion had in the community. Was early modern religion an integrating agent in communal life? Did rituals counteract the conflicts that erupted from political

[30] Pierre-Henri Bordier relates this story in "La compagnie du Saint-Sacrement de Grenoble, 1652-1666," Travail d'études et de recherche (Université de Grenoble, 1970), p. 221. I thank the author for permitting me to consult his work.

or economic competition to restore a sense of community to their participants? Historians have frequently portrayed them this way. The mass emphasized the need to pray for kin, friends, and enemies and dramatized it in the pax.^[31] Processions displayed the community to itself in hierarchical order and organic unity.^[32] Confraternities and youth abbeys gave individuals structured roles to play in the religious and social life of their communities. Their charivaris, for instance, helped maintain community norms by mocking those who transgressed them.^[33] And above all, confession healed conflict by stressing the social as well as the spiritual dimension of sin and by exacting penances that entailed restitution.^[34]

Much evidence exists, therefore, to support interpretations of early modern religion as an agent of social integration. And approaching it in this way has produced compelling explanations of how religion functioned in communities. But they tell only half the story. Ritual could not smooth out all social conflict. In fact, religion also contributed to village tensions. It exacerbated conflict as well as healed it. For an example we can return to the mass. When the Church, fearful of the sexual implications of neighborly kissing in the pax, succeeded (during the fifteenth century) in substituting a board that parishioners kissed instead, the ritualistic implications of the ceremony changed. Rather than assuage communal conflict the new pax board provoked it, for quarrels erupted over who would go first—that most common of conflicts in the hierarchical society of medieval and early modern Europe.^[35] The reality of social life had asserted itself over the integrative force of the mass. Indeed the mass, in a sense, now fomented conflict.

Furthermore, interpretations that privilege the integrative power of religion have an incomplete view not only of religion but also of communities. These were not simply bodies in constant search of social

[31] John Bossy, "The Mass as a Social Institution, 1200-1700," Past and Present 100 (August 1983): 29-61. Bossy adds that despite the injunction to pray for one's enemies, the mass also contained ritualized means to wreak vengeance on them.

[32] Richard Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (New York, 1980), pp. 267-271, 339-340. Trexler also recognizes that while uniting the social body and providing psychological calm, processions could be manipulated by participants (see p. 271). His concern is with early modern urban society, but much of what he says pertains also to the rural world.

[33] On youth abbeys and charivaris see Natalie Z. Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1975), pp. 97-123; E. P. Thompson, "'Rough Music': Le charivari anglais," Annales: ESC 27 (1972): 285-312; and the essays in Jacques Le Goff and Jean-Claude Schmitt, eds., Le charivari (Paris, 1981). On confraternities, see A. N. Galpern, The Religions of the People in Sixteenth-Century Champagne (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), pp. 52-68; and Hoffman, Church and Community , pp. 59-63.

[34] Bossy, "Social History of Confession," pp. 24-27.

[35] Bossy, "The Mass," pp. 56-57.

equilibrium. Rather they were poised between the constantly competing demands of cohesion and familial ambition. Religion helped construct a sense of community and aided the villagers in playing out their contests for position and prestige. The interpretation of religion in early modern society must make room for this two-way interaction between religion and society. Communities contained tendencies toward both solidarity and the pursuit of family interests. The cultural system of early modern communities, namely religion with its symbols and their malleable meanings, shaped and was shaped by the attempt to balance the two.^[36] Religion expressed both the aspirations of communal unity and the realities of communal conflict.

The third component necessary for an interpretation of early modern cultural change is an analysis of the effect of political power on the process. It might, at first, seem the easiest component to define: in France, the monarchy, nobles, the Church, and urban notables had power; villagers did not. The powerful might not always have worked together, but the seventeenth-century French state and Church alike strove to enforce conformity, order, and obedience either through troops and tax collectors or through a newly reformed clergy and the manipulation of religious symbols. The question of who had power is, however, considerably more complex. Most people exercised and were objects of the exercise of power. The state and Church could array themselves against villagers, and the contest would by no means be equal. But power could also be exerted from the bottom up. We should not underestimate the capabilities of the "powerless." Villagers could resist, as they did in the many revolts of the seventeenth century. Less violent means of resistance were in fact probably more frequent, if less obvious to the historian.^[37] Villagers could find ways to manipulate those who sought to coerce them, reforming bishops for example.

Political power did not shape culture merely in the clash between the powerful and the less powerful. Cultural change resulted from alliances between different groups in the pursuit of interests they did not necessarily share. The impact of the Counter-Reformation depended not just on the power of reforming bishops to impose their concept of religion on their flocks but also on an alliance they established with parish elites. The bishops were interested in establishing their authority over communities while village notables wanted to cement their position within them. Catholic reformers, so interested in maintaining harmony in com-

[36] See discussion of religion's social and cultural role at the beginning of this chapter.

[37] On this topic see James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak (New Haven, 1985).

munities, actually aggravated social divisions. And just as the arrangement of political alliances between the Counter-Reformation and villagers was unexpected, so too was their timing. As we shall see below, village elites were often engaged in turning the opportunities presented by religious change to their own advantage long before reforming bishops arrived on the scene.

The Locale

The rural parishes of the diocese of Grenoble will furnish the site in which to examine the three components of cultural change at work, and an analysis of the evolution of saints' cults will provide the means. The location is good for a study of cultural change during the Counter-Reformation because the ecclesiastically sponsored reforms started there in such an abrupt manner with Bishop Le Camus's arrival in 1671. He was the diocese's first diligent Catholic reformer. His predecessors had been ineffective. And religious orders had little impact on the area.^[38] Despite its remoteness from Paris and the mountainous terrain that made communications difficult, the diocese was by no means isolated from major cultural currents or political developments. The Dauphiné had felt quite strongly the pull of monarchical centralization under Richelieu and Louis XIV.^[39] The city of Grenoble was a regional center with a considerable legal community attached to its Parlement and with its own group of dévots in the Company of the Blessed Sacrament. Furthermore, a major route to Italy cut through the region, making it a crossroads of northern French and Mediterranean cultures. The northern third of the diocese was not even French but part of the Duchy of Savoy. In fact, the bishopric was made up of a variety of areas with distinct topographies, historical backgrounds, and political structures. Towering alps may have surrounded the diocese's villagers, yet they were anything but closed off from the world.

For the historian, the diocese's most appealing aspect is its good supply of documents. Ecclesiastical records from the early seventeenth century are often fragmentary, but those from the second half of the century, especially during Le Camus's episcopate, are both plentiful and detailed. Numerous studies of early modern religious change have exploited similar documents—catechisms, synodal legislation, accounts of missions, spiritual writings, records of bishops' pastoral visits to

[38] They were engaged mostly in anti-Protestant missions elsewhere in the province.

[39] The most important example of this impact, the procès des tailles , will be discussed in chapter 1.

parishes—to describe the program of the Catholic reformers.^[40] This study will use them somewhat differently, examining them not so much for what they disclose about the Counter-Reformation but, instead, for what they reveal about local religious change. Pastoral visits, which describe certain aspects of local religious life, will be more important than, say, spiritual writings, which villagers rarely read.

Our understanding of the vitality of village religion can be easily undermined if we depend for our information on the writings of those who condemned it. We must do what we can to avoid adopting the outlook of religious reformers even while extracting from their work a clearer picture of village religion. Indeed concepts like village religion or village culture can be defined only in relation to a larger framework. Villages were never isolated from outside institutions or culture. The documents of reformers seeking to change village religion helped to structure the interchange between the community and the larger culture and therefore helped to construct village culture itself. In other words, village culture did not exist on its own but was always the product of an interaction between the village and the outside world.^[41] The contents of Church documents such as the records of pastoral visits can reveal much about the villagers' attitudes toward religious change despite the goals of the reformers who wrote them. Thus although this study seeks to diminish the role of a bishop like Le Camus as an agent of cultural change, it will emphasize his legacy to historians: the records of his pastoral visits to the parishes of his diocese.

In the final analysis, however, Church documents cannot present a full view of village life. They must be compared to records that come from the village. Such records are not plentiful for the seventeenth century, but they present what the Church documents cannot, a picture of the ways in which cultural and religious change transcended the efforts of the Counter-Reformation Church.

The most compelling reason for focusing on rural areas is that most people in early modern France lived in the countryside. If we do not examine their religious beliefs and practices, we cannot claim to know very much about early modern French culture. Since the diocese was overwhelmingly rural, it provides an excellent region in which to test ideas about the changes in village culture. By concentrating on rural areas, this study will complement the work of others who have written

[40] ee the diocesan studies listed in note 2 above.

[41] On the use of elite documents to study popular culture, see David Warren Sabean, Power in the Blood (Cambridge, 1984), p. 3.

on religious change in the city of Grenoble.^[42] The provincial capital will not be absent here, but it is important to the study as it affected the cultural life of its surrounding villages.

Village religion, then, will be the object of this study's attention. It is a more specific and useful concept than popular religion because it is not a neatly delimited entity separated from elite, or high, or universal religion. Rather village religion was simply the religion of those within the village community. It was the complex of ceremonies, beliefs, and customs in which villagers engaged. The term is not meant to suggest that all inhabitants of a village participated in the same activities, shared the same values, and derived the same meanings from religious symbols. But the religious lives of villagers were most immediate and intense within their communities. Here cultural change would be most apparent.

The next chapter begins the examination of village cultural and religious change by describing the diocese Bishop Le Camus would encounter in 1671. Its political divisions as well as its variety of languages, legal traditions, and local customs presented a formidable challenge to a reformer seeking to impose cultural uniformity. But two other obstacles were greater. First was the prelate's own misunderstanding of the character of village religion in the diocese. Where he could see only decay, indecency, and superstition, villagers saw creativity and vitality. Customary festivals along with new and old shrines and confrater-nities provided a rich religious life for the bishop's flock. Only the diocese's ecclesiastical institutions were decaying and its clergy was ineffective. They were the second great obstacle to the bishop's plans. The contrast between them and the largely independent religious lives of villagers was marked. The bishop would succeed in reinvigorating his priests and institutions. But his impact on the villagers and their religion would be less forceful.

Chapters 2 and 3 describe the encounter of the bishop and the villagers, the first in Le Camus's intentions toward his flock and the second in their response to him. During his pastoral visits, Le Camus brought his authority and moral stature to bear on rural parishes. He also realized, however, that to work his will he had to manipulate both village religious symbols and the social divisions within communities. He sought allies among village leaders attracted to his program because of the opportunity it offered them for social advancement and the dom-

[42] Kathryn Norberg, Rich and Poor in Grenoble, 1600-1814 (Berkeley, 1985); and Bordier, "La compagnie."

ination of their poorer neighbors. What the bishop did not realize is that as he was manipulating villagers, they were manipulating him. They made use of his authority sometimes to settle conflicts but also to advance their own positions. And they reinterpreted the symbols and religious conceptions he brought with him to suit their purposes. These chapters therefore explore the question of how the power each side exerted shaped the process of cultural change.

To examine cultural life at village level, we must overcome one considerable difficulty. Few villagers left written accounts of how they perceived their religion or culture. We must find other means to gain access to these perceptions. One method, pioneered by Gabriel Le Bras, has been to measure the level of participation in the sacraments.^[43] But since most people attended mass and took annual communion both before and after the Counter-Reformation, the approach reveals little about cultural change or the meaning people derived from these practices. Much more rewarding has been the use of wills to assess religiosity through charitable giving.^[44] They do a better job of assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the religious reform. A large and long series of testaments is necessary, however, and it is hard to come by in the countryside.

Pastoral visits provide another means of measuring rural religious change in the information they contain on the local cult of saints. Saints were important to reformers and their flocks alike. Of the great variety of cultural symbols that characterized village religion, none prove as fruitful or as accessible as the saints to whom villagers were devoted. Saints fulfilled a variety of functions and took on a variety of roles. They were protectors, patrons, friends, and teachers, symbols of communal unity and of familial standing. Social harmony and political order depended on the cult of saints. But so too did family honor and ambition. Reformers preferred to emphasize the saints' roles as teachers and exemplars of the proper spiritual and moral life. They promoted devotions that would encourage this interpretation of the cult. As religion changed, so did the saints whom people worshiped. Each variation of religious culture within the larger framework of Catholicism had a complex of saints' devotions unique to it, and individual saints could possess different meanings for those devoted to them. Whether people

[43] Gabriel Le Bras, Etudes de sociologie religieuse , 2 vols. (Paris, 1955); and the diocesan studies in note 2 above. One application of this approach is Jacques Toussaert, Le sentiment religieux en Flandre à la fin du moyen âge (Paris, 1963).

[44] Michel Vovelle, Piété baroque et déchristianisation en Provence au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1973); Pierre Chaunu, La mort à Paris aux XVIe, XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1978); and Norberg, Rich and Poor , esp. chaps. 6, 10.

adopted the meanings that the reformers intended is the concern of chapter 4.

By tracing the evolution of the cult, we can obtain a picture of changing religious sensibilities. Catholic reformers have provided us with a means and the documents to carry out the study; these are analyzed in chapter 5. The evolution of the cult of saints was visually evident in a village through the foundation and placement of chapels in the community's religious space. The texts of bishops' visits to parishes record in considerable detail the saints to whom chapels were devoted. The attention given to this information in the visits is an indication of the chapels' importance to religious authorities.

But pastoral visits also indicate the importance of chapels to villagers by noting their interest in founding new ones or in maintaining devotion to old ones. Villagers, despite the injunctions that reformers repeated in visit after visit, might continue to honor their customary saints in ways which authorities had condemned as indecent. Such devotional habits were a strong statement of the villagers' beliefs and, perhaps, rebuked those who promoted new concepts of religion.

As chapter 6 shows through a case study of one village, new devotions entered the pool from which a community or individuals chose saints to honor. To understand their decisions, we must examine the operation of the village cultural system or, more precisely, the way in which villagers used religion to construct their cultural system. The selection of saints depended on communal tradition, concurrent needs, the desires and ambitions of families, their contact with religious changes outside the community, and the influence of political as well as religious authorities. In other words, the array of saints honored in a village reflected and shaped, in the broadest sense, the village's society and culture. And this array changed constantly. We can trace the changes, assess the interplay of internal and external forces operating on the village, and thereby follow the workings of cultural change in rural society.

When seen as symbols of culture and cultural change, saints teach us about the subtle interplay between new ideas and traditions, between external demands and internal desire for stability and change, between the power of outsiders to govern villagers' lives and that of villagers to shape their own lives. Saints taught villagers how to live. They can teach us how villagers did live.

One
The Diocese of Grenoble in the Seventeenth Century

When Bishop Le Camus arrived in Grenoble in 1671, he saw not religious vitality but religious decay. He came from a world quite different from that of the people whose spiritual life he was now to direct. Le Camus was born into a Parisian family of the noblesse de robe in 1632. When he was ordained as a priest twenty-six years later, he obtained an almoner's post at the court. As Saint-Simon took pleasure in pointing out, Le Camus's life during the period he held this post was not entirely exemplary, but in the late 1660s, following the example of his friend and mentor Rancé, he underwent a personal conversion. To the austerity he learned from the abbot of La Trappe, Le Camus added an intellectual discipline gained from his association with the Oratory and a severity and rigor adopted from his close friends at Port-Royal.^[1] This background prepared him for the career of an activist Counter-Reformation bishop. But he was not prepared for what he was to face in the diocese of Grenoble.

The problems the Church faced in Grenoble were similar to those it faced elsewhere in France, but the diocese presented its particular difficulties. It was divided by geography, language, and even by national borders. Most of the diocese was located in the Dauphiné where the Parlement, the local nobility, and the major towns preserved the mem-

[1] See Paul Broutin, La réforme pastorale en France au XVIIe siècle (Tournai, 1956), 1:233; Godel, Le cardinal des rnontagnes , pp. 12-13, and for Saint-Simon's view of Le Camus, see Jean-Pierre Collinet, "Le cardinal Le Camus, épistolier," in Godel, ed., Le cardinal des montagnes , pp. 17-37.

ory of the province's autonomous medieval past under the dauphins and tried to defend the liberties promised them at the time of the transfer to France. But a large portion of the diocese belonged to the Duchy of Savoy and was ruled from Turin, not Versailles. Within the Dauphiné, natural obstacles compartmentalized regions, and diversity was further accentuated by the province's location at a crossroads between northern France and the Mediterranean world. In the south and east, Provençal dialects predominated. Villagers, whose rights in these areas of Roman law were fixed by written reconnaissances negotiated with their seigneurs once a century, participated in strong communal governments that sharpened their political skills and cultural ambitions. In the north, reconnaissances did not exist, seigneurs were thicker on the ground, and communal institutions were weaker.

The two regions also had different means of taxation, which led to different levels of social conflict. The 1579-1580 carnival in Romans and the peasant rebellion it accompanied revealed the extent to which the taille personnelle in the north exacerbated tension between villagers and tax-exempt nobles or city dwellers who bought land in rural communities.^[2] In the south the taille was réelle . The status of each piece of land as exempt (noble or church properties) or taxable (commoners' properties) was fixed in cadastres. Generally, very little land in this region was exempt; therefore, taxes were distributed in a more equitable manner than in the north.

The bloody repression of the uprising brought social calm to the Dauphiné but at the price of a loss of provincial autonomy. In 1628, Richelieu was able to use the long-running procès des tailles , originally initiated by the province's Third Estate against tax-exempt nobles, to suspend the provincial estates and set up bureaux d'élection for the apportionment of taxes. By 1634, the royal government was finally willing to accede to the Third Estates's requests that the taille be made réelle throughout the province. The Dauphiné's nobility lost not only their tax exemption on any lands they bought in the future but also their political bastion, the provincial estates, which would not meet again until 1788. Commoners gained a fairer division of the tax burden, but the victory was made hollow by the extent to which that burden grew

[2] On the carnival see Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Le carnaval de Romans (Paris, 1979). On the taxation system see Daniel Hickey, The Coming of French Absolutism (Toronto, 1986); L. S. Van Doren, "Civil War Taxation and the Foundations of Fiscal Absolutism," Proceedings of the Western Society for French History (December 1975): 35-53; Bernard Bligny ed., Histoire du Dauphiné (Toulouse, 1973), pp. 245-248; and the thèse of Bernard Bonnin, "La terre et les paysans en Dauphiné au XVIIe siècle" (Thèse d'état, Université de Lyon, 1980), pp. 149-155.

over the rest of the century.^[3] The growing weight of the state, both in the demands it made on the inhabitants of the Dauphiné and in the opportunities it offered them for social promotion and political power, gradually eroded the cultural differences between the north and south.^[4]

The line that divided the province's legal customs and fiscal systems also traced a linguistic boundary. Villagers to the south and east spoke Provençal, those to the north and west, Franco-provençal.^[5] But the contrast in patois did not represent a profound cleavage: the important linguistic difference was not geographical but social. Villagers had more in common with those who spoke differently but were at the same social level than they did with social superiors who spoke French. French was the language of the provincial elite, who used it in the law courts, in the institutions of government, in commercial transactions, and in their intellectual and social lives. In villages French made its appearance in a notary's legal formulae and in official documents demanding taxes or soldiers. Gradually French also became the language of village notables, the small group (rarely more than 10 percent of the village's families, though the number varies by region) composed of the wealthiest landowners and moneylenders. They dominated village politics and had wide contacts outside the community, contacts that permitted them to monopolize local official posts and made them the villagers most receptive to religious change.^[6]

The diocese of Grenoble lay astride not only the legal and linguistic divisions of the Dauphiné but its geographical divisions as well. It stretched from the low rolling hills of the Isère valley to some of the highest mountains in Europe. The bishopric was rugged, and travel within it was hazardous. Le Camus thought that it was the "roughest diocese in the world, filled with more precipices than any other." "One cannot," he wrote, "visit any parish without being in danger of falling into some abyss." Indeed, touring the diocese was so difficult, the prelate complained, that after a number of his traveling companions had

[3] For the history of the procès des tallies , see Hickey, Coming of French Absolutism .

[4] Jacques Chocheyras traces the process of cultural homogenization in an interesting study of medieval mystery plays. The urban-based productions of northern Dauphiné were tied to French theatrical traditions, while plays of southern towns and villages performed in Provençal followed the traditions of Provence and Italy. By the seventeenth century, the southern productions were also in French. The mystery plays declined because devotional practices were changing and because the triumph of French had undermined their connection to local cultural life (Le théâtre religieux en Dauphiné du moyen âge au XVIIIe siècle [Geneva, 1975]).

[5] Information on linguistic differences is taken from Bonnin, "Terre et paysans," pp. 77-79.

[6] Chapter 6 provides a more detailed village social analysis and discusses village notables.

The Diocese of Grenoble in the Seventeenth Century.

fallen into precipices during the first trip, he had trouble finding anyone to accompany him on the second.^[7] The records of his visits are filled with the difficulties encountered in traversing even short distances through snowfields, in fording mountain torrents, in climbing steep rocky paths that dropped off hundreds of feet into swiftly running streams, or merely in enduring the bitter weather. Small wonder that so few of his predecessors had made the effort to visit the diocese regularly.

The harshness of the topography discouraged much urbanization. Most of the Dauphiné's cities—Vienne, Valence, Romans—lay to the west.^[8] Grenoble was the single major French urban center within the

[7] Letters of 26 July 1672 and 25 April 1674, to Sébastien Camboust de Pontchateau, a member of the Port-Royal community and influential ambassador for the Jansenists, in Lettres de Le Camus, évêque et prince de Grenoble , ed. P. Ingold (Paris, 1892), pp. 63-64, 128-130.

[8] The seventeenth-century limits of the diocese discussed here differ considerably from the present boundaries, which include much of the old archdiocese of Vienne.

diocese, and it was at best a small city with a population of ten thousand at the end of the sixteenth century and twenty-two thousand at the end of the seventeenth.^[9] Still, this figure represented an impressive rate of increase for the remote provincial capital. In the ancien régime the city was becoming known for its textiles and leather products. But its role as a commercial center for the metal and textile industries located in nearby bourgs and rural areas was more significant.^[10]

Grenoble was the seat of the Parlement of the Dauphiné, the Chambre des comptes (separated from the Parlement in 1628), the Bailliage of the Grésivaudan, and a municipal court. The panoply of courts required a sizable number of legal officials. At the top were the great nobles who came from the most prestigious of Dauphinois families. And below them trailed a multitude of lawyers, bailiffs, secretaries, and other minor functionaries.^[11] Grenoble was also the home of officials, such as the intendants and the élus (tax collectors), who enforced the monarchy's growing hold on the Dauphiné. And as the last major city before the Savoyard frontier, it was a busy military headquarters. Seventeenth-century mountain villagers all too frequently witnessed French armies pouring through the Dauphiné's mountain passes headed for Savoy.

Chambéry, the only other city in the diocese, was a key administrative and ecclesiastical center for the Duchy of Savoy. The dukes had transferred their government to Turin in the sixteenth century, but they left the city with the Intendance governing the province, the Sénat, a counterpart to Grenoble's Parlement and home of its own independent-minded noblesse de robe , and a college of canons in the Sainte-Chapelle, a cathedral in all but name.^[12] The college, along with other prominent religious groups such as the Jesuits and the local penitential confrater-nities, caused Le Camus no end of trouble. He ran afoul of the Savoyards' sense of autonomy and their distrust of the French. The intrigues, which involved not only Le Camus and the Chambéry elite but also the royal court at Versailles and the ducal court at Turin, led eventually to accusations of Jansenism against the bishop. His authority was maintained as was that of his successors until 1779, when the Savoyard province became a separate diocese with Chambéry as its seat.^[13]

[9] Norberg, Rich and Poor , p. 14.

[10] Norberg, Rich and Poor , pp. 14-15; see also Pierre Léon, La naissance de la grande industrie en Dauphiné (Paris, 1954), 1:13-90.

[11] I follow Norberg (Rich and Poor , chap. 1), which contains more detail; see also Vital Chomel, ed., Histoire de Grenoble (Toulouse, 1976), chaps. 5-7.

[12] Jean Nicolas, La Savoie au 18e siècle , 2 vols. (Paris, 1978).

[13] For an overview of the conflict between Le Camus and Chambéry, see Jacques Lovie, "Le cardinal Le Camus et le décanat de Savoie," in Godel, ed., Le cardinal des rnontagnes , pp. 171-177. For specific aspects see Robert d'Apprieu, "Conflit religieux àChambéry (1673-1675)," and "Brebis indocile," Bulletin de l'Académie delphinale 4-5 (1965): 2-11 and (1966): 107-118; and Raoul Naz, "La premiA0232>re visite du cardinal Le Camus dans le décanat de Savoie," Mélanges d'histoire savoyarde 2 (1943): 31-63. The conflict also appears in Le Camus's correspondence with the court at Turin (Lettres , ed. Ingold; and Lettres inédites du cardinal Le Camus , ed. Claude Faure [Paris, 1933]).

Grenoble and Chambéry were the biggest towns that most inhabitants of the diocese knew. Their experience even with these cities might be limited to the occasional commercial expedition, the search for a servant's position (by women from nearby villages), or the lawsuit appealed to an urban court. Only the merchants of mountain villages or those who took up the military life ranged more widely. For the rest, contact with the diocese's bourgs was more frequent than encounters with cities. These towns were market centers and sometimes small industrial centers mostly nestled in or near the Isère valley. Tullins with five thousand communicants was by far the largest. Others, such as Vinay, textile-producing Voiron, or Pont-en-Royans (called "little Geneva" because of its Protestant population) did not pass two thousand.^[14] La Mure was the only town at the southern end of the diocese. It stood perched on hills in a coal-producing region, and it was a Huguenot center. The largest bourgs in the Savoyard part of the diocese were Montmélian, a military outpost, and Aix-les-Bains, where, Le Camus commented, numerous "personnes de qualité" were already coming to take the waters.^[15] In the eastern part of the diocese, Bourg-d'Oisans sat beneath the high alps of the Oisans where the Romanche tumbled out of its mountain gorges. It was an important center for the commercial activity of the alpine villages.

Aside from these few cities and towns, the people of the Grenoble diocese lived in small villages that rarely had more than three or four hundred inhabitants and often had far fewer. In the northwestern hills of the diocese, villages had access to both the Isère and the rolling terrain leading down to the Rhône valley. From here the border of the diocese cut directly south, joined the Isère north of Saint-Marcellin, and then followed the river to Saint-Just-de-Claix. To reach this point the Isère hooks around the northern edge of the massive walls of the Vercors, one of the remotest areas of the diocese. Its highest peaks reach only about two thousand meters, but the heavily forested steep slopes, narrow valleys, and small rushing streams prevented any major roads from probing the interior of this natural fortress. In winter many of its hamlets were practically inaccessible. Even hardy itinerant school-

[14] Pont-en-Royans stood on cliffs overlooking the Choranche at the western edge of the Vercors massif, but had fairly easy access to the larger river.

[15] Archives départementales de l'Isère (hereafter cited as ADI) 4G.272, p. 1436.

teachers could not penetrate such isolation. So it is not surprising that the Vercors had one of the lowest literacy rates in the Dauphiné.^[16]

At the northeastern corner of the Vercors, the Drac joins the Isère. Grenoble, facing the eastern wall of the Vercors, sits on the floodplain created by the two rivers. Here the Isère hooks again, this time around the southern edge of the Chartreuse. This area was much like the Vercors in its topography, in its lack of roads, and in the seclusion of its villages. On the eastern slopes, Grenoblois bought vineyards.^[17] But the interior of the massif provided the sort of solitude that attracted Saint Bruno when, at the end of the eleventh century, he established the Grande-Chartreuse. Perhaps nothing better attests to the isolation of the mountain villagers than their problems with a very restricted marriage market. Le Camus's pastoral visits contain numerous examples of parishioners asking for the bishop's dispensation to marry within the forbidden degrees of kinship. It was hard in this area to find a spouse who was not already kin.^[18] Still, even the villages of the massif's interior could at times be drawn harshly into the world of seventeenth-century France. In Sappey between 1672 and 1674, royal gardeners tore more than one hundred thousand young trees out of the community's forest for the gardens of the Tuileries. The loss ruined the forest and thereby the village's economy.^[19]

Further to the north was the décanat de Savoie, the Savoyard part of the diocese. From the Chartreuse the border extended north through Chambéry to Aix-les-Bains and on to the lac du Bourget. In the northeast it stretched along the Isère through Montmélian toward, but not to, Albertville, and then east-west along a jagged line from the river to the lake. This, too, was a mountainous region, and some of the interior

[16] This assessment is based on Bonnin's figures for peasants' ability to sign their names ("Terre et paysans," pp. 909-911). In Villard-de-Lans, the community Bonnin chooses for his sample of the Vercors, the literacy rate among male artisans rose from only 8 percent to 20 percent over the century, a marked improvement but still lower than in other areas of the Dauphiné Bonnin tests. In the same village the figures for other social groups were even worse; for instance, laboureurs and journaliers had a literacy rate of 11 percent as late as 1730.

[17] Bonnin, "Terre et paysans," pp. 501, 509.

[18] The bishop encountered this problem in all mountainous areas of the diocese, but most severely in the Chartreuse. Couples in Saint-Martin-du-Cornillon in the western Chartreuse squabbled over bread: wives who had come from the river valley were upset at finding themselves condemned to a life of eating only the poorest oat bread, for they had known better even in their impoverished homes. Few other young women would come up to marry the men of the mountains (ADI 4G.272, pp. 1032-1033).

[19] Or so the villagers complained to royal tax assessors (Raoul Blanchard, "Le haut Dauphiné à la fin du XVIIe siècle," Revue de géograpbie alpine [formerly Recueil des travaux de l'institut de géograpbie alpine ] 33 [1915]: 337-419). Even in the nineteenth century the Chartreuse symbolized isolation and backwardness in Balzac's Le médecin de campagne , for example.

villages were very remote, but Le Camus's visits do not generally describe a situation in which access was as difficult as in the Vercors or the Chartreuse.

From Grenoble the border of the diocese ran south along the wild Drac river to la Mure. This was also rough country, but the important route between Grenoble and Gap ran through its heart. The road gained its greatest fame when Napoleon, returning from exile, met his troops along it at the lac du Laffrey. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, travelers on the route included merchants transporting the region's coal, Protestant preachers who moved south, Protestant troops who moved north, and, much later, Catholics like Le Camus, who moved south to regain the area for the Church. Religious change, commercial exchange, and armies frequently followed the same paths.

Such was also the case at the easternmost end of the diocese, in the Oisans and Valbonnais. The topography of this region is the most dramatic of the diocese. Here peaks like la Meije and les Ecrins soar to practically four thousand meters and are separated by knife-edge gorges cut by streams rushing down from glaciers and high snowfields. The landscape is beautiful but barren, much of it above the tree line. One might expect little habitation in such a harsh terrain, but in fact the area was quite densely populated in the seventeenth century.^[20] Villages clung to mountainsides at altitudes of sixteen hundred to eighteen hundred meters. The population of each village could reach four or five hundred. The critical need to regulate use of land, water, and wood for this large population led to well-organized communal governments, which, with reconnaissances , had considerable autonomy from absent seigneurs such as the powerful Lesdiguières family.

One might also expect with so tortuous a terrain that the Oisans would experience an isolation if anything even greater than that of the Vercors and the Chartreuse. But here again, as with the southern part of the diocese, a route made the difference. The road ran along the Romanche river through the col du Lauteret, which marked the eastern edge of the diocese, down to Briançon, and then into Italy. It was a major route in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, used by preachers, itinerant workers, peddlers, merchants, and armies. The travelers on this road and the ideas they brought to the communities stretched along it made the lives of the Oisans people in many ways different from those of other mountain villagers. And those differences will be of considerable importance for understanding religious change in this area.

[20] Bonnin, "Terre et paysans," p. 81.

Religious Life in the Diocese Before Le Camus

Five months after Le Camus's arrival in Grenoble, he described his impressions of the city in a letter to his friend Pontchateau at Port-Royal. He decried the general ignorance of the population, the lives wasted in luxury, the debauched priests who were as bad as those in Italy, and the haughtiness of the Jesuits. Religious life consisted of nothing "except confraternities, indulgences, and congregations." The countryside was worse. "Can you believe that there are in this diocese entire villages where no one . . . has even heard of Jesus Christ?" After this expression of shock, he tempered his assessment. He recognized that in the city there were "each day a thousand communions and as many confessions" (although he did not necessarily favor frequent communion, which he felt was encouraged by lax Jesuits). In the countryside he found those who were "disposed to profit from the word of God because they have never abused the sacraments."^[21] The sorry state of Church institutions had led to ignorance and improper observances. But Le Camus was confident in his abilities and purpose. A conscientious, hard-working reformer could infuse his flock with the right spiritual attitudes. However, as his own description suggests, what he faced was not a religiously ignorant people but one with a rich religious life that had developed largely independent of an official Church that, in this diocese, had suffered a century of neglect and deterioration.^[22]

The problems stemmed from the Wars of Religion. The Dauphiné had been one of the main battlegrounds of the confessional conflict pitting Protestant forces led by François de Bonne, duke of Lesdiguières first against Catholics under the duke of Mayenne and later against the Ligue. Provincial life was completely disrupted.^[23] Eustache Piémond, a notary of the town of Saint-Antoine in the west of the province, recorded in his journal the daily toll exacted by rampaging troops, ravaging disease, wild price fluctuations, and the heavy taxes demanded by

[21] Lettres , ed. Ingold, pp. 55-57.

[22] The following summary draws on a number of works. Besides Norberg, Chomel, and Godel cited above, see also Bernard Bligny, ed., Le diocèse de Grenoble (Paris, 1979), chaps. 5-6; Bligny, ed., Histoire du Dauphiné , pp. 220-227, 295-304; the excellent article by Robert Avezou, "La vie religieuse en Dauphiné du XVIe au XVIIIe siècles," Procès-verbaux de la société dauphinoise d'ethnologie et d'archéologie (1955): 23-54; and the indispensable work by Bordier, "La compagnie."

[23] For accounts of the Wars of Religion in the Dauphiné, see Bligny, ed., Grenoble , chap. 5; Bligny, ed., Histoire du Dauphiné , chap. 9; Chomel, ed., Histoire de Grenoble , chap. 5; and Eugène Arnaud, Histoire des protestants du Dauphiné au XVIe, XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (1875-1876; reprint, Geneva, 1970), vol. 1.

both sides. The harsh climate, natural disasters, and frequent crop failures of those years only compounded the problem.^[24]

Piémond chronicled all these melancholy affairs, but he also described those interludes in the fighting during which people, especially his fellow Catholics, sought less violent ways to demonstrate the efficacy of their religion. He took great care to note the arrival of pilgrims in his town and the departure of his neighbors on pilgrimages and processions elsewhere. The abbey of Saint-Antoine with its collection of Saint Anthony's relics was part of a network of important regional shrines. Two of the oldest active shrines in the network (both renowned since the thirteenth century), Notre-Dame-de-Milin near the town of Burcin just beyond the northwestern corner of the diocese and Notre-Dame-de-Myans south of Chambéry in the deanery of Savoy, housed miracle-working statues of black Virgins.^[25] These shrines were rooted in medieval legends and modes of piety, but they continued to exert a considerable attraction in the seventeenth century. In the early 1630s during an outbreak of plague, the consuls of both Chambéry and Grenoble vowed pilgrimages to the black Virgin of Myans.^[26] Le Camus found many nearby parishes making annual processions to Myans in the 1670s.^[27]

By the 1670s, however, new Marian shrines had joined the network, and their popularity largely eclipsed that of the older sanctuaries. The first was Notre-Dame-de-l'Osier, which grew from a vision of a bleeding tree near the town of Vinay in the northwestern part of the diocese. The second was Notre-Dame-du-Laus near Gap at the southern edge of the province. This shrine had its origin in a shepherdess's visions of the Virgin in 1664. In each case ecclesiastical authorities moved in to control the shrine after the initial burst of local enthusiasm. Indeed, the complex interplay between village religion and that of the Counter-Reformation might explain why neither one had a miracle-working image. Reformers felt uneasy with such objects. The pilgrimage centers

[24] Eustache Piémond, Mémoires (1572-1608 ) (1885; reprint, Geneva, 1973).

[25] On Milin see Michel Berger, Notre-Darne-de-Milin, ou la bienheureuse Marie de Milin (Grenoble, 1876); and Michel Brechet, Notre-Darne-de-Milin: Burcin, Isère (Lyon, 1943). On Myans see H. Ferrand, "Histoire de la chute de Granier en 1248," Annuaire du club alpin français 9 (1882): 580-602. Black statues were a common representation of Mary in medieval shrines. According to legends, returning Crusaders founded both chapels. The eighth day of September, considered the middle of the year (mi-an ), was the festival for both shrines, which may have drawn their names from this fact. Myans gained its greatest fame in 1248, when a catastrophic rockslide from Mount Granier stopped at the chapel's door. The fall of the mountain on 24 or 25 November 1248 destroyed a number of villages and towns including that of Saint-André, the ecclesiastical center of the region containing perhaps 5,000 people.

[26] Ferrand, "Granier," p. 595, and Archives communales de Grenoble, BB112.

[27] ADI 4G.272, p. 1515. For further discussion of these processions see chapter 3.

were also caught up in other concerns of the Counter-Reformation. L'Osier, for example, provided a rallying point for the regional struggle against Protestantism. The shrines grew, however, out of the religious experiences of villagers and continued to meet the desire for direct and miraculous contact with divine power. They thereby attest to the creativeness of local village religion.^[28]

What was true for new shrines was true of religious life more generally during the first half of the seventeenth century. Religious vitality stemmed from the experiences of the people, not from the institutions of the Church. The clergy had a limited role in creating new centers of devotion or, for that matter, in directing any aspect of spiritual life. Busy shrines such as l'Osier and Laus displayed this point spectacularly, though most people could make the long pilgrimages to them only on the most extraordinary occasions.^[29] They constructed their religious lives closer to home with activities such as local processions.

Grenoble's consuls, for instance, led an annual procession to a chapel dedicated to Saint James in the neighboring parish of Echirolles. They claimed that the chapel contained relics of Saint James the Greater, though for centuries bishops had disputed the idea.^[30] To honor their protector Saint Gerald, the inhabitants of Auris-en-Oisans went in procession twice a year to his chapel perched on a mountain overlooking the village. Those of Clarafond in Savoy marched to a chapel dedicated to Saint Sebastian, thus fulfilling a vow made during a time of plague. Those of Rencurel in the Vercors, and of neighboring communities as well, made processions to the remote spot called Ecouges. Their goal was the site of a monastery that may, at one time, have contained the relics of Saint Hugh, but which had stood in ruins since at least the late fifteenth century.^[31]

Such examples could be multiplied many times, but they would still represent only a portion of parish processions. Others, to take one further example, were performed at rogation time in the spring when villagers marched around their communal boundaries to petition for divine help at a crucial stage of the agricultural cycle. The processions were also a ceremonial marking of a village's limits and a symbolic

[28] For a more detailed discussion of these shrines, see Luria, "Pilgrimage Shrines."

[29] One such occasion involved the village of Laval in the diocese of Grenoble and the shrine of Notre-Dame-du-Laus (Robert Chanaud, "Un cas de possession collective dans un village du diocèse de Grenoble," Acres du 105e congrès national des sociétés savantes, Caen: histoire moderne et contemporaine 1 (1980): 471-484.

[30] ADI 4G.272, p. 548; and Chomel, ed., Histoire de Grenoble , p. 102.

[31] ADI 4G.272, pp. 128 (Auris-en-Oisans), 1420 (Clarafond), 1194-1195 (Rencurel).

expression of its identity and unity. They could, however, provide occasions and ritualized opportunities for arguments over precedence, land, and livestock ownership. Thus they could easily spark disputes between communities and among the inhabitants of one community.^[32]

This multiplicity of meaning was inherent in all religious activities. So, too, was the ambivalent relationship they revealed between village religion and the clergy. Priests were essential for processions and other ceremonies. Villagers, however, did not always accept clerical direction, especially when the clergy seemed ineffectual or when the concerns of the Church conflicted with the uses to which villagers put their religion.^[33] Although compromises were possible both before and after Le Camus, tension over how to pursue religious activities was often apparent, and nowhere more so than in the organizations that dominated village religious life.

When Le Camus complained that "no one knows anything of religion except confraternities," he paid rueful homage to their importance and growth. New groups had multiplied rapidly in the diocese during the three-quarters of a century before his arrival. He appreciated that the blossoming of new confraternities revealed great devotion and zeal, but he feared that they would escape ecclesiastical control and therefore not display a proper Counter-Reformation spiritual style.^[34] In some parishes religious orders, not the laity, had founded or at least directed such groups. But for the bishop, given his harsh views on the behavior of local religious orders, their involvement only compounded the problem. In Moirans, the Rosary confraternity escaped the curé's control by being located in an Ursuline convent.^[35] In Domène, the monks of the local Cluniac house accompanied the members of the Rosary confraternity on the frequent processions that Le Camus disliked.^[36] He went so far as to prohibit Augustinians in the parish of Pontcharra from founding any confraternities.^[37] But in most parishes, evidence of clerical involvement in establishing or directing confraternities is lacking. It is likely that the parishioners took the initiative themselves. Few, for instance, could produce written episcopal permission for their groups on Le Camus's demand.^[38]

[32] William Christian describes the way rogation processions demonstrate both solidarity and divisiveness in Local Religion , pp. 118-120.

[33] This issue will be explored in later chapters.

[34] For his remarks on the devotion and zeal of new confraternities, see the visit of Rives, ADI 4G.272, p. 921.

[35] Ibid., p. 981.

[36] Ibid., pp. 564-573.

[37] Ibid., p. 441.

[38] Bernard Dompnier points out the role of Jesuits in founding penitents' groups at Vif and Sassenage in 1632, Capuchins in founding Confraternities of the Blessed Sacrament at Montmélian and la Chapelle-Blanche, and Recollets in estabhshing one at Grignon (no dates given) ("Confrères du Saint-Sacrement et pénitents dans le diocèse de Grenoble [XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles]," Actes du 108e congrès national des sociétés savantes, Grenoble: histoire moderne et contemporaine 1 [1983]: 275-293). These examples are only a handful of the new confraternities in the diocese; Dompnier does not investigate the numerous Rosary groups. Suggesting that villagers took the initiative does not preclude a role for the clergy; not enough evidence on the foundations exists for a definitive answer. But Dompnier suggests that the form of one group, Penitents of the Blessed Sacrament (a hybrid of the penitents and the Confraternities of the Blessed Sacrament), combined the intentions of clergy and laity (p. 288). Hoffman also finds lay initiative important in the founding of confraternities (Church and Community , p. 109). Andrew E. Barnes suggests that lay initiative particularly characterized devotional life in the second half of the sixteenth century, when there was "comparatively little clerical influence" ("Religious Anxiety and Devotional Change in Sixteenth-Century French Penitential Confraternities," The Sixteenth Century Journal 19, no. 3 [1988]: 389-405, esp. 391).

That villagers, not the clergy, took the leading role in founding new religious organizations should not be surprising once we remember that communal and confraternal life had at one time been indistinguishable. The numerous Holy Spirit confraternities in the diocese dated back to the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries, when they had provided villages with their first independent communal organizations, even preceding village assemblies. When the formal institutions of communal government took shape, the confraternities continued as a counterpart to them, undertaking social and charitable duties.^[39]

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these old confraternities came under attack from both secular and ecclesiastical quarters. A royal ordinance of 1561 demanded that their revenues be turned to educational projects in communities.^[40] But the ordinance was slow to take effect in southeastern France. Almost a century later, Bishop Pierre Scarron, during one of his infrequent pastoral visits of the diocese, found many Holy Spirit confraternities still in existence and ordered at least some of them to disband.^[41] Even his efforts had little impact. His successor, Le Camus, also ran across a good number of them, especially in the Isère valley stretching from Grenoble north into Savoy.^[42] Bishops worried about the competition these organizations might provide for newer, more acceptable confraternities; behind this uneasiness was dis-

[39] Félix Bernard, "Les confréries communales du Saint-Esprit, leurs lieux de ré-unions et leurs activités du Xe au XXe siècle dans la région Savoie-Dauphiné," Mémoires de l'Académie de Savoie (1963): 19-79; and Hoffman, Church and Community , pp. 59-60.

[40] Bligny, ed., Grenoble , p. 117.

[41] There are numerous examples in ADI 4G.269, visites pastorales 1623-1637. Hoffman finds Holy Spirit confraternities in the diocese of Lyon surviving into the eighteenth century (Church and Community , pp. 107-108).

[42] For the location of confraternities, see the important essay by Robert Chanaud, "Folklore et religion dans le diocèse de Grenoble à la fin du XVIIe siècle," in "Religion populaire," special edition of Le monde alpin et rhodanien 1-4 (1977): 42-48.

approval of their activities. Le Camus did not like the custom of the confrères in Saint-Ismier who carried a barrel of wine in their procession, nor that of their comrades in Corenc who consumed large quantities of wine during their periodic banquets. For the brothers of Saint-Ismier and Corenc, however, the bibulous sociability of confraternal life might have been the logical link for their religious, communal, and economic concerns since both villages were located in a wine-producing area. In fact, the Corenc confraternity drank wine made from grapes grown in the vineyard attached to its own chapel.^[43]

Nonetheless the bishops were correct in thinking that by the mid-seventeenth century, many Holy Spirit confraternities were in sorry shape. Most had little or no revenue, devotion, or sociability. They did not totally disappear, but the people of the diocese found new confraternities into which they could put their devotional and financial resources. The relations between the new organizations and the clergy reveal more clearly than the decaying Holy Spirit groups how both the changes in the larger Catholic culture and the desire of villagers to use their religion as they saw fit shaped the evolution of village religion. The conflict did not simply pit a reforming bishop against traditional, popular confraternities but was, rather, a struggle to control and direct new institutions and their meaning.^[44]

Penitential confraternities took over many of the spiritual and charitable aspects of Holy Spirit confraternal life and displaced the older groups as religious leaders in communities. But they had a different form of organization. Penitential associations spread through southern French cities in the sixteenth century, and in the seventeenth, they gained momentum in rural areas.^[45] By the arrival of Le Camus, many parishes in the diocese had one.^[46]

Local records indicate that women as well as men joined the penitential groups. That of la Mure, for instance, in the late 1620s included

[43] ADI 4G.272, pp. 747 (Saint-Ismier), 780 (Corenc). The Corenc confraternity demanded the payment of a barrel of wine, cheese, and 24 loaves of bread for the burials they performed.

[44] Later chapters discuss the interaction of confraternities and communities; the emphasis here is on that of confraternities and ecclesiastical authority.

[45] Andrew E. Barnes, "The Wars of Religion and the Origins of Reformed Confraternities of Penitents," Archives de sciences sociales des religions 64, no. 1 (July-September 1987): 117-136; Barnes, "Religious Anxiety." In 1583 Grenoblois nobles and robins (judges), following the example of Henry III, established an organization of flagellants under the title of Pénitents blancs de Notre-Dame-du-Gonfalon. It was a fertile recruiting ground for the local Catholic Ligue but did not survive Henry's reign (Bligny, ed., Grenoble , p. 117; and Auguste Prudhomme, Histoire de Grenoble [Grenoble, 1888], p. 406).

[46] See chapter 5 for further discussion of the penitents and their Blessed Sacrament devotion.

100 women and 170 men. In other towns and villages the proportions were similar.^[47] Both confrères and consœurs confessed and took communion each month, but women could not participate in the same public spiritual activities as men.^[48] The penitents constructed their spirituality around the adoration of the Eucharist, a devotion inherited from late medieval piety.^[49] The brothers made processions on Corpus Christi and accompanied the Blessed Sacrament when priests carried it to the homes of the sick. During Forty Hours' devotions, they took turns standing vigil through the night before the Blessed Sacrament displayed on the altars of their chapels.^[50]

Catholic reformers could certainly appreciate the penitents' adoration of the Blessed Sacrament as well as their diligence in confessing and taking communion. So, too, the reformers could approve of the con-fraternities' attempts to regulate their members' behavior. Penitents were to lead irreproachable lives. They were not to quarrel with one another nor to forget to give charity. They had to conduct themselves decorously during public religious ceremonies and to abstain from the raucous banqueting and drinking typical of medieval confraternities. They were, in short, to be a "holy community" existing within the larger village society.^[51] Nonetheless, seventeenth-century reforming bishops were unwilling to see the hooded confrères as allies. Le Camus thought that the penitents of his diocese did not live up to their own moral strictures. On visits to various parishes he ordered new regulations drawn up where old ones were no longer followed or where none had existed.^[52] And he frequently reminded penitents that those brothers who did not obey the ordinances were to be excluded from the confraternity.

Aside from occasional cases of drunkenness or a few public brawls

[47] J.J.-A. Pilot, "Notes et documents sur les confréries en Dauphiné," Bibliothèque municipale de Grenoble (hereafter cited as BMG) R.7906, no. 28, p. 4; E. Pilot de Thorey, "Notes sur quelques confréries du diocèse de Grenoble," BMG R.7906, no. 376; and the numerous examples in the pastoral visits of Scarron and Le Camus, ADI 4G.269 and 272.

[48] Ronald F. E. Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence (New York, 1982), pp. 209-217; and Hoffman, Church and Community , p. 38.

[49] On late medieval adoration of the Eucharist, see Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence , pp. 54-58, 118; Bob Scribner, "Cosmic Order and Daily Life," in Greyerz, ed., Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe , pp. 17-32, esp. 20, 23, 26; and John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400-1700 (Oxford, 1985), p. 74.

[50] On the Forty Hours' devotion, see Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood , pp. 229-234; and Keith P. Luria, "The Counter-Reformation and Popular Spirituality," in Worm Spirituality: An Encylopedic History of the Religious Quest vol. 18, ed. Louis Dupré and Don E. Saliers (New York: Crossroads Publishing, 1989), pp. 93-120.

[51] The phrase "holy community" is from Froeschlé-Chopard, Religion populaire , p. 312. See also Hoffman, Church and Community , p. 39.

[52] For one example, see the visit of Bourg-d'Oisans, ADI 4G.272, pp. 9-12.

involving penitents, Le Camus's visits actually reveal little evidence of the sort of "disorders" among the penitential groups that he had found among the older Holy Spirit confraternities. At issue in his criticism of the penitents was a basic disapproval of their religious practices and their position in the community. Like many reformers, he found the fervent, collective public devotion of the penitents difficult to police. Priests complained that the penitents drew people away from the parish mass by holding their services at the same time. Sixteenth-century penitents' regulations had sought to avoid the problem by directing the confrères to attend the parish mass even if they had first heard one in their own chapel.^[53] The complaints of seventeenth-century bishops suggest that the penitents were no longer doing so. Le Camus pointedly reminded the penitents of Bourg-d'Oisans that, at their establishment in 1638, they had promised to attend the parish mass rather than their own.^[54] Now they frequented mass only in their own chapel. To counteract such separatism, the bishop ordered penitents throughout the diocese to change the time of their ceremonies to an hour different from that of the parish mass.

Their processions, too, presented an alternative focus for parish religious life. The Jansenist-leaning prelate disapproved of the too frequent exposition and benediction of the Blessed Sacrament that accompanied the nighttime, torchlit processions performed by penitents disguised in their characteristic hoods and long robes. Other nocturnal observances also worried him, since they might provide occasions for social and sexual unruliness even if they involved an approved devotional exercise. When he found the penitents of Chambéry observing the Forty Hours' devotion, he insisted that they cease the vigil during the night hours.^[55]

Bishops labeled these practices profane, but for penitents they were a sign of reverence for the Blessed Sacrament. Within the contest for the control of local religious life, such activities allowed the penitents to flaunt their independence of clerical direction and their purity as a holy community. It was for this reason that they preferred to wear their robes even when attending the parish mass, another practice that Le Camus prohibited. Their intentions, however, encompassed more than the group. As the major organized spiritual activity for men in the parish, penitents provided local religious leadership. Their rituals thus

[53] Hoffman, Church and Community , p. 39.

[54] ADI 4G.272, p. 10.

[55] Ibid., p. 333.

made a claim for the autonomy of self-directed village religion as a whole.

The penitents consolidated their role as religious leaders of the community by supplanting older confraternities, not all of which were Holy Spirit groups. In Bourg-d'Oisans the penitents absorbed the Our Lady of Mount Carmel organization and took over the task of saying the masses that it had founded. They also sparked "contestations" with a Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament, established since "temps immemorial" in the parish, when they tried to take over the other confraternity's legacies.^[56] Le Camus intervened and ordered that the declining group's bequests be turned over to the parish rather than to the penitents.^[57]

By turning the revenues over to the community, the bishop attempted to strengthen the hand of those in the village most likely to be his allies—the notables who dominated the village assembly.^[58] The distinction between the two groups was not exact; members of the village elite were also likely penitents. The organization, however, was socially inclusive, including men and women from all ranks of the community. Clearly the wealthier men directed the confraternity, but in the group's meetings all the brothers had the right to deliberate, and they could challenge the leadership.^[59] The social distinctions among members were (at least symbolically) hidden by the hoods and robes they wore during ceremonies.^[60] Not every villager or townsperson was a penitent, but the confraternity did reflect the social composition of each community, and social heterogeneity reinforced the association's identification with all the inhabitants as well as the autonomy of their village religion from episcopal control.

Le Camus exhorted his curés to establish new Confraternities of the Blessed Sacrament.^[61] These organizations were more socially exclusive than the penitents'.^[62] They did not spread as widely in the diocese of Grenoble as they did elsewhere, for example in Provence.^[63] And, over

[56] The confraternity was, in fact, established in 1609 (Dompnier, "Confreres," p. 289).

[57] ADI 4G.272, p. 10.

[58] This issue receives further discussion in chapters 2, 3, and 6.

[59] Froeschlé-Chopard, Religion populaire , p. 314.

[60] Ibid., pp. 308-309.

[61] Recueil des ordonnances , pp. 252-253.

[62] Froeschlé-Chopard, Religion populaire , pp. 145, 221-251; Ferté, La vie religieuse , p. 366. Dompnier suggests that memberships ranged from 5 to 25 percent of a parish's communicants ("Confreres," p. 285); even at their largest number, they were more exclusive than penitents' organizations.

[63] Dompnier found only six (given the vagaries of indentification, the total might have been seventeen); he suspects they were more numerous at the end of the sixteenth century, but little evidence on their number or character exists from that period ("Confrères," pp. 280, 284, 288).

time, some of them may have succumbed to villagers' desires for a more open and sociable organization.^[64] Where they did survive, in the deanery of Savoy for instance, they provided a means for the local elite both to escape a common associational life with their poorer neighbors and to dominate parish religious life through alliance with the social, political, and religious authority that the bishop represented. The devotional life of the confrères of the Blessed Sacrament was more concentrated than that of the penitents on the parish church. But the pious brethren did not participate in parish religious life on equal terms with other villagers. The bishop hoped that they would serve instead as examples to the rest of the community.^[65] To do so they had to restrict themselves to the activities of which reformers approved: monthly confessions, visiting sick confrères , seeing to it that they were administered the sacraments, resolving any lawsuits or "inimitiez" between them, accompanying the bodies of deceased brethren to burial, and praying to God for the repose of their souls. Neither banquets nor processions joined the list.^[66]

The Confraternities of the Blessed Sacrament and the penitents shared a Counter-Reformation devotion to the Eucharist, but the organizations developed from different impulses. Through the confrater-nities, bishops could employ parish priests and village elites to oversee religious behavior. Penitents, by contrast, used the baroque spirituality of the Counter-Reformation, with its taste for display and collective activities, as an expression of communal religious devotion and vitality. Rosary confraternities were more numerous than either of the others and offered much to both sides. They provide the best example of how the religious creativeness of villagers could exploit even officially sponsored institutions for their own purposes.^[67] The Rosary was not a Counter-Reformation devotion. Confraternities dedicated to the Ro-

[64] Thus Dompnier describes how Confraternities of the Blessed Sacrament evolved into Penitents of the Blessed Sacrament, groups that combined the activities and spirituality of the confraternities and penitents (ibid., pp. 288-289).

[65] "The confraternity, for Le Camus, was to be nothing other than a grouping of the zealous faithful whose devotional activities should carry over to the rest of the parish" (ibid., p. 290).

[66] Recueil des ordonnances , p. 252.

[67] Rosary confraternities outnumbered other groups elsewhere as well (see, e.g., Pérouas, La Rochelle , p. 166). Chanaud counted sixty-one Rosary confraternities in the diocese at the end of the century, with twenty-nine groups each for Holy Spirit confraternities and Penitents of the Blessed Sacrament ("Folklore et religion," p. 46). However, the numbers of Rosary and Penitential groups seem low in comparison with those in the 1670s. Chapter 5 discusses the spread of these devotions.

sary existed in the late Middle Ages, and the cult received its greatest clerical impetus in 1571 when the Church chose the Rosary feast as the means of giving thanks for the victory of Lepanto.^[68] Dominicans were the Rosary's most ardent promoters, but although the Frères prêcheurs may have brought the devotion with them to Grenoble, they left little record of their having vigorously preached it in the countryside.^[69] Instead, the available evidence suggests that villagers took the initiative in founding the confraternities and in spreading the devotion.^[70]

Seventeenth-century Rosary confraternities, like those of the penitents, had large memberships that included men and women alike. By the eighteenth century, Rosary groups would be largely women's organizations, and the penitents would be men's.^[71] The separation of the sexes appealed to Catholic reformers, and they also valued the Rosary associations' emphasis on the individual recitation of prayers. This observance, they believed, would help inculcate the interiorized and abstract spirituality that the Counter-Reformation favored and would discourage flamboyant nighttime processions, services that interfered with the parish mass, and raucous banquets.

Furthermore, the Rosary devotion honored Mary, one of the Church's central cultic figures, and thereby promoted, along with decorous spirituality, church unity and authority. For many confrères and consœurs of the Rosary, the devotion offered a new way of demonstrating reverence for the most powerful of divine intermediaries.^[72] The widespread Rosary was, therefore, the seventeenth-century manifestation of the long-standing cult of the Virgin. For the members of her Rosary confraternities, the individual recitation of prayers—the official requirement of their organization—was insufficient. They engaged in collective activities to gain her favor. They celebrated the five annual Marian festivals: the Purification, the Annunciation, the Assumption,

[68] For a description of a fifteenth-century Rosary confraternity in Colmar, see J. C. Schmitt, "Apostolat mendiant et société," Annales: ESC 1 (January-February 1971): 83-104.

[69] For a discussion of the role of religious orders in the rural areas of the diocese, see below.

[70] See chapter 6 for the example of one community's Rosary confraternity. Several confraternities were housed in monasteries rather than parish churches, but documents do not always state whether monks founded the confraternity, as seems the case with the Rosary group in the Minimes' house in Tullins, or instead attracted one already established by offering to hear confessions and lead frequent processions, as seems the case in Domène (ADI 4G.272, pp. 902 [Tullins], 573 [Domène]). The comments in note 38 on Blessed Sacrament groups and regular clergy apply to the Rosary as well.

[71] This development is evident in Jean de Caulet's pastoral visit (ADI 4G.284). See also Dompnier, "Confreres," p. 282.

[72] Chapters 4 and 5 present more analysis of devotions such as the Rosary.

the Nativity, and the feast day of Our Lady of the Rosary. On the first Sunday of each month, they said masses and had the priest perform the exposition and benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, a practice to which Le Camus agreed, provided it did not occur more than once a month. On these days members of the confraternities went in procession through parishes, sometimes carrying statues of the Virgin with them. The Rosary organizations also took on funerary functions similar to those of other confraternities by burying deceased members and saying masses for their souls. The members made periodic processions around the cemetery—an act of particular importance in the cult of the dead—demonstrating the active membership of the departed in the group.^[73] Rosary confraternities, then, show how village religion could incorporate the abstract form of an observance favored by reformers into one that focused more directly on village life.

The spread of penitent and Rosary confraternities is one of the most striking indications of religious vitality in the diocese prior to the arrival of the official Counter-Reformation with Le Camus. They only begin, however, to reveal the richness of local associational life. The people of the diocese grouped themselves into many other religious organizations. Grenoble had the greatest array: in addition to its three penitent associations, it had the Agonisants, the devotees of the Holy Thorn, the Company of the Blessed Sacrament, the Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith, and three Jesuit congregations—each for a different social class.^[74] Chambéry had confraternities of the Rosary and of the Blessed Sacrament, as well as two penitent groups known by the color of their hoods as the Blacks and Whites. It also had a Holy Trinity confraternity and a group under the name of Our Lady of Suffrage, which said masses for souls in purgatory.^[75]

Smaller bourgs also had a variety of confraternities, such as those that honored Mary under vocables like Our Lady of the Carmes or Our

[73] Froeschlé-Chopard, Religion populaire , pp. 288-291.

[74] The "companies" and "congregations" were not, properly speaking, confrater-nities; they did not take on all aspects of confraternal life (e.g., funerals or processions). But they did group people together to promote a particular devotion or, in the case of the Company of the Holy Sacrament and the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, to fight against Protestantism. Thus they fit under the rubric of religious organizations. The Jesuit congregations included the Purification (founded in 1624) for "gens de qualité" and the Assomption (1628) for bourgeois Grenoblois; only in 1707 did the order open the Annonciation for artisans and workers (Godel, ed., Le cardinal , p. 164; Bligny, ed., Grenoble , p. 134). On the Jesuit congregations more generally, see Louis Châtellier, L'Europe des dévots (Paris, 1987).

[75] ADI 4G.272, pp. 1269-1296. The sisters of the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament looked after repentant prostitutes.

Lady of Mount Carmel.^[76] And they maintained groups devoted to craft saints. Tullins had the most: the drapers dedicated their confraternity to Saint Blaise, the weavers to Saint Bridget, the carpenters to Saint Joseph, the bakers to Saint Honoratus, the wool combers to Saint Paul (under the vocable of the Conversion of Saint Paul), the shoemakers to Saint Crispin, the merchants and blacksmiths to Saint Eligius, the hatters to Saints James and Christopher, the vine growers to Saint Vincent, and the pin makers to Saint Claude. Each group celebrated the feast of its saint with masses and a procession. Each also donated torches to the general processions of the parish and to accompany the Blessed Sacrament when it was carried through the town.^[77]

Even with such an extensive list, not everyone in Tullins belonged to a confraternity. Neither women nor the poorest men could join. But those men with property, and hence with civic identity, did, and their associations constituted the political community. Communal processions displayed the civic hierarchy arranged in its ranked order with the highest trades in front followed by the lowest (importance being decided by the traditional sense of a craft's nobility or by its economic weight in the town). They demonstrated not simply the unity of the community but the seeming harmony and immutability of its political order as well.

Villages never possessed such an array of confraternities. Hence we can discern one reason why the Holy Spirit, penitents, or Rosary groups—but not the Confraternities of the Blessed Sacrament—pro-vided the dominant form of religious organization in these communities. But villagers were not limited to confraternal activities as a way to use religion to construe the community in both its solidarities and tensions. They participated in a wide range of customs associated with healing or propitiating certain saints important to the whole community, celebrations surrounding the rites of passage, and ceremonies connected with the annual seasonal holidays. It is because reformers wanted to eliminate or modify many of these customs that we have some record of their existence. But in reformers' frequently repeated denunciations, we also have evidence of the persistence of such practices, the inextricability of what had become acceptable or unacceptable, and the contribution these activities made to the vitality of village religion.^[78]

[76] For Marian groups see, for instance, the parish of les Echelles (ibid., pp. 1020-1021).

[77] Ibid., p. 902.

[78] These practices and customs have drawn considerable attention from historians and folklorists. Out of the extensive literature (too long to present here) one might begin with Arnold van Gennep, Le folklore du Dauphiné (Isère) (Paris, 1932). Recent historical studies include Bercé, Fête et révolte ; Davis, Society and Culture ; Muchembled, Culture populaire ; see also Burke, Popular Culture .

Le Camus disliked, for instance, many of the practices attached to baptisms, marriages, and other rites of passage. He could not abide the shooting of guns to celebrate a wedding or the charivaris used to mock couples who transgressed communal norms by the matches they made. Nor did he care for many of the rituals associated with healing. He was suspicious of the miracles announced at sanctuaires à répit where parents prayed that stillborn children be revived long enough to receive baptism.^[79] He found it strange that the parishioners of Sassenage used stones from their waterfalls to cure illnesses of the eyes.^[80] And he forbade the use of church keys to cure rabies in dogs—a practice found in many areas.^[81] He ordered his curés to see to it that these "superstitions" and numerous others were abolished, though there is little evidence of his success.

So, too, he wanted priests to instruct their flocks in the "true" spiritual meaning of the festivals he referred to as vogues, brandons , and carnavals. Vogues were usually the fêtes of parish patron saints, and brandons were a part of the annual carnival celebrations.^[82] They could, however, refer to a variety of festivals, since the bishop was not always specific when he used the terms. Villagers commemorated the feasts of parish patrons and the days of other saints important to their community. When they went on processions to shrines, they carried saints' images, danced to the music of violins, and sometimes scuffled with villagers in processions coming from other parishes. Throughout France, reforming bishops mounted vigorous offensives against these festivals. In 1693 Bishop Le Peletier of Angers removed twenty-four fêtes from his diocesan calendar.^[83] In the same year, the number of official annual festivals in Autun shrank from ninety-six to seventy-seven.^[84] Le Camus engaged in little calendar cutting. His list of fêtes

[79] See, for example, his comments on the shrine at Tullins, ADI 4G.272, pp. 894-896.

[80] Ibid., p. 1112.

[81] Recueil des ordonnances , p.16

[82] Chanaud, "Folklore et religion," pp. 58-66. Chapter 3 presents a more detailed assessment of the clash over festive customs; here I emphasize their contribution to the vitality of village religion.

[83] René Lehoreau, Cérémonial de l'église d'Angers, 1692-1721 (Paris, n.d.), p. 127. A papal bull of 1642, Universa , set at thirty-four the number of obligatory fêtes from which each diocese elaborated its calendar (Schmitt, L'organisation ecclésiastique , p. 173).

[84] Schmitt, L'organisation ecclésiastique , p. 173. A royal edict of 1695 supported the bishop's attempts to reduce the number of festivals.

stood at about forty, more or less the same as on the late medieval calendar.^[85] Perhaps the bishop felt no need to attack a calendar that was already restrained by comparison with those of other French dioceses, but he repeatedly ordered the abolition of what he considered abusive practices on festivals.

Villagers had a somewhat different view of their festivals and rituals. A reformer looked at dances, carnival festivities, and nighttime processions and saw an immoral mixing of young people of both sexes; villagers saw important opportunities for courting and for establishing new families. Reformers looked at vogues and fêtes chômées (festivals on which parishioners did not work) and saw only times for idleness and unwarranted leisure; villagers saw days for celebration with their neighbors and reaffirmation of the importance of divine powers in their lives. And they could use the festivals to reemphasize not only village solidarity but also village rivalries. With them they could mark phases of the year, designate the boundaries of their communities, establish and maintain the norms by which they would live, and, periodically, "turn the world upside down" to criticize the social order even if they could not usually change it. Such beliefs and practices had a limited place, if any, in the religion of the Counter-Reformation, but a real and important place in that of villages. When Le Camus complained that in this diocese, "no one knows anything of religion," he failed to understand how knowledgeable villagers in fact were about their complex religion with its organizations, festivals, rituals, and customs. They understood that it was not their vital and richly textured religious life that was without effectiveness and meaning but rather the decayed and crumbling ecclesiastical structure of the Church.

The Church and the Clergy in the Diocese

The Wars of Religion, the harsh mountain climate, and neglect had left the Church's material condition in the diocese in a shambles, and all obstructed efforts toward reform.^[86] Many of the lands that had provided the revenues to finance Church functions were either uncultivated, subject to disputes over ownership, or lost. Décimateurs , those who owned the tithes of parishes and who were therefore obligated to

[85] On the medieval calendar, see Bligny, ed., Grenoble , p. 89; for Le Camus's, see his Recueil des ordonnances , pp. 302-304.

[86] For accounts of the Wars of Religion in the Dauphiné, see Bligny, ed., Grenoble , chap. 5; Bligny, ed., Histoire du Dauphiné , chap. 9; Chomel, ed., Histoire de Grenoble , chap. 5; and Arnaud, Histoire des protestants , vol. 1.

maintain church choirs, often failed to do so. Impoverished communities, heavily in debt from the religious wars, could not easily raise the funds necessary for refurbishing the naves and the ornaments. Possessing private family chapels, local nobles often refused to contribute their share. And patrons of parish chapels, whether nobles, village notables, or entire communities, let buildings and ornaments fall into ruin.^[87]

The demoralized and depleted clergy made the situation even bleaker. The problems started at the top. Grenoble's bishops during the first half of the seventeenth century were not equal to the task of reconstructing the Church in the diocese. The first two were high-ranking magistrates from prominent Dauphinois families who were quickly ordained for their episcopal appointments. François Fléhard, a former premier président of the Chambre des comptes, held the seat from 1575 to 1606 during the heat of the religious conflict and was deeply involved with the Ligue and political intrigue.^[88] Jean de la Croix de Chevriéres, who served from 1607 to 1619, had been premier président of the Parlement and took up religious life after becoming a widower at age fifty-two. He did strive to introduce Tridentine reforms into local synods but apparently took no major steps to carry the Counter-Reformation to the countryside.^[89] His successor and relative, Alphonse de la Croix de Chevriéres, served only a year.

In 1620 Pierre Scarron succeeded to the episcopal seat. He held it for forty-seven years, a long episcopate and one that for better or worse left its mark on diocesan administration for a major part of the century. Scarron has always suffered in comparison to his successor, Le Camus. The comparison may be unfair, but he was an ineffective reformer. He was most noted for speeches he made to Louis XIII during his early years as bishop, defending the three estates of the province against the encroachments of royal officers and revenue demands.^[90] He also loved to pontificate before the Parlement (in his role as honorary conseiller ) and before the provincial estates, where he once suffered the humilia-

[87] This abbreviated description is drawn from the works cited in note 22, esp. Bligny, ed., Grenoble , p. 122. See also incomplete pastoral visits from the period, ADI 4G.267-269.

[88] On Fléhard, see Avezou, "La vie religieuse," p. 23; Bligny, ed., Grenoble , p. 110; and the fragmentary pastoral visit of 1600, ADI 4G.267.

[89] We know of only one pastoral visit he performed, in 1609; even that tour was incomplete (Avezou, "La vie religieuse," p. 35; Bligny, ed., Grenoble , p. 110; and ADI 4G.267). On his role as a lawyer for the noblesse de robe in the procès des tailles , see Hickey, Coming of French Absolutism , p. 111.

[90] P. Scarron, Recueil des harangues faites par Messire Pierre Scarron, évêque et prince de Grenoble, conseiller du roy en ses conseils d'état et privé et président perpetuel des estats du Dauphiné (Paris, 1634), pp. 12-112. He gave these speeches on 26 November 1622, 14 February 1629, and 12 July 1632.

tion of forgetting his speech. As an administrator of the diocese he was, at best, inconsistent and, especially in his later years, preferred the solitude of the library in his country estate at Herbeys to the daily chores of the episcopal palace. His pastoral visits were infrequent and incomplete; he managed to visit only sixteen of the over three hundred parishes in the diocese in 1624, forty-four in 1637, and another twelve in 1652. He delegated his single complete visit, carried out between 1665 and 1667, to his vicaire-général , Joseph de la Poype Saint-Jullin.^[91] High absenteeism marked his synods. In addition, he mismanaged the funds and properties of the diocese and even his own personal residences, which Le Camus found in a state of disrepair. But Scarron did not totally neglect his duties. He organized retreats for ordinands in 1660, and in 1664 he tried to establish a seminary based on the revenues of the Notre-Dame-de-l'Osier shrine near Vinay.^[92]

Scarron might claim credit for the efflorescence of new religious orders in the towns of the diocese, but it was Grenoble's lay elite that generally took the initiative in founding the houses.^[93] The remarkable seventeenth-century growth of religious orders was constructed on meager medieval foundations. At the end of the Wars of Religion, Grenoble and its environs had fewer than ten religious establishments.^[94] But eighteen more had taken root within the city by 1666, and another four by the end of the century.^[95] The Franciscan orders were the first to arrive. The Recollets founded their Grenoble home in 1605 and then opened another within the diocese, at Bourg-d'Oisans, in 1654. The Capuchins followed by opening Grenoble houses in 1606 and 1611 and then pursued the fight against Protestantism south to la Mure in 1643. Grenoble was also one of the first places to receive Francis de Sales's and Jane de Chantal's groups. The Visitandines establishes themselves there in 1618 and opened a second house in 1648; the Bernadines arrived in 1624. The teaching order of the Ursulines opened its Grenoble house in 1607 and then moved to Tullins, Moirans, and Vif in the 1630s. The

[91] For Scarron's visits see ADI 4G.268-270. As with the records of earlier visits, their fragmentary state may owe more to the hazards of survival than to Scarron's failure to fulfill his duties. But there are no indications that he carried out more numerous or complete visits. This sketch comes largely from Bordier, "La compagnie," p. 119-131.

[92] The attempt involved him in legal battles, and the seminary did not outlast his episcopate (Bligny, ed., Grenoble , p. 140).

[93] Bernard Dompnier makes this point in showing that parlementaires were active in the foundation of Capuchin houses ("Activités et méthodes pastorales des capucins au XVIIe siècle, l'exemple grenoblois," Cahiers d'histoire 12 [1977]: 235, 237).

[94] The number depends on whether suburban houses, such as the Dominican convent at Montfleury or even the Grande-Chartreuse in its mountain isolation, are included.

[95] Pierre-Henri Bordier, "Le diocèse à l'arrivée de Le Camus," in Le cardinal des montagnes: Etienne Le Camus , ed. Jean Godel (Grenoble, 1974), pp. 163-170, esp. 165.

Dominicans set up a school in Grenoble in 1606. Their rival educators, the Jesuits, established a residence in the city in 1623. Numerous other orders followed these.^[96]

Because the city of Grenoble lacked a large secular clerical establishment—only three understaffed parishes to serve some 15,000 to 20,000 people—the regular clergy assumed a major role in the city's religious life.^[97] Their effect on the countryside is more difficult to assess. Scarron looked to new orders, especially the Jesuits and Capuchins, not only to propagate the faith among Protestants but to reinforce it among Catholics. It was for this reason that, in 1643 and 1645, he sought permission for the Capuchins to receive confessions in their houses, and he asked that the friars treat his entire diocese as a pays de mission.^[98] But Capuchin missionaries, and the Jesuits as well, concentrated their efforts in Protestant areas outside the diocese.^[99] Examples of missionary work by other groups are hard to find. The strongest missionary effort came with Le Camus, who promoted missions in conjunction with his pastoral visits. Despite his misgivings about the behavior of religious orders and the emotionally charged religiosity they encouraged, he used groups like the Capuchins to hear confessions, to regulate rural confraternities, and to preach Lenten sermons.^[100]

Hostility marked Le Camus's relations with some of the other orders. He had a running conflict with the Jesuits throughout the years of his episcopate. He felt that they challenged his authority, and they in turn accused him of Jansenism. Because of his contacts with Port-Royal, the bishop had some difficulty in extricating himself from this charge. The dispute eventually involved the courts of both Versailles and Turin (the Jesuits were particularly influential in Chambéry) as well as the Curia. In the end, he allowed the Jesuits little room to operate in his diocese.^[101]

[96] The Cistercian nuns, long entrenched near Grenoble in the abbey des Ayes, expanded to Voiron. The Annonciades célestes came to Grenoble and l'Albenc. The sisters of the Verbe incarné (who cared for poor girls) arrived, as did the hospital orders of the Pénitentes de Sainte-Madeleine, the brothers of Saint-Jean-de-Dieu, and the sisters of Saint-Augustin. During Le Camus's episcopate the number of teaching, hospital, and missionary orders continued to increase (list compiled from Bligny, ed., Grenoble , pp. 127-131; Avezou, "La vie religieuse," pp. 35-36; and Bordier, "La compagnie," pp. 102-110).

[97] Bligny, ed., Grenoble , p. 165; Norberg, Rich and Poor , pp. 16-17.

[98] Dompnier, "Activités et méthodes," p. 244.

[99] Such as in the Pragelas valley where Jesuits replaced Capuchins (Bordier, "La compagnie," p. 110).

[100] In his work on rural missions in the Dauphiné, Bernard Dompnier comes to similar conclusions for the diocese of Grenoble ("L'activité missionaire en Dauphiné au XVIIe siècle" (Doctorat de 3e cycle, Université de Paris I, 1981), pp. 240-278.

[101] Godel, ed., Le cardinal , pp. 91-121, 171-177. Le Camus's problems with Jesuits and accusations of Jansenism are recorded throughout his correspondence (Lettres , ed. Ingold, and Lettres inédites , ed. Faure).

But the older orders and houses provided the most serious pastoral problem. Many of the numerous priories that dotted the landscape were either defunct or close to it, sometimes surviving merely because they contained a couple of clerics living off the priory's land and fighting over its revenue. The spiritual influence of these houses on nearby parishes was nil, but their presence was still felt because of the interminable financial disputes they provoked.^[102] Convents also did little to promote spiritual life, sometimes because they were too busy directing social life. The old Dominican house at Montfleury near Grenoble was a home for the daughters of the city's elite families. The nuns ignored even the slightest hint of a cloistered existence. Instead they sponsored receptions and concerts for friends and relatives. Le Camus was shocked; however, he had to be circumspect in his actions because of the convent's ties to Grenoble's elite, a group that never warmed to the austere bishop. Even new houses could quickly leave their original aspirations behind. Such was the case with the Ursuline convent at Vif where the nuns accused their superior of being despotic, of carrying on love affairs with monks from nearby monasteries, and of using the convent's choir as a theater in which to stage productions of Tartuffe .^[103]

The worst of the regular clergy were those unattached to any house. Often exiles from other dioceses, they wandered the Grenoble bishopric searching for ecclesiastical posts. The example of the new shrine of Notre-Dame-de-l'Osier shows what happened when they obtained one.^[104] The heavily frequented shrine came under the control of two wayward "missionaries"—one a former Augustinian and the other a former Carmelite—soon after its foundation in the late 1650s. They used their position to amass a small fortune by charging exorbitant rates for their services, by stealing candles from the chapel for resale, and even possibly by counterfeiting. They also found time to harass women pilgrims, terrorize local villagers, and fight with soldiers in taverns. The contrast between the new shrine attracting pilgrims from

[102] Bligny, ed., Grenoble , pp. 77, 126-127. The priories were mostly Benedictine or Augustinian and often owned the tithes of nearby parishes.

[103] ADI 4G.272, p. 1055; Bligny, ed., Grenoble , p. 126; Jacques Solé, "La crise morale du clergé du diocèse," in Le cardinal des montagnes: Etienne Le Camus , ed. Jean Godel (Grenoble, 1974), pp. 179-209, esp. 200. Convent theatrical productions were not unusual and served spiritual as well as recreational purposes (Elissa Weaver, "Spiritual Fun: A Study of Sixteenth-Century Tuscan Convent Theater," in Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance , ed. Mary Beth Rose [Syracuse, 1986], pp. 173-205). A Catholic reformer would not have approved of this use of a church, especially given the specific play.

[104] Solé, "La crise morale," pp. 180-184.

thoughout the province and the two monks who, at least temporarily, were able to exploit it is at once a tribute to the vitality of religious life in the area and a sad comment on the condition of diocesan leadership and institutions.

The reliance of bishops, prior to Le Camus, on regular clergy to make up for the scarcity of good parish priests only underscores these weaknesses. The most basic problem facing parish priests in the first half of the seventeenth century was material insecurity. Those curés who had surrendered their incomes in favor of the portion congrue (which was supposed to be two hundred livres a year as of 1632) often had difficulty in getting the décimateurs to pay the full amount.^[105] The dilapidation of Church-owned buildings ensured that many did not have maisons curiales in which to live. Because of the negligence of episcopal administration, refugee priests expelled by other dioceses found posts in the diocese of Grenoble, further diluting the incomes of local clergy.^[106] Since clerical careers in the diocese offered no great attraction, the parish clergy suffered from a lack of good recruits.^[107]

Le Camus found a very troubled situation during his first visit. He took careful note of the parishioners' complaints about their curés through the first half of the parishes he toured. By that point he was so scandalized that he ceased recording this information in the procès-verbal of the visit and began a secret register, which has since been lost. After the visit Le Camus wrote to a friend that, of the approximately three hundred curés in the diocese, he had found only ten who were not corrupted.^[108] He exaggerated the problem, but not by much. Le Camus recorded information on 142 priests from both the eastern mountain areas and the larger river valleys of the diocese. Of these only about twenty received a good mention, and only eight passed inspection without reservation. Among the others the bishop found eighty-five cases of sexual misconduct ranging from concubinage through promiscuity to

[105] Bligny, ed., Grenoble , p. 123. The décimateurs were often members of the higher clergy or local priors.

[106] Bordier, "La compagnie," p. 97.

[107] Vital Chomel's study of ordinations (summarized in his chapter in Bligny, ed., Grenoble , pp. 112-115) reveals that from 1570 to 1579 fifty-five priests were ordained, seventy-nine from 1580 to 1589, eighty-one from 1590 to 1599, forty-nine from 1604 to 1609, and 104 from 1610 to 1619. But many joined religious orders rather than the corps of parish clergy. For instance, of the eighty-one men ordained in the 1590s approximately forty entered orders, twenty went to the Grande-Chartreuse, ten became Franciscans of various sorts, and another ten scattered among other groups.

[108] Letter cited in Avezou, "La vie religieuse," p. 26. For this section on the curés, I have relied on Solé, "La crise morale," and on the pastoral visit of 1672-1673, ADI 4G.272.

outright polygamy. Some of these priests consorted with women of "mauvaise vie." Others terrorized and raped younger women from their parishes. Sixty-six curés were "avaricious"; they overcharged for religious services such as marriages and funeral masses, or they had more enthusiasm for speculating in land and livestock than for their curial functions. Sixty priests were alcoholics. Numerous curés were too old or illiterate, or they spent too much time gambling, hunting, and socializing with the local Huguenots to perform their duties. Many absented themselves frequently from their parishes. Others stayed at home but alienated their flocks by acting as coqs de village or, in Le Camus's word, tartuffes . And some had no conception of what it meant to be a priest. When Le Camus arrived in the village of Engelas, he asked the curé if he had a New Testament. The priest replied no, and Le Camus showed him one. The man responded by saying that he had not even known that there was such a book. The secretary recording the visit was quick to add that these were the priest's exact words so that no one would fail to believe his account.^[109]

Although the situation may have been especially severe in the diocese of Grenoble, the problems of all parish clergy before the Counter-Reformation were essentially the same. Recent studies of other seventeenth-century dioceses have shown that reforming bishops found mediocre curés everywhere in France.^[110] But it is necessary to approach the criticisms of curés with caution and with a sense of the priests' position in rural society. Curés could be caught between several competing interests. Bishops wanted priests who shared their Counter-Reformation conceptions of religion, men who would be their representatives in parishes. Seigneurs might be interested in sheltering a friend and agent from the prelate's or parishioners' wrath. I have found only one case in which Le Camus suggested that villagers, from Autrans, were afraid to complain about their curé because a nobleman, the powerful duke of Lesdiguières, was protecting him.^[111] But it is certain that relations be-

[109] ADI 4G.272, pp. 153-169; Solé, "La crise morale," p. 195.

[110] The most complete studies of the parish clergy are Hoffman, Church and Community , chap. 2; and Robert Sauzet, Les visites pastorales dans le diocese de Chartres pendant la première moitie du XVIIe siècle (Rome, 1975), pp. 126-143. See also Pérouas, La Rochelle , pp. 196-205; Sauzet, Contre-réforme , pp. 91-93; Soulet, Traditions et réformes , pp. 56-57; and Ferté, La vie religieuse , pp. 170-186.

[111] ADI 4G.272, p. 1200. Sauzet notes that villagers in numerous Chartrain parishes uttered not a single complaint about their curés to the visitor even though the priests were eventually hauled before the diocesan court and imprisoned. Villagers were reticent, he suggests, because the priest intimidated them or had the local seigneur's protection or because parishioners colluded with the priest, perhaps in using tithe money to pay taxes. They might also have been suspicious of the visitor and might have differed with him about what was acceptable behavior in village life (Sauzet, Visites pastorales . . . Chartres , pp. 101-113).

tween priests and local nobles, even if they were Protestants, were often close.

And yet, as is evident from Le Camus's catalogue of complaints about curés, few parishes in the diocese were intimidated by either seigneur or priest. After all, a visitor's investigation of a curé could not proceed without the information provided by parishioners. Villagers had their own concerns regarding their pastor's behavior. They, too, had certain expectations about how he should conduct himself and perform his duties. Animosity between individual parishioners and curés may have led to accusations of sexual impropriety or financial duplicity. But the sheer volume of complaints suggests that more than personal grievance was at work. Parishioners and bishops alike expected priests to be able to perform all necessary religious functions: the mass, confession, marriage, baptisms, funerals, processions, and so forth. Bishops, however, stressed the curé's role as an instructor, spiritual guide, and moral policeman; parishioners looked for a willing clerical functionary who did not overcharge for his services in village ceremonies. When the priest could not meet these expectations because of age, illiteracy, or drunkenness, parishioners were as quick to criticize him as was a bishop. And when he transgressed community sexual norms through promiscuity, adultery, or rape, villagers needed little prompting to turn him over to a prelate's punishment.

We cannot, therefore, consider the accusations against curés merely the result of a new ideal of the priesthood propagated by the reformers. Before priests met the new strict standards of behavior set down by the Counter-Reformation Church, they had to meet the standards of their flocks. They had to live in the community in a manner that villagers found acceptable, and they had to ensure the functioning of village religion. The curés of the diocese of Grenoble could fulfill neither the expectations of their own parishioners nor those of their new bishop.^[112] Hampered by the personnel shortage, Le Camus could not levy sanctions against all the priests he found wanting. Still the turnover was impressive. After the first decade of Le Camus's episcopate, for example, in twenty-five parishes of the Chartreuse and Oisans, twenty had new curés.^[113] These seminary-trained priests would be more to their bishop's liking, but relations with parishioners may not have improved.

[112] One might have expected such complaints to surface during Saint-Jullin's visit in 1665, but the vicaire-général was concerned mostly with material conditions.

[113] Bligny, ed., Grenoble , p. 139.

The former curés had been incapable of discharging their functions in village religion; the new ones, imbued with the spirituality of the Counter-Reformation, would not always be willing to do so.^[114] They may have ended up more isolated from their flocks than their predecessors, or else they found allies among village notables interested in putting the new curès to their own uses.

Beyond the internal problems, reformers in the diocese of Grenoble perceived another obstacle to their plans—Protestantism. But in fact they greatly exaggerated the strength of the Huguenot community in the midseventeenth century.^[115] The proportion of Huguenots in the population of the diocese, never as large as that of the nearby diocese of Die, declined considerably over the course of the seventeenth century. Only about four thousand Protestants lived in the diocese of Grenoble in the 1670s, grouped mostly into four areas. The city of Grenoble had between four and five hundred; Pont-en-Royans at the far western edge of the diocese had about the same; another thousand lived at the southern edge of the diocese centered on the town of la Mure; and approximately fifteen hundred lived in the high mountains of the Oisans in the eastern part of the diocese. In these areas, Protestants might form the majority or even the entirety of a village's population. But overall, the Protestant population was falling. In the Grésivaudan valley north of Grenoble, for instance, several Huguenot communities totally disappeared during the 1660s and 1670s.^[116] Nevertheless, Catholics felt that Protestants represented a threat far beyond what their actual numbers warranted.

The two religious communities had lived in an uneasy coexistence during the early decades of the century. Huguenots were protected by the Chambre de l'Edit in the Parlement set up specifically to hear cases involving them. In mountain villages after the end of the religious wars, Protestants and Catholics achieved a modus vivendi, though a precarious one. The end of hostilities did not mean an end to disputes. The two sides argued over the obligation of all members of the community to contribute to the maintenance of the parish church, and rival cler-

[114] No study in this diocese has examined relations between the new priests, agents of the Counter-Reformation, and their parishioners as Hoffman has for Lyon. Drawing on lawsuits against new priests, he suggests that relations were troubled (Church and Community , chap. 5).

[115] The work of Eugène Arnaud provides the general outline of Protestant history in the province; Pierre Bolle, with his colleagues, gives us excellent in-depth studies of Dauphinois Protestant communities. Their concern is not the diocese of Grenoble but the communities of Mens-en-Trièves, Gap, and Die (Arnaud, Histoire des protestants ; Pierre Bolle, ed., Le protestantisme en Dauphiné au XVIIe siècle [Poët-Laval, 1983]).

[116] Pierre Bolle, "Le Camus et les protestants," pp. 145-148.

gymen held debates in some areas.^[117] After the 1640s, coexistence gave way to increasing tension. Pressure on Protestants to convert came in part from a series of edicts from the Parlement restricting their activities and from the work of Grenoble's Company of the Blessed Sacrament and Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith.^[118] The situation deteriorated steadily until the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, when the Huguenots were forced into conversion or into flight toward the Savoyard border. Those who were caught attempting to flee were thrown into Grenoble's prisons and their children were abducted into the orphanage run by the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith.^[119] Le Camus employed both encouragement and coercion to gain conversions, and he reported huge successes in the immediate aftermath of the edict's revocation. By the 1690s, he realized how limited these successes were: the Catholic campaign never eliminated Protestantism but instead drove it underground until the next century. A more complete examination of the Protestants in the diocese would require a separate study, but they will not be absent here. They will appear mostly as they affected the concerns of reformers, changes in the cult of saints, and the life of the case-study community.

This, then, was the diocese Le Camus set out to visit and to change in 1672. It had a rough landscape and bitter climate. Some villages were isolated and others more open to the world. The bishop inherited a troubled institution, but he faced rural parishes with lively religious lives. In each village, religion provided the means for people to manipulate a difficult environment and to shape their social world. Through its beliefs and practices, villagers could construct their relations both with divine powers and their neighbors. Village religion also helped them adapt to pressures from the outside. The Counter-Reformation was one such, and its impact depended in large part on the villagers' desire to alter their relations with one another and with the world outside the village.

[117] See chapter 6.

[118] For a discussion of the midcentury increase in tension, see Avezou, "La vie religieuse," p. 40. On the anti-Protestant campaign, see Norberg, Rich and Poor , chaps. 3-4.

[119] Norberg, Rich and Poor , p. 76.

Two
The Bishop and His Pastoral Visits

When Le Camus left Grenoble on his first visit of the diocese in June of 1672, he entered a world that was in some ways as foreign to him as the strange lands other European explorers and missionaries encountered during this period. Certainly the foreignness of his new diocese was much on his mind. In a letter to Pontchateau, Le Camus compared it to China, telling his friend that anyone who wanted to do missionary work in China need go no further than the diocese of Grenoble.^[1] In another letter the bishop referred to his new territory as a pays de conquête , albeit not one that he could take by storm, but rather one in which he had to insinuate himself through persuasion.^[2] Eventually Le Camus came to feel at home among the rocks and precipices of his diocese. He thought that he had begun to resemble its hard landscape, and he resigned himself to making the Alps his tomb.^[3] But in the first years of his episcopate, many of Le Camus's letters spoke of his isolation from his friends and from the urban and court life he had known in Paris.

[1] Letter to Pontchateau of 5 February 1673 in Lettres , ed. Ingold, p. 75. Dominique Julia points out that contemporary pastoral visits often describe rural people as "sauvages" like those in accounts of overseas voyages ("La réforme posttridentine en France d'apres^[*] les procès-verbaux de visites pastorales," in La società religiosa nell'eta moderna [Naples, 1973], pp. 311-415, esp. 388). Reformers frequently compared their flocks to those of overseas missionaries (Burke, Popular Culture , p. 208).

[2] Letter to Pontchateau of 9 September 1673 in Lettres , ed. Ingold, p. 100. In this letter he refers specifically to the Savoyard part of the diocese.

[3] Letters to Pontchateau of 26 July 1672 and 2 April 1675 in Lettres , ed. Ingold, pp. 63, 197.

If the land and people seemed strange to Le Camus, he must have seemed no less strange to his flock. After all, nearly two hundred years had passed since Laurent Allemand had carried out the last really complete episcopal visit of the diocese in 1488. The remote villagers were acquainted with lower-ranking ecclesiastical officials, and they knew royal tax and military officers all too well. None of these authorities, however, undertook the task of "reforming" the religious, and therefore the cultural, basis of village life. A bishop's presence in these communities, especially when he was a committed reformer, had a particular impact. The encounter of the bishop and his flock would be open to the misconceptions and unrealistic expectations possible in any meeting of strangers, but it would also contain prospects for both sides.

The bishop set out resolutely to impose on villagers his style of religious practice, his understanding of doctrine, his standard of social behavior, and, above all, his control. He employed a number of pedagogical tools toward this end, such as new catechisms, sermons, and the village petites écoles.^[4] Chief among these tools were the periodic visits the bishop made to each parish in the diocese. Pastoral visits allowed a reformer to investigate parishioners and to order correction of their ways. The commitment of Counter-Reformation prelates to pastoral visits has provided numerous historians with detailed information on village religion and social life. But few have understood that the visits were also a ritual. This point does not imply that the reformers weakened their own efforts by routinizing them with standardized words and gestures. Rather they recognized the importance of adding significance to their actions by ritualizing them, and they understood the value, indeed the necessity, of communicating their conception of religion with ceremonies that would educate through the manipulation of religious symbols. They did not seek to deceremonialize religious practice, but they did demand new rituals for old. The new rituals would emphasize less the collective, public aspects of village religion and more the individualized, interiorized character of Counter-Reformation piety. To understand the politics of the encounter between reformers and villagers and the pressure reformers could bring to bear on villagers, we must

[4] Gerald Strauss sees similar tools used by Lutherans as instruments of (unsuccessful) indoctrination; Robert Muchembled thinks of them as a means of acculturation (Gerald Strauss, Luther's House of Learning [Baltimore, 1978]; and Muchembled, Culture populaire ). These views have elements of both truth and overstatement. The Catholic reformers saw their task as educational; better instruction would make people better Christians. That is why I use the educational metaphor. But their perception hardly precludes less benign interpretations; better instruction would produce more malleable and obedient Christians as well.

interpret the rituals that bishops like Le Camus employed and encouraged.^[5]

The marshaling of rituals to construct village culture and its politics was not one-sided, however (as chapter 3 will demonstrate). The villagers had their own rituals and their own reasons for retaining, altering, or discarding them. They too invested certain ceremonies and other activities with significance. They did not reject out of hand the rituals of the Counter-Reformation, or the understanding of religion that those rituals sought to instill. But they did use them for their own purposes, as they had done long before Le Camus and the official Counter-Reformation arrived on the scene. The bishop's office gave him a particular status among his flock, one that commanded respect though not necessarily complete obedience. Le Camus's position also gave the villagers the opportunity to utilize his religious conceptions and practices to do what they always did, namely construct their own religious lives and negotiate through rituals their social and political relationships within and beyond the village. And, in an ironic twist, they found they could make use not only of the bishop's ideas and practices but of the bishop himself. Villagers would incorporate him and his ideas into their concerns for salvation, earthly betterment, political struggles, and sociability.

The bishop's intentions are clear in his rituals and also in the purpose and language of his visits. On visits a bishop examined the competency and dedication of curés. During his stay in a community, the visitor asked parishioners (or at least the most prominent ones) if the priest performed his duties exactly and if he led an upright life. In turn, he questioned the priest about the parishioners. Did they conscientiously partake of all the sacraments and attend mass and the curé's instructional sermons? Did they also lead proper lives: were they spending Sundays in the "cabaret" rather than in church, were they feuding, were they in conflict with their spouses, were they engaging in illicit sexual activities? Proper social behavior was as much a religious responsibility as taking annual communion. And enforcing proper social behavior was essential for bishops who wanted to ensure what they would call "peace," or what we might interpret as order, in the parishes of their dioceses.

Thus a pastoral visit was much more than an exploration of parish

[5] In this chapter and the next I might seem to conflate the concepts of ritual and custom, which are not necessarily the same. I would argue that the Catholic reformers' program to transform behavior and meaning in village religion made ritual, ceremony, and custom inextricable.

life. It was an instrument of social and religious change; it was a method of introducing new ideas, suppressing old practices, and, above all, imposing a bishop's authority and discipline on his flock. It had none of the openness that the term exploration implies. The descriptive language of the texts, usually composed after the visits from notes taken during the tour, relates the thinking of a reformer who wanted to uncover and suppress abuses. The visitor saw what he was disposed to see.^[6] The questions he asked were designed to elicit information about predetermined issues—certain faults of the clergy, specific shortcomings of the populace. Since a visitor came looking for abuses to condemn, he could hardly fail to find them. Villagers' religious activities were almost always "indecent" or "superstitious" as a result of ignorance. In fact, a reformer could see in the religion of villagers nothing other than a collection of errors precisely because the people were uninstructed.^[7] Their social life reflected their ignorance. Le Camus sometimes depicted his flock as awash in immorality. Mountain people especially seemed quick-tempered and prone to violence. In his early years in the diocese, however, like a Rousseau avant la lettre , the bishop more frequently relied on other stereotypes that made isolated villagers virtuous and gentle.^[8]

Le Camus would have difficulty overcoming his preconceived notions about rural life because he had close dealings with only a small proportion of the population. The rest participated mostly as spectators and as recipients of confirmation. He spoke at length with few villagers, and they were of the communities' elite.^[9] These principaux habitants

[6] Even describing the most mundane aspects of the tour, Le Camus used stereotyped phrases. The mountains, which we might consider beautiful and majestic, were "préci-pices affreux," certainly true for a seventeenth-century traveler but an echo of clichés in the writings of other mountain bishops like Francis de Sales and Jean d'Arenthon, and in those of their contemporaries like Mme de Sévigné (see the comments of Armogathe, Devos, and Duchêne in Godel, ed., Le cardinal , pp. 260-261).

[7] The reformers' perception of village religion was obstructed also by their attitude toward the peasants, whom reformers frequently compared with dumb animals. One prelate claimed that they contracted animality (like a disease) by living close to livestock (cited in Dominique Julia, "Discipline ecclésiastique et culture paysanne aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles," in La religion populaire , ed. Guy Duboscq, Bernard Plongeron, and Daniel Robert [Paris, 1979], pp. 208-209).

[8] See the letter to Pontchateau of 25 April 1674 for such a description (Lettres , ed. Ingold, p. 129). Thus he labeled the people of the parish of Saint-Christophle-en-Oisans, where isolation and poverty had combined to keep the villagers virtuous. By the end of the 1670s, a good curé had also made them "très bien instruits" (ADI 4G.272 [1672], p. 49; 4G.273 [1677-1678], pp. 560-561). Off the main road through the Oisans that followed the Romanche river, this village lay in the remote area along the Vénéon and had no sure road to the rest of the region until the nineteenth century.

[9] This point is evident in the texts of the visits. Ruchier, the curé of Bourg-d'Oisans, also stated, in a mémoire , that for reports on religious life the bishop called on the priests, clerics, and "principaux habitants du lieu" and gave his subsequent orders to Ruchier and to the "officiers et principaux de la communauté" (ADI 4G.199 [1727]).

were often obstinate and independent-minded people. Nonetheless, they were the ones most likely to be well disposed toward the bishop and interested in what he had to offer.^[10]

Le Camus retained his idyllic view for a long time. Only after the disappointments of three decades of work set in, especially the failure to convert the Protestants, did his opinion of his flock begin to sour. The people of the diocese were gentle as long as the bishop perceived them as pliant. Like his colleagues elsewhere in France, he viewed obstinacy or persistent reluctance to fulfill his orders as rebellion. Still, he was slow to anger. If parishioners did not meet his demand for a refurbished church, for example, he attributed their negligence to poverty, not obstinacy. But eventually his charity gave way to exasperation. Once his flock proved stubborn in defending their traditions, they became rebels to be crushed. In reacting to a challenge from a priest in Chambéry, he wrote that not only was punishment required for the cleric, but a "just fear" (une juste crainte ) had to be imprinted on the minds of others. If not, the trouble would grow into open revolt.^[11] Even if people were not rebellious, they were still children who had to be taught obedience and discipline. Direct action by a reformer visiting a parish would be the most effective way.

It is for this reason that the procès-verbaux of the visits have been called "the archives of a repression."^[12] It would be more accurate to say, however, that they are the archives of an attempted repression because the bishop recorded, albeit unknowingly, not just his efforts to change the character of village religion but also the villagers' responses to those efforts. The responses are revealed mostly in the documents' interstices. The parishioners' frequent failure to carry out the visitor's orders suggests their resistance to his program. So, too, do the visits' repeated condemnations of particular practices. Each procession held after Le Camus insisted it stop, each "sacrilegious" statute or image still standing on a church altar after he ordered it removed, each vogue or charivari staged although he regulated against such customs—each act testifies that villagers continued to shape their own religious lives.

The visits have more than information and counterinformation on local religious life. They are also marked by significant silences. There is the silence of incomprehension, of clerics who could not record any-

[10] This point receives further discussion in chapters 3 and 6.

[11] See the letters to the duke of Savoy of 16 January and 7 February 1672 in Lettres inédites , ed. Faure, pp. 39-41, 48-50.

[12] Julia, "La réforme," p. 329.

thing that did not meet their expectations or who preferred not to see anything that contradicted their views.^[13] There is the silence of resentment, of villagers who preferred to guard their ways from the prying eyes of reformers. These silences cannot be reliably interpreted, for we do not know if visitors found nothing to record or if villagers concealed unapproved activities. The systematic study of chapel dedications (in chapter 5) helps to overcome the misrepresentations of villagers as well as the rhetoric of the Counter-Reformation. Nevertheless, although pastoral visits can bring us closer than any other document to both village religious life and the encounter between bishop and villagers, we must acknowledge those stubborn silences that elude our comprehension.

Pastoral Visits

Le Camus's reforming efforts were varied, but he directed most of his energies into pastoral visits. Complete episcopal tours in this region were a rarity. Some of his predecessors had visited parts of the diocese: Scarron's last attempt had been in 1637, some thirty-four years before Le Camus's arrival. After that Scarron's deputies had visited twelve out of the approximately three hundred parishes in 1652, and his vicar-general, Joseph de la Poype Saint-Jullin, conducted a more or less complete tour between 1665 and 1667. Le Camus, by contrast, was almost always on the move. During the thirty-six years of his episcopate, he completed eleven visits and was in the midst of his twelfth when he died.^[14] Admittedly, not all these visits were equally rigorous in their investigation of the diocese. The first five, performed between 1672 and 1683, delved most deeply into the religious and social conditions of rural parishes. The sixth, conducted in 1685, gathered much information on the Protestants of the diocese and the aftermath of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The visits of the 1690s collected less detail. Age was catching up with the once energetic prelate. He could not climb

[13] Strauss suggests that Lutheran visitors were overly optimistic about their efforts, even if the evidence was to the contrary (Luther's House , pp. 263-264). The same could be said of Catholic visitors.

[14] Such feats were not unique. Alain de Solminihac, bishop of Cahors, made nine visits of a much larger diocese in thirteen years; in Besançon, a diocese more than twice the size of Grenoble, Pierre de Grammont finished four in three years (Delumeau, Le catholicisme , p. 84; Schmitt, L'organisation ecclésiastique , p. 32). Broutin includes Le Camus among the numerous seventeenth-century French bishops who devoted themselves to visits but reserves the title of "hero of pastoral visits" for Jean d'Arenthon d'Alex of Annecy. Such heroic activity accords with the militant style of the Counter-Reformation and is celebrated in its historiography and hagiography. Counterparts are the many Counter-Reformation figures who became saints: missionaries like Francis Xavier, charitable workers like Vincent de Paul, or mystics like Theresa of Avila.

the steep paths to the mountain villages any more, and had instead to station himself in nearby bourgs and receive reports from the curés and parishioners of the remote communities. Still, he remained aware of the general tenor of life in the diocese. In his last two decades he was, for example, constantly preoccupied with the failure of efforts to bring the nouveaux convertis fully into the Catholic fold. He also took great pains during the eighth tour to record the deleterious local effects of the war of the League of Augsburg. And he never failed to reprimand the clergy or parishioners for their faults. It is because of this constant effort that we have sources that enable us to assess both the bishop's impact on the diocese and the villagers' response to him.

Episcopal visits have, in recent years, attracted a good deal of attention as sources for the religious and social history of early modern Europe, but they were hardly new in the Counter-Reformation.^[15] From its origins in the apostolic period, the visit was used both to teach the faithful and to prohibit unwanted practices.^[16] A visitor had always been expected to reform morals and to punish crimes against Church and, sometimes, state law.^[17] The Council of Trent inherited a form of the visit elaborated by the fifteenth-century Gersonian reforms. Before setting out, a bishop was to send announcements of the impending tour. These would give curés time to ready churches for inspection and parishioners time to prepare themselves for confirmation, a primary purpose of the visit. The visitor was to inspect the suitability of the clergy, the holy chrism and oils, and the baptismal fonts. And he was to see if the Host was stored properly. Then he had to find out if the sagesfemmes could carry out their duties and if the parish contained heretics, magicians, usurers, adulterers, or anyone who had committed blasphemy or practiced superstitions. Curés and parishioners had to attest that they observed all fêtes and fasts properly, that they attended the mass and the offices, that they knew the Pater and Credo, and that they lived together peacefully. Gerson also instructed the visitor to inquire into the welfare of the parish's children and to make himself and other priests available for confession.^[18]

[15] See, for example, Le Bras, Etudes de sociologie religieuse , 1:100-103; Delumeau, Le catholicisme , pp. 209-214; Julia, "La réforme"; Sauzet, Les visites ; and the studies mentioned above by Schmitt, Ferté, Pérouas, Sauzet, Froeschlé-Chopard, Hoffman, and Strauss.

[16] For a historical summary, see Georges Baccrabère, "Visite canonique de l'évê-que," in the Dictionnaire de droit canonique (Paris, 1963), vol. 7, cols. 1512-1594.

[17] Without strong central secular authority, the institution of the visit had suffered from the end of the twelfth century on.

[18] In Grenoble, fifteenth-century bishops of the de Chissé family and the Allemand family carried out visits according to the Gersonian reforms.

Although the Council of Trent added little to these regulations, it did impel the visitors and those visited to fulfill their responsibilities. Sixteenth-century reformers like Charles Borromeo put the Tridentine decrees into action and provided a model for those who followed. During his term as archbishop of Milan (from 1566 to 1584), Borromeo established legislation for his diocese that meticulously covered every detail of the visit from the timing of its announcement to the numerous types of faults the visitor was to investigate. A look at some of his regulations reveals the program of the Counter-Reformation Church.^[19] Letters announced each tour and exhorted parishioners to attend services, to take advantage of the confessors who would pass through parishes before the bishop, and to receive communion. When the bishop arrived, the community met him with an elaborate ceremony and conducted him to the church. Here he would examine the parish's ornaments, relics, books, documents, inventories, and revenues and then continue to religious institutions, such as schools, confraternities, and hospitals. He inquired into the clergy's conduct, conversations, clothing, letters of ordination, books, and income. He also wanted to know if they got along well with the parishioners and if they carried out their spiritual functions properly. The same effort was applied to the laity. Borromeo's regulations enumerated thirty-five categories of people for whom the visitor was to search in each parish, encompassing everything from children destined for the clergy to heretics and sorcerers. The categories included separated spouses; those who did not take pascal communion; those who sold or read forbidden books; those who frequented banquets, dances, and taverns; and those who dressed indecently, gambled, or committed sexual improprieties. The visitor was to ensure that teachers taught correctly, that tavern owners closed on Sundays, and that fathers exercised proper paternal authority.

The wealth of detail is astonishing, but it was necessary for Borromeo's ultimate goal. He visited parishes not just to inspect churches and to correct priests and people who had gone astray, but to know their minds, to punish when necessary, and to establish "Christian" discipline in his diocese.^[20] Discipline is the key term. The form of the visit may not have changed since the Middle Ages, but a new mentality

[19] For a fuller account see Baccrabère, "Visite canonique," cols. 1525-1533. Some visits are in A. Roncalli [Pope John XXIII], Gli atti della visita de S. Carlo Borromeo a Bergamo, 1576 , 6 vols. (Milan, 1936-1949). Borromeo, too, had his model in Gian-Matteo Giberti, bishop of Verona (Delumeau, Le catholicisrne , pp. 47, 211).

[20] Baccrabère, "Visite canonique," col. 1526.

was at work, one that wanted to delve much deeper into the lives of the faithful and exact a much stricter obedience.

The Tridentine decrees were never officially published in France and, in fact, were not even received by the assembly of French clergy until 1615.^[21] Nevertheless, some French prelates, such as Joyeuse of Toulouse and Sourdis of Bordeaux, displayed the influence of Trent and Borromeo in visits well before this date. The royal government also appreciated the value of visits and visitors as means of furthering monarchical power. A series of edicts from 1606 to 1768 gave bishops a variety of administrative responsibilities. They had to oversee parish registers, schools, and poor-relief institutions as well as parish buildings and finances.^[22]

By the time Le Camus started his work in Grenoble, the Borromean model was well established north of the Alps. The example of the Milanese archbishop's methods extended beyond visits. Le Camus, like the man he emulated, established a seminary to train parish priests, required them to attend periodic conferences, held frequent synods, and promulgated an array of new synodal legislation to counteract the failings of clergy and laity. But his pastoral visits are the hallmark of his episcopate. In his early visits, the bishop divided the diocese of some three hundred parishes in two and covered half each year. From the mid-1680s, he completed a tour every three years. He generally began with the southern and eastern region—the Oisans, Valbonnais, and the Matheysine (the region around la Mure and the eastern bank of the Drac)—and the eastern bank of the upper Isère. In his second outing he would cover the western bank of the upper Isère, the Chartreuse, and Savoy. He would then move to the lower Isère valley from Voreppe to Vinay, the Vercors, and the western bank of the Drac (the region around Vif). A mandement would announce the visit and include a slate of some two hundred questions for which the parish was to prepare

[21] René Taveneaux, Le catholicisme dans la France classique, 1610-1715 , 2 vols. (Paris, 1980), p. 21.

[22] Baccrabère suggests that the seventeenth-century bishop was almost a fonctionnaire administratif , more a manager of the state's social services than a director of spiritual life ("Visite canonique," col. 1534). He relies on the work of R. Suadeau (L'évêque, inspecteur administratif sous la monarchie absolue d'après les archives du centre de la France , 2 vols. [Paris, 1940]), which I have not been able to consult. This view is overstated. Bishops were appointed by the king and well aware of the service they owed to him. But the "social-welfare" concerns of the Church were not new, and some French bishops opposed the monarch on issues such as Jansenism and the régale (Taveneaux, Le catholicisme , pp. 503-505). Rather than speak of bishops as simply supporters or opponents of royal policy, we may see a merging of the preoccupations of state and Church in social welfare and social control.

responses.^[23] In later years Le Camus sent missionaries in advance of his visits. Capuchins, Lazarists, or Carmelites preached and prepared parishioners for confirmation. He would follow with a small group, including a recording secretary to take the notes of the investigation, the diocesan official who heard cases involving clerics, a couple of servants, and a cook, all of whom traveled on horse or mule.^[24]

This rigor made Le Camus true to his Borromean heritage. At least in the visits he performed during the first two decades of his episcopate, he strove for the same exactitude, the same carefulness as had the archbishop of Milan. Reformers felt that under the watchful eyes of episcopal visitors, under the weight of the minute detail of the investigations, the faithful would internalize the new spiritual attitudes of the Counter-Reformation. Once they had adopted the reformers' rigor, parishioners would achieve the reformers' vision of a new type of Catholic. They would turn their religious energies inward; they would continuously examine their consciences in detail.^[25] And they would direct their lives in conformity with the Counter-Reformation's concern for decent religious observance, obedience to authority, and proper social behavior.

The Image of the Bishop and the Ritual of the Visit

Le Camus realized that to implement the Counter-Reformation program, he would have to alter the basis of village religion. Merely to condemn "superstitions" would not suffice. He had to gain control of the village's religious symbols and institutions, and only then could he and his newly reformed parish priests undertake the pedagogical task of changing the people's understandings of them. To do so he had to gain acceptance in the community by projecting an image of himself that, although perfectly in keeping with his desire to exact obedience, would nonetheless lend him moral authority. He also had to insinuate his concept of religious practice into the community's ritual system. The

[23] The categories of questions included the condition of the vessels containing the Blessed Sacrament, the condition of the baptismal fonts, the church's relics, the altars, the sacristy and ornaments, the confessionals, the tower and bells, the cemetery, the capabilities of the church wardens, the state of the confraternities, the competency of the curé and rectors of chapels, the piety of the laity, the ability of midwives to perform their duties, and the state of village schools (Godel, "Les visites pastorales," pp. 221-222).

[24] Ibid., pp. 222-223.

[25] This goal was also suggested in different ways and to different audiences by Loyola's Spiritual Exercises or de Sales's Introduction to the Devout Life , among other works.

visit provided the means to accomplish both goals. The visitor received a ritualized entry into the village and a way of establishing, through the ritual, his dominance over it. The ceremony contained gestures that would elevate the visitor's standing in the villagers' eyes. And since the bishop performed the ritual with the participation of the parishioners, it heightened the significance of the visit for all involved. The ritual ensured an encounter between the bishop and villagers in which the reformer could, from his point of view, communicate and advance his program to control first the villagers' religious territory, then their activities, and finally their attitudes and beliefs. The visit, thereby, staged a contest both on the ground of the community and in the minds of its inhabitants.

Le Camus may have been a stranger to the parishes of his diocese, but, as a bishop and prince of the Church, he was also a personage of higher social status and authority than anyone else likely to pay attention to these remote villages. The image he presented during his visits, however, emphasized more his moral than his social superiority. Whenever possible he lodged with parish priests, and he made a point of refusing invitations from local seigneurs. He always ate sparingly and shunned meals offered by wealthier members of the community. Such austerity from a figure of importance must have come as a surprise to villagers used to the more indulgent ways of military officers and local nobles.

He tempered the image of self-mortification with generosity. Le Camus was acutely aware and made frequent mention of the terrible poverty in his rural parishes. He had every curé draw up a list of impoverished parishioners, and at the end of each visit he gave alms, usually in the form of salt. Salt may have been important more for its symbolic value than as a serious means to alleviate poverty, but his gifts are nonetheless likely to have made a good impression on the villagers.^[26]

To the image of austerity and generosity, Le Camus added kindness and evenhandedness. For instance, he promptly granted dispensations to those who needed to marry within the forbidden degrees of consanguinity, a frequent problem in the inbred mountain communities. He raised no objections and exacted nothing in return for the dispensation, except a donation to the couple's parish church.^[27] In the meting out of

[26] Blessed salt was regarded as a protection against evil. It is used in baptism and is a symbol of preserved faith (J. C. J. Metford, Dictionary of Christian Lore and Legend [London, 1983], p. 218). Also a symbol of hospitality, it may have figured in the visit's reversal of the roles of guest and host; see the description of the visit's ritual below.

[27] See chapter 3.

penance, he also showed his moderation. Although he insisted on the proper performance of acts of contrition, he realized that peasants could hardly afford the cost or the time for "grosses pénitences"; their burden of poverty was often penalty enough.^[28]

By comparison with many of his fellow prelates, Le Camus was fairly lenient in his treatment of the Protestants. Although the diocese's Huguenots in no way escaped the horrors that followed the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the bishop claimed, both before and after the revocation, that he wished to convert them through persuasion rather than force. His persuasion, however, could be forceful. In each parish containing both Catholics and Protestants, he insisted that the boundaries between the religious groups be maintained: curés would not meet with Huguenots, children of the two confessions would not attend school together, and the deceased would not be buried in the same cemetery. As the pressure on Protestants grew in the early 1680s, he occasionally ordered that they not be allowed to participate in communal assemblies.^[29] Such moves left the Protestant minority in an increasingly difficult position. Yet the texts of the visits present the bishop as always courteous and generous with the Protestants he met on his tours, relying more on theological argument than on coercion to convince them to convert. The Protestants, in return, always seemed responsive. Those of Mizoen, where there were no Catholics in 1672, reportedly received the bishop with civility and asked him to dinner. He felt compelled to follow the Apostle Paul's example and refused the invitation. When he preached at Vif, during the same tour, some wanted to eject a Huguenot nobleman who had entered the church, but Le Camus allowed him to stay and preached a second time for the Protestant's benefit. He may have been encouraged by what he saw at Besse. According to the account of the visit, the doctor and consul of the community, both Protestants, were very impressed by the bishop's sermon. They stated that he had preached nothing but what was in Scripture, even though, the secretary tells us, he had really spoken on polemical matters in a gentle way.^[30]

The final element of the image, and perhaps the most useful for the villagers, was the bishop's role as mediator. He wrote to his young admirer, Bishop Caylus of Auxerre, that he always considered the set-

[28] Letter to Pontchateau, 6 October 1674 in Lettres , ed. Ingold, p. 159.

[29] Visit of Chazelet in 1682, ADI 4G.276, p. 96.

[30] ADI 4G.272, pp. 122 (Mizoen), 1052 (Vif), and 114 (Besse). Pierre Bolle identifies the (unnamed) apostle Le Camus cited in refusing the invitation at Mizoen ("Le Camus et les protestants," p. 151).

tling of disputes one of his major duties.^[31] If a prelate wanted to promote "civilized" forms of behavior and obedience in the people of his diocese, then he had, at times, to serve as a peacemaker. Unfortunately, the texts of the visits reveal less about such activities than we might wish. They frequently report the bishop's intervention in lawsuits between villagers but rarely give precise details. We can see, however, that he did not restrict himself to religious issues such as marital disputes, conflicts over the patronage of chapels, or complaints against curés. He also settled economic grievances between communities, and he tried to protect villages from the ravages of royal troops billeted in them.^[32] It was precisely the combination of his position as an outsider, his authority, and the moral standing his image generated that allowed him to fulfill this mediator's role.

The visits constructed an image both effective and calculated. The calculation is evident when we compare the Le Camus of the visits with that of his correspondence. In his letters, we see his petulance when he was not received with proper dignity, for instance in Chambéry, or his anger whenever his authority was challenged, as by the local Jesuits. Even the moderation with which he met Protestants during his tours contrasts strongly with his immense satisfaction over the long sought-after destruction of the Protestant temple in Grenoble or the conversion of an important Grenoble pastor.^[33] Perhaps his comment, "Never had they had more success against the heretics," made in a 1682 letter to his counterpart in Luçon, reveals more about his real attitudes than do the visits.^[34] Against recalcitrant Catholics, he was prepared, if necessary, to leave moral suasion aside and rely on ecclesiastical penalties or the secular arm of the royal courts to enforce his will. But the villagers of the diocese were becoming all too accustomed to overbearing tax officers, self-important judicial officials, and loathsome military men. They were more likely to be well disposed toward a prelate who enhanced his ecclesiastical authority with an image of gentility and an aura of holiness.

Le Camus must have been gratified, at least in the early visits, by the result of his image making. People wanted to see this stranger who combined sanctity with ecclesiastical and political authority. In part they came because only he could grant confirmation. Since no bishop

[31] Letter of 28 November 1705 in Lettres , ed. Ingold, p. 620.

[32] I return to specific examples in chapter 3.

[33] Bolle, "Le Camus et les protestants," p. 152. The Grenoble pastor Alexander Vigne converted in 1684.

[34] Letter to Barrillon (bishop of Luçon), 30 December 1682 in Lettres , ed. Ingold, p. 413.

had toured the diocese in thirty-five years, Le Camus found "an infinitude of people," both children and adults, who needed to be confirmed.^[35] The day of Le Camus's visit to a parish was declared a fête chômée , and people turned out in droves. On one such visit to the parish of Saint-Léger in 1673, the church was so crowded he could not complete the required tour of its interior.^[36] But if he arrived in a village during the harvest or on the day of an important fair, he might find only the curé and an empty church awaiting him. These events were of vital importance to the village economy and neglecting them could be disastrous.^[37] Such occasions, however, were rare. Usually Le Camus could expect the majority of parishioners to participate—if only as spectators—in the ceremony of his visit.

The ceremony both introduced the visitor into the community and established his authority there through a carefully laid-out ritual of acceptance and reception: first the parish received the bishop, then he received the parishioners. I draw the description of the ceremony from the procès-verbaux of Le Camus's visits and from the ordinances of the Church. The meaning imputed to it is, therefore, likely to be that of the Church. It is not necessarily the meaning that the viewers would have gleaned from the same ceremony. But that is precisely the point. Through the ceremony the bishop wanted to communicate a message about how he saw the relationship with his flock. Since his actions relied on certain community symbols well known to the villagers as well as on symbols shared by his form of religion and village religion, his message would not likely have been lost on the parishioners.

The Pontifical of Clement VIII (1596) instructed the clergy on the proper preparation and performance of the visit; Le Camus took up its details in his synodal legislation.^[38] The curés were to make their parishes ready to receive the bishop through conducting public prayers, hearing confessions, catechizing, and giving first communion. They had to prepare memoirs on any disorders in the parishes' religious and social

[35] See Ruchier's memoir, ADI 4G.199.

[36] ADI 4G.272, pp. 1269-1296. Le Camus also made a point of commenting on the turnout in la Grave (in the Oisans) in 1672 (ADI 4G.272, p. 85).

[37] For example, in Sarcenas in 1694 (ADI 4G.279, p. 254). Generally Le Camus planned his visits around the agricultural calendar. Ruchier reported that after the summer's visits to the Oisans parishes, the bishop would retire to Grenoble when harvests began in the mountains (ADI 4G.199).

[38] Baccrabère discusses the appropriate section of the Pontifical, the "Ordo ad visitandis parochias," in "Visite canonique," cols. 1548-1549. For the section in Le Camus's synodal legislation on visits, see Recueil des ordonnances , pp. 157-165.

life and on the state of their religious buildings.^[39] Priests also had to read the mandement announcing the bishop's visit on three consecutive Sundays during their sermons. It is readily apparent that the curés of the diocese often did not follow these detailed instructions. Nonetheless, their parishioners, no doubt primed for the impending visit by the news of the bishop's tour, would prepare by mobilizing communal resources, gathering complaints about one another and their curé, and planning how they might take advantage of the visit to pursue their own interests both religious and political.

Many of the Grenoble diocese's parishes were too poor to possess all the ornaments ordered for the occasion. Le Camus's visits, therefore, departed somewhat from the pontifical's instructions, but the basic structure of the ceremony and its rich Catholic symbolism remained. Le Camus was not adverse to demanding the full ritual in a place where his authority was challenged, as in Chambéry.^[40] For the most complete description of the ceremony he did perform, we can turn to the text of the first visit, in which he was highly concerned with establishing his authority.^[41]

Church bells announced the bishop's entry. The bells called people into the church and could serve as a communal alarm against approaching intruders. The bishop, however, was no ordinary stranger to be treated with suspicion or indifference; he commanded respect and attentiveness from the priest and the parishioners. As directed by the pontifical, the curé, wearing his liturgical garments, met the bishop and his train at the parish's boundary. There the priest presented the community's cross, which the visitor kissed, and before which he might also genuflect. Meanwhile, those accompanying the bishop chanted the antiphonal "Sacerdos et pontifex." This part of the ceremony conducted the visitor and his party across the boundaries of the parish. The bishop acknowledged the religious symbol of the parish, the cross, and was thereby received into the community. But the specialness of the cere-

[39] Disorders included sexual misbehavior, failure to perform religious duties, the presence of unauthorized clergy in parishes, and conflicts between parishioners (which priests were to try to resolve). The curé was also to report on the poor and sick, schoolteachers, and midwives.

[40] Godel, "Les visites pastorales," p. 225.

[41] Godel insists that Le Camus avoided much of the ceremony for the sake of simplicity; the instructions for his third visit do include an order to parishes not to make special ceremonial preparations for his arrival (Ibid., pp. 224-225). However, the earlier visits indicate that much of the ceremony was followed. See for example the 1672 visit of Chantelouve (ADI 4G.272, pp. 133-139): this parish owned no canopy to cover the bishop as he proceeded to the church; the secretary made a special note of the shortcoming in the procès-verbal.

mony, the display of liturgical garments, and the intoning of the antiphonal all announced the bishop's stature.^[42]

After the reception at the village boundary, all present proceeded to the church. The pontifical set a processional order suitable for visits to cities: riders on horseback led, followed by a priest carrying the cross, cathedral canons, gens de robe , and the bishop under a canopy. In these small villages, the procession was far less elaborate. First came the curé with the cross, then the bishop under a canopy, when the parish could afford one. And the clergy chanted a "Te Deum." At the entrance to the church, the parish priest gave the bishop an aspergillum and a censer with which to purify his entourage with holy water and incense, a necessary step before entering the church. However, the purification was also the last stage in the ceremonial reception of the outsider into the parish. At the entry to the village, the bishop had stopped, acknowledged the community's uniqueness, and announced the visit. He had, in addition, recognized one of the parish's important religious symbols by kissing the cross. Now he and his followers were purified and ritually accepted into the community. From this moment on, the ceremony of reception and acknowledgement was turned around. The bishop continued to honor certain of the village's religious symbols, but once he entered the church, he was within his realm. His authority and privileged position there were unquestioned. Henceforth, he would do the examining, and he would receive the curé and the parishioners with their reports on religious life in the village. The parishioners would be expected to acknowledge the bishop's authority and carry out his orders.

The church was the bishop's domain, and the way he positioned himself within it gave clear indication of his intentions regarding its disposition and its use in promoting his program of reform. But the church also belonged to the community. Confraternities often had their chapels in the church, and families built tombs there or altars devoted to their favorite saints.^[43] Catholic reformers sought to control all religious activity in the parish, centering it on the church. They hoped thereby to decrease the importance of more autonomous village religious centers, such as confraternity chapels and saints' altars outside the church. Furthermore, within the church they wanted to direct attention

[42] In some parishes, especially if Le Camus arrived at an odd hour, this part of the ceremony was compressed, but elements remained even if transported to the next section of the ritual.

[43] For a further discussion of the church's interior space, see chapter 5.

to the main altar and away from the lateral chapels.^[44] The main altar was the center of the Eucharistic cult and the place where the mass was performed. It was, therefore, the primary physical representation of the Church's power and authority. Upon entering the parish church, the bishop proceeded directly to the main altar.^[45] By making this his first stopping point, the visitor immediately associated his own authority with the highest-ranked place in the carefully structured hierarchical space of the church. The bishop then moved to the right side of the altar, the second most important place in the church.^[46] Here he chanted the orison of the parish's patron saint. Honoring the patron was yet another way of attesting to the parish's uniqueness, but it also demonstrated to the viewers the bishop's ability to enlist their protector in his cause. And the communal religious symbol was clearly subordinated to the central authority of the Church when the bishop stepped to the side of the Host.

The visitor returned to the main altar, gave the benediction, and the mass began. During the mass he presented to the congregation the reasons for his visit. He said that he had come to pray for the souls of the parish's dead. The bishop intended to include the entire range of the Catholic "economy of salvation" within the scope of his visit.^[47] He then informed the congregation that he would inquire into both the spiritual and temporal direction of the parish. He made it clear, in other words, that all aspects of village life would pass under his inspection. He would not only examine the administration of the sacraments and the celebration of the offices but would also investigate very carefully the lives of the clergy and parishioners. Finally he would make himself available to all those who wanted his services or his advice, and he would give confirmation. After presenting the reasons for the visit, the bishop gave an exhortation on penance, the sacraments, or faith, and then he

[44] Various historians have pointed out this concern of the reformers, but see for example Froeschlé-Chopard, Religion populaire , pp. 72-83.

[45] Again the basic description of this part of the ceremony comes from Le Camus's visits and Clement VIII's pontifical, with certain additions noted below (Baccrabère, "Visite canonique," cols. 1548-1550). The visits and the pontifical did not agree completely on all details but the structure of the ceremony is essentially the same.

[46] See M.-H. Froeschlé-Chopard, "Univers sacré et iconographie au XVIIIe siècle," Annales: ESC 31, no. 3 (May-June 1975): pp. 489-519, esp. 491. She draws on Emile Mâle, L'art religieux du XIIIe siècle en France , 8th ed. (Paris, 1948). See also Stephen Wilson, "Cults of Saints in the Churches of Central Paris," in Saints and Their Cults , ed. Stephen Wilson (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 233-260. This ordering of the church's interior space was, of course, the Church's and not necessarily shared by the villagers, a point to which I return in chapter 5.

[47] On this concept see Natalie Z. Davis, "Ghosts, Kin, and Progeny," Daedalus 106 (Spring 1977): 87-114, esp. 92-96.

granted the plenary indulgence given to those present at the visit who had made a confession.^[48]

Once the mass was concluded, the bishop's actual examination of the parish began. Nevertheless, this part of the visit also had ceremonial aspects. It started once more by signaling the importance of the dead to the community's religious life and the Catholic scheme of salvation.^[49] A "De profundis" was said, followed by a special prayer for all deceased bishops (reaffirming the primacy of prelates); then the bishop and his entourage made a procession around the cemetery and returned to the church where they said further prayers for the dead. As in his previous reference to the parish's departed, the bishop here recalled for the villagers the essential unity of the earthly Church with the Churches of Heaven and Purgatory. The visit would reemphasize that unity. In addition, the bishop recognized the strength of the connections between the dead and the living. The parish's religious customs were tied to the past and to the departed both through those ceremonies specifically connected to the cult of the dead and through the memory of those who had once participated in village religion. By his solicitation of the deceased through prayers and the procession, the bishop hoped to add the dead to his camp, thus making the villagers more susceptible to his program.

The central act in this part of the ceremony, the procession around the cemetery, also had another goal the separation of the parish's sacred area from profane activities. The procession marked off the boundaries of the cemetery, which the visitor wanted to include with the church under his control. Villagers considered the cemetery part of their communal territory; like the common lands, it was open to all. They grazed their cattle, held fairs, and sometimes convened their communal assemblies there. The bishop found it indecent that such activi-

[48] Mentioned in the synodal legislation in the Recueil des ordonnances , p. 157. Le Camus seems to have separated the exhortation from the sermon, which came before the mass. The visits frequently note the Latin subjects for the sermons. If the sermons were also delivered in Latin (which is not certain), they could not have had much meaning for the listeners. The synodal regulations specified that public prayers on festivals and Sundays should be said in French, but many people in these parishes did not understand French (ibid., p. 5). Other Counter-Reformation bishops were sensitive to the need for preaching in a language people could understand (J. B. Séguy, "Langue, religion, et société," Annals de l'institut d'estudis occitans 5, no. 1 [1977]: 79-105). The secretary recorded no information on how sermons were received by listeners but dwelt on the energy Le Camus expended in giving them. He mentions, for instance, that the bishop finished sermons exhausted and drenched with perspiration, giving them the appearance of athletic events more than homilies intended to instruct.

[49] I follow here the 1702 catechism of Charles-Joachim Colbert, bishop of Montpellier, because details of Le Camus's ritual varied somewhat from parish to parish (Baccrabère, "Visite canonique," col. 1550).

ties took place on church land. He insisted that walls or hedges be set up to prevent any trespassing on cemetery grounds by people or animals. In other words, the visitor understood that to introduce the Catholic reform into the parish, he would have to deprive the community of its accustomed use of church and cemetery, thereby wresting control of the village's sacred territory from the community.

When he had completed the circuit of the cemetery, the visitor returned to the church and the main altar. Here, because of the Counter-Reformation's emphasis on the proper observance of the Eucharistic rites, he turned his attention first to the tabernacle in which the consecrated Host was kept. Bishops insisted that tabernacles be made of silver, and they discarded tin or wooden ones. Le Camus, who was frequently lenient if poverty prevented parishes from immediately fulfilling his orders, made no exceptions on this point. On subsequent visits nothing infuriated him more, nor more damaged his image of generosity and patience, than to discover that a community had failed to carry out his orders for a new tabernacle.^[50] After inspecting the various ornaments of the main altar and its holy oils, the bishop proceeded to the other end of the church to examine the baptismal font. It had to be locked and properly placed on the left side of the church. He then continued around the church scrutinizing the building itself, its decorations, the sacristy, and the lateral altars. When the tour of the church was complete, the bishop inquired into the state of the maison curiale , hospitals, confraternity chapels, and any other religious buildings. Then he was ready to receive the curé's report on the parishioners and their complaints about the priest.

The ceremony provided the bishop with weapons to wage a territorial campaign over the community's central religious institutions. The community with its customs represented an alternative, and rival, locus of authority. The bishop had to contest communal power to promote his conception of religion. He would also use the visit to penetrate further into the religious landscape of the village by attempting to impose his orders on the outlying chapels, as well as on those areas whose purposes were not primarily religious, such as homes, fields, and the marketplace. But first he had to construct his base within the parish. He did so by establishing his power over the church. He emphasized the importance of the main altar and the Eucharistic cult, which in turn reflected his position as a representative of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

[50] On the proper maintenance of church ornaments, see the synodal regulations in the Recueil des ordonnances , p. 163.

And he reversed the encounter with the parishioners so that he was no longer a stranger asking for acceptance at the village boundary but a powerful figure of authority, at home in the church, issuing commands and passing judgment.

Le Camus would continue these efforts—ceremonial, investigative, and educational—for three and one-half decades and twelve tours. The visits brought him into constant contact with the people of his diocese. Over time his energy would flag, his opinion of his flock would sour somewhat, and his confidence in his own success would decline (especially in the difficult war years of the 1690s). But he was never ready to give up the fight. His touring made him a very important part of the process of religious and cultural change in the diocese. He never really grasped, however, that this process was continuous. He intensified it, but he did not control it.

He was old and ill when he left Grenoble in 1707 on his last tour. His subordinates asked him not to make the trip, but he reportedly replied: "A bishop is a soldier; let me die on the field of battle."^[51] Less than a month later he was dead. Le Camus had used his visits to investigate parish life, to convey an image of authority, to communicate his view of proper religious and social behavior, to wage a campaign for control of parish religious space and institutions, and, thereby, to change the mentality of his flock. A diocese had to be conquered to achieve these goals, and pastoral visits were the military campaigns that would do so. As was the case with many military campaigns, this one's leader never quite understood the nature of the people among whom he was fighting.

[51] Quoted in Godel, "Les visites pastorales," p. 238.

Three
The Encounter of Villagers and Bishop

In his May 1696 synod, Le Camus reported learning that "libertines" had paraded through the streets of Chambéry wearing masks, religious habits, and penitential cagoules . He was outraged.^[1] Donning masks and disguises in public echoed the unruliness of carnival, which the bishop, in his visits and synodal regulations, had repeatedly condemned as "criminal insolence." Le Camus objected to what he saw as the profane license that carnival revelers took by mocking authority figures. He condemned the festival and, like other reformers, sought to weaken its allure with competing expositions of the Blessed Sacrament, Forty Hours' devotions, and missions.^[2] The demonstrators in Chambéry were bound to anger Le Camus not only because they evoked carnival but also because their actions were directed at the bishop. They drew on the resources of their religion to express opposition to his cultural challenge.

Indeed, people throughout the diocese mobilized elements of their religion in response to Le Camus. Sometimes they accepted his program. More often they adapted it to the purposes of their communal society, and they frequently succeeded in manipulating the reformer to that end. Occasionally, as in Chambéry, the response was outright resistance. Then the cultural elements on which they drew, such as masks and disguises, became the objects of fierce contention. By exam-

[1] Synod of 9 May 1696, art. 10, in ADI 4G.363.

[2] Recueil des ordonnances , pp. 26-27 and Luria, "Popular Spirituality," p. 116.

ining the use of religious resources, we can study the encounter between the bishop and the villagers from their perspective.

Clerical condemnations singled out carnival masks and disguises for special opprobrium. These hid the participants, making it difficult for the agents of reform to discover the perpetrators of profanity.^[3] But the masks obscured more than just the identities of their wearers. They also provided a symbolic defense against the religious reform's program of changing people's spiritual practices and beliefs by probing their hearts and by classifying the faithful (according to Borromeo's categories, for instance, or according to their social eligibility for certain religious organizations). Disguises protected the continued practice of unapproved customs just as they protected those who participated in them. They permitted the continuation of the counterorder of carnival and those other moments during the year when people used carnival's cultural repertoire of practices to criticize authority.^[4]

Masks concealed their wearers but might also caricature, and thus proclaim, the targets of carnivalesque criticism.^[5] They did not need to represent their victims figuratively to attack them Disguises could also allude to them in a less direct and perhaps less provocative way.^[6] The revelers in Chambéry wore the robes of monks and penitents but mocked Le Camus. The bishop was a convenient target for the Savoyards' dislike of the French, for he had angered the powerful Sénat in Chambéry and the local nobility. He was always a potential threat to the power of provincial nobles, particularly those of Savoy. War in the 1680s and 1690s had, if anything, sharpened the Savoyards' sense of independence and resistance to French authority. The groups that most directly challenged the bishop's ecclesiastical authority were religious

[3] Although identities could be concealed in cities, in small villages the masqueraders likely were known.

[4] Criticism of the social order during carnival could, under certain circumstances lead to revolts, the most well known being the sixteenth-century carnival in Romans that Le Roy Ladurie describes. He also notes other occasions of revolt or political dissension associated with carnival, such as the revolt of the masques in the Vivarais in 1783 (Carnaval , pp. 345-349).

[5] Their targets might be those in authority or of higher social standing than the mask wearers. But masks could denote inferiors from whom the wearers disassociated themselves. Samuel Kinser describes burghers in Nuremberg's sixteenth-century carnival, who wore peasant masks "to give free rein to conventionally repressed sexual and sensual inclinations while at the same time expressing disgust for these [peasant] clodhoppers." Though "anxious to separate their lifestyle from that of rustics outside the walls," the city dwellers also used the stereotype of the peasant as fool, in the inversions customary at carnival, to make of the "silly peasant" the "symbol of Everyman" ("Presentation and Representation," Representations 13 [Winter 1986]: 1-41, esp. 8).

[6] On other possible meanings of masks in carnivalesque activities, such as separating daily from festive life, ridding communities of demons, fighting for justice, and helping to guarantee good harvests, see Le Roy Ladurie, Carnaval , pp. 338-350.

orders, most notably the Jesuits and the confraternity of the Pénitents noirs.^[7] The choice of disguises was, therefore, significant. The people of Chambéry demonstrated their feelings toward Le Camus by adopting the garb of his most vocal opponents.^[8] Here then is another aspect of the symbolism behind the choice of religious disguises. The bishop represented not just French power but also the attempt to dominate Savoy's traditionally autonomous religious life. The disguised "monks" and "penitents" opposed France, and they disliked Le Camus personally, but they were also rejecting his program with its emphasis on episcopal control over local religious life and its distaste for independent groups like religious orders and penitential confraternities.^[9]

Rarely did the people of the diocese of Grenoble make such striking use of the possibilities inherent in their religion to oppose the bishop and his religious conceptions. More often, they maintained customary practices in the face of episcopal condemnations—a quieter form of resistance—or they modified village religion by adopting and adapting aspects of Counter-Reformation Catholicism. The bishop condemned older usages and promoted newer ones. The villagers of the diocese saved customs that still corresponded to their beliefs, provided a symbolic expression of their cultural outlook, and served their instrumental needs. They adopted new rituals, devotions, religious organizations, and beliefs to suit their religious lives. Villagers manipulated the bishop's religious conceptions, drew him (unwillingly perhaps) into their ceremonies or used him to authorize them, and adapted his new religious organizations—all for the purpose of constructing village religion.^[10] Thus the encounter of the reform-minded bishop and the diocese's villagers during pastoral visits is a particularly salient moment for studying the construction of a village religion always produced by an interplay between inside and outside, the cultural (as well as social and political) changes within communities and the impact of influences from beyond them.

[7] On these conflicts and that of Le Camus's authority in the décanat , see the works mentioned in chapter 1, note 13.

[8] Indeed we might wonder if the participants were not in fact from religious orders. But Le Camus speaks only of masked libertines.

[9] Another prelate to run afoul of Chambéry was Jean d'Arenthon d'Alex, bishop of Annecy, who had a conflict with the Sénat over jurisdictional matters. Religious orders in Chambéry and Annecy accused him, as they did Le Camus, of Jansenism; "libertines" defamed his portrait and hanged him in effigy (letter of Le Camus to Dom Le Masson of 10 February 1697, in Lettres , ed. Ingold, p. 587).

[10] Peter Burke suggests that cultural change was a negotiation between the two sides; but this process involved adaptation and even mutual manipulation ("From Pioneers to Settlers," Comparative Studies in Society and History 25, no. 1 [January 1983]: 181-187).

The Villagers' Response

The response of the people to this saintly but nonetheless authoritarian figure touring their parishes is harder to discern than his attitudes toward them. The villagers, of course, left little in the way of written records to express their opinion of the bishop and his program. As is the case with most investigations of lower levels of early modern society, we must infer what people thought from what they did. The procès-verbaux of the pastoral visits and a variety of communal records give us considerable evidence on that.

The bishop must have been pleased with his immediate impact. People flocked to see this man who wanted to reorder their lives according to his standards of religious and social behavior, yet who was willing to offer them charity, to listen to their complaints, and to help resolve their problems. At the very least, they wanted to see a bishop. Some villagers had a faint memory of Scarron visiting them over thirty years earlier, but in many parishes no one had ever glimpsed a bishop.^[11]

The villagers realized the advantages of having a bishop physically present in the parish. Reformers may have wanted to alter the basis of village belief and practice by constraining people within the boundaries of Counter-Reformation religion. Villagers, however, sought to employ the reformers' authority to reinforce village religion. The result for parish priests, local agents of the reform, was ironic. The Church's attempt to reduce the initiative of the laity in religious activities, eliminate "superstitions," and increase the clergy's control of local religious life in effect bestowed on priests a saintly status. Village religion had always required priests to perform mass on saints' festivals, to lead processions, and so forth. But their role had not always been dominant. As the Counter-Reformation bishops insisted that priests had to be the central religious figures in parishes, and as curés increasingly distanced themselves from the daily secular concerns of village life, their own sacrality increased. Now people turned to the clergy with demands as urgent and insistent as those they made on saints. Villagers did not exactly expect miracles from the bishops and curés, but the clergy did find themselves called on as intermediaries between villagers and the natural forces that threatened the well-being of rural communities. If a bishop would not authorize—or if he and the curés were not ,willing to perform—certain expected functions, then villages were at risk. In these situations people experienced the same sense of betrayal they felt when

[11] In la Grave (in the Oisans), Le Camus mentioned that no prelate had visited the parish in thirty-five years (ADI 4G.272, p. 84).

a saint whom they had carefully propitiated through proper ritual failed to protect them.

But even rigorous Counter-Reformation clergymen did not always disappoint. After all, despite their effort to make religion more spiritualized and interiorized, they had not set aside all belief in Catholicism's instrumentality. They just felt increasingly uncomfortable with it. Villagers, too, varied in their beliefs and actions. So the encounter between bishop and villagers did not end merely in condemnation and rejection. In parishes each party had to decide whether to refuse the demands of the other or reach some compromise. Le Camus may have described his visits as campaigns of conquest, but they were actually more like negotiations in which each side sought to manipulate the other to achieve desired ends.

In some cases, Le Camus simply refused to accept village practices. When visiting Chabottes in 1672, he found in the margins of the parish's book of rites handwritten notes on benedictions that the priest was to recite when the community planted crosses at the edges of its fields. Such blessings were unauthorized and, furthermore, could seem like magical formulae to reformers. But the crosses held great importance for the villagers. They served as boundary markers that defined the area for which the community requested divine protection during its rogation processions each spring. The ceremony of planting the crosses demonstrated a community's sense of its identity and illustrated its devotion toward the divine powers it supplicated. The ritual had to be performed correctly. In forbidding the customary blessings, Le Camus undercut the ability of the villagers of Chabottes to invest the planting of crosses with its full religious significance and thereby put the village's survival in question.^[12]

A community could not always follow the bishop's orders. In Huez (in the Oisans), Le Camus repeatedly refused to allow the curé to lead a procession to and say mass at the remains of a chapel in a nearby abandoned mining settlement called Brandes. The bishop thought the ruined chapel an indecent place for a religious ceremony. For the villagers, the procession and mass were essential for staving off drought. They pleaded with Le Camus to change his mind, but he remained unmoved. In fact, the people of Huez and neighboring parishes continued the procession—it was too important to neglect—even though their curés would no longer say mass at the chapel.^[13] Le Camus held out

[12] Ibid., p. 1073.

[13] Ibid., p. 27; and ADI 4G.273, p. 537.

the possibility of reauthorizing the mass if the villagers restored the chapel. Doing so involved a considerable expense to the community, but by 1683, the Brandes chapel had been rebuilt. A compromise had been reached. The negotiation here had satisfied both the bishop and the villagers, and village religion with its customary procession would continue.

Despite Le Camus's suspicions about the orthodoxy of using rituals to control nature, villagers were sometimes successful in bending him to their wishes. In the Savoyard village of Saint-Hippolyte in 1677, Le Camus learned that the priest was not making rogation processions and had stopped blessing the water villagers used to cure diseased livestock. Faced with the parishioners' complaints and perhaps realizing that the priest's actions went further than even he cared to go, Le Camus ordered the priest to bless the water and to resume the rogation processions. He insisted, however, that the curé give sermons instructing his parishioners on the proper meaning of these actions.^[14] When during the same tour, Le Camus arrived in Villard-Reculas (in the Oisans), he found the village plagued by rats eating the ripening grain. The inhabitants begged him to allow their curé to perform an exorcism or "abjuration" to rid them of the rodents. The request placed him in a quandary. In his words, "the people had such a great faith in the prayers of the Church that they were persuaded that as soon as a priest performed an exorcism, the animals would die or, at least, depart for somewhere else." This use of prayers smacked of indecency. Yet the Church condoned exorcism, and Le Camus had to admit that he knew of cases like this one in which it had worked. So he allowed the priest to exorcise the rats with the proviso that he intended to make a serious study of the matter before he would include exorcisms of animals in the diocesan book of rites.^[15]

It is doubtful that the stipulation mattered much to the people of Villard-Reculas. The bishop had acted in the way they hoped he would. The exorcism would proceed, and if it worked properly, the rats would be gone. Their faith in this element of Catholicism and village religion would be renewed. The negotiation with Le Camus had not forced them into compromise. They had, instead, successfully manipulated him.

[14] ADI 4G.273, p. 708. Julia also describes the fundamental importance of the clergy, especially the more sacralized Counter-Reformation clergy, to rogation processions; to blessing animals; and to blessing bread, salt, and water for animals. He suggests that the clergy took on this role to prevent lay initiative that could seem like witchcraft ("Discipline ecclésiastique," pp. 205-208).

[15] ADI 4G.273, p. 536.

Their conviction that the bishop was a powerful figure who could be put to useful ends would grow.^[16]

The Bishop as Mediator

The bishop, however, could be called on to do more than intercede between villagers and nature; he could also mediate among villagers themselves. Indeed, he felt far more comfortable doing this than exorcising rats. As an outsider to the community, he was removed from its tensions and conflicting loyalties. Because of his moral standing and saintly reputation, his arbitrations would carry great weight. So villagers entreated him to settle economic and political grievances, battles over precedence, and marital disagreements. His social status also enabled him to intervene in conflicts between villages and governmental or military authorities. Le Camus willingly accepted the obligation. As he would remind Bishop Caylus, it was one of a bishop's chief responsibilities.^[17] And one of the stiffest criticisms he leveled at his predecessor was precisely that Scarron had failed to resolve conflicts, especially in a parish where he was also the seigneur.^[18]

All pastors were obligated to take up the burden of conflict resolution. In his synodal regulations, Le Camus instructed curés to try to arbitrate lawsuits and reconcile differences in their parishes.^[19] And in his Instructions et méditations pour la retraite annuelle , he reminded them that priests were forbidden to engage in commerce, politics, and other secular activities not only to ensure their spiritual standing but also to avoid provoking or becoming involved in "les factions" and "les inimitiez."^[20] By remaining apart, they would be more able to resolve disputes. Yet even those parish priests who rigorously followed Le Camus's injunctions were still of limited use as mediators. They lived in their communities (even more than before the Counter-Reformation, given the new insistence on the residence of curés in their parishes).

[16] Catholic reformers throughout France faced similar requests: Godeau, bishop of Vence, acquiesced in demands that he exorcise insects in one village in 1670; Mesgrigny, of Grasse, did the same in 1717 (Froeschlé-Chopard, Religion populaire , p. 325). For examples from the dioceses of Langres, Montpellier, Tarbes, and others, see Julia, "Discipline ecclésiastique," pp. 205, 208.

[17] See chapter 2, p. 64. For examples of lawsuits that Le Camus mediated, see the visits of Les Hières, ADI 4G.272, p. 109; Saint-Hilaire, 4G.273, p. 340; Lavaldens, 4G.279, p. 108; Entraigues, ibid., p. 114. Le Camus remarked that his trusted lieutenant, Claude Canel, undertook the same task in Vizille (4G.272, p. 349).

[18] Visit of Saint-Hilaire in 1677, ADI 4G.273, p. 340.

[19] Recueil des ordonnances , p. 162.

[20] Instructions et médiations pour la retraite annuelle de dix jours; avec un discours aux prêtres (Grenoble, 1698), p. 140.

They could not remain unaffected by the issues and personalities involved in conflicts. Bishops could handle the task more effectively.

Marriages and marital disputes prompted the most frequent episcopal interventions in village life. The Church still considered cases of broken betrothals and consanguinity to be under its jurisdiction. Although ecclesiastical officials complained bitterly about the encroachments of secular courts into matrimonial matters, villagers still turned to a bishop, when one was available, rather than to royal judges. For example, while visiting Presle (in the Vercors) during his 1677 tour, Le Camus ruled on a breach of promise accusation that might otherwise have found its way to the bailliage court or the Parlement. A young woman from the neighboring diocese of Die had lodged the complaint against a man of the village. The bishop determined that it was not the man in question who had promised to marry the woman but his brother. He ordered the curé to proclaim the banns and proceed with the marriage of the brother and his intended.^[21]

Couples who, because of dowry problems or the small number of available partners in isolated areas, wished to marry kin within the forbidden third or fourth degrees had to ask Le Camus for permission.^[22] He almost always acquiesced. Perhaps the granting of a dispensation should not rightly be considered the settling of a dispute. But given the tightly knit village world of family alliances and rivalries, it is not hard to see how the timely permission for a young couple to marry might defuse conflict. And Le Camus's interventions in cases of consanguinity or other marital issues did nothing, as far as we can tell from the visits, to upset the control of families over their children's futures. When he came across a young noblewoman who had run away from home to join her lover in the parish of Coublevie (near Voiron in the Isére valley) after her mother had blocked their marriage, he did not absolve her

[21] ADI 4G.273 p. 493. As in most such reports, the procès-verbaux of the visits concentrate on the bishop's actions; therefore we do not know the full circumstances of the case.

[22] Those with sufficient wealth and social standing could appeal to Church officials in Rome, as local nobles did. Le Camus found the practice irritating. Dispensations should be granted only for the gravest reasons, he said; in Rome, officials took frivolous concerns (les frivoles ) into consideration. Since the logic of this argument was unlikely to appeal to the betrothed or their families, he reminded them that Roman officials demanded large payments for dispensations whereas he asked only that couples make donations to their churches according to their means. He delivered this piece of his mind in Vimines, where in 1677 he came across a noble couple who had received dispensation from Rome (ADI 4G.273, p. 684). The option of appealing to Rome was never open to poor villagers. While visiting Entraigues in 1683 he found that a previously approved marriage had not taken place between Claude Helme and Anne Brunet, related in the fourth degree; he returned to them their donation of ten écus (ADI 4G.276, p. 76).

from filial obligation. With no soft spot in his heart for tragic romance, he ordered her to separate herself from the young man, who was reportedly ill, and forbade her to enter the church until they were formally married.^[23]

A congruence between the interests of the reformer and those of, at least, some villagers appears in the disciplining of illicit sexuality. The boundaries around permissible conduct were negotiated between Le Camus, who wanted to cultivate a certain standard of behavior, and those members of the community who wanted to maintain a certain familial order in the village. Information was the currency of the negotiation since Le Camus could only "correct" problems of which villagers informed him, such as those relating to curés' sexual faults. Villagers often reported to Le Camus what they considered scandalous in the behavior of their neighbors. In Eybens (just south of Grenoble), the bishop excommunicated one Antoine Buisson after people charged that within a six-month period he had fathered two children by two different women.^[24] At Arvillard (near the northeastern border of the diocese), Le Camus heard that the "widower" Pierre Figuier and Claudine Fay were living together though they were not formally married and, to make matters worse, even though it was not certain Figuier's first wife was dead. He ordered the couple to separate until the death of the first wife was proved and they were properly married.^[25] In Vaulnaveys (southeast of Grenoble), he found a similar situation. There a widow lived "scandalously" with a man despite having no evidence of her first husband's death. Again the bishop demanded proof of the woman's widowhood followed by a proper marriage.^[26]

What is clear from these cases and others is that communities themselves placed a premium on well-regulated families. Problems of inheritance, arguments over property, and bitter lawsuits could follow family disruptions. The community as a whole had a financial stake in maintaining households. In 1683 while visiting Saint-Ismier (on the eastern flank of the Chartreuse), Le Camus received reports that a member of

[23] ADI 4G.273, pp. 439-440.

[24] Ibid., p. 524.

[25] ADI 4G.276, p. 20.

[26] Ibid., p. 39. A comparison with the well-known case of the false Martin Guerre and Bertrande de Rols suggests that communities were concerned with the ambiguous position of single or married adult women living alone (Natalie Z. Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre [Cambridge, Mass., 1983], chap. 5). This worry may have prompted the villagers of Artigat to accept Arnaud du Tilh as Bertrande's legitimate husband and may have moved the inhabitants of Vaulnaveys to urge the marriage of the widow with her lover. In each case familial order would be restored, the family would be headed by a male, and problems of succession would be avoided.

the village elite, one Sieur Brun, having lived seven years in "concubinage" with Françoise Chome, now wanted to dispose of Chome and their daughter by placing them in a maison de piété in Grenoble. The bishop insisted that he would never allow Brun to do so and ordered him to provide for the woman and girl permanently. Brun agreed, and Le Camus decided not to prosecute him.^[27] The bishop was mollified and so, too, were the other villagers since now there was no chance that Chome or her daughter would become burdens on the community's poor-relief roll.

When Le Camus reported scandals in a parish, he was very likely recording not only his own feelings but those of the villagers as well. His decisions reduced the opportunities for conflict in the community. They also reinforced the sexual standards that villagers, or at least some of them, desired. Parishioners saw in Le Camus a guarantor of the boundaries they erected around the liberties of communal life. Conflicts erupted not just over the crossing of these boundaries but also over their placement, and Le Camus was drawn into the process of fixing them.^[28] The sexual and marital disputes do not clearly indicate if the argument involved all the inhabitants of a community or only those members of the village elite seeking to strengthen their ties to authorities outside the community and their position within the village patriciate.^[29] In other conflicts provoked by village tensions and rivalries the protagonists are more certain. Some disputes grew out of social divisions in communities, sparked by the efforts of the elite to separate itself from those lower on the village social and political ladder. Not all cases, however, set rich against poor. Many pitted notable against notable as they struggled to define their positions vis-à-vis one another and their poorer neighbors.

The communal construction of behavioral boundaries and the conflicts it incited put Le Camus, eager as he was to mediate disputes, in an awkward position. First, he found it hard to believe that villagers could

[27] ADI 4G.276, p. 217. The maison de piété in question may have been the Madeline hospice in Grenoble or the hôpital général . On these institutions, see Norberg, Rich and Poor , esp. chaps. 2, 5.

[28] The idea of such boundaries resembles the "traditional view of social norms and obligations" that Thompson defines as a moral economy (E. P. Thompson, "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century," Past and Present 50 [February 1971]: 76-136). Because the term "traditional" implies that the moral economy is static, the norms and obligations fixed, I find Sabean's formulation more useful to describe agreements over boundaries: "Members of a community are engaged in the same argument, the same raisonnement , the same Rede , the same discourse, in which alternative strategies, misunderstandings, conflicting goals and values are threshed out" (Power in the Blood , p. 29).

[29] The elite was not a fixed group but generally included the community's largest landowners and most powerful members; see chapter 1, p. 23.

create proper social standards without prior episcopal admonitions and religious instruction. In la Grave, after listening to a long list of complaints about disorders including "des médisances fréquentes" and "des injures attroces" that led to brawls in the village assembly meetings, Le Camus exclaimed that such problems occurred precisely because no bishop had visited the parish in thirty-five years. As a result, the villagers were totally uninstructed in the principles of religion.^[30] His reasoning is not surprising. In demonstrating the baseness of village life, he inflated the importance of his own task.

The complaints in la Grave, however, came not just from his observations or the local "ecclésiastiques" but also from the "principaux laïques." The village leaders wanted to reorder social behavior in the community and sought Le Camus's help. He readily gave it, but in doing so he risked accentuating social tensions already existing in the community. The Counter-Reformation's program often exacerbated village social divisions.^[31] The reformers' encouragement of a more "decorous" religious practice appealed to those villagers with social ambitions. They, for instance, provided the membership of the new more exclusive confraternities that the reformers promoted to supplant the penitents or the Holy Spirit groups.^[32] The civilizing mission of the Catholic reform fit the aspirations of village elites, who, as the reformers saw it, provided allies for their program.

But the socially divisive aspect of the Counter-Reformation's program clashed with its more communitarian vision of the parish. Communities were to be united in the search for salvation through proper religious practice led by a newly reformed clergy. The vision did not, however, deny a hierarchy in the village society. Maintaining ranks in a community would sustain rather than disturb its internal order. And the discipline that the clergy would impose on the whole community would promote this goal, whereas provoking social division was foreign to it. Le Camus could not always take the side of the principaux in those disputes that divided them from other inhabitants in the community. To do so would have violated his own injunction to the curés against mixing in village affairs and becoming involved in village factions. Nonetheless, his policies often intensified social division. So Le Camus had to contend with his ideal view of the parish, his desire for more social discipline, and the interest of at least some villagers in using him for their own ends.

[30] ADI 4G.272, pp. 83-84.

[31] Froeschlé-Chopard, Religion populaire , pp. 251, 254, 347-349.

[32] See chapter 1.

The disputes over religious institutions and customs reveal more than any others how the purposes of the reformers, the village elite, and the larger community could converge at one moment and diverge at another. Villagers used some of these institutions and customs to maintain communal solidarity in the face of outsiders like the bishop, and they manipulated others to promote their own standing in the village. In these instances, the bishop could be drawn into a community in a manner he had not intended. Take, for example, conflicts over blessed bread. During the mass priests blessed bread donated by families or parish groups. The bread was then divided and distributed at the church door to parishioners as they left.^[33] This bread was laden with meaning because it was endowed with grace as well as with a symbolism that echoed Holy Communion and evoked communal union. Villagers also invested it with other qualities. The combination of the bread with blessed salt and water cured sick livestock. Morsels of the bread chased mice from granges and induced hens to lay more eggs. And they were tokens that could help win lawsuits.

The contribution and distribution of blessed bread carried a particularly powerful significance because these acts could create conflict between the interests of individuals or groups and those of the whole community. Those who gave the bread drew prestige from their gifts. By providing the substance of this "communion," they made themselves religious patrons of the community. The distribution of the blessed bread reflected the distribution of political power and social prestige in the village. The monopolization of the bread by certain people demonstrated their control not only of political power but, in a sense, even of divine grace, or at least a communal recognition of grace. The withholding of it from certain groups or individuals illustrated their lack of position and, what is more, denied them a place in the religious community of the village. Not surprisingly, competition for the honor of contributing or taking the bread could be fierce, and Le Camus found himself called on to regulate the donations.

In Oris-en-Rattier (in the Valbonnais), enmity between the two noble Beaufort brothers led to the murder of the older by the younger (ironically, named Abel). The feud split the village and resulted in a variety of charges against those who associated with the murderer.^[34] The

[33] The bread in early Christianity was considered a substitute Holy Communion for noncommunicants, but the distribution came to include all parishioners (Dictionnaire de théologie catholique [Paris, 1903-1950], vol. 11, cols. 1731-1733).

[34] For example, Matthieu des Molines who housed the younger Beaufort was accused of swearing in God's name, of never working, and of dressing in too fine a manner (ADI 4G.273, pp. 592-593). The conflict had led both brothers to avoid taking the sacraments. For Le Camus this meant that they were not fulfilling their Catholic duties. For villagers it also meant that the fabric of communal religious life was torn, since communion, in theory, joined and reconciled all inhabitants of a community. For a comparison in German Lutheran communities of the avoidance of communion after conflicts, see Sabean (Power in the Blood , pp. 37-60, esp. 47). Le Camus, on his visit to Oris in 1683, noted that after the murder the parish had entirely changed. The younger Beaufort had fled, taking some associates with him; others restored their ties with their neighbors. Le Camus remarked, wryly, that the community was well rid of a "race aussy peu sociable" and that it seemed almost necessary in "une paroisse aussi déréglée" to endure this much trouble to bring about order (ADI 4G.276, p. 71).

bishop, "pour éviter les contestations," made a point of ordering the person who apportioned the bread not to hand it to specific individuals but rather to let anyone who wanted take some of it. Oris represents an extreme example, but other parishes quarreled over the blessed bread without erupting into murderous feuds. In each case, Le Camus sought to preserve the impartiality of the custom and therefore its usefulness in unifying a community. He would instruct parishioners to distribute the bread "indifferently at the door of the church."^[35]

Battles over rank and power did not stop at the church door. Within its walls, villagers competed for space and for prestige.^[36] Benches were often weapons in these struggles. Local notables fought for the right to install them in the choir, near the main altar, or in chapels they had founded. Since communal assemblies, which looked after church buildings, had to approve the building of a bench, the granting of permission was a communal acknowledgement of a family's prominence in the village. With a bench near the front of the church or in a chapel, a family could, while attending the parish mass, create a very visible display of status for their neighbors who stood.^[37]

Le Camus's territorial struggle with communities over parish churches extended even to these seats. The bishop sought to control them just as he did everything else in the church. As far as he was concerned, only curés and seigneurs possessed the inherent right to benches. He insisted that everyone else obtain his written permission and make a donation to the church of as much as thirty livres—a substantial sum that effectively restricted the competition for benches to the wealthiest villagers. He ordered thrown out all benches built without permission in the church of Nantes-en-Rattier (in the Valbonnais).^[38]

[35] Visit of Villaroux, ADI 4G.276, p. 17. The impartial apportionment did not include curés and seigneurs, who were to receive the bread separately from others.

[36] For further discussion of competition between villagers over space in the church, see chapter 5.

[37] On similar conflicts over church benches in England, see David Underdown, Revel, Riot, and Rebellion (Oxford, 1985), pp. 29-33.

[38] ADI 4G.273, p. 605.

In Sainte-Marie-d'Aloy (in the Isère valley north of Grenoble), he ordered all benches except the seigneur's removed from the church since no one could produce authorizations for them.^[39] And in Seissenet (in the Vercors), he instructed the parishioners to remove the benches near the balustrade before the main altar to some less conspicuous place and to reduce their size because they obstructed the performance of the mass and the adoration of the Blessed Sacrament.^[40]

But Le Camus's sediliary interventions were not necessarily opposed by communities as a whole or, at least, not by certain groups within them. Because of his interest in the benches, villagers appealed to him to resolve the often bitter conflicts that erupted over them. In Entraigues (in the Valbonnais) he was called on to settle a dispute over church benches that grew out of a long-standing feud between the community's two wealthiest families.^[41] In Chapareillan, the conflict raged not between clans but between the penitents and the community. Here the confraternity sought to use its benches to promote its standing in the village, perhaps at the expense of (and certainly at the displeasure of) the notables who controlled the communal assembly and who may have wanted to preserve for themselves bench space in the church. Forced to choose sides, Le Camus decided for the "community," which is to say the notables, rather than the penitents of whom he was always suspicious.^[42]

Not all conflicts into which Le Camus was drawn involved religious customs or institutions. Villagers also called on him to intervene in economic or political matters, as in la Thuile (in Savoy) where a three-way dispute over fishing rights among the inhabitants, the curé, and the monks of a nearby Carthusian house required a delicate compromise.^[43] He mediated a confrontation in Marcieu (near la Mure) between the inhabitants and a miller whom they accused of stealing grain and flour.

[39] Ibid., p. 317; and 4G.276, p. 208, where he demands a "considerable donation" for a bench.

[40] ADI 4G.273, p. 507. Benches that interfered with the installation of confessionals were also to be removed (Recueil des ordonnances , p. 163).

[41] See chapter 6. In Villar-d'Arêne (in the Oisans), when one family's bench disappeared from the church at night, the family members complained to the bishop (ADI 4G.276, p. 102).

[42] ADI 4G.276, p. 205. The bench dispute may have been sparked by an earlier conflict between the principal villagers and other inhabitants over the tithe's partitioning (ibid., 4G.272, p. 675). Tithes, like blessed bread and church benches, fell under Le Camus's purview, and like any tax they incited disputes. Le Camus's decision is not documented. Social tensions aggravated by the church tax in Chapareillan may have resurfaced in the argument over benches. The missing 1677 visit of Chapareillan might have linked the two incidents.

[43] ADI 4G.273, p. 652.

The bishop agreed to suggest to the siegneur that he get rid of the larcenous miller.^[44]

The people of the diocese also found that Le Camus's status and reputation made him an effective intermediary between neighboring villages. Le Camus was frequently willing to intercede, as he did in a boundary dispute between the communities of la Mure and la Motte-Saint-Martin. Each community claimed pasture land on the mountains between them as its own. Le Camus resolved the problem by setting marker stones that delimited the border.^[45] Villagers occasionally asked him to take their side in conflicts with secular authorities, though this could prove more difficult. While visiting the Vercors in 1677, he heard news of a "sedition" by the people of Lans-en-Vercors against a conseiller of the Parlement named Saint-Marcel to whom the community owed a debt of 40,000 livres. The sum was enormous for a village in one of the poorest areas in the diocese. Le Camus rushed to Lans to console the villagers with his presence and to exhort them to pay the sum and avoid "les fâcheux accidens" like sedition. But he found the conseiller arriving with judicial officials and archers to investigate the incident. The villagers were too frightened to be consoled. The bishop returned to Grenoble, where a week later he found those involved and entreated them to resolve their differences amicably. The villagers had hoped that Le Camus would blunt the anger of the assaulted creditor, and, indeed, he did so somewhat. But in the end he could neither cancel the community's debt nor absolve it of its crime.^[46]

Le Camus's mediations, therefore, had their limits. But villagers had no one else to turn to, especially when the terror inflicted on them came not from enraged creditors but from the state and its army. In the seventeenth century, the monarchy resorted to the military occupation of its Dauphinois villages for several reasons. Lodging troops in villagers' homes was an effective means of making recalcitrant communities hand over unpaid taxes, and after the revocation in 1685 it was an equally useful way of forcing Protestants to convert. But in the late 1680s and the 1690s, villages suffered the depradations of the French army not as targets of royal wrath but merely as way stations on the road to campaigns against Savoy. The billeting of soldiers and horses meant extraordinarily burdensome expenses. The bishop, in his later

[44] Visit of Ponsonnas, ADI 4G.276, p. 67. Millers were often the targets of such accusations (see Ginzburg, Cheese and Worms , pp. 119-120).

[45] Reported in the visit of Saint-Etienne-de-Jarrie (Haute-Jarrie), ADI 4G.272, p. 538.

[46] Reported in the visits of Rencurel and Sassenage, ADI 4G.273, pp. 499-500, 514.

visits, frequently saw the strains such demands could place on village society, and he redoubled his mediating efforts. In Domène (northeast of Grenoble) in the early 1690s he stepped into a confrontation between the inhabitants and their local officials over the cost of military provisions. He told the villagers to draw up an account of the expenses, from which he would try to arrange matters to everyone's satisfaction. Because of these expenses, he also granted the community a year's grace in fulfilling his own orders for church repairs. In Mont-de-Lans (in the Oisans), he recalled the principal inhabitants to their responsibility for establishing a poor list and providing relief, obligations they had been neglecting even though the "passage continuel des troupes" had brought great misery to the parish.^[47] The incidents reveal, in separate ways, how the monarchy's wartime demands aggravated social tensions at the lowest levels of French society. Le Camus also ordered his curés to inform him of disorders or any crimes that the troops committed. He would use the reports to seek redress from the intendant for the victimized villagers.^[48]

The bishop had more than just the safety of his flock at heart. He was acting to protect his vision of the diocese. After having spent two decades combating what he saw as the villagers' natural moral laxity, he had no desire to see his work undone by troublesome troops. He railed particularly against scandalous village women who became too familiar with the soliders, and he threatened to lock them up in prison or the hospice (run by the Sisters of the Madeline) if they persisted in "impurities."^[49] The bishop was, by his own estimation, unsuccessful in protecting the purity of his flock. His eighth visit, carried out between 1693 and 1695, speaks eloquently of the miseries that war brought to the diocese, by which Le Camus meant moral degradation as well as material destruction.^[50]

Despite the problems of the 1690s, Le Camus's complaints about sexual license, business trickery, theft, profanities, and the like cannot be taken strictly at face value. They too closely resemble those he had been making in every pastoral visit since 1672 and hence acquire a timeless quality. Without a doubt the presence of an unruly army in the area multiplied the occasions and aggravated the situations about which Le Camus complained. As we have seen, however, in the accusations

[47] ADI 4G.279, pp. 14-15 (Domène), 125 (Mont-de-Lans).

[48] Synod of 8 April 1693, art. 28 in ADI 4G.363.

[49] See, among numerous examples, the visits of Vizille and Domène, ADI 4G.279, pp. 13, 15.

[50] See also his letter to Barrillon of 4 August 1693 in Lettres , ed. Ingold, p. 565.

villagers leveled at priests and in their criticisms of their neighbors' marital and sexual transgressions, the inhabitants of the diocese's communities, too, had standards of moral and social behavior. They were appalled by the troops' actions, a more immediate threat to them than to the bishop. And they had not only their moral standards to guard but their families and homes as well. The bishop suited their purposes, or at least he was their last resort.

A close examination of the texts of Le Camus's pastoral visits does not reveal just the program of a reformer and a stubborn resistance to his efforts. Nor does it suggest a cultural fault line between villagers and their bishop. A subtler process of exchange was at work. The villagers' response to him did not lack respect, but it was eminently utilitarian. He could help protect communities and maintain peace and order. He could also further the interests of families within villages. These were among the priorities of villagers, and they could quickly demonstrate them to Le Camus as they did in Herbeys (a community of which he was also the seigneur) in 1693. Here he was about to preach to the parishioners when the entire congregation rushed out to fend off troops who were passing nearby. They left the bishop facing an empty church and with no recourse but to forgo his sermon.^[51]

The Festivals of Village Saints

The event in which villagers' spiritual, social, economic, and political interests became most closely intertwined was the village festival. And for this reason it also became a contested object between villagers and reformers who condemned its mixture of sacred and profane activities. An examination of festivals from Le Camus's visits demonstrates how they adapted to the bishop and the conditions of the late seventeenth century. It also suggests that festivals were not, as some have described them, simply anachronistic celebrations doomed by the onslaught of modernity in the form of the Counter-Reformation Church, the absolutist state, or industrial economic change. Rather they were active elements in their contemporary cultural systems.^[52] They changed, and

[51] ADI 4G.279, p. 70.

[52] On modernity's role in the demise of "popular religion," see Muchembled, who argues that festivals succumbed to political repression and acculturation by elites. The eventual outcome was a modern mass culture (Culture populaire , 2d part). Bercé writes of an uprooting of popular customs and agrarian festivals by the Counter-Reformation and royal policy in the seventeenth century and by another governmental assault in the late eighteenth (Fête et révolte , pp. 143, 163-180).

so did their meaning, as villagers' ideas about the best form for village religion evolved.^[53]

Villagers used festivals in their search for salvation and for divine aid in combating earthly misfortunes. They also employed them in the regulation of their relations with outside powers; the establishment and enforcement of norms and values in the community; the social control of unruly groups, especially young men; the construction of village solidarity; and the competition for prestige and honor. It is important to note that this list includes opposites such as solidarity and competition. Religion could reweave the social fabric torn by political or economic struggles, but it also presented and created occasions for rivalry, dissension, and protests, such as that in Chambéry.^[54]

The annual festival of a community's patron saint was the centerpiece of village religion.^[55] Unfortunately, no contemporary accounts from the diocese of Grenoble, not even Le Camus's reports, give a rich enough description of patronal festivals to permit as thick an interpretation of them as I have given for the ceremony of Le Camus's visit. However, combining information from the visits and communal records with the secondary literature on early modern festivals provides an illustration of how the people of the diocese maintained elements of village religion in the face of Le Camus's reform program, how they adapted certain of his conceptions, and how they sometimes succeeded in drawing the bishop into their designs.

The ways villagers honored their patrons were not the same everywhere but shared essential characteristics. The festivals generally lasted several days, though they varied from one-day to week-long celebra-

[53] Roger Chartier describes the development of urban festivals in "Ritual and Print. Discipline and Invention," in The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France (Princeton, 1987), pp. 13-31. He emphasizes the impact of municipal oligarchies and then ecclesiastical and political reformers on festivals. I would stress instead a more dynamic interaction between authorities and participants.

[54] For a critique of the "integrationist" view of religion, see Mary Douglas, "The Effects of Modernization on Religious Change," Daedalus 111 (1982): 1-19, esp. 7.

[55] A parish's patron saint should not be confused with the church's titular saint, whom the founders had chosen and whose hold on seventeenth-century villagers' affections was often weak. Thus in Bourg-d'Oisans, the church was named for Lawrence, but the inhabitants celebrated the fête of Sebastian. In Valbonnais, Peter was the titular saint, but the villagers were devoted to Anthony. In Oulles (in the Oisans) where the titular saint was Desiderius, the parishioners annually demonstrated their devotion to Anthony, Joseph, Sebastian, Roch, and the Holy Savior and Transfiguration, but not to Desiderius. These examples come from the visit of Bishop Jean de Caulet in 1728, which recorded parish fêtes more systematically than those of Le Camus (ADI 4G.284, pp. 475 [Bourg-d'Oisans], 366 [Valbonnais], and 448 [Oulles]).

tions.^[56] A fête might begin, for instance, on Saturday evening with a charivari-like announcement before the church and the homes of local notables, complete with catcalls, mockery, and raucous music. On Sunday morning the villagers first attended a mass in their patron's honor and then went on procession through the community, perhaps carrying the saint's relics. Many villages had an outlying chapel dedicated to their patron that was the goal of the procession and the site for a mass in addition to, or more likely, instead of that performed in the parish church.

The people of Auris-en-Oisans, twice a year, climbed the steep slope to the chapel of their patron, Gerald. As it does to this day, his sanctuary overlooked all the dispersed hamlets of Auris, and the procession to it provided an opportunity for the inhabitants of the different settlements to affirm, or reconstruct, a sense of community. The processions also allowed particular inhabitants to build their prestige in the village; hence they could be the source of conflict. In 1681, when the Gerald processions were in need of an endowment to pay the priest and refurnish the chapel, one of the community's merchants, Louis Faure, stepped forward. He provided land for the foundation and, in turn, dictated the order of the procession. It would take place on the Tuesday of Easter and on the festival of Saint James the Major on 25 July (a means of honoring another saint as well as Gerald). The processions would proceed up the mountain from the parish church with villagers chanting various psalms and saints' litanies. At the chapel, after prayers for the king, Gerald, and the preservation of the crops, the curé would celebrate mass "as solemnly as possible."

Rather than return directly to the parish church after mass, the procession would detour to the hamlet of Cours and its chapel of Our Lady of the Angels, thus incorporating into the larger communal ritual a chapel that could have been an alternative to the parish church as a locus of religious activity.^[57] The contract of foundation prescribed the

[56] I draw the basic description of patronal festivals from Michel Vovelle, Les méta-morphoses de la fête en Provence de 1750-1820 (Paris, 1976), pp. 39, 44, 54-64; I complement it with Maurice Agulhon, Pénitents et francs-maçons de l'ancienne Provence (Paris, 1968), pp. 43-59; Bercé, Fête et révolte , pp. 127-130; Gérard Bouchard, Le village immobile (Paris, 1972), pp. 300-301; Burke, Popular Culture , pp. 178-204; Chanaud, "Folklore et religion," pp. 58-61; Froeschlé-Chopard, Religion populaire , pp. 335-340; Hoffman, Church and Community , pp. 62-65, 134, 141; and Muchembled, Culture populaire , pp. 123-127.

[57] On the rivalry between churches and outlying chapels, see Froeschlé-Chopard, Religion populaire , pp. 338-340. The inhabitants of hamlets wanted a succursale chapel especially for the winter when travel to the church could be perilous. Bishops and curés acquiesced as long as the chapel did not assume particular parish functions—housing the Blessed Sacrament, maintaining baptismal fonts—or did so only during the winter. See chapter 4.

ceremonies at the chapel, which included an orison for Our Lady, requesting her protection for the entire community, and another for Saint Louis. Louis was an interesting choice, since there is little evidence in other foundations that Auris's villagers had particular veneration for him. He was, however, Louis Faure's name-saint.^[58]

The community of Auris certainly wanted an endowment for the processions but was not happy with Faure's attempt at self-aggrandizement. Faure wrote to Le Camus, trying to enlist his aid. He asked the bishop to register the act of foundation and order Auris's curé to announce it during his Sunday sermons.^[59] In the foundation's contract, Faure insisted on certain practices that could associate him with the bishop's religious style. Reformers like Le Camus were suspicious of processions on patronal fêtes. The mingling of the sexes; the stops made by thirstier parishioners at taverns rather than sacred stations along the route; the independence of villagers, who did not necessarily want to go where their priests wished to lead them—all these seemed profane to reformers. But Le Camus could have found little that was objectionable in Faure's foundation with its list of prayers, orisons, and litanies, and its tone of unquestionable piety. Other villagers may have wanted processions in a style to which they were accustomed. If they did perceive Faure's actions as self-aggrandizing and also as a specific attempt to tie himself to the bishop, then the conflict between the donor and the community would only have been exacerbated.

Faure had to wait two years to get his way. In 1683, Auris desperately needed two hundred livres to pay debts. Faure supplied the sum on the condition that the community undertake in perpetuity the obligation of paying the annual pension based on his endowment for the processions and masses. If it failed to do so, he would be entitled to full payment of the principal and interest; otherwise he would never demand repayment. To seal the deal, Faure gave the chapels of Gerald and Our Lady of the Angels a variety of ornaments and furnishings. The communal assembly quickly agreed.^[60] The festivals honoring Auris's patron would be guaranteed. The processions would continue as the focus of communal religious life, but now they would be intimately

[58] The 1681 act of foundation is found in ADI 27J.3/67.

[59] ADI 4E.24 S3, letter of 1681.

[60] ADI 27J.3/67, assembly of 1 November 1683.

linked with Louis Faure's name and prestige as well as with a spiritual style agreeable to the bishop.

A chapel on the boundary of a parish was often the goal of processions from that community and others nearby. Gerald's chapel in Auris attracted the neighboring parishes of la Garde and le Freney. These communities, therefore, also had a claim on the saint's attention, even though he was not formally their patron. If the different processions to a chapel took place on the same day, a likely occurrence since all involved wished to honor the saint on his or her festival, then the competition among individuals might be less apparent than that among communities concerned with promoting their sense of honor and protecting communal boundaries. The result was often a brawl.

Le Camus reported no fights at the chapel in Auris, but the inhabitants of le Freney proved to be quite combative on their excursions elsewhere. They fought in Besse on the festival of Saint Anne, that community's patron, and in Mizoen on the fête of its patron, Saint Christopher.^[61] The chapel (actually more a regional shrine) that attracted these "batteries" most often was Notre-Dame-de-Myans in Savoy. The visits mention at least eleven Savoyard parishes that undertook processions to Myans besides that of les Marches in which it was located.^[62] Fights were frequent not only at the shrine but along the route as the inhabitants of one parish passed through others.

Most current discussions of these fights describe them as an integral part of the festival ritual in which organized abbeys or companies of young men defended their parishes' honor and guarded marriageable women from outsiders seeking to court them.^[63] Le Camus never indicated, however, that the fights were strictly the preserve of village youth. Adults took part as well, provoked by disputes with neighboring villages over precedence, wood cutting, water use, or livestock gone astray.^[64] Thus the ritual of the saint's festival—which included proces-

[61] ADI 4G.272, p. 124.

[62] Visits of La Motte-Servolex, Bissy, Arbin, Les Marches, and Saint-Jean-d'Arvey in ibid., pp. 1349, 1361, 1494, 1515, 1555; visits of Les Déserts, La Thuille, Thoiry, and Saint-Jean-de-la-Porte, Saint-Léger, Saint-Pierre-d'Entremont, in ADI 4G.276, pp. 154, 156, 166, 183, 199; and visit of Saint-Badolph, ADI 4G.284, p. 251 (visit of Bishop Jean de Caulet).

[63] On youth organizations and protection of the marriage market, see Hoffman, Church and Community , p. 64; on regeneration of communal identity through fights, Froeschlé-Chopard, Religion populaire , p. 336. For an interesting discussion of symbolic protection of a community by youths, though urban rather than rural, see Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence , pp. 368-399.

[64] Chanaud notes Le Camus's silence on the ages of fighters in "Folklore et religion," p. 58. Vovelle describes festival fights in Provence as involving "locals" without distinguishing between younger and older combatants (Les métamorphoses , pp. 62-63). Christian suggests these reasons for fighting and also restricts the battles to village youths (Local Religion , p. 118). Tensions between processions could even stem from national rivalries, as Robert Hertz shows in his classic essay on the shrine of Saint Besse in the val Soana between France and Italy (Hertz, "St. Besse," in Saints and Their Cults , ed. Stephen Wilson [Cambridge, 1983], pp. 55-100).

sions, masses, prayers, and quite often fights—served both the community's spiritual and material interests. It is a mark of the multiple meanings of chapels, those small territories of grace on village outskirts, that they provided the most important locale and occasions for communities to petition divine powers and defend earthly welfare even while individuals such as Louis Faure pursued their personal advantage.

Reformers wanted to divide these different strands of meaning into sacred and profane. As part of the campaign to control sacred territory in parishes, they would try to preserve the sanctified site of the chapel from profane concerns and activities. They were, of course, appalled by the fights, which they thought demeaned celebrations honoring saints. Yet villagers fought, quite literally, to maintain the role of chapels and processions in village religion. The disagreement over the activities at chapels was only part of a larger dispute over saints' festival practices. Reformers objected to athletic contests such as races, vaulting, target shooting, ball games, or animal baiting. They disliked the blessing of livestock, though it helped protect animals vital to the village economy. Feasts, which increased the prestige of rich villagers who gave them and which were occasions for the poor to break their normally meager diets, merely provided opportunities for the sin of gluttony. So too did drinking, which along with gluttony reflected a loss of the internal self-control so central to the Counter-Reformation's desire for individualized piety and the constant examination of conscience. Just as troubling was that money spent on food and drink wasted villagers' spare economic resources.^[65] Music and dance had the same effect and led inevitably to sexual immorality. Le Camus condemned the playing of "violons, flutes, et tambours" not only on festivals but also when parishioners carried blessed bread to the church.^[66] Condemnations of dance were nothing new; it had long been considered pleasing to the

[65] Bercé, Fête et révolte , p. 164.

[66] ADI 4G.363, synod of 9 May 1685. The visits contain numerous prohibitions of accompanying blessed bread with violins; for example, ADI 4G.273, p. 651 (Arbin), or 4G.276, p. 14 (Grignon). For further examples see Chanaud, "Folklore et religion," pp. 42, 79-81.

devil.^[67] Le Camus had, moreover, a specific model in Borromeo, who had composed a treatise against dancing.^[68] But Le Camus never succeeded in depriving his flock of the practices that were so much a part of their saints' festivals. His later visits, no less than his earlier ones, are filled with fulminations against festive music, dancing, drinking, and so forth.

What made these festive practices so difficult to uproot was their complete integration into village life. They were necessary for economic survival, for recreation, for communal sharing, and for familial competition. Hence the responsibility for arranging the festivals fell to the most organized institutions in communal religion. Elsewhere in France these were groups known as reinages or royaumes . They financed festivities by auctioning the offices of king and queen of the fête, who would preside over the celebration, judge disputes, and levy fines. They mocked the normal political order while possibly, through the inversion of that order, suggesting alternatives to it.^[69] The reinages or royaumes , often indistinguishable from youth abbeys were more common in towns and cities. Le Camus did not mention them in his visits and singled out only one specific organization, the basoche of Montmélian, for its carnival custom of parading with a "phantosme," which the marchers threw into the air.^[70] In the small parishes of the diocese, the young men may have made the arrangements without benefit of a specific organization, or they acted in concert with the community's most prominent formal religious group—the one that represented the community as a whole—the Holy Spirit confraternity.^[71]

[67] Jean-Claude Schmitt, "'Jeunes' et danse des chevaux de bois," cited in Chanaud, "Folklore et religion," p. 60.

[68] Bercé, Fête et révolte , p. 150. The treatise was translated into French in 1664; Jean-Baptiste Thiers, who thought dancing always posed a moral danger, took up Borromeo's ideas in his Traité des jeux . Not all reformers were so harsh; see the comments of Francis de Sales in Introduction to the Devout Life , trans. Michael Day (London, 1961), pp. 174-176.

[69] Davis, Society and Culture , pp. 97-123; Jean-Pierre Gutton, La sociabilité villageoise dans l'ancienne France (Paris, 1979), pp. 232-234; Hoffman, Church and Community , pp. 62-65; and Bercé, Fête et révolte , pp. 28-36.

[70] ADI 4G.272, p. 1507; and Chanaud, "Folklore et religion," p. 66. He draws on Félix Bernard, Histoire de Montmélian (Chambéry, 1956), pp. 282-283,350, 383. Since the late Middle Ages, the term basoche designated associations of younger members of the lower-ranking parliamentary court personnel such as avocats and procureurs (Bercé, Fête et révolte , p. 28). For several decades the civic authorities in Montmélian had attacked this basoche ; it survived in part through a legacy from someone whom the members thanked with a "De profundis" each year, but it disappeared soon after Le Camus's mention of it.

[71] Hoffman, Church and Community , p. 64.

The reformer and the villagers also disagreed on the issue of festivals and work. Villagers were obligated to give up their daily labors during festivals, but the frequent episcopal admonitions against work on fêtes suggest that normal employments often continued.^[72] Bishops understood this profanation of fêtes as indicating the difficulty poor villagers had in observing too many economically unproductive days. Accordingly, the reformers tried to reduce the number of festivals, which would mean, in addition, fewer occasions for unauthorized festive practices.^[73] Royal authorities were also bothered by the frequent suspension of work, concerned as they were with maintaining productive and therefore taxable laborers.^[74] No doubt, in many instances people did need to work, but it seems that reformers misread the situation since villagers resisted episcopal efforts to cut back their holidays.

Rather than divide festivals from economic activities, villagers combined them. The vogues of the diocese provided a distinct opportunity not just for piety and play but also for commercial exchange. Not all festivals had fairs, and not all fairs took place on festivals. But the two often went together, much to the annoyance of reformers. Festivals were good for business, since they brought a confluence of people to a village, providing a larger than normal clientele for local products. In many cases the saint thus honored had been instrumental in protecting the community's crops, livestock, winemaking, cheese making, or cloth weaving. It must have seemed perfectly logical to express thanks for protection by offering these goods for sale.^[75]

Reformers not only condemned commercial profanations of festivals but backed up their condemnations by restricting access to religious

[72] Ordinances against working on festivals in synods of 12 April 1690, art. 9; 20 April 1692, art. 14; 8 April 1693, art. 10; and the Recueil des ordonnances , p. 160. The visits also contain numerous condemnations of work on festivals in specific parishes.

[73] Bishops also declared certain holidays non-chômées , meaning work was permitted on them. The calendar of festivals for the diocese of Grenoble in the Recueil des ordonnances lists forty-two festivals (including universal celebrations such as Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost) with work permitted on ten of them: the days after Easter and Pentecost, and the festivals of Saints Mathias, James and Philip, James the Apostle, Lawrence, Bartholomew, Matthew, Simon and Jude, and Thomas.

[74] On governmental efforts to reduce fêtes and thereby poverty, see J. Maarten Ultee, "The Suppression of Fêtes in France, 1666," Carbolic Historical Review 62 (1976): 181-199.

[75] Visits of la Combe-de-Lancey and Triviers, where wine was sold on Saint Vincent's fête (ADI 4G.276, pp. 33, 164); and Saint-Alban, where even the curé sold wine on Saturnin's fête (4G.272, p. 1569). In the parish of Brié (south of Grenoble), villagers sold cheese on the festival of their patron, Peter, despite an arrêt of the Parlement forbidding it (ADI 4G.276, pp. 120-121).

institutions and ceremonies. Le Camus instructed curés to hold an early mass and then close their churches if fairs continued on festivals. Or else they were to withhold the benediction of the Blessed Sacrament and play villagers' economic interests against their adoration of the Eucharist.^[76] Moreover, he tried to enforce both ecclesiastical and royal ordinances that ordered parishes to move fairs to the day after the festivals. This strategy, he thought, would break the connection between saints and commercial exchange.^[77]

But the bishop's attempt to separate commerce from religious celebrations would not succeed so easily. It ran up against the villagers' own desire to associate these two activities. Witness the assembly composed of the consuls of the Oisans communities that met in Bourg-d'Oisans on 4 January 1673. The memory of Le Camus's first, dramatic visit to the area, seven months before, must still have been fresh. The consuls met to address the difficulty posed by the regional livestock fairs held in and around Bourg-d'Oisans on Palm Sunday and the fête of Saint Matthew. Ordinarily the fairs were conducted on the same days at the festivals. The problem that concerned the consuls, however, was not profanation but traffic congestion. Too many sellers crowded too many animals into the town on each festival. They ran afoul of one another and provoked disorder. For "the advantage of the public," not for the solemnity of the festivals, the consuls would have to regulate the markets.

So the Palm Sunday fair would, henceforth, begin on the preceding Thursday morning for "bestail grave" and no one could bring livestock into town prior to Wednesday evening. The sale of "bestail a pied rond" would start on Saturday, providing that was not also a festival. As for the fair on Saint Matthew's day, the sale of "bestail de graisse" would start on the evening before the fête and that of the "bestail a pied rond" in the evening after the festivities, unless the festival fell on a Sunday, when no one could sell livestock.^[78] It is clear that the consuls wanted to keep at least Sundays free from commercial activity. They may have been responding to the bishop's criticisms of mixing festivals and commerce, but they made no reference in their deliberations to Le Camus, episcopal orders, or even royal ordinances forbidding fairs on festivals.

[76] Visits of Chapelle-Blanche in ADI 4G.276, p. 18, and St-Martin-d'Uriage in 4G.273, p. 782.

[77] Synod of 3 May 1702, art. 4; and visits of Brié and Saint-Pierre-d'Entremont in ADI 4G.273, pp. 358, 372.

[78] The report on the assembly is in the Archives départementales des Hautes-Alpes (Archives communales de la Grave, BB1).

Instead they cited "the advantage of the public." Their careful arrangement of festive and commercial days suggests a subtler interpretation than that of compliance with the bishop's wishes. Commercial exchange per se did not stain festivals, but the disorder caused by colliding beasts and quarreling merchants hampered the peaceful pursuit of both commerce and festivities. The consuls would not divorce commerce from festivals. Instead they would associate the two by creating around each festival a complex of days, some of which would be dedicated to buying and selling and others to rituals and play. Indeed, they may have hoped that those aspects of festive rituals that stressed reconciliation or communal solidarity would help cool off the competitiveness the market generated.^[79]

The people of the diocese at times simply refused to follow the bishop's instructions. He would often discover during his later visits that a parish had done little to fulfill his orders. In only a few communities, Le Camus found well-instructed parishioners who no longer engaged in superstitions, had completed necessary church repairs, purchased missing ornaments, and conducted parish affairs according to the bishop's and curé's wishes. These parishes stood out because they were unusual.^[80] Often the people of the diocese followed the example of those in Varces (in the southern part of the diocese, west of the Drac river) who rang church bells while dancing around a festival bonfire, despite Le Camus's condemnation of this act.^[81] By ringing the bells, they were reclaiming their church from him or resisting his claim to it. The church, which the reformer had tried to take for his own during the ceremony of the visit, remained firmly in the community's grip. The villagers continued to use it, and in this case particularly its bells, in the accustomed way. The bells were vital to their view of proper festival celebration. Not to ring them was to impair communal festivity and to tempt the saint's wrath. No matter what the demands of a reforming bishop, the villagers could not easily risk that outcome.^[82]

Outright resistance, however, was not the most frequent response. Because of their own aspirations or because of the social and political

[79] On the use of ritual to ensure honesty in commercial exchange and security against market competition, see Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 18-40.

[80] For examples, see the visits of Gières and Vimines, ADI 4G.276, pp. 3, 190.

[81] The most frequent occasion for dancing around bonfires was St. John the Baptist's day, celebrated at midsummer.

[82] ADI 4G.273, p. 825.

divisions within their communities, villagers were often willing to embrace certain aspects of the bishop's religion, such as churches in good condition, better curés, or new devotions. They recognized the bishop's authority, measured it against their own desires, and the result was frequently a compromise.

The parish of Uriol (in the southern part of the diocese, west of the Drac river) celebrated two patronal festivals each year, Saint Lupus's and Saint Michael's. Lupus was, by far, the favorite. He attracted great devotion from this community and from neighboring parishes, whose people flocked to Uriol to display their devotion and to enjoy the indulgences attached to Lupus's day. They celebrated the festival, by their choice, on the first Sunday in August.^[83] The Uriol church was small and built on a mountain.^[84] Access to it was difficult, practically impossible in winter, according to Le Camus. To accommodate the influx of people on Lupus's festival, the curé had moved the church altar outside. One can easily imagine the crowd gathering on the mountainside to hear the mass. The Lupus festival was the high point of the parish's religious calendar. The community had only eight families, and the church was practically unused the rest of the year. It did not house the Blessed Sacrament and had neither ornaments nor baptismal font. The parish had no cemetery, and the curé lived in the nearby community of Vif. So Lupus's day, with its "grand concours" of people, was the community's central annual rite, its one act of religious self-definition. Likely it was also vital for the village's economic sustenance.

Michael, by contrast, attracted far less devotion. No crowds flocked to Uriol on his fête at the end of September. The date interfered with harvest work, and it may have been difficult to undertake a second celebration so soon after the first. Uriol's parishioners decided to combine Michael's festival with Lupus's. Perhaps they wanted to revive veneration for Michael by joining his day to that of the more widespread devotion. Binding the festivals would strengthen the efficacy of the two patrons and would help the villagers petition for a successful harvest. However, this manipulation of Uriol's small pantheon did not sit well with Le Camus. He ordered the curé, on pain of suspension, not

[83] The official observance was on 29 July. Le Camus's language—"On a choisy le premier dimanche pour la fête de St. Loup patron"—suggests that the choice of the date was the parish's own, conscious and independent, decision.

[84] Mountain churches and chapels were often dedicated to Michael because visions of the archangel usually occurred on mountains (Donald Attwater, The Avenel Dictionary of Saints [New York, 1981], p. 245).

to move the festival, give the benediction over the Blessed Sacrament, or publicize the indulgences attached to the festival, if the parishioners insisted on honoring Lupus and Michael together. For the bishop, Michael could be properly venerated only on his appointed date.

Le Camus also found problems with Uriol's Saint Lupus festival, specifically the location and decoration of the altar. It was bare of proper ornaments, and its position outside the church door was indecent. So too were the ex-votos displayed around it. Some villagers who had benefited from Lupus's miracles left small silver hearts, as marks of their gratitude. Le Camus had come across ex-votos of this sort on a number of altars in the diocese. As far as he was concerned, they sullied the dignity of the altar and the honor due the saint. They were a reminder of the superstitious instrumentality that he sought to strip from the cult of saints. He ordered the altar destroyed and the hearts melted down to make a ciborium for the Eucharist. The parishioners could not follow such orders without losing their means of honoring the saint. The outside altar was necessary for accommodating the large crowds. Without it only a few worshipers could pack into the church on the festival to hear mass and ask for the saint's help. And removing the ex-votos would have deprived the faithful of a key element of the cult, namely a means of expressing appreciation for the saint's help and of fulfilling a vow to their friend.^[85]

As a result, the villagers only partially followed the bishop's orders. The outside altar remained. The visits of Uriol after 1672 make no further mention of the ex-votos, so perhaps Le Camus won on that point. He also won on the issue of maintaining Michael's September fête, but it was a Pyrrhic victory since the saint ceased to hold any attraction for the villagers. Jean de Caulet's 1728 visit mentions only Lupus, for whom devotion remained strong, as a patron of Uriol.^[86]

Adapting the Counter-Reformation to Village Religion

It is exactly these half victories, compromises (willing or unwilling), and stubborn resistances that marked much of the encounter between the religion of the bishop and that of villagers. The bishop ordered his curés

[85] Chapter 4 further discusses this conflict over saints' devotions.

[86] ADI 4G.272, pp. 1075-1080; 4G.273, pp. 808-811; 4G.276, p. 382; 4G.284, p. 462.

to hold early masses on festivals and then close their churches; to refuse benedictions of the Blessed Sacrament; to lead processions only on approved routes; and to instruct their parishioners—in sermons, catechism classes, and the new confessional boxes—not to profane festivals. As a last resort, to which he rarely turned, Le Camus threatened to interdict parish churches.^[87] He tried to instill his attitude toward religious faith and practice in these communities; they in turn could not let the bishop undercut all the habitual meanings and uses of their religion. His power could be useful to them when they set out to change their fêtes. So they might seek to employ him in arranging religious life the way they saw fit, even if their plans did not always coincide with his. In the end, however, villagers could not easily surrender their construction of village religion.

What happened if they did not evade the bishop's orders or if they could not force curés to fulfill their functions in village religion was all too apparent. In 1677 hailstorms severely damaged the crops of a number of Savoyard communities. The storms left the villagers without food and feeling resentful toward Le Camus and his parish priests. The prelate had forbidden the people of Saint-Cassin, for example, to say mass at a chapel in bad condition near the ruins of a château. The parishioners were convinced that they had been struck by hail on several occasions because of this prohibition. Le Camus declared the idea to be a mere "superstitious belief," but faced with the villagers' anger and worry, he agreed to let masses begin again once the chapel was repaired. Here a compromise was reached: Le Camus would reinforce the normal form of village religion while exacting, at least, a suitable location for it. In nearby Vimines, the inhabitants blamed the hail on the curé who was absent and who, therefore, could not say the "customary prayers" to ward off the storms. They did not go as far as their neighbors in Montagnole who, the previous year, had threatened to stone their priest for such negligence, but they were clearly incensed at the curé and, by association, the bishop. Le Camus retorted that they could not expect priests to be "slaves" in their parishes all summer long. And the bishop insisted that the curé's absence did not cause the hail. Rather the parishioners' sinfulness had precipitated the destructive storms. The villagers would not have denied their sins, but the bishop's explanation

[87] Interdiction more often followed the parishioners' failure to repair the church (ADI 4G.276, pp. 13 [Cheylas], 22 [le Moutaret]). Even in these situations, its use was infrequent.

was too simplistic. Village religion made provision for coping with a natural disaster by appeasing the anger of God and the saints; the bishop's Counter-Reformation style of worship did not. Now village religion was out of joint. Economic disaster was the result.^[88]

In a vicious cycle, economic failure further undermined religious practice, the weakening of which in turn brought further harm to the villagers. The parents of the region customarily brought children (and sometimes adults) suffering from nervous disorders to the pilgrimage site at the parish church of Saint-Ombre (also known as Chambéry-le-Vieux). When Le Camus arrived in the parish a few days after visiting Saint-Cassin and Vimines, he found that the number of supplicants had recently fallen off severely. Because of bad local harvests, parents could no longer afford to make an offering to the local priest who recited selections from the Gospels to help cure the children. The failure to perform certain rituals of village religion brought about economic hardship, which made it impossible to pursue other rituals. Parishioners were angry at their priests, priests were fearful of their parishioners, families were impoverished, and children suffered.^[89]

Not all religious rituals were undertaken to manipulate nature, avoid physical calamity, and alleviate the anxiety provoked by the environment.^[90] Such activites, however, were elements of the villagers' culture, which provided an understanding of nature and a way of coping with its problems. Sinfulness and the failure to observe the dictates of village religion were likely to bring on natural disaster. A religious response was therefore necessary; to fulfill it villagers would have to marshal their religious resources. They numbered the bishop, the curés, and aspects of the bishop's religion among these resources. But they could not allow the bishop, his curés, or his beliefs to obstruct the pursuit of what they considered proper religious practice.

In the 1690s, more' than at any other time during Le Camus's episcopate, villagers needed to call on the instrumentality of village religion. During this decade war brought material destruction, disease, and financial burdens to the people of the diocese. Le Camus described the troubles of his flock during these years as disorder and death took their toll. He wrote to his friend and colleague Barrillon (bishop of Luçon) about the purpura epidemic that struck Chambéry and was arrested

[88] ADI 4G.273, pp. 680, 684-685.

[89] Ibid., p. 695.

[90] See introduction.

only by the bitterly cold winter of 1691. The next winter he described the famine "caused by troops and poor harvests." Villagers who defended themselves against the thievery and violence of soldiers were reduced to indigence and despair by fires the troops set in retaliation. The shortages of food and wine, the bishop said, were "prodigious." By 1693, "war and misery" had so changed his diocese that he no longer recognized it, and the death rate during 1694 was so severe that he lost some forty curés.^[91]

Around the diocese, people once again mobilized their religious resources to restore their relationship with divine beings; to ward off the disasters warfare brought upon them; to gain, at times, frantic advantage over their neighbors; and, at others, to restore harmony in their communities. They reclaimed the old saints' festivals that Le Camus had discouraged or in which they had lost interest. Or they incorporated new ones into their religious calendars and made use of them in ways Le Camus did not approve. They founded chapels or refounded old ones. They established processions or restored old ones, sometimes resisting Le Camus's ordinances or adapting them to suit their own needs.

In the depths of the 1694 crisis, the inhabitants of Notre-Dame-de-Mésage (west of Vizille) looked not to the religion of Le Camus but to the history of their own village religion for a means "to turn away the scourge that menaced them." They remembered or rediscovered the vow their community had made to Saints Sebastian and Roch during the plague in 1618. At that time, Notre-Dame-de-Mésage and neighboring Saint-Pierre-de-Mésage were one parish, and the processions that the vow established tied the two communities together. On the first of May, a procession would start at the parish church in Saint-Pierre and proceed to the boundary chapel of Our Lady of the Altars. On Roch's festival, another went from the church of Saint-Pierre through the hamlets of both communities to the outlying chapel of Saint Firmin where there was also an altar to Roch. The villagers remembered the success of the vow. Their parish was spared the plague, which struck all the neighboring communities. They continued the annual processions, masses, and prayers until 1668 when the parish was divided into two. With separate parishes (and, no doubt, in the absence of any

[91] Letters to Barrillon of 22 January 1691, 17 January 1692, 4 August 1693, and 26 October 1694 in Lettres , ed. Ingold, pp. 543-544, 557-571.

immediate threat) processions whose structure bound the one larger community together no longer made sense.

In 1694 the inhabitants of Notre-Dame saw the illnesses "for which the art of medicine could find no remedy" as the will of a God who sought "vengeance for the laxity of the parishioners in the matter of the pious exercises." The communal assembly voted to reestablish the processions as much as possible in the "way their ancestors and predecessors had intended." They did change a few things. To the festivals of Sebastian and Roch they added those of James and Felix. The procession on Roch's fête would once again visit various hamlets and end at the chapel of Firmin. But for the procession on 1 May, the community could not simply restore the past. The availability of sacred places within the village's religious space was no longer what it had been in 1618 or even 1668. Le Camus had interdicted the outlying chapel of Our Lady of the Altars. A procession there would have meant outright defiance of the bishop. The villagers, however, had a logical alternative and a somewhat less direct way of demonstrating their determination to conduct pious exercises as they saw fit. Denied the use of the chapel, they would instead march to the parish church of Saint-Pierre. It was formerly their church but was now in a separate community. To go there, they had to cross into another community, temporarily eliminating the parish boundary and defeating the bishop's preference for confining processions within a single parish. The villagers respectfully asked their bishop for his permission but left him little choice. Given the misery of the times, Le Camus bowed before the inevitable machinations of villagers intent on determining their own religious lives.^[92]

The example of Notre-Dame-de-Mésage shows the adaptability of village religion. It was not a stubborn, static body of practices and beliefs that only the forceful impact of an elite reformer could modify. It mobilized its own resources to meet the crisis of the 1690s. And we may assume, though the paucity of documents prevents a conclusive demonstration, that it did the same to cope with the plague of 1618 or that of the early 1630s, when across the diocese villagers dedicated chapels, processions, and confraternities to the plague saints, Sebastian and Roch.^[93] But innovation in village religion was not only a response

[92] ADI 4G.106 (cure et chapelle), documents for Notre-Dame-de-Mésage.

[93] There are no surviving records of pastoral visits between those of 1624 and 1637, which are fragmentary: of the more than 300 parishes, Scarron visited only 16 in 1624 and 44 in 1637 (ADI 4G. 269). Other diocesan records are also too scanty to give a systematic account of foundations during the plague years 1629-1633, but later records provide ample evidence of the many Sebastian and Roch foundations made during these years.

to crisis. Religion shaped villagers' social, economic, and political lives, and was, in turn, shaped by them. Religious change was continuous.

In the encounter between a community and Le Camus, religious change was a two-way process. Each brought to it interests, preconceptions, and a certain flexibility. In the end, however, village religion depended on villagers. We must therefore understand more than just how each side tried to control its construction. We must examine how all participants created cultural meanings through religion and how those meanings varied. And a close analysis of how village religion actually worked in a community is necessary. The key to these investigations is the cult of saints. Through it the reformers and villagers communicated the meaning of their beliefs and practices. And with their saints, villagers built communal identity and played out communal tensions.

Four
The Saints of Village Religion
Friends of the People or Friends of God?

When the villagers of the Grenoble diocese sought divine protection for their livestock, they turned to Saint Anthony. Catholic moralists preferred to use Anthony as an instructive example for encouraging the faithful to resist worldly temptation. The saint served a variety of purposes and possessed different meanings for those devoted to him; so did the cult of saints as a whole. Yet villagers and moralists had a common interest in Anthony and his fellow holy figures. Because the religion of villagers and that of Catholic reformers revolved around saints, each side could adopt, adapt, or seek to influence the other's religious practice and beliefs through these devotions. The processes of adoption, adaptation, and manipulation described in the last chapter also ensued in the symbolic realm that saints constituted. Their meanings were malleable, and therefore all individuals devoted to saints could shape their own understanding of the cult. But such constructs were neither simply antithetical nor identical, just as village religion and Catholic reforms were never simply opposed or congruent. Instead, the conceptions of those who participated in the cult ranged along a series of axes whose poles contrasted meanings that were local to universal, collective to personal, and instrumental to morally edifying.^[1] The constructions of the saints' significance varied over time, with circumstances, and according to the devotees' goals, whether to protect livestock, preserve

[1] The phrase "morally edifying" does not suggest that the instrumental uses of a saint's cult were immoral, though reformers often thought them at least indecent and superstitious. Rather it contrasts the saint as ethical exemplar and the saint as provider of protection and help. Village religion contained some degree of both meanings.

communities, or promote the Counter-Reformation. In the diocese of Grenoble, Anthony had a richer complex of meanings than most holy figures, and so with him we start an explanation of the diocese's cult of saints, the different religious conceptions it encompassed, and how through it we can trace cultural change.

The Dauphiné had long been a stronghold of the anchorite's cult. The abbey of Saint-Antoine (le Viennois), to the west of the diocese and north of Romans, contained a large collection of Anthony's relics, and had been a pilgrimage center for centuries. I have already cited local notary Eustache Piémond's descriptions of the processions to the abbey from nearby towns and villages during pauses in religious warfare at the end of the sixteenth century.^[2] The faithful followed pilgrims who had for centuries traveled, often from considerable distances, to seek Anthony's favor. A local monk recorded that in 1514 more than ten thousand pilgrims from Italy had crossed the Alps to venerate the saint's relics. The steady flow of visitors throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries provided the resources to make the abbey one of the few monuments of Gothic art in the province.^[3]

The inhabitants of the Grenoble bishopric, too, made the trip down from their mountains and across the Isère to the abbey, but they also found means closer to home to pay homage to this most important saint. They established chapels dedicated to Anthony in their own parishes, where they offered him their prayers, vows, and oblations. In the later decades of the seventeenth century, approximately one-sixth of the parishes in the diocese had altars under Anthony's name inside or outside their parish churches.^[4] Others had private domestic chapels in seigneurial châteaux. Still others honored Anthony's fête without an altar to him. The number of Anthony's chapels in the diocese could not compare with the number of those dedicated to the Virgin Mary or Christ, but among the saints who healed the sick or protected crops and livestock none enjoyed a stronger devotion than he did. This veneration, in the years before Le Camus's arrival, came from all levels of rural society. Nobles frequently endowed his chapels and founded masses at them, as did common villagers or entire communities. And in gratitude for some divine favor, many anonymous donors left their offerings on his altars. His cult was vital to the mountain herding economy, which

[2] See chapter 1, note 24; Luria, "Pilgrimage Shrines;" Bligny, ed., Histoire du Dauphiné , p. 185.

[3] Bligny, ed., Histoire du Dauphiné , p. 185.

[4] I return to a statistical and geographical analysis of saints' cults in chapter 5.

supported everyone from seigneurs looking to their rents to poor villagers looking to their survival.

Anthony was useful to the people of the diocese for other reasons as well. He was sometimes called upon to protect crops, to cure people of ergotism (Saint Anthony's fire), and to preserve them from the plague (here joining Sebastian and Roch, who were hard at work in the diocese, especially since the epidemic of the early 1630s). But Anthony's association with animals was paramount; his altar statues or paintings invariably depicted him with a pig to remind parishioners of the connection. The pig, one of Anthony's traditional iconographical symbols or attributes, enfolded various meanings of its own. When the faithful perceived the pig as a dirty animal, they recalled the lustful temptations Saint Anthony suffered in the desert. The reformers were probably more satisfied with this moralizing interpretation of the saint's role than they were with his function as a protector of swine. The pig also had a more obscure, but a more local, meaning. In 1095, Gaston de Dauphiné founded the Antonine hospital order at what would become Saint-Antoine-l'Abbé. The monks obtained the privilege of allowing their pigs to scavenge in the streets, and the iconographical pig could also refer to that right.^[5] Anthony's animal companion, therefore, reminded villagers of the saint's principal employment—protecting livestock—as well as of his historical alliance to the region.

When people placed a painting or small statue of Anthony with a pig on a chapel altar, and when they asked him for protection, they reproduced an understanding of the cult of saints that combined veneration of a sacred figure with both the reinforcement of local identity and the desire for earthly gain or survival. It is likely that Anthony also taught villagers the moral lesson of resisting temptation, but the dominant meaning of his cult equated veneration with agricultural prosperity. Hence Savoyard villagers held their piglet market in front of Saint Anthony's church in Chambéry, a desecration for Le Camus and a mess for that city's nobles and bourgeoisie.^[6] Indeed, the disparity between the clerical and village construction of the pig's meaning can be extended. The saint resisted temptation, a concept close to the reformers' hearts, but villagers succumbed to it at least once a year during carnival when they ate the flesh of those animals Anthony helped them raise.

[5] Metford, Dictionary of Christian Lore , pp. 30, 199; Bligny, ed., Histoire du Dauphiné , p. 151. The pigs were to wear bells, another of Anthony's iconographical attributes.

[6] The piglet market was more accurately connected to Saint Anthony of Padua, on whose festival they were customarily sold, than with Anthony the Hermit (Metford, Dictionary of Christian Lore , p. 30). But since both saints were associated with pigs, it is possible that people did not always make a careful distinction between them.

Devotion to Anthony also provided a centerpiece around which communal sentiment and village religion could be constructed. The hamlet of Moulin-Vieux lay some four or five rugged kilometers from the center of its parish, Lavaldens (located between the Drac and the Oisans). The inhabitants of the isolated hamlet had developed a certain separate communal identity. When Le Camus first visited the area in 1672, they requested that he promote their small Anthony chapel to a parish church. Le Camus was reluctant; he permitted such succursal chapels only to ensure that infants in hamlets distant from their church could be quickly baptized and that the dying could receive the viaticum in time. Five years later when the villagers repeated their request, the bishop pointed out that the hamlet was so poor that few families could pay even twenty sous a year to support a priest. He doubted they would ever find an endowment large enough for a church.^[7] At this point Saint Anthony saved the villagers' hopes. His chapel began to attract petitioners from this and neighboring communities who, for "recourse to his intercession," left offerings mounting to some sixty livres a year, a revenue sufficient to establish a parish. Thus Anthony, focus of the parishioners' devotion and symbol of their communal identity and village religion, provided the money to fulfill their aspirations.^[8]

We can see here the multiple meanings attached to a saint like Anthony. He was a protector of agriculture and villagers' livelihoods, a healer and preserver from the plague, a provincial symbol and reminder of the Dauphiné's religious history, an exemplar of moral values, a catalyst for communal solidarity, and, as the offerings at his altar in Moulin-Vieux suggest, a friend and guardian of families and individuals. Few saints could match the breadth of Anthony's associations, but like him each had meanings situated along the axes between the local and universal, the collective and personal, the instrumental and morally edifying.

Local and Universal Meanings

The cults of some saints were purely local in character either because the saint had never been formally canonized and was, therefore, unknown to Christendom at large, or because the cult had never spread

[7] In Lavaldens as a whole, forty-five families or about 30 percent of the population qualified as poor enough to receive salt from Le Camus. The figures from the 1677 visit do not permit an assessment for Moulin-Vieux alone (ADI 4G.273, pp. 595-599).

[8] Ibid.; ADI 4G.272, pp. 179-182; 4G.276, pp. 69-70; 4G.284, p. 331; 4G.104 (Lavaldens); 4G.105 (Moulin-Vieux).

widely. Maur and Grat, for example, were venerated only in the Sa-voyard part of the Grenoble diocese. Other saints—members of the Holy Family, the Apostles, church fathers, or the patrons of major pilgrimage shrines—were significant for all Christians. The importance of a local saint derived from his or her identification with a region. The identification strengthened the saint's charisma and meant increased ability to work miracles and offer aid to supplicants. People felt that such saints looked after them specifically rather than dividing their attention between locals and others, and, in this way, a cult could produce regional pride, as did Anthony's in the Dauphiné.

Many saints were both local and universal. Saint Francis de Sales, for instance, was beloved in his native Savoy and of great importance to the Counter-Reformation Church as a whole (though his cult did not spread widely outside Savoy in the seventeenth century). But a saint's place of origin and the spread of the devotion were not the only determinants of universality or locality. The saint's functions could contribute to the faithfuls' understanding of her or his cult. Consider the example of Saint Anne, a member of the Holy Family and known everywhere as the protector of women, who in the Alps also took on the localized role of guarding villages against avalanches. Yet Anne had no personal experience with avalanches, nor is there a connection between the sound of her name and that of the word avalanche —a means by which saints were sometimes assigned to specific problems. So it seems that Anne was invested with a very particularized significance simply because of her power as a miracle worker.^[9] To comprehend, then, the opposition of universality and locality, we must be aware not only of a saint's personal history—origins, deeds, and death—but also of the purposes to which a saint's aid could be put.

Collective and Personal Meanings

The second axis connected collective to personal meanings of saints. Collective meanings were those held in common by an entire community or by corporate groups, such as confraternities. Personal meanings were those held by families and individuals. We have seen with Anthony the communal and some of the personal uses of a saint. A community petitioned a saint for protection of crops or livestock or for preservation from the plague. In return, it offered a vow, perhaps of making an

[9] On Anne, see Arnold van Gennep, Culte populaire des saints en Savoie (Paris, 1973), p. 193.

oblation, a procession, or a pilgrimage to the saint's shrine, of observing the saint's festival, or of establishing a chapel. Recall here how the inhabitants of Notre-Dame-du-Mésage in 1694 undertook just such a vow or rather recommitted themselves to an earlier but then neglected one, of solemnizing with processions the fêtes of their saintly protectors. Their previous negligence had brought divine wrath on them in the form of marauding and disease-carrying soldiers.^[10] The vow involved all members of the community. To fulfill it, the community had to act as a whole, as a religious entity unified at a given moment and across time, since future generations would also be obligated.

Vows created an exchange relationship between a group or person and a saint. In the vow, the village, confraternity, or individual incurred debts or obligations similar to those acquired in the village economy and in the intricate system of patron-client relations between villagers and seigneurs, creditors, or royal officials. Debt and obligation provided the frame for both the social and religious order. Hence vows to saints added to the way in which earthly and heavenly hierarchies reinforced and, indeed, construed one another.^[11] Supplicants might propitiate a saint with promises that they would keep regardless of whether a miracle occurred or not, but often such contracts were reciprocal. Saints who did not protect their communities or who failed to grant petitions risked losing the villagers' devotion and even more, to judge from the stories of saints' images being thrown into rivers or otherwise desecrated after some calamity had struck a community.^[12]

In the choice of a saint, the interpretation of signs could be crucial. An event or series of them—some as unusual as an earthquake, others as common as personal illness—indicated the need to seek celestial aid. Or rather, villagers invested such an event with this meaning. A sign might also tell the villagers which saint to invoke. If disaster struck on a particular saint's fête, he or she became an obvious choice. A saint might also make herself or himself known through a vision, an indisputable sign for villagers if not always for religious authorities. In the absence of a sign, the weight of a previously neglected vow could make the choice clear. Or the villagers could turn to the saint who usually attended to the specific problem troubling them. The petitioners might

[10] See chapter 3, pp. 103-104.

[11] Pierre Sanchis describes how, for Portuguese peasants, the balance of life and health depends on the fulfillment of vows, "routine investments" that are "part of normal life and the way the universe functions" ("The Portuguese Romarias, " in Saints and Their Cults , ed. Stephen Wilson [Cambridge, 1983], pp. 261-289, esp. 267, 269).

[12] For examples see Wilson, introduction to Saints and Their Cults , pp. 1-53, esp. 22; and Ferté, La vie religieuse , p. 340.

also resort to some more complicated procedure, perhaps a lottery. Le Camus found that the villagers of Allemont (Oisans), who engaged in a variety of "superstitions in order to be healed," made their decision by lighting an array of candles, each of which they assigned to a different saint. The one whose candle burned down first was their choice, or rather it was a signal that God or the saint had made the decision for them.^[13]

If the saints fulfilled their role, the loyalty of villagers could be fierce. And at no time was this loyalty more evident than on those occasions when communities would oppose the orders of a reformer to remove a certain saint's image, now considered indecent or superstitious, from a church or chapel. If a bishop ordered an old statue buried, the villagers might comply only to dig it up again as soon as he had left. Or else they dragged their feet, and the bishop had to repeat his order in visit after visit.

The other end of the collective-personal axis is more difficult to describe. Just as communities had patrons to look after their well-being, so too did families and individuals. The name-saint one received at baptism became a sacred godparent ready to serve as a special intermediary for his or her namesake. Guardianship did not end with a person's death but continued when the deceased needed the saints' pleading—that of name-saints or others—to gain release from purgatory. The living made this expectation quite clear. They commended their souls to saints in wills, and if their status in the community permitted it, they requested burial in a saint's chapel or before his or her image. If they were sufficiently wealthy, they might even donate a chapel or image of their saint to the church. Whenever possible they would go on pilgrimages, offer votive gifts and prayers, and participate in processions and festivals. Such activities served earthly as well as spiritual needs. Individuals and families could aid their social and political ascension with an ostentatious display of their devotion.^[14]

These practices, however, tell us little about the nature of the interaction between a person and a saint. That is harder to explore, for the saint was not only a celestial patron but a friend and companion. Peter Brown has eloquently described this personal relationship between the individual and the saint in late antiquity. In the "intense dialogue" between the literati of late Roman society and their saints, the disembodied power of supernatural protectors assumed human form and

[13] ADI 4G.272, p. 43; 4G.276, p. 84. On the interpretation of signs in choosing saints and similar examples of lotteries, see Christian, Local Religion , pp. 33-50.

[14] Chapter 6 presents a case in point.

faces. The saints took on the "precise and palpable features of beloved and powerful figures." A saint was not just a patron but an "invisible friend," a "constant companion," even a "heavenly twin."^[15]

Whether such an intimate entwining of human and sacred survived through the Middle Ages—as human social relations, and the human-divine relations that reflected and helped construct them, changed—remains to be investigated. But the late medieval devotion to saints was still, as John Bossy paints it, intensely personal in tone. The humanity of saints remained a powerful part of their attraction. The friendliness of saints with people and God provided a channel through which people could become the friends of God. As Bossy points out, people could demonstrate such amity in both their personal and collective relations by establishing friendship among themselves, by reconciling their differences, by being charitable, by avoiding factional discord within their communities, and by building corporate groups that emphasized fraternity. The saints aided this process not as patrons advancing the interests of their earthly charges but rather as godparents and friends.^[16]

Instrumental and Spiritual Meanings

By changing the nature of the relationship between saints and people, reformers were also trying to relocate the meaning of the cult along the third axis, that which opposed instrumental uses of saints to their role as ethical or spiritual examples. The veneration of saints always reflected a tension between personal needs and general cultural values. People manipulated saints for earthly desires and learned from them higher values. They asked saints for help, for protection from illness, for social or political advancement, and for victory over rivals. At the same time saints represented the search for spiritual perfection, a means of expressing reverence for higher things, and models of how to live well and act correctly in the world. We must not assume that these lessons escaped villagers nor that Catholic reformers were right to criticize them for caring only about the "temporal favors" they sought from saints^[17] It seems equally likely, though it is rarely remarked on, that saints provided not only aid and protection for those who venerated them but also ethical teachings drawn from the culture's "central value

[15] Peter Brown, The Cult of Saints (Chicago, 1981), chap. 3.

[16] I follow here Bossy's argument in Christianity in the West , pp. 12-13.

[17] The term is Le Camus's (Recueil des ordonnances , p. 16).

system."^[18] For the reformers, however, the issue was clear. They needed to stress a view of saints that emphasized moral example over sacred benefaction, even if ecclesiastical authorities, too, were not above using saints and their miracles for more worldly and political ends.

The Counter-Reformation and Saints

In constructing their understanding of the cult of saints, Catholic reformers emphasized the opposite of locality, collectivity, and instrumentality. They saw saints as symbols of the universal Church, as guides to individual action and belief, and as paragons of moral virtues. The line between the villagers' and reformers' views, however, cannot be drawn too strictly. The Protestant challenge to the cult put sixteenth-century Catholic reformers in a difficult position. They could not condone what they thought were superstitious elements of the cult without drawing Protestant ridicule and without offending their own religious sensibilities. Nor could they deny that the intercession of saints was efficacious in righting earthly ills without undermining a central tenet of Catholic faith and without coming too close to the Protestant position. They therefore countered criticism of the cult—even when leveled by someone on their own side, by Erasmus for example—with the claim that "popular cults . . . [are] not foreign to our faith." True, it would be better to direct the efforts of the faithful toward a more contemplative and Christ-centered piety, yet saints' cults could provide steps toward that goal.^[19] Customary means of venerating saints were impure but not contrary to true piety. They were rather an early stage in the development of a more acceptable religiosity.^[20]

By the late decades of the sixteenth century, Church leaders found further reason to look with favor on the traditional cult of saints when members of the lower classes, previously drawn to Protestantism, turned away from the reformed church precisely because they did not want to give up customary forms of collective and festive piety.^[21] Catholic leaders seized the opportunity to attract these people. They prop-

[18] On saints as bearers of a central value system, see Peter Brown, "The Saint as Exemplar in Late Antiquity," Representations 2 (Spring 1983): 1-25.

[19] Letter of Jacopo Sadoleto (1530) to Erasmus quoted in Marc Venard, "Dans l'affrontement des réformes du XVIe siècle," in La religion populaire , ed. Guy Duboscq, Bernard Plongeron, and Daniel Robert (Paris, 1979), p. 117 n.12.

[20] Ibid., p. 117.

[21] In the spring of 1561 villagers invaded southern French cities and joined with the urban lower classes in celebrating agrarian festivals and marching in processions that in some cases turned into anti-Protestant pogroms (ibid., p. 119). According to Venard the events marked a turning point in lower-class attitudes toward Calvinism.

agated new saints' cults and revived older ones, encouraged the veneration of relics and marked their translations with splendid ceremonies, and promoted new pilgrimage shrines while celebrating their miracles, especially if they could interpret them in a manner that counteracted Protestant belief.^[22]

As the threat of Protestantism receded after the early decades of the seventeenth century, the other side of the Counter-Reformation attitude toward saints' devotions became more evident. Catholic reformers now increasingly looked at popular cults with a disdain born from their humanist education and a fear of disorder, which encouraged them to suppress all occasions for unruliness among the lower classes.^[23] They now saw saints less as friends or conciliatory go-betweens and more as models of virtue. Saints were examples to be imitated rather than benefactors from whom to seek help or companions in whom to seek solace.^[24] Virtuous exemplars would discourage superstitious cultic practices and Protestant ridicule. Friendship could take its place among the saintly virtues, primarily as it expressed an affinity for God. Saints would direct attention not to their own power but to that of a majestic Christ. It is notable that Le Camus's writings describe the saints as "friends of God" but never as friends of people.^[25]

The Church hierarchy came to suspect all manifestations of lay initiative. New pilgrimage shrines that sprang up after the visions and miracles experienced by shepherdesses in the countryside or artisans in the towns quickly lured crowds. Ecclesiastical officials found it difficult to establish control over the shrines and to enforce instructional interpretations of the miracles rather than the instrumental ones the faithful preferred.^[26] The devotion to saints, which had looked like a useful means of binding people to Catholicism, was now considered too attached to questionable holy figures, indecent practices, and unreasonable beliefs.

The older attitude never entirely disappeared. Even a reformer with

[22] For examples see Ferté, La vie religieuse , pp. 342, 369; Soulet, Traditions et réformes , pp. 278-279; and Bernard Cousin, Le miracle et le quotidien (Aix-en-Provence, 1983), pp. 144-145.

[23] Venard, "Dans l'affrontement," pp. 120-124.

[24] Bossy, Christianity in the West , p. 96.

[25] Recueil des ordonnances , p. 276. He also refers to saints as the "living members of Jesus Christ," emphasizing their closeness to God and their distance from people (pp. 15, 276).

[26] Luria, "Pilgrimage Shrines." A late example of miracles the Church used against its perceived enemies occurred in Marseille during the plague of 1720 after Bishop Belsunce consecrated the city to the rapidly growing Sacred Heart devotion. It was not the Protestants' beliefs that the miracles disproved but the Jansenists' (Cousin, Le miracle et le quotidien , p. 145).

Jansenist leanings like Le Camus would never deny the importance of saints, relics, shrines, or the possibility of miracles through saintly intercession. He saw such customs and beliefs not as a means of keeping people in the fold but as one of educating them in the tenets of the Catholic reform. In the parish of la Terrasse, he requested a relic of a former curé, Saint Apre (also known as Avet), not because he expected miracles from it but because he had "much veneration for holy pastors."^[27] At the same time, he bemoaned the loss of his saintly predecessor Hugh's relics through negligence and destruction by Protestants.^[28] Devotion to such local saints could be fostered if it reminded people of the importance of priests and bishops and hence of the authority of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

Just as the customs of the saints' cults were reexamined, so too were the saints themselves and their powers to cure maladies and prevent disasters. Enthusiastic uncontrolled devotion to true holy figures was bad enough, as far as the reformers were concerned. But fervor inspired by false saints or false tales about saints was impermissible. Old saints had to pass tests of historical verification. Bollandist scholars toured European collections of documents, critically examining hagiographical literature, separating fact from legend in saints' lives, and sometimes dividing historical from fictional saints.^[29] They questioned the authenticity, for example, of many of the Theban martyrs whose cult was widespread in the Alps and in part of the Grenoble diocese.^[30]

New candidates for sainthood found the road much tougher than in the past. The Counter-Reformation Church placed the procedure for canonization—increasingly bureaucratized and brought under papal control since the thirteenth century—in the hands of the Congregation of Rites in 1587 and codified its rules with the decrees of Urban VIII in 1634.^[31] A judicial investigation, complete with the devil's advocate, determined whether the candidate met the three criteria of doctrinal purity, heroic virtue, and the performance of miracles. The faithful still played a role in saint making. They were the recipients of and audience for a saint's wonders. Without their belief in the candidate's power to work miracles, none would be acclaimed. Church investigators, how-

[27] ADI 4G.272, p. 711.

[28] Ibid.

[29] On the Bollandist enterprise, see H. Delehaye, L'œuvre des Bollandistes, 1615-1915 , 2d ed. (Brussels, 1959); Paul Peeters, "L'œuvre des Bollandistes," Académie royale de Belgique: mérnoires , 2d s., 54 (1961): 3-202. The Bollandist Acta Sanctorum (begun in 1643) considerably contributed to developing critical historical method.

[30] Hertz, "St. Besse," pp. 77-78.

[31] Wilson, introduction to Saints and Their Cults , p. 6; and Pierre Delooz, "Towards a Sociological Study of Canonized Sainthood," in ibid., p. 191.

ever, grew increasingly strict in acknowledging miracles. Local priests and judicial officers had to verify the event, and physicians had to attest that it could not be explained by natural means.^[32]

As a result, the participation of the faithful in the canonization of saints declined during the Counter-Reformation. A well-organized lobbying effort was required to work a candidate through the ever more formal and lengthy process. Religious orders were in the best position to mount such campaigns, which is one reason why such a large proportion of Counter-Reformation saints came from the orders.^[33] Those considered saints by popular acclamation found it increasingly hard to get a hearing in the Congregation of Rites. Cults of unofficial, uncanonized saints could still exist, but not as readily as they had prior to the Catholic reform. Vigilant bishops visiting their dioceses were always eager to suppress unauthorized devotions.

Thus although the clerical discourse on the cult of saints never entirely lost its ambivalence, it increasingly turned away from an open attitude that saw, admittedly with a condescending eye, some merit in customary practices, and drew instead a much more rigid distinction between what was proper and what was not. Late medieval reformers such as Gerson provided a foundation for the construction of this discourse, as did Erasmus.^[34] But rather than rely on Erasmus's wit and ridicule, seventeenth-century Catholic reformers preferred the drier canons of the Council of Trent and the sharp criticisms of customary practices offered by various clerics from Charles Borromeo in the sixteenth century to Jean-Baptiste Thiers in the seventeenth.^[35] The reformers differentiated true and rational beliefs and practices from false ones rooted in passion rather than reason.^[36]

"Catholic rationalism" set itself apart from popular superstitions by first declaring villagers ignorant and then condemning their practices as

[32] Henri Platelle describes the procedure used to verify miracles in his introduction to Les chrétiens face au miracle (Paris, 1965).

[33] Peter Burke, The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 54-56.

[34] See Desiderius Erasmus ("A Pilgrimage for Religion's Sake," in The Colloquies of Erasmus , trans. Craig R. Thompson [Chicago, 1964], 1:285-312) for a typically witty and trenchant critique of religious practices. On Gerson see Steven Ozment (The Age of Reform, 1250-1550 [New Haven, 1980], p. 206); for an example of Gerson's attitude toward saints see Bossy's comments on Gerson's rehabilitation of Joseph (Christianity in the West , p. 10).

[35] Jacques Revel describes later discourse against popular customs in "Forms of Expertise," in Understanding Popular Culture , ed. Steven Kaplan (New York, 1984), pp. 255-273.

[36] Revel suggests a third criterion, conventional propriety versus impropriety, which was used increasingly in the eighteenth century, displacing the true-false distinction as the reformers' primary concern (ibid., p. 257).

errors.^[37] Though distinguished from the rationality of the libertins érudits by its claim to priestly authority and its nonscientific definitions of knowledge, Catholic rationalism shared much with its secular counterpart.^[38] Both established a social division in which the upper classes possessed true knowledge and reason and the lower classes error and superstition. Both objected to misrepresentations, historical inaccuracies, indecency, and false beliefs in the cult of saints. Le Camus had a foot in each camp.

The development of the seventeenth-century Catholic rationalist discourse against superstitious practices culminated in the catalogues of Jean-Baptiste Thiers. He composed his inventories while Le Camus was at work in Grenoble. Thus they could not have been formative influences on the bishop. The comparison here rests instead on attitudes toward popular behavior that the Jansenist curé from the diocese of Chartres and the Jansenist-leaning prelate shared. Such Jansenist ideas would not have been universal among French ecclesiastical authorities. Indeed, the Chartrain priest was often in conflict with his superiors.^[39] But his works were widely known and appreciated precisely because they drew on a centuries-long tradition of clerical criticism of "popular" practices contained in the literature of the exempla, conciliar decrees, synodal statutes, and episcopal ordinances.^[40] They thereby provided systematic historical support for the work of Catholic reformers and for the complementary efforts of secular magistrates to restrict customary festivities.^[41] Hence Thiers's catalogues were central to the broadest rationalist attack on superstitions.

In the Traité des superstitions , Thiers railed against the destruction of "truth by the false maxims and bad customs that it [superstition]

[37] rrow the term "Catholic rationalism" from Revel, "Forms of Expertise," p. 259.

[38] bid., pp. 260-266. Libertines and later Enlightenment writers discreetly deferred to clerics in matters of popular superstitions. Revel shows how an encyclopédiste , the Chevalier de Jaucourt, relied on Thiers (discussed below) in his articles on superstition (p. 260). On the common ground between Catholic reformers and Pyrrhonist skeptics, see Richard H. Popkin, The History of Skepticism from Erasmus to Descartes (Assen, 1960), chap. 4.

[39] Thiers's early work (1668) on reducing the number of holy days was placed on the Index, nor would his reliance on writings such as Calvin's treatise on relics have pleased ecclesiastical authorities (see William Monter, Ritual, Myth and Magic in Early Modern Europe [Athens, Ohio, 1983], pp. 121-124; Chartier, "Ritual and Print," pp. 16-19; and Roger Chartier and Jacques Revel, "Le paysan, l'ours et saint-Augustin," in La découverte de la France au XVIIe siècle [Paris, 1980], 259-264).

[40] Monter discusses a 1712 diocesan conference that took its "entire agenda on superstitious practices directly from Thiers," though perhaps prudently without naming him (Ritual , p. 124).

[41] Chartier, "Ritual and Print," p. 16.

spreads throughout the world." And he had no doubt about how superstition could be recognized: "Something is superstitious when its effects could not be attributed to nature or when it had been instituted neither by God nor by the Church."^[42] That which was not natural (or, as he stated in another passage, "was accompanied by certain circumstances that one knew to be without natural virtue") was necessarily superstitious.^[43] But so too were those things the Church had not ordained, since beliefs were false if they were "neither divine, nor apostolic, nor episcopal or ecclesiastic," the only "three sets of true traditions."^[44] Despite his Jansenism, Thiers's systematic approach echoes that of strictly orthodox ecclesiastical reformers. Truth and reason can be defined only by authority. Furthermore, the social location of particular practices and beliefs becomes a distinguishing feature of what is and is not acceptable. For Thiers, "popular" may have meant local (whether of country, province, diocese, town, or parish), as opposed to universal, more often than it meant lower class versus elite. But in his Traité des jeux , he refers to charivaris as an activity of the "canaille and people of no importance."^[45]

As for the cult of saints in particular, Thiers recalled in the Traité des superstitions that the Council of Trent had enjoined reformers to remove all superstitions surrounding the veneration of saints, relics, and sacred images; he cited numerous examples.^[46] For instance, people venerated false saints, "an improper and pernicious" custom that gave great pleasure to the devil, who established these cults to lure people into error.^[47] Or people lent undue significance to occurrences on saints' days. If rain fell on Saint Vincent's fête (or on that of several other saints) then it would likely continue for thirty or forty days. Other accidents on a festival presaged war or shortages of food or wine.^[48] Some individuals claimed special powers by virtue of a fictitious kinship

[42] Traité des superstitions (1679), pp. 3, 80-81.

[43] As were the results of pacts with demons (ibid., p. 75). Monter lists Thiers's rules for judging superstition in Ritual , p. 122.

[44] The quote is from Thiers's Dissertation sur la Sainte Larme de Vendôme cited in Revel, "Forms of Expertise," pp. 258-259.

[45] Traité des jeux (1686), p. 283. Here I disagree somewhat with Revel, who states, "Thiers's characterization of popular culture does not refer to any social or sociocultural attribute" ("Forms of Expertise," p. 259).

[46] Traité des superstitions , p. 39. Thiers ascribed "superstition" to saints' cults more freely than his predecessors. Borromeo used the term more to refer to belief in the occult or rites of conjuring and divination. Borromeo's Acta ecclesia mediolanensis , however, also condemned customary aspects of the cult of saints like dancing and banqueting on festivals (Venard, "Dans l'affrontement," p. 122).

[47] Traité des superstitions , pp. 105-106.

[48] Ibid., p. 271.

with saints. Those descended from Saint Hubert thought they could, like their progenitor, cure rabies. And members of Saint Roch's lineage believed they could work among plague victims and sometimes heal them, without being afflicted themselves.^[49]

Misrepresentations of saints complemented false beliefs. The blacksmiths who took Saint Eligius as their patron often dressed his image in blacksmith's clothes. It was an error, Thiers thought, to think of the bishop of Noyon as a simple artisan and treat him as such.^[50] Such historical error displayed the ignorance of the faithful and their lack of reason. And worse, it offered Protestants much opportunity for ridiculing the cult of saints. As the midseventeenth-century archbishop of Sens pointed out, Eligius may have started out as a smith, but his "great virtues" elevated him to "episcopal dignity."^[51] Likewise a colleague in Senez objected to the depiction together of holy persons from different historical periods. Only the "absurd imagination of painters" could produce such images.^[52]

Libertines shared with Catholic reformers this contempt for "popular" unreasonableness, a contempt nurtured in their common literary milieu and coteries. Indeed, the two groups were close enough that when the skeptic and libertine François de La Mothe Le Vayer included an essay on the irrationality of certain saints' cults in his Hexaméron rustique , he presented his views through a character, Simonides, modeled on his friend Etienne Le Camus.^[53] The setting of the colloquy is one familiar to Renaissance readers. Six friends retire to the countryside for six days of learned and witty conversation. Each day one delivers a

[49] Ibid., pp. 432-439; Thiers presents further examples.

[50] Ibid., p. 273. Here popular traditions proved more "truthful" than Thiers's historical standards since Eliguis had been an artisan, though a wealthy goldsmith rather than a blacksmith (Attwater, Avenel Dictionary , p. 112).

[51] Ordonnance of 1648 cited in Julia, "La réforme," p. 337.

[52] Ibid., p. 336. Jean Soanen (bishop of Senez) ordered the effacement of an image of the infant Jesus from a painting in which he was sitting on Saint Christopher's shoulders. What seemed absurd to Soanen was a central event in Christopher's legend (Art-water, Avenel Dictionary , p. 85).

[53] "De l'intercession de quelques saints particuliers," in Hexaméron rustique, ou les six journées passées à la campagne avec des personnes studieuses (1670; Paris, 1875). All characters in the work are known by pseudonyms. Most scholars of La Mothe Le Vayer's work agree that this particular character is Le Camus because Simonides refers to the Greek word for monkey, and camus in French means "snub-nosed" or "monkey-faced." La Mothe Le Vayer often used such learned wordplay for friends' pseudonyms in colloquies like the Hexaméron or the Mémorial de quelques conferences avec des personnes studieuses (1669) (René Pintard, La Mothe Le Vayer—Gassendi—Guy Patin [Paris, 1943], pp. 18-31). Florence L. Wickelgren holds that Simonides was the gazetteer Théo-phraste Renaudot, based on a handwritten note in a copy of the 1670 Hexaméron (La Mothe Le Vayer [Paris, 1934], pp. 42-43). Her view has not drawn further support. I thank Ned Duval for advice on this identification.

discourse and general conversation follows. Simonides-Le Camus's contribution on saints' cults is a somewhat curious addition to discussions that otherwise consider literary matters or sexual organs and habits.^[54] But the essay's tone is not so different from that of the other journées . It offers an amusing look at the foibles of those whose lack of reason or failure to exercise it leads to silly beliefs and customs. And no reformer could have objected to that content!^[55]

In fact, the criticisms Simonides-Le Camus levels against popular beliefs were much the same as Thiers's. First, some people mistakenly invent saints by corrupting the names of certain places or holidays. Hence a Saint "Tiphaine" is created for the festival of Kings or "Epiphanie," and a Saint "Verin" for the chapel at the "Tour sans venin " near Grenoble, which keeps away venomous beasts (pp. 122-123). Further, some real saints are chosen as the healers of specific illnesses because their names and the maladies are homonyms. "Hydropiques" (those with dropsy) appeal to Saint "Eutrope." People who suffer from scrofula look to Saint "Marcou" since they have "mal au col." The blind ask Saints "Luce" or "Claire" for help (pp. 124-125). The choice of patrons for crafts may depend on a correspondence between a saint's name or legend and the occupation in question. Washerwomen who "blanchissent le linge" pick Saint "Blanchart"; wool carders because of their "amas de laine" (balls of wool) look to the Magdalen; learned booksellers and printers choose Saint John of the Latin Gate (pp. 128-130).^[56] Simonides-Le Camus continues that such superstitions should not be permitted to "prejudice our true religion, which, although

[54] 1. "Que les meilleurs ecrivains sont sujets à se mesprendre" (Egisthe = Urbain Chevreau); 2. "Que les plus grans auteurs ont besoin d'estre interpretez favorablement" (Marulle = l'Abbé de Marolles); 3. "Des parties appellées honteuses aux hommes et aux femmes" (Racémius = Guillaume Bautru); 4. "De l'antre des nymphes" (Tubertus Ocella = La Mothe Le Vayer); 5. "De l'éloquence de Balzac" (Ménalque = Gilles Ménage). Marolles also mocked the cult of relics in his memoirs (Robert Mandrou, From Humanism to Science, 1480-1700 , trans. Brian Pierce [Harmondsworth, 1978], p. 200).

[55] The words were La Mothe Le Vayer's, but probably based on conversations with Le Camus. Referring to the Mémorial , Pintard suggests that the discourses of La Mothe Le Vayer's characters were based on discussions of the literary coterie at the home of the Dupuy brothers and were perhaps constructed with notes of these conversations. Most of the participants in the Hexaméron were members of the coterie, and Le Camus moved in similar circles before his appointment to the Grenoble bishopric. Thus the line between La Mothe Le Vayer's thoughts and Le Camus's is difficult to draw (Pintard, La Mothe Le Vayer , pp. 25-31).

[56] The author displays both the skimpiness of his knowledge of popular saints' cults and his fixedness within a Latin literary tradition by assigning certain saints to crafts not through wordplay in French or patois but in Latin; shoemakers, for instance, are devoted to Saint Crispin because of the similarity of his name and crepidis . The point is not that such Latin allusions never provided the basis of specific cults but rather that for the seventeenth-century writer they continued to do so (pp. 129-130).

often above human reason, is never absolutely contrary to it." Therefore one should never be "too reserved or too circumspect in investigations of altars because nothing is as profane as the abuses that establish themselves under the appearance of a zealous devotion" (pp. 130-132).^[57] The real Le Camus, who was soon to take up his post in Grenoble, could easily have taken these words as a personal motto.

Indeed Le Camus was a product of both the libertine and Catholic rationalist milieux and shared the concerns for true and reasonable belief, proper practice, historical accuracy, and decent representation. He ordered his curés to prevent anyone from "painting or adorning images and figures of saints in an indecent, unusual, or extraordinary manner." Nor should they be beautified with ornaments that "reek (sentent ) of the softness and dissolution of our time (du siècle )." Further, priests were to ensure that their churches had no "mirrors, tapestries, or paintings representing indecent nudities, profane stories, or the false divinities of paganism."^[58] Le Camus's instructions and the orders he gave during his parish visits echoed those of prelates around the country. Nude or partially nude figures such as Saint Sebastian in his loincloth were indecent. So too were depictions of saints with animals—hence the concern with Anthony's pig or Martin's horse.

Relics were subject to the same scrutiny, episcopal control, and historical verification. Le Camus prohibited his clergy from offering any relics for veneration that he had not first "recognized, approved, and authorized after an examination of authentic attestations."^[59] Ecclesiastical authorities wanted careful records maintained with positive identifications of relics and information on their provenance.^[60] Le Camus traveled his diocese cataloging relics, insisting that they be properly housed and displayed, and demanding that parishioners and priests produce documents testifying to their authenticity.^[61] Often no papers

[57] These comments also contained a criticism of "those who defend" superstitions, likely aimed at the Jesuits who did not defend popular customs but were embroiled in conflict with skeptics and Jansenists alike (Mandrou, From Humanism to Science , p. 200).

[58] Recueil des ordonnances , p. 16.

[59] Recueil des ordonnances , p. 276. We lack a complete study of the diocese's relics assessing their location and concentration, the saints represented, the dates of their translation to the area, and their importance in village religion. Christian provides an example of such a study in Local Religion , pp. 126-141.

[60] Julia, "La réforme," pp. 393-394; Christian, Local Religion , p. 171, and on the Vatican's authentication of relics, p. 138.

[61] I found only one parish, Barraux, where Le Camus permitted the devotion for an unverified relic to continue, accepting the local sacristan's word that it had been in the church for a long time and thereby equating antiquity with validity (ADI 4G.272, p. 678).

existed. He was especially concerned if he received reports that undocumented relics had been working miracles.^[62]

Like other Catholic reformers, Le Camus worried about whether the faithful derived the proper spiritual lessons from the cult of relics. He exhorted his curés to ensure that their parishioners treated true relics with the proper respect, though not because they had any "virtue" in and of themselves. Honoring relics was a means of honoring their saints, provided the petitioners always remembered they were invoking the saint and not the relic (or, for that matter, the saint's image). Furthermore, the saints, and therefore their relics, should only be "considered as sacred instruments that God uses when it pleases Him to do so. There is no grace necessarily and perpetually attached to them as there is to the sacraments of the Church." Hence relics must always be used properly: housed in decent reliquaries, carried in processions by priests rather than laypeople, and never displayed merely for the profit of their owners. Like images, relics should not be conveyed through the streets "in a superstitious manner, or plunged in water to plead for rain" or used in any other indecent way to obtain "temporal favors from God." Above all, the faithful had to be taught that all the "benefits and graces that we receive from prayers come only from . . . [the] virtue and merits of Our Lord Jesus Christ."^[63]

Le Camus, even more than many French Catholic reformers, may have been intent on making clear his view of the relationship between saints and their relics or images. His opponents in the diocese (in this instance it is uncertain whether they were Savoyard Jesuits or Jacobins upset over the strictures the bishop had placed on their convent at Montfleury outside Grenoble) had spread rumors about him at Rome, including criticisms of his teachings on the cult of saints. From Le Camus's reaction it seems that he was being accused of a weakness toward the "popular" view of relics and images, an ironic twist for a prelate often charged with Jansenism. His reponse was vigorous: "There is no virtue attached to relics and images. Has there ever been a theologian who has held otherwise? There is neither virtue nor excellence in one or the other [relics or images]. The Church has never believed otherwise. Where does this outburst in Rome come from, then? Could [public opinion] of me be so crass (grossière ) and so universal?"^[64]

[62] See, for example, the case of Saint Peter's relics in Risset (ibid., p. 1095).

[63] Recueil des ordonnances , pp. 14-16, 276-277.

[64] Letter to Dirois, 15 October 1687 in Lettres , ed. Ingold, p. 508. Dirois was a theologian attached to the retinue of Cardinal d'Estrées in Rome.

Perhaps the bishop was too sensitive on the issue of his support at the Vatican. He had, after all, been elevated to the cardinalate only a year before this letter. What Church authorities might have found more troubling than the bishop's view of relics was the reception of the quietist Madame Guyon in Grenoble in 1684, three years before the papal condemnation of Molinos and quietism and four years before Guyon's first arrest. Le Camus's feelings about Guyon and quietism remain murky, but the mystical doctrine of "pure love" seems to have held some attraction for him.^[65] It could, for instance, bring him to reevaluate relics as objects of mystical contemplation. In a 1689 letter to his friend and fellow prelate Barrillon, he reported on receiving some pieces of the True Cross that the writings of the quietist theologian Jean de Bernières-Louvigny had assured him were unequaled among relics. God had thus provided the bishop with a "sure path to reach Him."^[66]

Fragments of the True Cross as objects of mystical contemplation represented one extreme of the spectrum of Catholic thought on relics. This position was as far as possible from the much-criticized use of relics to obtain "temporal favors," and a little too far for the Church, which forced the quietist Fénelon to retract views expressed in his Explication des maximes des saints sur la vie intérieure .^[67] Perhaps it was also a temporary lapse for Le Camus who otherwise placed his thoughts squarely within the Counter-Reformation's primary discourse on relics and images. They were an important means of reinforcing the belief in saints, but people had to understand that they worked no miracles on their own. Instead, they instructed the faithful on the proper spiritual meaning of the cult. Only by conveying this understanding of relics and images could the Catholic reformers protect themselves from Protestant attacks and separate themselves from the presumed misunderstandings, superstitions, and irrationality of village religion.

Such terms of opprobrium—superstition, irrationality, indecency—were harsh. They suggest that the reformers, in proposing a more "reasonable" understanding of the saints and their pedagogical value, possessed a conception of the cult of saints radically different from that of their flocks. So it bears repeating that what they combated was not a totally foreign system of beliefs but rather the people's appropriation of

[65] For an overview of quietism, see Taveneaux, Le catholicisme , pp. 411-416; on Le Camus's attitude, Jean Orcibal, "Le Camus, témoin au procès de Mme Guyon," in Godel, ed., Le cardinal des montagnes , pp. 123-140.

[66] Letter of 14 October 1689, in Lettres , ed. Ingold, p. 524.

[67] On the debate between Fénelon and Bossuet and Fénelon's retraction, see Taveneaux, Le catholicisme , pp. 415-416.

saints and a definition of the cult too close to the local, collective, and instrumental poles of the axes of meaning. In the end, however this construction of the cult could not be shorn of all its elements. Saints remained intercessors, friends of God, but also friends of people. The Counter-Reformation Church had to reaffirm the central tenets of Catholic doctrine on saints in the face of the Protestant challenge and the persistence of the customary construction of the saints' role in religious practice. Catholic reformers, therefore, could not—indeed, had no desire to—deny the importance of the cult of saints. If anything, they chose to exalt it. But they would chip away at what they saw as its worst aspects: undocumented relics, unbelievable miracles, indecent images, and unruly festivals. And since they had no interest in undermining the veneration of saints as a whole, their strategy had to include promoting new forms of devotion and new cults in substitution for the old.

Saints as Symbols for Reformers and Villagers

The propagation of new cults and the transformation of practices associated with traditional saints was essential for the task of educating the faithful since Catholics, reformers and villagers, recognized that saints symbolized varying conceptions of spirituality. Saints were symbols that also communicated configurations of authority, knowledge, reason, social and human-divine relations, and patterns of personal identity, which were reflected in spiritual styles.^[68] These formations drew their elements from the central cultural repertoire of the society and existed in great variety. Even villages contained more than one. I reduce the configurations here to two, that of the Counter-Reformation Church and that of village religion, keeping in mind that the distinction merely ensures clarity and does not reflect a simplistic division between elite and popular religion. The saints that each side employed as symbols condensed important understandings of hierarchy and deference,

[68] I use the term symbol here not in its narrow sense as a substitute for a specific referent but in a broader sense as a representation of abstract ideas, such as power, authority, theological concepts, ethical values, group solidarity, and individual aspirations. Symbols can both represent and provoke types of behavior or modes of thought. The literature on symbols is vast; I have found the following useful: John Skorupski, Symbol and Theory (Cambridge, 1976); Dan Sperber, Rethinking Symbolism , trans. Alice L. Morton (Cambridge, 1975); Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols (New York, 1970); and Victor Turner, "Symbols in African Ritual," in Symbolic Anthropology , ed. Janet L. Dolgin, David S. Kemnitzer, and David M. Schneider (New York, 1977).

outward devotion and inner states of mind, individual well-being and the ethics of interactions among people.^[69]

As I have shown with Anthony, a saint could symbolize meanings that closely pertained to the village, such as communal unity, religious autonomy, sacred healing and protection, personal ambition, and the active construction of individual religious lives. Local particularism in saints' devotions or in the meaning of widely venerated saints was strong. The reformers, in contrast, deployed saintly symbols that represented the power of the Church, the authority of the clergy (especially bishops), doctrinal purity, and the spiritual themes of the Counter-Reformation. Reformers would combat the symbols of local particularism with those of universal Catholicism. The saints most closely associated with Christ served this purpose well. They were known everywhere. And if the reformers could succeed in making their understanding of these saints dominant, then the holy figures would illustrate Christ's central position in the faith and, in turn, the Church's central role in directing religious practice.

Saint Joseph provides an excellent example. Religious orders in the Counter-Reformation, specifically the Carmelites and Jesuits, saw in him the perfect example of their vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Franciscans appreciated his hard work as a carpenter, which in turn provided a meditation on Christ's humble origins. His lack of a sexual relationship with his wife, once a source of medieval humor (the "holy cuckold"), became a Counter-Reformation demonstration of virtue.^[70] Joseph's daily usefulness to Jesus made him a model for all to follow. Artists depicted him less often in his dotage and more as a young father with his adopted son at his side. Hagiographers described him as the veritable father of the Savior because he had accepted his role and "resolved to be a faithful minister of God's work."^[71] His role was thereby translated into an example of properly exercised paternal authority in the spiritual upbringing of children. His family became an "earthly trinity," a counterpart to the heavenly one.^[72] Joseph's peaceful

[69] On the capacity of symbols to condense numerous meanings and bring them into association with one another, see Turner, "Symbols in African Ritual," pp. 184-185.

[70] So, too, did the understanding he displayed when his wife suddenly became pregnant, though, according to the critical hagiographer Louis-Sébastien Lenain de Tillemont, it took the apparition of an angel to allay his suspicions (Memoires pour servir a l'histoire ecclesiastique des six premiers siècles justifiez par les citations des auteurs originaux 2d ed. [Paris, 1701], pp. 76-77).

[71] Ibid., pp. 73, 77. On artistic representations, see Emile Mâle, L'art religieux de la loin du XVIe siècle, du XVIIe siècle et du XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1972), pp. 314-324.

[72] The "earthly trinity" of Joseph, Mary, and Jesus depended on Joseph's fifteenth-century elevation to the rank of an earthly analogue to God within the heavenly trinity. Each had earthly functions: Joseph was a carpenter; Mary spun or wove, though some artistic representations depicted her as reading holy books; the child was a helper. Mary's role as a reader of sacred works took on significance as a symbol of the Church and made her a "repository of true knowledge of the workings of grace." Spiritual tasks flowed from and superseded the holy family's mundane work, as summed up in a phrase from Voragine's Golden Legend that provides the title for Cynthia Hahn's article on the subject ("'Joseph Will Perfect, Mary Enlighten and Jesus Save Thee,'" Art Bulletin 68 [1986]: 54-67). I thank Celeste Brusati for this reference.

demise reminded the faithful, often organized into confraternities of Agonisants, to strive for a good death surrounded by one's family and resigned to the Lord's will. Here the Counter-Reformation construction of Joseph gave way to that of village religion: Agonisant organizations engaged in practices that Le Camus found "unacceptable," such as saying sixty-nine masses for the deceased, one for each of the saint's years. And alongside such meanings, that of Joseph as the patron of carpenters continued to attract the diocese's craftsmen.^[73]

Anne's cult also received a new impetus. The more critical hagiographers of the Counter-Reformation pointed out the apocryphal nature of her legend and that of her husband, Joachim. Bollandus and Lenain de Tillemont demonstrated that almost nothing certain was known about the two saints.^[74] While Joachim's cult all but succumbed to the doubt of ecclesiastical authorities—Pius V suppressed his office in the 1572 breviary—Anne's popularity remained strong and still useful to Church and state. The discovery of a statue of Anne at Auray in Brittany in 1625 made that town an important pilgrimage center and attracted the attention of Louis XIII. In addition, it served as a miraculous riposte to the Protestants of western France at a time of increased military conflict around La Rochelle. Anne also became a symbol of purity, especially for those promoting the controversial devotion of the Immaculate Conception. In 1677, to downplay any hint of a physical taint in the Virgin's origins, Innocent XI banned further artistic representations of Joachim and Anne embracing before the Golden Gate of Jerusalem after receiving the news of Mary's conception.^[75] Instead of the wife-husband relationship, the mother-daughter one was empha-

[73] Mâle sees Joseph's promotion as coming with the publication of the Summae de donis Sancti Joseph by the Dominican Isidorus Isolani in 1522; Hahn convincingly illustrates the late medieval growth in his cult's popularity. The major push began in the fifteenth century with Gerson, Pierre d'Ailly, and Bernardino da Siena, who drew on a tradition from Ambrose that depicted Joseph as an earthly artisan paralleling God the heavenly artisan. A model of perfection, Joseph fulfilled his earthly artisan's role by shaping souls and leading them to repentance. For customary meanings of Joseph's cult, see chapter 2.

[74] Lenain de Tillemont, Memoires , p. 57.

[75] Maria Warner, Alone of All Her Sex (New York, 1983), p. 248.

sized through the cult of the Nativity and through images of the "Education of the Virgin." These paintings, in which Anne passed on her virtues of piety and charity to her daughter while teaching her to read the Old Testament, were common despite the suspicions of theologians who disliked the apocryphal nature of the story and its implications for women reading Scripture. It is worth remembering, however, that Anne's success during the Counter-Reformation developed less from doctrinal considerations and more from an earlier and enduring popularity that often had local significance, such as the guardian of women or of alpine villages from avalanches.^[76]

The most honored member of the Holy Family, aside from Jesus, remained Mary. Her popularity was nothing new; indeed, by the end of the seventeenth century, some Jansenist devotional writers had become leery of it and the practices it inspired.^[77] Throughout most of the Counter-Reformation, however, everyone from the lowliest peasant to the royal couple sought her favor. Louis XIII consecrated his kingdom to the Virgin in 1638, and Anne of Austria founded a Norman shrine to Mary after the birth of an heir.^[78]

For many of these devotees, Mary continued her late medieval role as the supreme protector and source of mercy under vocables (devotions) such as Our Lady of Consolation, Compassion, Mercy, Protection, the Seven Sorrows, and most of all in the Grenoble diocese, Pity.^[79] Mary's position as the sacred figure closest to Christ, the one most marked by his special grace, reinforced her position as the supreme mediator. But the reformers saw other possibilities in her cult. Bérulle thought of her as an example of Christian perfection. Meditation on her life was one of the surest paths to Christ.^[80] The universal nature of her cult also made her a useful symbol of Catholic unity and a bulwark against Protestants who denied her importance. Numerous images of her trampling a snake reminded viewers that she was the new Eve, "immaculate" and untainted by the fault of her predecessor. In addition, such

[76] See above p. 110.

[77] Taveneaux, Le catholicisme , p. 372.

[78] Ibid., p. 378; Bercé, Fête et révolte , p. 130.

[79] Taveneaux, Le catholicisme , pp. 462-463; and the discussion in the next chapter.

[80] Taveneaux, Le catholicisme , p. 371. Also the channel through which grace descended to priests, Mary thereby reemphasized the priesthood's position in the earthly hierarchy. Her gift of the infant Jesus to the world was equated with the priest's gift of the Host to the faithful (Mâle, L'art religieux , p. 32; Taveneaux, Le catholicisme , pp. 462-464). On Mary as the special patron of priests, see Warner, Alone of All Her Sex , p. 158. She was the guardian of priestly celibacy, though for some Counter-Reformation clerics she often became the object of a rapturous love.

representations publicized her role as the leader of a militant Catholicism, stamping out the serpent of heresy.^[81]

Thus although Mary was still an intercessor, she now taught Counter-Reformation doctrine as well. The increasingly popular Rosary devotion displayed this double purpose. The collective life of the confraternities—attending masses, marching in processions, and participating in confraternal politics—provided the devotional group, especially women, with a powerful way to express reverence for the Virgin and to petition her for aid. For reformers, the meditative recitation of the prayers counted out on the chaplet promoted an individualized, sober, contemplative, and therefore more sincere, mode of piety opposed to an external and collective religiosity.^[82] Mary, then, became a highly condensed symbol of Catholic success, doctrinal purity, and proper spirituality. For the faithful she also retained the alternate meaning of a powerful protector.

The members of the Holy Family satisfied better than any other saints the Counter-Reformation's desire for symbols of unity because of their widespread importance in Catholic devotional life and imagery. Their virtue could be seen as reflections of Christ's own, and they could help inculcate a respect for Church hierarchy and doctrine.^[83] The other saints associated with Jesus could not take on such heavy symbolic burdens, but they could illustrate spiritual themes reformers wished to emphasize. Mary Magdalen and Peter, who denied Christ three times and then repented, reminded the faithful of the importance of penance.^[84] Peter also supported the authority of the papacy. Saints who had been bishops reinforced episcopal power over religious life. Hence Le Camus's interest in the relics of the eleventh-century bishop of Grenoble, Saint Hugh, and the efforts of many prelates to ensure that Eligius was depicted as a bishop and not as an artisan.

In addition to using Christ's associates and the legendary heroes of Catholic history, the Counter-Reformation Church had need of new figures who could simultaneously attract the faithful and embody spir-

[81] Mâle, L'art religieux , pp. 38-40. The images illustrated proper doctrine by showing the Virgin killing the snake with the assistance of her son. To Protestants an interpretation of the story on which the image was based that gave any role to the Virgin was excessive Catholic Mariolatry.

[82] The militant Church also found the Rosary a useful symbol of success against opponents. Pope Pius V attributed the victory in 1571 over the Turkish fleet at Lepanto to Mary's intercession, gained by Roman confraternities reciting rosaries (Warner, Alone of All Her Sex , pp. 305-308; Taveneaux, Le catholicisme , p. 371).

[83] The use of a devotion to inculcate respect for and obedience to Church authority was most apparent with Christ. See the discussion below.

[84] Mâle, L'art religieux , pp. 65-67.

itual and doctrinal purity. It found them in the canonized leaders of the Counter-Reformation. An Ignatius of Loyola, a Philip Neri, or a Theresa of Avila, each so often depicted by painters and sculptors in ecstasy, provided forceful images of direct contact with divine love.^[85] But few people could share the intensity of such experiences, and an institution wary of uncontrollable religious enthusiasm did not wish to encourage them. In promoting the cults of these saints, Church officials celebrated their dedication, obedience, and organizational accomplishments, such as founding orders, establishing convents, doing hospital work, and teaching. Charles Borromeo was the epitome of austere Counter-Reformation spirituality but also of episcopal authority.^[86] Vincent de Paul and Jane de Chantal found their way into the saintly corps not only for their piety but even more for their practical work on behalf of the Church's spiritual and social aims. The martyrs of the struggle against Protestantism or of overseas missionary work provided similar examples of heroic virtue and activity. Such figures gave the Church rich material with which to construct its discourse on the cult of saints.

These devotions, however, had little impact on village religion.^[87] Its construction of the cult valued other qualities and looked for different virtues in the new saints, who thus often displayed two or more contrary sets of symbolic meanings. For the Church, Francis de Sales was another illustrious reformer. He combated Protestantism in the Chablais and carried on missions elsewhere as well. His devotional writings, such as the Introduction to the Devout Life , described a form of self-examination central to Counter-Reformation spirituality.^[88] In addition to his doctrinal purity and heroic virtue, de Sales needed to prove his sanctity through miracles. And the Savoyards venerated him for these miracles, collected and publicized by his nephew and the Visitandine order he helped to found. One deposition offered at the canonization hearing listed well over a thousand incidents of miraculous healings of all sorts. From this list, however, the Congregation of Rites would accept only seven as authentic.

The cult of Francis de Sales responded directly to the requirements of

[85] Ibid., pp. 151-171.

[86] For the faithful, however, Borromeo became a thaumaturge, a plague saint, because the most heroic achievement in his legend occurred during the 1571 plague in Milan, where he stayed to work among the sick after the rest of the Milanese elite had fled. Though not very evident in the diocese of Grenoble, his cult provides another example of the different symbolic meanings a saint could carry (ibid., pp. 87-91).

[87] Weinstein and Bell suggest, to take one example, that the cult of Theresa could never have replaced that of older miracle-working saints in Spain (Donald Weinstein and Rudolph M. Bell, Saints and Society [Chicago, 1982], p. 191).

[88] Taveneaux, Le catholicisme , pp. 403-406.

the village religion of the Chablais but was little known elsewhere until the spread of the Visitandines.^[89] Savoyard villagers honored him during his lifetime for the exorcisms he performed. Eyewitnesses recounted how he had worked miracles that echoed those of numerous other saints, such as providing inexhaustible stores of bread and wine for monastery banquets or distributing chaplets from a supply that continually replenished itself.^[90] The healings multiplied so rapidly after his death that he began to replace older local saints and, more surprisingly, the Virgin, especially in those sanctuaries where parents brought stillborn infants to be revived for baptism. Indeed, like Mary, Francis de Sales did not specialize but guarded people from all sorts of perils. But many of the varied illnesses he cured were specifically the problems of his region, such as outbreaks of malaria in the mountain valleys, injuries from falls down steep slopes, or accidents on Lake Annecy.^[91] Thus de Sales's thaumaturgic powers contributed to the local particularism of his cult even as the Church celebrated his devotional writings and example as a reformer. Neither meaning entirely excluded the other. Canonization authorities necessarily believed in at least some of his miracles, and the Catholic villagers of the Chablais no doubt appreciated his conversion of Protestants. But the dominant meanings with which each side invested his cult did tend towards different poles of the axes of meaning.

It was partly to avoid this contrariness in interpreting the saintly symbols of the Counter-Reformation that reformers turned to the central figure of the faith, Christ, and his most common cultic representation, the Eucharist. Devotion to Christ, as opposed to the saints or Mary, was hardly new in the Counter-Reformation. The Eucharist was an object of intense veneration in the late Middle Ages, especially on the new festival of Corpus Christi.^[92] In the diocese of Grenoble, the Holy Cross had attracted a great deal of devotion in the fifteenth century, and the Holy Spirit was the vocable to which most village confraternities were dedicated.^[93] The cult of Christ, however, had always competed with those of Mary and the saints in Catholic devotional life. Reformers would now push it to the forefront.

The Christ-centered spirituality of the Counter-Reformation was, in

[89] Indeed, as I show in the next chapter, his cult did not spread widely even in the nearby diocese of Grenoble, except for the deanery of Savoy.

[90] These incidents recalled Christ's "multiplication of fishes" or the turning of water into wine as well as widespread folkloric themes like the inexhaustible purse.

[91] I rely here on van Gennep, Culte populaire , pp. 135-155.

[92] Bossy, Christianity in the West , pp. 70-72, 74-75.

[93] See chapters 1 and 5.

one sense, a response to that of Protestantism. But it also had other roots and very different implications. The influence of humanism led some theologians to stress Christ's humanity. In the hands of a Francis de Sales, this emphasis could open the possibility of self-perfection to all Christians, whatever their estate or condition. Such christocentrism found its devotional outlet in cults built around moments of Christ's life, the Holy Infant Jesus, for example, or the Passion (though this cult was also strong before the Reformation).^[94] Another, and perhaps contradictory, current in the "French school of spirituality" flowed from the writings of Pierre de Bérulle, which described a more resolutely abstruse path toward spiritual perfection by adherence to the "states" of Christ's life.^[95] Although Bérullian spirituality found little immediate echo outside Carmelite convents, houses of the Oratory, and Jansenist circles, it did expand beyond clerical milieux to lay dévots later in the seventeenth century thanks to the work of missionaries such as Jean Eudes. It took its place in devotional life with christocentric cults honoring the Holy Family or the Verbe incarné.^[96]

Despite differences among them, theologians intended all forms of christocentrism to inculcate a spirituality in which devotion to Christ was undiluted either by devotion to other sacred figures or by the disapproved beliefs and practices associated with their cults. Christ's majesty could only increase that of the Church. His vitality as a spiritual and ecclesiastical symbol would combat both the heresy of Protestants and the local particularism of Catholics. He would with the assistance of his earthly models, the priests—guard proper doctrine and the Church's authority over religious life.^[97]

The christocentric cult that enfolded the thickest set of meanings honored the Eucharist. As the most highly "condensed" of all Christian symbols, the Eucharist could serve the Counter-Reformation better than any other Christ-carrying symbol.^[98] Yet because the Eucharist received such widespread attention and devotion from Catholic people, we can assume it fit their requirements as well. For reformers concerned with control, the Host's location in the church drew all eyes to it, and in return it radiated the Church's authority. It sat in the center of the

[94] Taveneaux, Le catholicisme , pp. 375, 403-408, 471-478.

[95] Ibid., pp. 406-410. Taveneaux briefly describes the debate over Bérulle's humanism or antihumanism.

[96] Ibid., pp. 376-377, 408.

[97] Taveneaux cites both Jean-Jacques Olier's and Bérulle's discussions of the priest's identification with Christ (Le catholicisme , pp. 159-160).

[98] On the Eucharist as a condensed symbol, see Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood , p. 222. In Catholic belief, the consecrated Host is Christ, not a symbol of him, but it has the polyvalent capacity of symbols in this study's use of the term.

main altar, the most important place in the church. Bishops were loath to allow its diffusion to other altars under any but the most pressing circumstances.^[99] All parishioners were now to attend the priest's performance of the mass at the main altar rather than hear it in their confraternal or domestic chapels. Visiting bishops insisted that the Host be properly housed.^[100] Le Camus smashed tin or wooden tabernacles and ordered gold and silver ones in their place. Ornate ciboria exalted the Eucharist.^[101] New retables attracted attention to it and framed it with representations of adoring sacred figures. Parishioners held vigils in front of it fulfilling the dictates of the Forty Hours' devotion or that of the Perpetual Adoration.^[102]

With all attention focused on the Host, the main altar, and the priest, reformers could now more easily fracture the religious life of the community into its social elements. As we have seen, bishops such as Le Camus also worked to maintain peace within communities. But when they sought to control religious life by emphasizing the parish church as its center, they envisaged the parish less as a "social miracle" and counterpart to the miracle of the mass than as one component within the larger unity of the Church.^[103] The ligaments that bound individuals to one another through the community as a collective religious entity were now to carry less weight than those that connected Catholics to the universal body of Christ through the institution of the Church and its network of parishes presided over by priests and bishops. The parish was now to be a collection of individuals examining their consciences, families raising properly catechized children, and corporate groups helping not the entire community but only their more restricted memberships toward life in the next world.

The newer eucharistic devotions would help. The medieval Holy Spirit confraternities and, to an extent, the penitents of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had brought the community together into a religious entity. And they guarded their autonomy from ecclesiastical authority. Those of the Blessed Sacrament, by contrast, were open only to the village elite. They engaged in a variety of eucharistic observances: monthly masses, expositions of the Host, frequent communion, Forty

[99] Such was the case with succursal chapels in far-flung hamlets.

[100] On this point and on the role of the main altar in the ceremony of the visit, see chapter 2.

[101] Mâle, L'art religieux , p. 83.

[102] On the Forty Hours' devotion, see Luria, "Popular Spirituality"; and Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood , pp. 229-233. On the Perpetual Adoration, see Taveneaux, Le catholicisme , p. 374.

[103] I borrow the concept of "social miracle" and its relationship to religious life from Bossy, Christianity in the West , chap. 4.

Hours' devotions, and the like.^[104] Each individual or group would now depend for spiritual well-being not on the community but on the priest and the functions he performed at the main altar of the church. The parish, as defined by outside religious officials, would no longer suffer the community as a rival.^[105]

Not all villagers shared this vision of the parish. They did not surrender the possibility for communal peace offered by the practice of communion and symbolized by Eucharist. For them the Host consecrated in the mass still bespoke unity and the hope of harmony. Those unable to reconcile themselves to their fellows might well stay away from the mass.^[106] Villagers still strove for communal religious unity in new organizations such as the Rosary confraternities; thus the village elite's attempt to separate itself provoked tension and, sometimes, its retreat.^[107] Villagers did not necessarily accept the reformers' understanding of eucharistic or, more generally, christocentric spirituality. William Christian shows that sixteenth-century Spanish villagers eagerly adopted a Christ-oriented spirituality. But their devotion to Christ, represented in miraculous images and crucifixes, did not express the abstract interiorized religiosity of the Catholic reform. Instead, Christ became a superior healing or helping divine figure. He replaced an earlier array of specialist saints, and the different vocables of his cult provided new communal protectors. Rather than promoting universality and obedience to Church authority, Christ sparked a "new wave of local piety and miraculism."^[108] In France, too, the Host continued to be as much a source of miracles as a symbol of a new style of sprituality.^[109]

In the last decades of the century, devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus started gaining popularity, though it did not reach its peak until well into the eighteenth century. Like most of the cults favored by the Counter-Reformation, the Sacred Heart was not new. It was invented in the fifteenth century, but devotional writers such as Bérulle seized on it

[104] Taveneaux, Le catholicisme , p. 374; and chapter 1.

[105] The fracturing of the religious community was even more readily apparent in cities where Jesuits frequently organized congregations for specific social or professional groups. See Châtellier, L'Europe des dévots ; see also Nicholas's description of the same process in La Savoie au 18e siècle 1:427-430; and chapter 1, note 74.

[106] Recall the feuding noble brothers in Oris-en-Rattier who did not participate in communion, described in chapter 3, pp. 84-85. And in parishes with both Protestants and Catholics, their different conceptions of the Eucharist and communion brought an irreconcilable tension to the heart of the community even though both emphasized the peace and unity to oe found in the Eucharistic rite.

[107] On Rosary confraternities, see above and chapters 1, 5.

[108] Christian, Local Religion , pp. 22, 181-206.

[109] From the seventeenth century on in both Spain and France, however, Mary performed miracles more frequently than Christ (ibid., p. 206).

as a counter to seventeenth-century rationalism. For them the heart was the seat of affection, the source of inspiration unfettered by the chains of reason, and the place where the individual encountered God. Despite their efforts to publicize the cult, the Sacred Heart garnered little attention until 1673 when visions of Christ appeared at Paray-le-Monial to a Visitandine nun named Marguerite-Marie Alacoque.^[110] Only after word of the miracles spread did the cult gain adherents, not all of whom by any means were villagers. In 1689, at a low point in his reign (and after much urging by Alacoque), Louis XIV adopted the devotion in the hope that it would bring him military victory. Thus began the long association of the Sacred Heart with political authority in France. Clearly believers other than those who participated in "popular religion" sought to improve their earthly situation with devotion to a miraculous cult. A christocentrism that emphasized miraculous intervention over recognition of Christ's divine humanity represented by the Sacred Heart was not what all Catholic reformers had in mind. Jansenists opposed both the cult's emotionalism and its promoters, the Jesuits. Church authorities never warmed to the devotion and never verified Alacoque's visions, though she was canonized in 1920.^[111] The combination of apparitions, miracles, and political support removed the Sacred Heart from the realm of Counter-Reformation spirituality and placed it instead squarely in that of village and national religion.^[112]

Saints thus served as reflections of and references to complex ways of seeing and understanding the world. Villagers and Catholic reformers employed cults to invest their actions and beliefs with meaning, to understand those actions and beliefs, and to communicate their understandings to one another. Their constructions were not radically distinct, one elite and one popular, as if they had no common cultural ground. Catholic culture was, indeed, what they did share; this larger culture of early modern Europe enabled people to use saints as symbolic currency in cultural exchange. But within the larger framework considerable variation existed between the dominant understandings that villagers and reformers took from the cult of saints and the uses to which they put it. For reformers the saints stood primarily for a more unified religion based on order, obedience, decorum, and abstracted relationship between humans and the divine, and an interiorized spirituality. For villagers, the saints meant autonomy from hierarchical control,

[110] The visions occurred between 1673 and 1675.

[111] In the same year as another French nationalist saint, Joan of Arc.

[112] Taveneaux, Le catholicisme , pp. 377-379; Bossy, Christianity in the West , p. 97.

collective religious expression, and a relationship with sacred figures from whom they learned moral values and received immediate aid. They signified, as well, a set of markers by which to measure life through the year, and an array of cultural symbols that reflected and constructed village existence in both its loyalties and its divisions. Each side found that certain devotions best communicated its views. On that basis we can begin to use saints to assess cultural change in the rural world of early modern Europe. The spread of Counter-Reformation devotions would indicate that its values and conceptions were taking root. The persistence of village saints would suggest that villagers were resisting the reform's impact.

But of course the situation was more complicated. The popularity of the Counter-Reformation's favored devotions did not necessarily mean the triumph of Counter-Reformation sensibilities. Saints could mean different things to different people. New devotions could carry with them new conceptions of belief and practice, but they could also adapt to the requirements of village religion. We must be sensitive, whenever possible, to the ways in which villagers could invest saints with meanings other than those the reformers intended. They sometimes signaled such a divergence by the practices with which they surrounded new cults. Further, village religion could come to display, within itself, the tensions between opposite poles of meaning. Villagers did not necessarily always agree among themselves as they set about the process of constructing their religious lives.

Five
The Evolution of Saints' Devotions in the Diocese of Grenoble

If saints symbolized different constellations of cultural and religious meaning, how do we assess the changes in saints' cults? Not all uses of devotions are very revealing of change over time, and many of the ways villagers venerated their saints were not recorded often enough for systematic evaluation. Personal expressions of piety—prayers, vows, anonymous offerings at altars—are not accessible to historians of the village except when recorded in notarial acts establishing chapels or founding masses. Other forms of devotion such as confraternities, pilgrimages, or processions drew on only a fraction of the whole panoply of saints. Baptismal records, used to examine given names, show that godparents (who gave their names to children) were usually grandparents or occasionally uncles and aunts. As a result, names alternated from generation to generation in a family and were not particularly sensitive to changes in the cult of saints.^[1]

To grasp the evolution of saints' devotions across the whole diocese, therefore, we need to find a means of tracing their appearance in and disappearance from people's religious lives. We need a manifestation of the cult of saints that was conspicuous in villages, that was consistently recorded, and that responded to changes in religious sensibilities. For-

[1] Other studies also show names to be unreliable in deciphering religious attitudes. See the comments of Alain Molinier in Une paroisse du bas Languedoc: Sérignan, 1650-1792 (Montpellier, 1968). For a modern but very similar description of the naming of children, see Tina Jolas, Yvonne Verdier, and Françoise Zonabend, "Parler famille," L'Homme 10, no. 3 (July-September 1970): 5-26, esp. 13.

tunately, the records of pastoral visits provide just such a tool in their information on the chapels dedicated to saints.

Within the sacred space of the community, a chapel was the small territory of grace that villagers recognized as the place where the saint's presence was strongest. There villagers could ask for their saint's help, acknowledge its receipt, and render thanks by leaving a votive offering. The chapel anchored the saint in the community. It tied him or her to the chapel's patrons and to those who came there to ask for aid. But devotion to a particular saint did not last forever. New saints attracted the villagers' veneration, and chapels of discarded saints fell into disrepair or were transferred to other cults. When Bishop Scarron's vicar-general, Saint-Jullin, visited la Buissière in 1665, he remarked that the saints of various chapels in the church were either forgotten or being forgotten. Similarily, Le Camus found that in 1683 the parishioners of Saint-Léger (in Chambéry) no longer remembered the saints of some twenty chapels listed by Bishop Laurent Alleman in his late fifteenth-century visit.^[2] Hence chapels can reveal the evolution of villagers' feelings about saints, and we can use them to trace changes in the cultural meanings saints symbolized.

Chapels carried a deep significance in part because they required a major investment, both financial and emotional. The founders had to construct a building or an altar in a church, and they had to endow the altar to pay for a priest to say masses. They usually financed the service through the income from donations of land. Few village families could afford these costs on their own. Wealthy landowners—city people who had land in the village, local seigneurs, rich clergymen, ecclesiastical institutions, or nobles with homes in the area—could undertake the expense. Le Camus's visits indicated that local village notables, those who displayed the honorific sieur before their names, also owned patronages. But often villagers had to rely on a group of families, a confraternity, or the entire community to finance a chapel, continue its maintenance, and provide its expensive ornaments. Le Camus insisted that each chapel have an altar stone, crucifix, silver chalice, candle-holders, balustrade, linens, and the like.

Despite the costs, would-be patrons frequently fought one another for the right to shoulder the financial burden a chapel imposed. Endowing a chapel allowed them to display wealth and extend patronage to a client when choosing a priest for the service. Thus their expenditure

[2] ADI 4G.270, pp. 266-271; 4G.276, p. 182.

visibly signaled their piety as well as their standing in the community.^[3] We are left most often with the financial records of chapels, but the money villagers invested does not fully account for the complex feelings that tied them to saints and moved them to endow altars. Chapels also joined people to saints in other ways: in individual prayers uttered at the altar, in anonymous offerings left there, in urgent trips prompted by some special need, or in hurried visits paid while passing by. Even if the chapel was neglected, it could beckon to the villagers in an emergency. Its physical presence in the village reminded people of their community's historical tie to the saint. Their prayers, offerings, and financial investment reminded the saint of her or his attachment to the people.

Beyond the appearance or disappearance of altars dedicated to saints, the location of chapels also reveals the evolution of devotions. Every altar (and therefore every saint) held a place within a hierarchy of chapels in a village's religious space. In the eyes of the Church, this space was carefully structured, and each position corresponded to a rank of importance.^[4] The most prestigious was the main altar of the parish church. The second most important location was to the immediate right of the main altar. The space to the immediate left held the third position.^[5] The rankings descended toward the back of the church, with those chapels closest to the door in the lowest positions. Many of the parish churches were not large enough for a very sophisticated articulation of space; they had room for only one or two lateral altars. Even minor chapels inside a church, however, held a higher rank than those outside.

The hierarchy of positions made the evolution of saints' devotions visually evident in the parishes of the diocese. In some instances, Counter-Reformation devotions replaced earlier saints in chapels located near the main altar. In other churches, the older saints did not disappear but were moved away from the main altar, closer to the door.^[6] And, at times, devotions were pushed out of the church into

[3] Le Camus's visits mention frequent lawsuits over chapel patronage; examples include ADI 4G.272, pp. 689 (la Buissière) and 1278 (Saint-Léger); 4G.276, p. 132 (le Bourget).

[4] On the relation of spatial hierarchy to the evolution of saints' devotions, see Froeschlé-Chopard in Religion populaire , pp. 72-84; in a contemporary Parisian context see Wilson, "Cults of Saints," pp. 250-253.

[5] The end of the church containing the main altar pointed toward the sacred east; nearby chapels were close to the Host. The right-left distinction is associated with the common classification of right above left (Wilson, "Cults of Saints," p. 251 n.18).

[6] Alphonse Dupront refers to them as "door saints" in his preface to Froeschlé-Chopard, Religion populaire , p. 14.

outlying chapels in the village, though exterior saints could also find their way inside.

We must remember it was the Church that arranged the religious space of villages to accentuate the importance of the main altar and the eucharistic service performed at it. The villagers, in contrast, had often been more closely attached to the altars of saints or confraternities. Now certain villagers who sought to associate themselves with those heavenly figures they saw as important and with prestigious earthly authorities adopted saints acceptable to the reformers and founded decently furnished chapels in the spaces to the right and left of the main altar. Other villagers purposely honored their saints in chapels near the door or outside the church.^[7] In doing so, they removed themselves from the ecclesiastical center of the village, where the power of outsiders—the bishops—was growing stronger. But they also venerated the outside saints precisely because their chapels were situated in places of importance to villagers: at the boundaries of their community, near streams, on mountaintops, in the fields, close to meadows where their livestock grazed, beside the roads by which they traded with other communities. It was at these limits to the village, places of economic activity and sites of potential crisis, that villagers most needed the help of their saints.

Saint-Pierre-D'albigny

The pattern is evident in the church of the Savoyard parish of Saint-Pierre-d'Albigny where, over the course of two decades, Saint Anthony lost his privileged position near the main altar and found himself pushed to the door (fig. 1).^[8] When Saint-Jullin visited the parish in 1665, Anthony's chapel occupied the position to the right of the main altar. Though it had no patron or endowment, it was sustained through offerings that people left at the altar. Across from it on the left, the confrères of Saint Joseph had constructed their own altar. The exact nature of the confraternity is uncertain, but judging from the members' practice of saying sixty-nine memorial masses for each deceased brother, it seems to have been an Agonisant group rather than a craft organization of carpenters. The Joseph group clearly held pride of place

[7] Wilson notes how "popular cult(s) may enter by the door" ("Cults of Saints," p. 252).

[8] The bourg's location above the Isère northeast of Montmélian likely involved it in prosperous river commerce, as suggested by the increase in communicants from 800 to 1,200 between Le Camus's 1672 and 1683 visits.

Figure 1.
Church of Saint-Pierre-d'Albigny

over the other confraternity in the church (that of Our Lady of Carmes) as well as over the old Holy Spirit association, which had no chapel. And Joseph's altar also outranked that of Sebastian established by the community after a vow. Most likely, then, Joseph's devotees were from the community's elite. When Le Camus first visited the parish in 1672, he found that Anthony's chapel still occupied the position nearest the main altar on the right side, but that the Joseph confraternity had moved its altar across the church to a place directly behind it. By the time of Le Camus's fourth visit in 1683, Anthony had lost his hold on the highest spot in the church and had been moved to the lowest, near the door. Those who venerated the guardian of livestock would continue to maintain his chapel, but they would now do so at a distance from both the Host and the most important position in the church.^[9]

Vizille

The example of Vizille shows even more vividly how the acceptance of Counter-Reformation cults changed the interior space of a church (fig. 2).^[10] In 1665, the church contained five chapels with a sixth under construction. To the right of the main altar was a chapel dedicated to Saint Blaise, further down the ruins of a Holy Spirit chapel, and then an altar to John the Baptist. On the left, Mary Magdalen was the titular saint of the chapel closest to the main altar. Nearer the door was a Nicholas altar under the patronage of the Lesdiguières family, the local seigneurs and most important noble family in the Dauphiné. In between the two altars, the noble Arnaud de Viennois was building a new chapel.

When Le Camus arrived in 1672, he found the situation somewhat changed. The Blaise chapel, once in an enviable location on the right, had disappeared. The local prior, Claude Canel, who was also a conseiller-clerc in the Parlement and a close associate of the bishop, was rebuilding the Holy Spirit chapel but intended to rededicate it to Francis de Sales. Le Camus ordered John the Baptist's altar torn down and moved lower in the church. The villagers may have taken a decade to fulfill this command since only in 1683 does the chapel receive further

[9] ADI 4G.270, pp. 477-482; 4G.272, pp. 1473-1479; 4G.276, p. 172; 4G.284, p. 623.

[10] Vizille, situated south of Grenoble, had 1,800 communicants in 1672 and 1,100 in 1683. As the seat of the Lesdiguières family and with connections to other Grenoblois nobles and clerics, it was closely tied to Grenoble's social and professional life.

Figure 2.
Church of Vizille

mention. Of the chapels on the left, those of Magdalen and Nicholas remained, and the middle one was still under construction. On his third visit in 1677, Le Camus found the altar of Francis de Sales established. The middle chapel was finally completed and dedicated by its noble patron to Joseph.

Outside the church, the evolution of saints' devotions took another direction. In 1672, the exterior chapels included one for the penitential confraternity, a Saint Francis chapel in the house of the Brothers of Charity who administered a local hospital, and an Assumption altar in the seigneurial château. By 1677 two of the community's hamlets had endowed chapels, one to Saint John and one under the double vocable of Roch and Bridget. Two confraternities, the Rosary and Scapular, had established themselves in the penitents chapel, though in this case the choice was prompted by the main church's state of disrepair. In 1683, a third hamlet had added a chapel dedicated to Our Lady of Pity and Saint Lupus.

Inside the church, the saints of the Counter-Reformation were taking hold: Francis de Sales, Joseph, and the Magdalen, though her chapel was an older foundation. Nicholas remained because he had powerful patrons. The villagers, however, still needed healing and protecting saints—Roch, Bridget, Lupus, and Mary under the medieval vocable of Our Lady of Pity—who had to find their homes in the community's outlying hamlets.^[11]

Goncelin

Not every parish had patrons who were as illustrious or as close to the bishop as those of Vizille. Nor was the evolution of devotions in other communities as dramatic as it was there. More often Counter-Reformation cults took root quickly only where they had a strong local base of support, such as a confraternity. Others made their impression very slowly and achieved, at best, only a tense coexistence with the older cults. The tension was reflected in the placement of their chapels. The situation in Goncelin, for example, was more typical than that of Vizille (fig. 3).^[12] In 1665, the parish church had a chapel to Saint Anthony to the right of the main altar. It had no patron or endowment, but it did receive frequent offerings from parishioners. Below it on the

[11] ADI 4G.270, pp. 1-2; 4G.272, pp. 341-350; 4G.273, pp. 786-791; 4G.276, pp. 39-41.

[12] On the eastern side of the Isère north of Grenoble, Goncelin had 1,100 communicants in 1672 and 1,500 a decade later, suggesting that it, like Saint-Pierre-d'Albigny, prospered from river commerce.

Figure 3.
Church of Goncelin

same side stood an altar to Saint George with a noble patron, and one to Saint Lucy, which had a landed endowment for masses but no patron. On the left near the main altar was a Rosary chapel that had formerly been located next to Anthony's. A Rosary confraternity, established without episcopal permission, maintained it. Below it was an altar with uncertain revenues dedicated to Saint Margaret, a chapel to Lawrence with a noble patron, and the shoemakers' confraternity chapel dedicated to their patron saint, Crispin. The church also contained a penitents chapel located in a balcony. A Holy Spirit altar had previously disappeared. Outside the church were four chapels: one dedicated to Our Lady of Consolation (referred to in later visits as Our Lady of Pity), another to Our Lady, a third one to Saint James, and a final altar dedicated to three saints. The community had constructed the last chapel in fulfillment of a vow to Saint Roch, but the confraternity of boatmen said masses there for Saint Nicholas and the woodworkers for Saint Joseph.^[13]

In comparison with the chapels of Vizille, those of Goncelin changed little. This is not to say that no evolution occurred, only that it was not simply the result of the bishop's reforming efforts. The inhabitants had lost their devotion to the Holy Spirit. The Rosary cult had moved to a place of prominence on the left of the main altar. The privileged position not only promoted Counter-Reformation spirituality but elevated an organization that continued customary confraternal activities such as processions and remained socially inclusive (unlike the more acceptable but exclusive Blessed Sacrament associations). Cults persisted here because they had strong bases of local support either from individual donors, in the case of Anthony; or from confraternities, in the case of Crispin, Joseph, or Nicholas; or from the whole community, in the case of Roch. The first devotion to reflect a more abstract spirituality does not appear until 1728 during the first complete visit of the diocese after Le Camus's death. The new bishop, Jean de Caulet, found that the altars of George and Lucy had disappeared from the right, where a chapel to the Immaculate Conception (a most abstract devotion) now stood. The new altar, however, held a position lower than that of Anthony.

What all three examples—Saint-Pierre-d'Albigny, Vizille, and Goncelin—suggest is the complex interplay in devotional change between the local power of high-ranking nobles and clerics, social tensions, the

[13] ADI 4G.270, pp. 367-372; 4G.272, pp. 462-468; 4G.276, pp. 11-13; 4G.284, p. 66.

organizational life of the community, and the evolution of saints' devotions. Socioeconomic conditions may also be important, but the similarities between Goncelin and Saint-Pierre-d'Albigny indicate the need for caution in associating cultural and economic change. Both seem to have been growing, prosperous river bourgs. Yet one experienced a more marked shift in religious life than the other. Religion was not static in any of these towns, but its development depended a great deal on particular local circumstances.^[14]

The instance of Goncelin suggests that Le Camus did not mount a full-scale assault on the older saints. He did insist that offices be said only for the saints from the Roman calendar and for the approved local saints of the diocese: Vincent, Hugh, Ferjus, Cérat, and Apre.^[15] If a community venerated others, he might try to hinder its devotion by making certain festivals non-obligatory. His success, however, was limited. In 1693, for example, he had to rescind an earlier order and restore to the status of fêtes chômées the festivals of Matthias, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, James and Philip, James and Christopher, and Simon and Jude. He upgraded these fêtes because he recognized the "pitiful state" of his flock in a time of war and famine and hoped that returning the saints to the people would "reheat and nourish their piety and devotion."^[16]

More problematic for a community were the bishop's efforts to hamper its usual means of honoring a saint. If a chapel was not repaired or furnished to his satisfaction, he would order the priest to stop saying mass at the altar and might eventually demand its destruction. Villagers did not always have the financial means to make the repairs. Or perhaps they did not share the bishop's sense of propriety. When the inhabitants of Saint-Pierre-d'Albigny or Goncelin left offerings on their Saint Anthony altars, they felt little need for new crosses, candleholders, linens, and so forth. And in numerous parishes, offerings continued to appear at altars Le Camus had condemned, indicating that the bishop's conception of the cult of saints did not go unchallenged.

Sometimes the bishop changed the entire function of a chapel's space in the church, thereby depriving villagers of a place to venerate their saint. In Fontaine, for instance, he ordered an unendowed chapel to

[14] The next chapter looks more closely at such circumstances in one community.

[15] Recueil des ordonnances , pp. 305-306.

[16] Affiche-Le Camus, BMG 1438; Recueil des ordonnances , pp. 302-304. The original demotion of some of these saints was most likely connected to their questionable histories; for instance, hagiographers linked Matthias to the Basilidian heresy (Lenain de Tillemont, Memoires , pp. 406-408). I owe this reference to Janet MacMillan.

Saint Blaise removed and a confessional, the perfect symbol of the Counter-Reformation, installed in its place.^[17] He also made it difficult for villagers to express gratitude to their saints in customary ways. When in various parishes, the bishop saw chapels littered with small replicas of hearts or limbs—gifts left by people who had received cures for those parts of the body—he demanded the removal of these tokens.^[18] Some communities found that they could no longer present offerings to their saints as they had in the past. In Bissy, villagers thanked Saint Valentine by bringing him chickens, which they placed in a cellar under his altar. Le Camus instructed them henceforth to offer only bread and wine in the church. And the inhabitants of Saint-Martin-d'Uriage who brought offerings of veal and ham to Anthony's altar were told to leave them at the church door.^[19] In various parishes he tried to stop or alter processions: in Valbonnais he prohibited a monthly procession led by the priest of the Scapular chapel; in Saint-Pierre-sous-le-Château (Chambéry) he refused parishioners the right to parade stone statues of Sebastian; in Saint-Pierre-d'Albigny he ordered readings from the Abridged Christian Doctrine instead of a procession honoring Sebastian and Fabian.^[20]

But people maintained strong attachments to the specific images of their saints, especially if the images worked miracles. Insofar as Le Camus succeeded in imposing his standards, he broke the close link between image, practice, and cult, thus undermining certain saints without directly attacking them. Chapels dedicated to old cults were more likely to be sites for these newly prohibited practices than those with Counter-Reformation devotions. Once the bishop uprooted the "superstitions and indecencies," people could no longer approach their saints in the accustomed manner. Le Camus hoped that his flock would find more acceptable ways to show their devotion, but a saint who was inaccessible was useless. Either the bishop's orders had to be subverted or the saint and his or her chapel abandoned.

The Chapel Data Base

In their reports on chapels, pastoral visits provide the information necessary to trace the bishop's impact, the villagers' acceptance of or re-

[17] ADI 4G.272, p. 1108.

[18] Examples in ibid., pp. 561 (Murianette), 621 (Jarrie), 1097 (Claix), 1222 (Pariset), and 1262 (Apremont).

[19] Ibid., pp. 520-521 (Saint-Martin-d'Uriage), 1360 (Bissy).

[20] Ibid., pp. 161-162 (Valbonnais), pp. 1298-1299 (Saint-Pierre-sous-le-Château), 1476-1477 (Saint-Pierre-d'Albigny).

sistance to his orders, and the longer evolution of the diocese's cult of saints. I have compiled the information into a large data base on the religious foundations of the diocese, drawing on the visit of 1665 carried out by the vicaire-général , Saint-Jullin, and on Le Camus's visits of 1672 and 1683.^[21] Those prior to 1665 are too fragmentary to be of any systematic use, as is the one from 1677. And in his later tours Le Camus's preoccupation with other matters such as the conversion of Protestants prevented his careful reporting on chapels, though he still handed down orders for their repair. The visits of 1665 and 1672 present the array of saints to whom people in the diocese were devoted before his arrival and at the time of his first tour. The 1683 visit records the evolution of saints' devotions after his first decade—the period of his greatest impact. By using the three visits, we can follow the evolution over two decades. And we can also date the arrival of new devotions to see whether they were, indeed, the result of Le Camus's work or if they predated his appearance in the diocese.

Le Camus's immediate successors, Ennemond de Montmartin and Paul de Chaulnes carried out no similar campaigns. It was only with the accession of Jean de Caulet, in 1726, that the diocese once again had a prelate who visited its entire territory. He did not, however, start his first tour until two years later and did not complete it until 1734. The record of his visit illustrates the continuing impact of Counter-Reformation devotions and religious conceptions and provides, in a sense, an epilogue to the story of the Counter-Reformation's impact on the diocese.^[22]

With the addition of a pouillé dating from 1497, we can enlarge the picture by examining the diocese's panoply of saints at the close of the Middle Ages.^[23] The pouillé's completeness is remarkable. Unfortunately, no sixteenth-century documents rival it. This problem leaves the analysis with a considerable gap of time during which the diocese's sentiments toward its saints cannot be traced systematically. The inclusion of the pouillé proves useful nonetheless. The survival of certain saints over a century and a half suggests the strength of the links between their cults and the village religion of the diocese. But the disap-

[21] The visit of 1665-1667 is in ADI 4G.270, that of 1672-1673 in 4G.271 and 272, and that of 1683-1685 in 4G.276.

[22] ADI 4G.284.

[23] A pouillé is a diocese's list of all sources of ecclesiastical revenue, including chapels; like a visit, it lists the vocables, patron, revenues, and services of chapels. It frequently gives the location of chapels inside or outside the church but does not usually report on their condition. The 1497 pouillé in ADI 4G.390 is in an eighteenth-century copy.

pearance of other saints should quickly dispel the notion that "popular religion" before the Counter-Reformation was either immemorial or changeless. The paucity or incompleteness of records between the pouillé and the 1665 visit leaves the reasons behind the evolution opaque, but the comparison between the two will make clear that it was unremitting.

The information recorded for each chapel includes its vocable, patron, endowed masses, income, physical condition, and location. Although we must consider all these categories of information in deciding if a devotion was active in a community, we cannot give them all equal weight. The report on a chapel's condition reflected the bishop's view of a proper chapel, not necessarily that of the villagers. Nonetheless, a neglected altar could remain standing in the church or in a dilapidated outside chapel long after its saint had ceased to excite any interest in the parish. Generally a saint who was still important to villagers would have a chapel with a foundation, income, and perhaps a patron. For purposes of this analysis, I have assigned each chapel to one of five possible locations: to the right of the main altar, to the left of the main altar, on the right side of the nave, on the left side, or outside the church.^[24]

To deepen our understanding of cultural exchange in the area we must also examine the whereabouts of saints' cults within the diocese and the routes by which they traveled. To do so I have divided the diocese into four regions.^[25] In each region, villages had similar economic activities, social structures, and communal political arrangements. In the Oisans and Valbonnais to the east of Grenoble, the first region, villages lay along or near one of the major routes to Italy. The villagers here participated in an active communal political life in part because they needed to manage scarce resources and in part because the presence of the local seigneurs was weak. The character of their religious life reflected and supported this communal involvement. The second region, the deanery of Savoy to the north, was not part of France. Its religious life contributed to the Savoyards' sense of autonomy. The third region consists of the Vercors, the Chartreuse, and the southern part of the diocese. Each was a mountainous area in which villages were isolated and their inhabitants impoverished economically and culturally. Literacy rates here were lower than elsewhere in the diocese. The

[24] Since churches vary in size and number of chapels, and since the visits' descriptions of outside chapel locations are not specific, the chapel locations cannot include more than five positions.

[25] See the description of the diocese in chapter 1.

only exceptions to this rule were those villages located very close to Grenoble. New religious conceptions would have had a hard time reaching the isolated villagers. The fourth region comprises the parishes along the Isère valley from the Savoyard border near Allevard to Grenoble, around the barriers of the Chartreuse and Vercors massifs to Tullins and Vinay with their metallurgical and weaving industries, and on to the western edge of the diocese. For reasons of geographical contiguity, I have added the area from Grenoble south to Vizille. The Isère ties the region together. The seigneurial presence was stronger in villages here than in the mountains, and Grenoble landowners played a large role in the parishes' political, economic, and religious lives. The analysis of chapels by region will determine the degree to which each had its own array of saints. The regional routes for and barriers to the movement of devotions can, in turn, suggest some of the limits to the Catholic reformers' impact and the extent of the villagers' creation of their own religion.

The Saints of the Diocese of Grenoble

The number of religious foundations dedicated to saints or other devotions increased considerably from the late Middle Ages to the time of Le Camus.^[26] The 1497 pouillé recorded 637 foundations. The 1665 visit listed 862, and the 1672 visit 1,076. The inhabitants of the diocese were clearly very busy establishing new chapels and confraternities in the seven years before Le Camus's arrival. Saint-Jullin's tour may have sparked some activity, but for the most part this more than 20 percent increase occurred while Bishop Scarron had all but retired to his library at Herbeys and the clerical impetus behind religious change, whether from parish clergy, religious houses, or missionaries, was weak.^[27]

After the new bishop's first decade, the number of foundations fell off to 919. The decline suggests that Le Camus had some immediate success in ridding churches of their devotional debris. His orders to destroy neglected altars, clean and repair the others, and put them on a surer financial base seemed to be bearing fruit. But only an examination of the saints of the altars can show how great an impact he had on local spirituality. By 1728, the number of foundations had increased spectacularly to 1,202. Because of the lapse of time between Le Camus's

[26] To give a more complete view of dedications to saints, I include confraternities; usually, though not always, they had altars under the same vocable. For these cases, I count only the chapel or the confraternity to avoid counting one foundation twice.

[27] See chapter 1, note 38.

death and this visit, the growth cannot be attributed simply to his work or to the diocese's reaction to him. It does correspond, however, to other evidence of people returning to their old saints or searching out new ones in the difficult years of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century.^[28]

What is most immediately noticeable about the cult of saints in the diocese is its great variety. The 1497 pouillé lists eighty-seven different devotions to which chapels and confraternities were dedicated. As the number of foundations increased, so, too, did the number of devotions. The total for 1665 was 112; for 1672, 130; for 1683, 131; and for 1728, 141. Most of these cults, however, appeared very infrequently. And a relatively small group attracted the attention of many villagers. The number of devotions with fifteen or more foundations (or that appeared in at least 5 percent of the parishes) was consistently small: thirteen (1497), nineteen (1665), nineteen (1672), nineteen (1683), eighteen (1728). They remained mostly the same cults from year to year. Only a few had truly widespread appeal with foundations in more than a quarter of the diocese's parishes. These figures suggest, first, the great importance of a very small number of saints or devotions, and, second, the great localization of other cults. The villagers of the diocese shared very few of their saints.

The array of late medieval holy figures consists, not surprisingly, of craft, therapeutic, and protecting saints (see the appendix). The Virgin headed the list with twice the number of foundations as any saint. She appeared primarily under the general vocable of Our Lady (eighty) or Our Lady of Pity (seventeen). Following her were saints drawn from the group of the Fourteen Holy Helpers led by Catherine of Alexandria, whose cult was very widespread both in numbers of chapels and their geographical location. Her chapels were distributed among all four regions, with a slightly higher proportion in the second and slightly lower in the third. Her martyrdom on the wheel made her a particular favorite of knife grinders and potters but especially of cartwrights and transport workers, groups less numerous in the isolated and roadless mountains of the Vercors and the Chartreuse. Other Holy Helpers included George, a protector of women, and Sebastian, the plague saint.^[29]

[28] See above and chapter 3. On the combination of war, economic distress, and plague in the early decades of the eighteenth century, see Norberg, Rich and Poor , pp. 82-83.

[29] On the Fourteen Holy Helpers, see Metford, Dictionary of Christian Lore , p. 102. Their cults spread widely in Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Other members of the group present in the diocese were Anthony of Padua, Blaise, Christopher, Denis, Margaret, and Nicholas, each with fewer than fifteen chapels.

Anthony, the guardian of flocks, was the diocese's second most popular saint in 1497. Devotion to him, as to Catherine, was spread over the entire diocese with a somewhat disproportionately large number of chapels in Savoy. After Anthony, Mary Magdalen had the most foundations. Catholic reformers would later propagate her cult because it taught penance and a contemplative life. But for the people of southern France she was a local saint, since Provençal tradition held that she had come to Marseille with Martha and Lazarus and had retired to a remote cave to live out her days. Because of the years in the cave, she might have been connected with the wilder places of the diocese's communities. Indeed, most of her chapels were located outside parish churches. Many of her altars were in hospitals where she fulfilled the role of healer advertised by her attribute, the ointment jar. But in Saint-Pierre-de-Genebroz (Savoy), the parishioners exhibited their great devotion to her at a chapel "situated on a crag (roche r)."^[30] Located in such places, she could mark boundaries, provide a goal for rogation processions, and serve as a sentinel against dangers from beyond the areas of human settlement.

Michael, with about as many chapels as Mary Magdalen, was certainly connected with remote places and mountaintops.^[31] In this diocese a good number, though not a majority, of his chapels were outside churches.^[32] From his position on summits, Michael could fulfill his role as the one who rescued souls from hell and brought them to heaven. Saint James guarded not remote rocky spots but the mountain routes that led to his shrine at Compostella.^[33] His chapels were established in the hospitals that tended to the pilgrims as well as in churches. He also had a local significance. People of the diocese considered relics in the village of Echirolles, just south of Grenoble, to be his. Two centuries earlier Bishop Laurent Alleman had denied the validity of the relics, and so did Le Camus, but to no avail. The villagers refused to give up their belief in the relics. In fulfillment of an old vow, Grenoble's consuls continued, right up to the Revolution, to make an annual procession to the chapel on James's fête.^[34]

The magnitude of John the Baptist's cult is difficult to gauge because the visits do not, or perhaps Le Camus's village informants did not,

[30] ADI 4G.273, p. 393.

[31] Attwater, Avenel Dictionary , p. 245; Metford, Dictionary of Christian Lore , p. 174.

[32] I describe one such chapel in Uriol; see chapter 3.

[33] Gabrielle Sentis, "Sur les 'chemins de Saint Jacques' en Dauphiné," Bulletin mensuel de l'Académie delphinale , 8th s., 17, no. 1 (January 1978): 26-31.

[34] Ibid.; ADI 4G.270, p. 314; 4G.272, pp. 547-548; 4G.273, p. 792.

always distinguish carefully between chapels dedicated to him and those under the name of John the Evangelist. Many are listed simply under John. Nonetheless, most of John's chapels in each visit belonged to the Baptist, and if others can legitimately be added to the list, his cult was one of the most widespread. John the Baptist was important for the village religion of this diocese, as for that of many others, because his festival coincided with midsummer. Villagers celebrated it by dancing around bonfires built to honor Saint John. For the reformers few customs exhibited more clearly the "remains of paganism."^[35] Finally we can round out the list of the most revered traditional saints in the diocese with the thaumaturges Claude and Bartholomew, as well as Margaret, the patron of unmarried women, and Nicholas, the patron of unmarried men to whose chapel at Huez (Oisans) sterile women came to rub against a phallic-shaped stone.^[36] The craft saints—Crispin for shoemakers, Eligius for metalworkers, Nicholas, again, for boatmen— did not have many chapels but show up in the bourgs where their confraternities were organized.

The chapels of most of the saints described so far were distributed throughout the four regions of the diocese. But for several cults such as those of Catherine, Anthony, and the Holy Spirit, the deanery of Savoy proved especially fertile ground. It seems also to have been a reservoir from which cults spread into the French part of the diocese. The reason, most likely, was the transalpine situation of the duchy. The Alps did not present a barrier to cultural change but a route by which it traveled. Saints' cults moved through the duchy from Italy and, like those of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, from other alpine areas in Germany and Austria. In 1497 over two-thirds of the chapels or confraternities dedicated to the Holy Spirit were located in the deanery. But by the midseventeenth century, its portion had fallen to a third.^[37] The devotion had taken hold in the communities along the Isère in region four, which now owned the major share of Holy Spirit foundations. Saint Eligius also moved from Savoy down the Isère into France, though the number of his chapels was never large. In 1497, the deanery had all but one of his chapels; by 1672, only one remained there. The focus of his cult had

[35] Delumeau shows, however, that Bossuet and other reformers frequently compromised their attacks on the fires by seeking not to abolish them but rather to "christianize" them as a means of "banning superstitions" (Delumeau, Le catholicisme , pp. 269-270).

[36] Chanaud, "Folklore et religion," pp. 54-56. Chanaud draws on van Gennep for information on the stone at Huez. The custom may postdate the seventeenth century, as Le Camus's visits do not mention it, though they record dances on Nicholas's festival.

[37] The percentages of Holy Spirit foundations in the deanery were 68 (1497), 42 (1665), 34 (1672), and 33 (1683 and 1728).

shifted to the metalworkers' confraternities in the bourgs along the Isère.^[38] Some Savoyard saints almost never moved beyond their borders. The cult of Saint Grat, a protector of livestock, had no presence whatsoever in France. Maur, too, was primarily a Savoyard saint, though the number of his chapels was small.^[39] Theodulus was also practically confined to Savoy. In 1665, seventeen of his eighteen chapels were located there. By 1672, the devotion had dropped dramatically to three chapels, all Savoyard.^[40]

These saints gave the village religion of the deanery of Savoy a different cast from that across the border. They helped foster the Savoyards' sense of cultural separateness from the French. Their decline in the seventeenth century suggests a weakening of this independence.^[41] The disappearance of certain devotions, however, does not mean that Le Camus's program was succeeding here any more than in the French part of the diocese. Rather, village religion developed in Savoy as it did in France with the retention of many older cults and the adoption of certain new ones like that of Francis de Sales, with its distinctive local meanings.^[42] The cult originated in Savoy and moved downriver into France. In 1672, the first visit to record dedications to him, regions two and four had three chapels each. After that, the Savoyards showed themselves more attached to their saint than their French neighbors. In 1728, eight of his eleven foundations were in the deanery.

If this discussion has dwelt at length on the late medieval saints, it is because they continued to attract the devotion of parishioners in the diocese well into the eighteenth century. The saints who healed or helped remained essential to village religion. So did the customs, beliefs, and meanings their cults entailed. The number of chapels dedicated to the thaumaturge Claude rose between 1497 and 1672 and stayed at the same level throughout Le Camus's episcopate. The chapels of Mary

[38] Perhaps this shift corresponded to a decline in the Savoyard metallurgical industry. This industry was expanding, however, in the French part of the diocese (Bligny, ed., Histoire du Dauphiné , p. 267).

[39] Whether Maur refers to Maurus, a sixth-century monk, or is a local variant of Maurice, the commander of the martyred Theban Legion, is not certain. Maurice is listed in the visits as a devotion separate from Maur but never had more than two chapels in the seventeenth century.

[40] Van Gennep identifies him as Theodore, a fourth-century bishop and promoter of the cult of the Theban Legion, an association that gave him great popularity in the Alps where these martyrs were widely venerated. Theodulus guarded the Savoyards' flocks and protected their crops against storms. In the deanery Francis de Sales had tried but been unable to revive the cult of this bishop, though he survived in other Savoyard dioceses (van Gennep, Culte populaire , pp. 7-32).

[41] This development provides a cultural complement to the political fate of the deanery as it became a satellite of France (Nicolas, La Savoie au 18e siècle , p. 30).

[42] On Francis de Sales, see chapter 4.

Magdalen, Michael, and John the Baptist suffered a small decline before 1665 but then stabilized until 1728.

The mere presence of chapels dedicated to these saints does not of itself demonstrate the persistence of their cults. If we examine how many of these chapels were active—at which masses were said and which therefore most likely had revenue and possibly patrons or donors—the resiliency of the diocese's traditional saints becomes even clearer.^[43] In 1665 and 1672 priests were drawing revenue from about two-thirds of Mary Magdalen's chapels, a sizable proportion. In 1683, about half of her chapels had masses performed, an average amount. By 1728, the figure had returned to almost two-thirds, and the Magdalen also had more chapels than many saints. Her attraction for the people of the diocese had remained strong. So had George's. In 1665, 69 percent of his chapels were active. By 1672, the percentage had fallen to 50, but the overall number of his chapels had risen from thirteen to eighteen. In 1683, 60 percent of his foundations showed activity; the same was true in 1728. The cults of other traditionally popular saints grew stronger. Of Michael's chapels 52 percent were active in 1665 and 59 percent in 1672. He suffered a drop to 42 percent in 1683 but by 1728, had jumped to 65 percent, his highest point ever. And Claude rose from 44 percent (1665) to 60 (1672). He then fell back to 43 percent in 1685, but in 1728 priests were saying masses at 67 percent of his chapels.

The only successful late medieval saint who underwent a considerable decline was Catherine. In 1497, she possessed fifty-four chapels in the diocese; by 1665, she had only thirty-eight. And by 1728, the total had dropped to thirty. In numerous parishes, her altars had fallen into desuetude. By 1672 at Saint-Paul-de-Varces (south of Grenoble, at the foot of the Vercors), Le Camus found that parishioners had demolished Catherine's chapel. In Saint-Pierre-d'Entremont (on the Savoyard border), he gave parishioners permission to turn her chapel into a sacristy, though all might not have agreed on the change since in 1677 the sacristy was still unbuilt.^[44] Despite signs of weakening devotion to Catherine, her cult remained quite strong. In 1683 and 1728, she had

[43] The percentages given below are based on the number of chapels where masses were performed compared to the total number under that vocable. Percentages based on the number with an endowment or other income would be slightly but not significantly lower, since masses usually implied revenue. Masses were said at some altars based on anonymous offerings rather than endowments. The percentage of those listed with patrons is, however, lower since the patronage of chapels was not always certain or reported.

[44] ADI 4G.272, p. 1085 (Saint-Paul-de-Varces); 4G.273, p. 356 (Saint-Pierre-d'Entremont).

more chapels than all but a handful of other saints. Furthermore, between 1665 and 1683, the proportion of her active chapels increased from about half to two-thirds. Catherine could still be a useful saint to the people of the diocese, and her traditional functions could be employed in some untraditional ways. In the early eighteenth century, a noblewoman established a chapel dedicated to Catherine in a cannon factory she owned in Saint-Gervais (western edge of the Vercors).^[45] Catherine and her wheel had been promoted from protecting humble carters to overseeing royal armaments.

One old saint—Anthony, that stalwart protector of beasts and people—not only resisted any decline from medieval prominence but actually flourished in the era of Le Camus. From thirty-four foundations in 1497, his cult grew to include fifty-one in 1665 and sixty-five in 1728. The biggest increase came between 1683 and 1728 when fifteen chapels were added to the total. And more than 50 percent of his chapels were usually active. Villagers continued to honor him in their customary ways. They brought veal and hams to the altar in Saint-Martin-d'Uriage (a practice that irritated Le Camus). They offered oblations that helped maintain his chapel on the right of the main altar in Goncelin. And as members of the herdsmen's confraternity in Saint-Vincent-du-Plâtre (Chartreuse), they indulged on his fête in what the curé called "débauches."^[46]

Anthony's continuing strength, especially the increase in his foundations after 1683, can be tied to the difficulties the diocese suffered in the last decades of the seventeenth century and the first decades of the eighteenth. In a period of warfare, with the threat of plague and famine hanging heavily over them, villagers more than ever before looked to Anthony for help and protection. He was not the only saint to whom they turned. The number of Roch's chapels also rose markedly in this period, as did those of Francis de Sales in the deanery of Savoy. But few saints combined thaumaturgic powers and local associations as strongly as Anthony, and, therefore, few helpers or healers could so well serve the people of the diocese.

The persistence of older sacred friends indicates their irreplaceability in village religion. Their tenacity, however, can too easily leave the impression that the cult of saints as a whole was changeless. Such was not the case. The old thaumaturgic or protecting saints provided continuity with the past, but around them the panoply of devotions in the

[45] ADI 4G.284, p. 401.

[46] For Goncelin and Saint-Martin-d'Uriage, see above notes 10 and 16; for Saint-Vincent-du-Plâtre, ADI 4G.276, p. 232.

diocese was transformed between 1497 and the midseventeenth century and from then to the early eighteenth century. The cults of certain saints who were entirely absent from the 1497 list grew dramatically in the seventeenth century. I have already described that of Francis de Sales, but much more important numerically were those of Roch and Joseph.

Roch was a plague saint, and many of his chapels appear to have been established from vows made during the epidemic of the late 1620s and early 1630s.^[47] But, as was the case with Anthony's cult, the biggest increase, one of 64 percent, came between 1683 and 1728. Villagers needed Roch's protection from the lash of disease during a time of war. Their devotion was often intense. In Goncelin, parishioners made six processions a year to their Roch chapel.^[48] The bishop's orders could not deflect such fervor. To prevent the vogue on Roch's fête during which villagers in Miribel-les-Echelles danced to acclaim Roch's protection, Le Camus commanded the priest to say a very early mass at the saint's chapel. His orders were to no avail. In 1728, Jean de Caulet found that the villagers were still celebrating the vogue in great numbers, and that villagers from neighboring parishes were joining them.^[49] In fact, a count of Roch's chapels may not reveal the real depth of his cult because they often attracted the devotion not just of one community but of an entire area.^[50]

Joseph was also new to the diocese and enjoyed great success. He had seventeen chapels in 1665, and the total had almost doubled by 1672. In 1665, 65 percent of his altars had endowed masses, but the proportion declined to 40 percent in 1672. Over the next decade, the total number of his chapels fell to twenty-two, but over 50 percent of them were active. The waning interest in a Counter-Reformation devotion is puzzling, but the Blessed Sacrament and the Rosary experienced similar declines. Few older cults encountered such a fate. Le Camus's efforts to ensure that each chapel had a proper endowment may have had some effect on the new devotions as did, perhaps, his insistence that confraternities dedicated to them were illegal if they did not have episcopal

[47] For instance in Rives (north of Tullins) where parishioners founded a chapel to Roch and Sebastian in 1628 (ADI 4G.276, pp. 313-316) and in Miribel-les-Echelles (Savoyard border) where their counterparts established a Roch chapel at about the same time (4G.272, p. 1011).

[48] ADI 4G.284, p. 66.

[49] ADI 4G.272, p. 1011; 4G.276, p. 195; 4G.284, p. 775. For one of Le Camus's few successful attempts to suppress a vogue on Roch's festival, see the visit of Vimines (Savoy) (4G.276, p. 190).

[50] See the visits of Clarafond (Savoy) (ADI 4G.276, p. 145) and Mouxy (Savoy), whose parishioners made processions to Roch's chapel in Clarafond (ADI 4G.284, p. 475).

permission. Or villagers may have overextended themselves in an earlier rush of enthusiasm for these cults and were now husbanding their spiritual and financial resources, putting them where they would do the most good. In any case, Joseph's cult (as well as those of the Blessed Sacrament and the Rosary) rebounded in the succeeding decades. Indeed, by 1728 he had forty-three foundations, and priests were saying masses at over 70 percent of them, a striking figure.

With Joseph the Counter-Reformation appeared to have a triumph, but given the complexity of Joseph's meanings the conclusion must be more nuanced.^[51] He was not a saint whom villages, as collective entities, sought out as a protector. His chapels most often had as patrons devout nobles or well-to-do commoners eager to ally themselves with the bishop. But patrons did not always adopt the meanings of the cult that reformers preferred. In Auris-en-Oisans in May 1696, a carpenter named Nicolas du Ser had a notary draw up a contract detailing his vow to reestablish Saint Joseph's chapel in the parish church. Le Camus had ordered the chapel destroyed because it had no endowment. Du Ser's act contained no defiance of the bishop. He donated land in perpetuity to pay for masses and took on the responsibility of maintaining the chapel. But the act suggests the continuation of a more customary form of saint's devotion. The choice of the saint was significant. Joseph was certainly acceptable to the reformers, provided that the devotion emphasized his role as a paternal figure or patron of the good death. But Joseph had an older meaning as well. He was the patron saint of carpenters, and it seems likely that du Ser, the carpenter, had this meaning in mind. Furthermore, he ordered not just masses on Joseph's festival but a procession as well. It would not be a long procession of the sort that infuriated reformers, but it was a procession nonetheless. It would go to the hamlet of Cours, thereby signaling not a Counter-Reformation style religious expression centered on the parish church but rather a more traditional expression that included outlying chapels and, hence, the entire community in village religion.

Other devotees of Joseph also exhibited customary forms of belief and practice. Du Ser's colleagues who celebrated Joseph's vogue in the carpenters' confraternity of Saint-Laurent-du-Pont (Savoyard border) were "more attached to the cabaret than the church." The confrères of the more acceptable Agonisant group in Saint-Pierre-d'Albigny said sixty-nine requiem masses for their departed brothers, a practice that Le

[51] On the meanings of Joseph's cult, see chapter 4. For what follows see ADI 4G.101 (Auris-en-Oisans).

Camus also disliked.^[52] Thus some honored Joseph as an example for pious fathers or for those facing death, thereby opening village religion to the sensibility of the Catholic reform. Many, however, turned to him for the same reasons they looked to other saints. And they often signaled their intentions by building their Joseph chapels outside their parish churches, a location that indicated their distance from the Counter-Reformation.

Such ambiguities were also possible in Anne's cult. She advanced the devotional objectives of Catholic reform, but she also undertook more customary responsibilities in village religion. Anne had only seven chapels in 1497. Between then and 1665, the total grew to eighteen and varied little thereafter. Since Anne was a member of the Holy Family as well as the educator of the Virgin, her increase might well indicate inroads made by Counter-Reformation spirituality, but the location of the chapels suggests otherwise. Villagers venerated Anne not in chapels near the main altar but in those near the church door or outside. In fact, in each visit her exterior chapels outnumbered those in any other position. Anne held no claim to the highest places in churches. Instead villagers sought her out elsewhere. The regional location of her foundations adds another clue to parishioners' perception of this saint. In 1497 all her altars were in regions three and four. In 1665 a disproportionately large share—one-third—were found in region one, and by 1728 almost half of Anne's chapels were established there. In the mountainous Oisans and Valbonnais, Anne could, especially in her exterior chapels, protect villagers from drought and avalanches. Inside, but near the doors of parish churches, village women seeking her guardianship could visit her altars and leave their prayers and offerings. Anne, as a Counter-Reformation symbol, made little impression on the people of the diocese. Her cult remained strong because she protected people from very local problems.

The other saints that reformers preferred also had little impact. Peter was venerated in only a dozen chapels in 1497. That number fell to eight by 1672 but returned to its earlier level in 1683. Usually more than half of Peter's chapels, however, were active. Thus the most important of bishops had a very small, but consistent, following in the diocese. More contemporary heroes of the Counter-Reformation left barely a trace: Charles Borromeo and Francis Xavier never had more

[52] ADI 4G.276, p. 196 (Saint-Laurent-du-Pont); and note 9 above. The proportion of Joseph's chapels with confraternities as patrons ranged roughly from 20 to 40 percent from visit to visit, though the nature of these confraternities is not always apparent from the visit.

than a chapel each. The only new saint with notable success was Francis de Sales.

The cults discussed so far, however, represented neither the principal focus of villagers' devotional life nor its area of greatest change. The overwhelming majority of religious foundations in the diocese's parishes were dedicated to Mary or to Christ-centered devotions. Although this was the case both before and during the Counter-Reformation, the particular Marian or christocentric cults that attracted villagers changed considerably, and their domination of village religion grew.

The most prevalent Marian title for chapels in 1497 was simply that of Our Lady (or Beata Maria ). In many cases the compilers of the pouillé may have been unaware of more precise vocables. Certainly the proportion of Our Lady chapels in relation to all Marian foundations decreased in the more detailed later visits. The second most widespread, late medieval, Marian devotion was Our Lady of Pity (Pitié ).^[53] And the third was Our Lady of Consolation. In addition, the diocese had a host of Marian vocables with only a few chapels each, if that. Some took their names not from one of Mary's generalized qualities but rather from their location, such as Our Lady of Lachar (parish of Varces), of Claix (Saint-Just-de-Claix), or of the Rotunda (Cruet).

Le Camus by no means challenged Mary's importance in the diocese. He sought only to enforce his exacting standards on her chapels. He tried to abolish, for instance, the beliefs and practices that surrounded certain of the old chapels, particularly those that were sanctuaires à répit .^[54] To these shrines—Tullins had one—parents brought stillborn infants to be revived for baptism. Le Camus mistrusted such miracles. He commanded that the doors of the chapel at Tullins be locked, that infants no longer be exposed on its altar except under the constant vigilance of a priest, and that no stillborn infant be baptized there unless it displayed signs of life that were verified by "persons of probity."^[55] But nothing he ordered undercut either devotion to Mary at this chapel or the hope that she would resuscitate infants.^[56] The bishop had no greater success in undermining devotion to Our Lady of Graces who worked miracles at her chapel in Cruet (Savoy), in stopping the dancing and bonfires with which villagers honored a plague vow to Our Lady of

[53] Pitié could also be translated as compassion, but Our Lady of Compassion shows up as a distinct devotion, though without many chapels.

[54] I leave aside here the processions and pilgrimages to important Marian shrines at Notre-Dame-de-Myans or Notre-Dame-de-l'Osier, which I have discussed above; see chapter 1.

[55] ADI 4G.272, p. 896.

[56] See the 1728 visit of Tullins in ADI 4G.284, p. 698.

Lachar, or in preventing the fairs and vogues by which villagers celebrated the fête of Our Lady of August in the parish of Notre-Dame-de-Commiers (Drac valley) and la Chapelle-Blanche (Isère valley, northeast of Grenoble).^[57]

In the seventeenth century the most important Marian cults were first, the Rosary, and second, Our Lady of Pity, but their vitality was less a reflection of the reformers' influence than of the intensity with which village religion honored the Virgin. Foundations of Our Lady of Pity grew from seventeen chapels in 1497 to sixty-six in 1665 and stayed close to this level from then on. From one-half to two-thirds of the altars were active at any one time. But even this notable increase could not compare with the spectacular success of the Rosary. The devotion did not exist in the diocese in 1497, but in 1665 it had fifty-seven foundations, more than any other cult except those of Sebastian and Our Lady of Pity. Over the next seven years, the cult practically doubled to 103 altars or confraternities and became the most widespread cult in the bishopric. Despite a slight decline in 1683, the Rosary grew to 175 foundations and remained the diocese's dominant devotion.

The reasons for the tremendous spurt of growth between 1665 and 1672 are not clear. Dominicans, who propagated the cult, do not appear to have engaged in any energetic missionary work. Nor did other religious orders. Probably no single explanation for the Rosary's increase exists. Instead, success built on success as villagers around the diocese adopted the devotion, formed confraternities, and built chapels. The Rosary was appealing for a number of reasons. It offered women a more organized and public spiritual role than any other confraternity. It also permitted the village elite, who established the confraternities and chapels, to gain prestige in their communities by associating themselves with a new cult, one approved by reformers. And by bringing the Rosary into their villages, they revitalized their village religion and gave it a new basis of organization with themselves at the head.^[58] Thus the Rosary imported the forms of Counter-Reformation spirituality into village religion. But village religion adapted it to the aspirations of its participants and its customary practices such as organizing confraternities and staging processions. The combination of meanings, those associated with the village and those associated with the Counter-Reformation, were essential to the Rosary's success. Marian devotions

[57] ADI 4G.272, p. 1493; 4G.276, p. 174; 4G.284, p. 563 (Cruet); 4G.273, p. 823 (Varces); 4G.276, pp. 18 (la Chapelle-Blanche), 46 (Notre-Dame-de-Commiers).

[58] I explore this further with an example in chapter 6.

that did not carry these double implications made little headway in the diocese. The Immaculate Conception, for example, never had more than one chapel.

In 1497, the Holy Cross garnered most of the devotion to Christ, followed by the Holy Spirit, whose confraternities were beginning to spread from Savoy into France.^[59] By 1672, the number of Holy Spirit groups had grown from nineteen to thirty-two, located mostly in Savoy and the Isère valley. Scarron's efforts to dissolve the confraternities had largely failed, even though a number of them were in decay. Le Camus had somewhat better success. In 1683, the total number of Holy Spirit chapels had fallen to twenty-one, but priests were saying masses at three-quarters of them. The Holy Spirit endured despite the efforts of bishops bent on ridding their diocese of these bastions of communal religious autonomy.^[60]

Other christocentric cults had little impact on the diocese. The number of chapels dedicated to the Trinity was quite small and varied little from its medieval base. The Holy Savior had only five chapels in 1728, its high point. The Catholic reform had even less to show for its efforts to promote its own christocentric cults. The Holy Name of Jesus or the Incarnation of the Word never appeared among the diocese's chapels. The Infant Jesus had only four, and those not until 1728.

The Transfiguration of Our Lord, though not a new cult, had no chapels in 1497 and seven in 1728.^[61] The total is not remarkable, but their proximity is. Five of the seven were in parishes of region one, specifically in the Valbonnais area or between it and Bourg-d'Oisans. One of the remaining chapels was in a parish just over the imaginary line between regions one and four, and the other was not much farther away.^[62] The locations of the Transfiguration's chapels described a small circle of cultural interaction in which spouses, land, and goods as well as cults were exchanged.^[63] The appearance of the Transfiguration chapels here and nowhere else in the diocese also suggests the religious entrepreneurship of certain villagers. They were among the merchants who left their communities each winter to pursue commerce elsewhere

[59] Thirteen of the nineteen Holy Spirit foundations in 1497 were located in region two.

[60] On the Holy Spirit, see chapter 1.

[61] The Transfiguration had become a universal feast of the Church only in 1456. Though not specifically a Counter-Reformation devotion, it would not have been widely promoted much before the reform.

[62] The parishes were Entraigues, Ornon, Lavaldens, Chantelouve, Siévoz, Séchilienne, and Notre-Dame-de-Mésage.

[63] The Transfiguration can also be considered a mountain devotion because Christ was transfigured on Mount Tabor.

in France and beyond, and who likely brought back new devotions with them. New cults followed the same roads as the merchants and thus took root in their mountain communities. As I shall show in the following chapter, the political and social conditions within these villages made them fertile breeding grounds for religious change. They were territories filled with a vital religiosity if not always with grace.^[64]

The most triumphant christocentric devotion in the diocese was the Blessed Sacrament. It built on no medieval foundations, yet by 1665 it had fifty-two chapels and confraternities distributed around the diocese. Despite a setback in 1683, the cult continued to grow, reaching 156 chapels in 1728, which left it second only to the Rosary.^[65] The establishment of the devotion in parishes generally took one of two forms, either Confraternities of the Blessed Sacrament or penitents, but penitential groups were by far the majority. In 1665, more than 50 percent of the Blessed Sacrament foundations were penitents. In 1672 and 1683, they claimed 75 percent of the foundations, and by 1728 the proportion had risen to 88 percent. The Confraternities of the Blessed Sacrament never rose above the 17 percent they had in 1665 and actually lost ground thereafter.

A reformer like Le Camus could thus take only partial comfort in the extraordinary growth in devotion to the Eucharist. Villagers found in it, as they had in the Rosary, a powerful expression of their piety and an innovative means of organizing their religious lives. They did not deny all the meanings that the Catholic reform attached to the Host. Penitents treated it with as much reverence as confrères of the Blessed Sacrament did. They piously performed their confessions and attended mass, even if they did so in their own chapels rather than in parish churches. But the penitents did reject at least one aspect of the reformers' view of the Eucharist, that which saw it as a symbol of episcopal control over village religious life.

The analysis of the pastoral visits, therefore, reveals a picture of devotional life increasingly dominated by the cults of the Rosary and the Blessed Sacrament and including the diocese's surviving healing and helping saints. The spirituality of the Counter-Reformation was adapted to village religion with its concern for miraculous contact with

[64] Region one also had a disproportionately large share of Saint James's chapels, testifying to the pilgrimage routes through the mountains. It was more receptive to the Rosary than regions two and three and to the Blessed Sacrament than regions three and four.

[65] I omit here and for the Rosary figures on chapels with masses founded, because the visits did not generally record masses that confraternities said. Thus figures on endowments would underrepresent the activity of these chapels.

the divine, for communally organized religious life, and for the possibility of expressing individual and familial piety as well as conflicts over position and prestige.

Some comparison with the situation in other areas of France is possible, though few extensive studies exist. We do know that the Rosary and the Blessed Sacrament cults became common throughout the southeast.^[66] The Rosary was a particular success. Michel Vovelle has described the "elementary type of church" in Provence as having its Rosary chapel on one side of the main altar and another dedicated to a christocentric cult or perhaps to Joseph across from it. Much the same could be said for other places.^[67] As was the case in the diocese of Grenoble, the saintly heroes of the Counter-Reformation had little impact elsewhere, but certain cults associated with the reform—notably Joseph's—enjoyed success.^[68] The most detailed studies show that old devotions, the cults of the traditional thaumaturgic and protecting saints, remained strong.^[69] People throughout France, it seems, preferred to keep their old saints even as they added the Rosary and eucharistic cults to their devotional life.

That villagers themselves were instrumental in the importation of new cults such as the Rosary and the Blessed Sacrament is borne out by the dates of their arrival in the diocese. Both cults built up a sizable number of foundations in the first half of the seventeenth century during the years before Le Camus's arrival when neither Scarron, his predecessors, nor religious orders were doing much to bring the new spirituality to remote mountain parishes. Counter-Reformation devotions reached the diocese well ahead of the Counter-Reformation. Although Le Camus did not recognize it, religious change was in full swing when he started his first tour of the diocese. The next spurt of growth occurred after the 1680s, when the bishop's efforts were encumbered by war, economic distress, and his own advancing age. Here, again, the bishop only contributed to religious change already in progress.

[66] Sauzet, Contre-réforme , p. 260; Froeschlé-Chopard, Religion populaire , pp. 108-117, 271-291; Vovelle, Piété baroque , p. 160.

[67] Vovelle, Piété baroque , p. 162; Pérouas, La Rochelle , p. 501; Ferté, La vie religieuse , pp. 363-364; Soulet, Traditions et réformes , pp. 252-253; Hoffman, Church and Community , p. 119.

[68] Vovelle, Piété baroque , pp. 162-163; Froeschlé-Chopard, Religion populaire , pp. 117-120.

[69] Vovelle, Piété baroque , p. 163; Froeschlé-Chopard, Religion populaire , pp. 85-94; Victor-L. Tapié et al., Rétables baroque de Bretagne et spiritualité du XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1972), pp. 168-171; Soulet, Traditions et réformes , p. 278; Ferté, La vie religieuse , pp. 336-358; Alain Croix, La Bretagne au 16e et 17e siècles (Paris, 1981), pp. 1111-1124. Hoffman, however, notes the disappearance of old cults in the diocese of Lyon (Church and Community , p. 119).

The evolution of saints' devotions in the diocese of Grenoble—the patterns of adoptions and adaptations, regional differences and timing, survivals and resistances—suggests that villagers made their own religious decisions. Catholic reformers did not impose new devotions and forms of spirituality on them. Instead, the people of the diocese chose from among the array of Christian devotions according to their religious desires and aspirations as well as the prospects and constraints within their village society. They constructed their village religion by employing new symbols and expressions of piety and by emphasizing certain of their meanings. They combined these with the symbols, practices, and meanings to which they were accustomed and which fulfilled the traditional purposes of religion in their communities. What remains now is to examine this process at work and observe how and why villagers of one community went about the task of reordering their religious lives.

Six
Entraigues and Its Saints
A Case Study

The evolution of saints' devotions reveals to us the continuities and changes in the diocese's collection of saints. Villagers throughout the diocese adopted some devotions of the Counter-Reformation, particularly Marian or christocentric cults, but also retained a very strong attachment to many of their traditional saints. Furthermore, villagers often adopted new devotions well before Le Camus's arrival and sometimes invested them with meanings different from those of the Counter-Reformation. More than the work of Catholic reformers, therefore, local reasons prompted devotional changes in the Grenoble bishopric. The analysis of the saints' evolution offers clues as to what these reasons might have been. But a more complete explanation depends on an understanding of the character of village religion, its place in village society, and the role of saints within it. Only the examination of a rural community can give us this understanding.

Villages are accessible to historians because the government found them useful administrative units in maintaining order and collecting taxes, and because the Church treated the parish (usually, though not always, coterminous with the community in this area) as the center of religious life. As a result, we have documents that occasionally permit us to penetrate seventeenth-century villages. Villagers' cultural horizons were not in the least limited by village boundaries. Nor did villages constitute the nucleus around which their inhabitants constructed their identities. Villagers lived within an extensive and complex web of con-

tacts inside and outside the village.^[1] Certainly, the monarchy's impact on them in the seventeenth century made it clear that they belonged to a political domain much larger than that of the local community. In the village, families, extending vertically over time and horizontally to blood or marriage kin, commanded more of villagers' loyalty than the community. Nonetheless, the village had meaning for its inhabitants because in it relationships with others, whether of friendship or enmity, were most intense. The village provided an arena in which individuals and families could measure achievements gained inside or outside the community against those of others. But the community also provided a social network in which villagers could pursue alliances and neighbors could cooperate. Although they were often in conflict, villagers could work together toward economic security as well as a sense of community. Villages were never bounded entities, even if historians often treat them as such. But they were central to constructing the social relationships that governed the lives of France's vast majority.^[2]

The nature of village religion must be explored through the tension between internal village harmony and divisiveness, and through the reticulation of villagers' outside contacts. We must be wary of interpretations that stress only the integrative functions of religious practices in the community.^[3] They ignore the fact that villages, despite their religion, were not always cohesive. Village religion could construct communal unity, but it could also foster and reflect conflict. After all, in a rogation procession, the question of who marched first might weigh more heavily on the minds of some inhabitants than the need to express communal solidarity. And a communal vow to a saint allowed some to promote their position in the community by donating more money than others. Furthermore, even in the absence of conflict, integrative inter-

[1] Sabean reminds us of this in Power in the Blood , pp. 27-30. See also Alan Macfarlane, "History, Anthropology, and the Study of Communities," Social History 2 (1977): 631-652, esp. 647.

[2] Jean-Pierre Gutton describes the political organization of villages, the "community of inhabitants," as essentially administrative units for collecting taxes (La sociabilité villageoise , pp. 20, 123-136). True in fiscal matters, this definition ignores the rich political, economic, and cultural life of communities, not all of which concerned meeting state obligations.

[3] See introduction. For a similar critique, see Davis, "Some Tasks and Themes," p. 307. Of particular relevance here are functionalist and anti-functionalist studies of ritual, such as those on the fiesta system of southern Mexico and northern Guatemala; a sophisticated functionalist view of the fiesta is Frank Cancian, Economics and Prestige in a Maya Community (Stanford, 1965); for the critique of functionalism, see Waldemar Smith, The Fiesta System and Economic Change (New York, 1977). Clifford Geertz offers a more convincing and influential approach to ritual's role in creating a unified system of symbols but at the expense of discerning difference and change; see "Religion as a Cultural System," in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), pp. 89-90.

pretations fail to leave room for the possibility that the variability of meanings, which characterized religious interchange between the village and the larger culture, also existed within the village. Religious practices and symbols did not always carry the same significance for all members of a community. The negotiation of meaning and its appropriation were processes that villagers undertook among themselves as well as with bishops.

Entraigues

The community of Entraigues, southeast of Grenoble, sits at an altitude of about eight hundred meters on a terrace overlooking the confluence of the Bonne and Malsanne rivers (see map, page 24). To the west lies the community of Valbonnais, chef-lieu of the district. Further west is the bourg of la Mure. To the south is the two-thousand meter peak of Mount Gargas and the Beaumont region, home of the nineteenth-century shrine of Notre-Dame-de-la-Salette. To the north, peaks of close to three thousand meters intimidate the narrow, winding road that leads from Entraigues, along the Malsanne valley, over the col d'Ornon, to Bourg-d'Oisans and the Oisans region. Another road winds east from Entraigues to the commune of Valjouffrey where it runs smack into the massive wall of les Ecrins, alpine peaks that climb to almost four thousand meters.

At the end of the seventeenth century, the community consisted of 436 people in about 110 families.^[4] When Le Camus first visited the parish in 1672, he found 250 communicants and 5 Protestant households. The inhabitants lived in three settlements—the main village of Entraigues and two smaller outlying hamlets, Villard and Gragnolet.^[5] The church was the most important structure in the village; the cemetery surrounded it. Next to the church was the place publique with a cross and the communal oven. Here the communal assembly met, and numerous other social interactions—business dealing, gossiping, courting, festive dancing—took place.

Private homes and properties surrounded the church and market place. Beyond them lay the village's fields, meadows, and orchards, and then the steep mountain slopes. The mountains, too, were areas of human habitation, at least in the summer when shepherds took com-

[4] Mémoires concernant les provinces du royaume: généralité de Dauphiné (Bibliothèque nationale [hereafter cited as BN] mss français ancien supplément), 11413, pp. 211-235.

[5] Entraigues here usually refers to the whole community.

munal flocks to the higher elevations. They lived there, in alpages at altitudes between 1,600 and 1,800 meters, and returned to the village before the heavy snowfalls.^[6]

The two hamlets, Villard and Gragnolet, maintained some sense of their separateness from Entraigues. They formed corporate entities that could file lawsuits, and they had their own procureurs and champiers . By the first decade of the eighteenth century, both had succursal chapels where a vicar could say mass during the winter months. Yet their centrifugal tendencies were circumscribed. The chapels never supplanted the parish church as the focal point of hamlet religious life. The bishop saw to that. Hamlet officers were chosen only during meetings of the communal assembly. And as far as royal fiscal officials were concerned, the villagers of Villard and Gragnolet always paid their taxes as inhabitants of Entraigues.

The community's land was poor at best, and certain tracts were "pays perdu," uncultivable. Of course villagers were always quick to underestimate the productivity of their property in reports to tax officials, and those reports are our sources of information on the quality and size of the community's holdings.^[7] Nonetheless, villagers could not get away with gross underestimations during the on-site surveys that the commissioners of the Révision des feux made at the end of the century.^[8] According to the surveyors, the land was indeed poor, and mountain torrents compounded the problem each spring when they carried away large chunks of the village's best soil. Very little of what was left escaped royal taxes. No noble resided in the village, and the only property exempt from the taille was that on which the church sat and a meadow from which the chapel of Saint John derived its revenue.

The harsh terrain and scarce natural resources of the mountains left the people of Entraigues and neighboring communities a political tradition of strong communal government and independence. Village assemblies, out of necessity, regulated many aspects of economic life. The community owned or rented four of the surrounding mountains for grazing, which was communally controlled.^[9] The communal assembly set harvest dates for the privately owned vineyards and the crops of cereal, hay, and hemp. It directed the cutting of wood in

[6] Bonnin, "Terre et paysans," p. 90.

[7] See the report to the intendant drawn up at the village assembly meeting of 1 April 1691 (ADI 4E.442 bb2).

[8] ADI 2C.312, pp. 1028-1033.

[9] For example, on Mount Combeguion, which the assembly rented from the abbey des Ayes (assembly of 1 April 1691, ADI 4E.442 bb2).

communal forests and organized the digging of canals and the repair of roads.^[10]

Community control could, especially at times of extreme need, bring to the surface the constant tension between village obligations and family competitiveness. The results were angry assembly meetings, threats of physical violence, and lawsuits between the community and individuals within it.^[11] But those with the largest private interests could also benefit from communal regulation. In 1672 when Entraigues rented Mount Combeguion to use for common grazing, four village notables turned over to the community their rights on the mountain. Doing so, of course, opened the entire grazing area to their large flocks.^[12]

The barren mountains that were so carefully controlled had never entirely supported the people of Entraigues. So they had, at least since the fifteenth century and probably from well before that, sent men out from the village to engage in commerce. These merchants and muleteers would leave Entraigues by All Saints' Day and return by Easter.^[13] In the seventeenth century, they profited from the commercial traffic between Italy and Lyon and carried their products all over France as well as to Spain and Portugal.^[14] Commerce proved to be important not only for

[10] Community concern with these issues is evident in the records of numerous assembly meetings: for instance, 16 January and 31 July 1667, and 15 January 1668 in ADI 4E.442 bb1; and 1 April 1691 in ADI 4E.442 bb2. Villagers traded their produce, which also included apples, pears, and nuts, at fairs in Valbonnais—they had none of their own—three times a year: on 25 January, Tuesday of Passion Week, and 21 July (Dénombrements généraux des habitants et productions et bois du Dauphiné [undated, eighteenth-century] [BN mss français anciens fonds] 8361, fol. 5; and Gaspard de Fontanieu [intendant of the Dauphiné], Mémoires généraux sur les productions et le commerce du Dauphiné [BN mss français anciens fonds] 8359, fol. 170).

[11] For examples, see the assemblies of 7 July 1686 and 1 March 1701 in ADI 4E.442 bb2. In the nearby Oisans communities, conflict often flared between wealthy families with large flocks to graze and those with few animals (personal communication of Laurence Fontaine). Such conflict was less apparent, but not absent, in Entraigues.

[12] Assembly of 7 August 1672 in ADI 4E.442 bb1.

[13] Jean Oherne, "Quelques aspects de la seigneurie de Valbonnais entre 1670 et 1730," Bulletin de l'Académie delphinale , 8th s., 6, no. 8 (November 1967): 237-266 esp. 265. Oherne cites a fifteenth-century text, which states that one man from each family left the village every winter. It is not certain that so many left in the seventeenth century; such was definitely not the case in the nineteenth (Laurence Fontaine, Le voyage et la mémoire [Lyon, 1984], pp. 35-39).

[14] Mémoires concernant les provinces, p. 34. By the nineteenth century, their commercial activities took them around the world. Louis XIV's wars and policy of closing frontiers (and, perhaps, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, though its economic impact on the region remains to be determined) damaged their prosperity permanently. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century descendants of the seventeenth-century merchants and muleteers were more likely to be colporteurs , peddlers carrying their goods on their backs (personal communication of Laurence Fontaine).

the village's economy but also for its cultural exchange with the outside world.

The Valbonnais seigneury, of which Entraigues was a part, belonged to three different families during the seventeenth century. François de Bonne, duke of Lesdiguières and constable of France, purchased it in 1593. His heirs held it until 1632 when they sold it to Pierre de Poligny, the governor of Château-Dauphin and the arsenal of Grenoble. His son traded the seigneury in 1677 to Pierre Moret de Bourchenu, doyen conseiller in the Parlement.^[15] In the mountains of the Dauphiné, however, the corollary to strong communal governments was a weak seigneurial presence. Mountain seigneuries were large, their owners were frequently absent, and written documents, reconnaissances , determined seigneurial rights.^[16] Entraigues's dues were not as heavy as those that villages endured elsewhere in France. Seigneurs of the Valbonnais, for example, did not have control over ovens, wine presses, the dates of the grape harvest, or water rights. The cens and corvée (commuted to a monetary payment) were relatively low.^[17] Seigneurs had the right and obligation to maintain a court in their seigneuries, and it served to protect their prerogatives. But the court also gave villagers, or at least those who could afford the costs of lawsuits, a means of settling their own conflicts, and thus did as much to aid wealthy peasants in conflict with their poorer neighbors as it did to guard the interests of the seigneur.

The outside power that weighed most heavily on the minds and purses of seventeenth-century villagers was the royal government. First and foremost, rural communities felt its impact through the taxes it imposed. The strain of the taille often sent a community into debt, and occasionally authorities had to scare it into paying its arrears by the "menace de gens de guerre."^[18] These twin afflictions—indebtedness and the billeting of soldiers—descended frequently on seventeenth-century Dauphinois communities. The government increasingly felt the need to step in to control communal finances.^[19] By the end of the

[15] Oherne, "Aspects," pp. 244, 246.

[16] Bonnin, "Terre et paysans," pp. 149-194; see the assembly of 25 August 1641, ADI 1J.503. For further discussion of reconnaissances and village-seigneur relations in Entraigues, see Keith P. Luria, "Territories of Grace" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1982), pp. 215-220.

[17] This is Oherne's impression ("Aspects," p. 265). It corresponds to Bonnin's opinion for the mountain areas as a whole ("Terre et paysans," p. 281).

[18] Assembly of 16 January 1667, ADI 4E.442 bb1.

[19] Hickey describes this process for the sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Dauphiné in Coming of French Absolutism , chap. 5. Hilton L. Root discusses the Crown's continuing interest in communal finances in eighteenth-century Burgundy (Peasants and King in Burgundy [Berkeley, 1987]).

seventeenth century, communities had to seek the intendant's permission for any major expenses; before granting it, he generally insisted on examining their financial records.^[20] Entraigues clearly resented those who "mixed in its affairs" and often replied half-heartedly to the intendant's demands.^[21] The villagers correctly feared that their compliance would only facilitate the government's desire to raise taxes. But they had also been accustomed to looking after their own affairs. The royal government forced them to surrender this independence piece by piece. Governmental centralization, the grand phrase that describes so much of French political and institutional history, was built on many such surrenders.

The state's most brutal intervention into the life of rural communities derived from its most pressing concern—warfare. War not only increased taxation but meant that young men would be chosen for the militia and, most frightening of all, that royal troops would be lodged in villagers' homes. Entraigues faced this last problem several times during the century either by actually having to billet regiments, or by having to contribute to the expense of lodging soldiers in other communities.^[22] In 1656 when Entraigues was forced to lodge troops, the soldiers terrorized villagers with physical violence, extorted extra funds, and stole clothing and other possessions. When village leader Jean Bernard complained to the company's commander, he was bloodied by a punch in the face. Jean Brunel reported that soldiers had kicked his pregnant wife down a flight of stairs. Other women were raped and their husbands struck with swords. Soldiers threatened to throw villagers down wells and to cut out the tongues of their cattle. Even the intendant's orders to stop the carnage had no effect. The local commander tore up the letter.^[23] The villagers' ability to manipulate outsiders for their own interests could not possibly match the state's ability to coerce them if it chose to exert its full power.

[20] Assembly of 17 November 1669 in ADI 4E.442 bb1; assembly of 21 December 1698, ADI 4E.442 bb2. See also Bonnin, "Terre et paysans," pp. 402-409.

[21] Assembly of 19 January 1672, ADI 4E.442 bb1. In 1691, for instance, the intendant complained that a report on communal land purchases was insufficient, and he remained unsatisfied by a second report that was essentially the same (assembly of 1 April 1691 in ADI 4E.442 bb2). The intendant's similar orders to redo reports appear throughout the assembly records of the 1680s and 1690s.

[22] In September 1655, the community scratched together almost four hundred livres to pay for the winter quartering of troops elsewhere in the province (assembly of 25 September 1655, in ADI 4E.442 bb1).

[23] I draw this account from Joseph Mouton, "La compagnie de Foucaud dans le Valbonnais, 1656," Bulletin de la société d'archéologie et statistique de la Drôrne 48 (1914): 95-110.

Village Society and Politics

The changing pattern of political relations with authorities outside the community provoked a transformation in the pattern of political relations within it. Villagers jockeyed for position with representatives of the monarchy just as they did with those of the Church. As royal power in the area grew, villagers sought to attach themselves to it by purchasing low-level offices such as that of the châtelain (now a royal rather than seigneurial post) or notary and by making use of royal courts. This process was not confined to the seventeenth century. It did speed up, however, in the era of Richelieu and Louis XIV, and villagers, even in the remote Alps, took notice and reordered their political lives accordingly. In Entraigues, competition in the political arena meant competition among families. Indeed, the history of Entraigues, or of any other village, can be written as an epic of the rise and fall of families.

In Entraigues two families stand out as antagonists, the Buissons and the Bernards. Each must be considered not just as a household but as an economic enterprise, a political faction, and a locus of cultural production for the village. Their rivalry, which endured at least three generations, provided one of the major motivations for religious change in the community over much of the seventeenth and on into the eighteenth century. As children succeeded to the property of their parents, they also inherited their forebears' aspirations and rivalries and passed them on in turn to their own children. Each successive chef de famille , generally the oldest male, took on the Bernard-Buisson feud as he took on responsibility for the family patrimony and the main house, which was the symbol of family continuity over the years. His final reward came with burial rights in the family tomb in the parish church, assigned to the inheritor of the house. But even here he did not escape the feud, for the tombs were also the objects of rivalry and were thereby part of the story of village cultural change.^[24]

We know more about the Buissons because of their extant family documents, an extraordinary series that stretches from this period to the

[24] The identification of family with home was common throughout southern France and especially pronounced in the Pyrenees, where the association of ostal or domus with house, family, and property was practically unbreakable (Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou [Paris, 1978], chap. 2; also Alain Collomp, La maison du père [Paris, 1983], pp. 53-112). The connection of tomb and home becomes apparent in acts in which founders of tombs declared that the privilege of burial belonged to those descendants who succeeded them "by right of inheritance in the homes where they live." For an example see act of 1657, ADI 1J.503; for comparison see Montaillou , p. 62.

nineteenth century.^[25] The histories of the two families, however, were so intertwined during the seventeenth century that we can also learn a great deal about the Bernards from the same documents. The Bernards were numerically important in Entraigues. According to the 1628 parcellaire (tax assessment), seventeen tax-paying households carried the name Bernard, and another ten had Bernard as part of a compound family name, such as Bernard-George, Bernard-Guillon, or Bernard-Peyre.^[26]

The Buissons were newcomers, though they did not come from far away. Guillaume Buisson, head of the family, was from the neighboring village of Valbonnais. He moved into the top of Entraigues's society by marrying Marguerite Gaillard, daughter of Claude—one of the community's wealthiest villagers. The date of Buisson's arrival in the village is uncertain. As early as 1620, he referred to himself as a "marchand d'Entraigues" but also as a "mercier de la Roche" (a hamlet of Valbonnais).^[27] From the mid-1620s on, however, he seems to have identified most closely with Entraigues, and it was at some point before 1627 that he married Gaillard. Buisson's wealth derived from his family's property in la Roche and from his commercial ventures. He had "trafficked in merchandise" in the Limousin and Périgord, and one of his brothers established himself permanently in the Auvergne. The commercial tradition was strong in this family. Guillaume's sons would later sell merchandise in the Poitou.^[28]

The Buissons and Bernards sat atop a village social structure similar to that of many mountain communities in the Dauphiné.^[29] The hierarchy is revealed in Entraigues's parcellaires , which carefully described the real property of every family, giving in each case the size and confines of their land parcels.^[30] These documents also give us some idea what family possessions were like. For instance, the community's wealthiest inhabitant, Guillaume Buisson, owned two homes in Entraigues. Each had barns, gardens, and orchards around it. His imme-

[25] The documents are in ADI 1J.511-530.

[26] The relationship between these families and the Bernards is not certain, but in a small village like Entraigues they were unlikely to have been unrelated clans. The comparable numbers in the 1663 parcellaire were nine Bernards and twelve with Bernard in a compound name.

[27] Acts of 1620-1627, ADI 1J.511.

[28] Acts of 1634, 1641 in ibid., and 1672 in ADI 1J.513.

[29] Compare it, for example, with that of Auris-en-Oisans analyzed by Bonnin, which he considers representative of mountain communities ("Terre et paysans," pp. 486-494).

[30] Two seventeenth-century parcellaires survive, one of 1628 in ADI 4E.442 cc2 and the other of 1663 in 4E.442 cc3. The information below is drawn from the 1663 parcellaire .

diate neighbors at his main residence included two other wealthy members of the community, Jean Bernard and Barthélemy Rey. The Buissons, Bernards, and the like had large homes by comparison with those of other villagers and also owned their own storage rooms and wine cellars. Buisson possessed a good deal more than just the two houses. In all, the parcellaire of 1663 listed 110 separate pieces of property for him, and this number did not include the land he owned in neighboring communities.

The parcellaire of 1663 reveals that the village had three households with a tax estimation of between four and five livres (those of Guillaume Buisson, Ambroise Bernard, and Jean Bernard); three of between two and four livres; five of between one and two livres; and ninety below one livre.^[31] In other words, Entraigues had a large proportion of small and middling property owners (about 90 percent of the taxpayers) and a very small group of larger owners (the remainder). Since the parcellaire —and the taille for which it was intended—was concerned only with property ownership, it probably underestimated the total wealth of those who had invested large sums in loans to their neighbors, partly to obtain income not subject to the taille . The absence of extensive notarial records for Entraigues makes careful assessment of its creditors and debtors difficult. But my impression is that a more complete picture would not greatly alter the description of the community's social structure presented here. The big property owners were generally also the big moneylenders.^[32] In addition, the wealth of village artisans, whose income derived from their trade as well as their land, may be underestimated in the parcellaires . Entraigues, however, had few artisans, only about a half dozen spread throughout the group of small owners.

At the other end of the parcellaire list, Jeanne Pra, the widow of Jean Rey Coulaud, had only one piece of property—a small home and gar-

[31] ADI 4E.442 cc3. Parcellaires listed tax estimations rather than the total worth of each taxpayer. Households paid a proportion of the community's tax bill based on the estimations. Bonnin compares two methods of analyzing social structure that yield the same results—by property division according to the total surface area each owner held and by tax estimations ("Terre et paysans," pp. 484-485); I use the estimations. Twenty women were listed as taxpayers, individually or with a sister. In all other cases, the parcellaire listed the male head of household or, occasionally, the married couple (perhaps because the wife's dowry provided a substantial part of the family's property or because it was a second marriage).

[32] Laurence Fontaine is presently studying debts and obligations in the seventeenth-century Oisans communities, which have more plentiful notarial archives; her work will more accurately assess the proportions of property and investment in family wealth (Laurence Fontaine, "Le reti del credito. La montagna, la città, la pianura," Quaderni storici , n.s., 68 [August 1988]: 573-593).

den. It is difficult to know whether such small parcels could ever have provided a minimum level of subsistence, but it seems incontestable that such property holders were among the communal poor. And the propertyless, servants and destitute laborers, made no appearance in the parcellaire at all. Hence it is difficult to use the parcellaires to count the impoverished. A list of the poor compiled by village notables in 1649 gives us a better idea of the extent of poverty in the village.^[33] It contains forty-eight names, about 12 percent of the population. Twenty of the people on the list were women, widows perhaps or indigent women who had never married. Some of those on the list later showed up on the 1663 parcellaire . Claude Helme Magot, for instance, was poor in 1649 but ranked fifty-fourth, about in the middle, on the parcellaire . For most of the villagers on the poor list, poverty was most likely a permanent state. Yet the fortunes of some improved as they inherited land or married someone with land. Property could also be lost, especially if large loans were called in. Some who made the 1628 parcellaire later showed up on the poor list.

A comparison of the parcellaires of 1628 and 1663 shows that Entraigues underwent little social change over the first half of the century.^[34] Fifteen families (14 percent of the taxpayers) were assessed at more than one livre, and ninety-one (86 percent) fell below one livre. As was the case later, small and middling owners made up the bulk of the population. Most of the family names in the wealthiest group remained the same from 1628 to 1663: Bernard, Brunel, Poncet, Helme, Rey, Leyraud. The most notable new arrival was Guillaume Buisson. When he married into the Gaillard family, he inherited Claude Gaillard's property and, in a sense, his place on the list. The Tousquan family showed a remarkable ascension between the two parcellaires , from thirty-second in 1628 to sixth in 1663. Most likely its rise resulted from François Tousquan's marriage to Françoise Brunel. Besides Gaillard, one other name from the top of the list disappeared before 1663, that of Grisail, which was seventh in 1628. Guigues Grisail left no heirs and Guillaume Buisson bought his estate. Entraigues's elite, then, was practically continuous through the first half of the century. Although we have no parcellaires for the period after 1663, an analysis of the community assembly and patterns of office holding suggests that, with a few additions, the elite retained roughly the same members until the end of

[33] ADI 4E.442 gg3. It was drawn up for the procureur des pauvres to use in distributing the communal grain; the criteria for choosing names listed are not known.

[34] The 1628 document is in ADI 4E.442 cc2. Based on a different formula than that of 1663, the highest estimates in 1628 lay between two and three livres.

the century. In such a closed group, the arrival of a newcomer like Buisson, who moved quickly to the top of village society, was likely to cause problems. It was a situation that the Bernards resented.

The social distinctions that matter most to us were not based strictly on wealth, however, and family competitiveness was not restricted to the economic realm. Political position and cultural contact with the outside world were often as important as wealth in determining the community leaders. To be sure, these factors corresponded very closely to wealth, but a large tax estimate did not ensure that an inhabitant would be influential in the village.^[35] Although the community's families, led by their chefs , were the constitutive elements of communal political institutions, not all families participated equally in politics. Only property owners could belong to the assembly, the institution that apportioned taxes, authorized expenditures, borrowed money, instituted lawsuits, distributed grain to the poor, elected officers, oversaw the community's economic activities, and deliberated on a wide range of issues concerning village religion. Still, property owners made up a majority of the village's families. Only the propertyless were excluded. They played no formal role in the community's politics, though informally they may have exerted pressure.

What set the members of the village elite apart from their neighbors was their control of the village assembly. The assembly and communal offices were dominated by a handful of families. Because of their higher social standing, their larger economic resources, and their more extensive contacts with the outside world, they had a clear advantage in the pursuit of advancement and the arrangement of alliances through marriage, fictive kinship (godparentage), or moneylending. When they cooperated, the village displayed its solidarity despite whatever dissension

[35] Nor did literacy, often assumed to be an indicator of elite status in rural communities. Here it was not confined to the elite. Commercial activity fostered higher literacy rates in mountain communities than elsewhere. Villagers engaging in trade found reading and writing essential to carrying out their transactions, and those retired from commerce spent winter months teaching the skills to a younger generation. Many mountain communities employed itinerant schoolteachers, whom Le Camus noted in his visits; he sometimes mentioned separate teachers for boys and girls and was especially concerned that Protestant and Catholic children not mix in school. Nonetheless, illiterates could be found even among the elite. Claude Gaillard, who in the early 1650s died one of Entraigues's wealthiest men, could not sign his name. But the signatures of others on all manner of legal documents demonstrate how rare he was. Such documents give only impressionistic results on the extent of literacy. Because Entraigues lacks parish registers, which indicate residents' ability to sign their names, it is difficult to study literacy systematically. In other communities in the diocese, rates as high as 50 percent for artisans were not unusual, nor 30 percent for laboureurs , who were middling and large landowners. Women in Entraigues were usually illiterate, but a smattering of evidence shows that some could sign their names (Bonnin, "Terre et paysans," pp. 904-910).

may have existed below. When they clashed, the village suffered deep internal divisions. And the fault lines lay along the networks of alliances. When in 1653 Guillaume Buisson brought suit against the Bernards, claiming that their servants had stolen some of Buisson's livestock, the Bernards brought Jean Chattard to testify on their behalf. Somewhat disingenuously, Chattard claimed that since he owed the Bernards money, and since they had pressed him hard for repayment, he was unlikely to be biased in their favor. The Buisson party pointed out, however, that since the Bernards had served as godparents for one of Chattard's children, he could hardly be a disinterested witness.^[36] Fictive kinship and money had cemented a patron-client relationship, and Buisson realized that he could challenge the witness on this point.

Membership and participation in the assembly was relatively high. Between 1653 and 1673 (or ten years on either side of the 1663 parcellaire ), an average of 47.7 different individuals attended annually. The number ranged from as low as 26 in 1669 to as high as 74, or almost three-quarters of the family heads, in 1670. Within any single year attendance from meeting to meeting could vary considerably. In January of 1656 28 villagers assembled, whereas in June 42 showed up. A meeting in January of 1672 drew only 27; in June 43 attended.^[37] Winter assemblies often suffered from the absence of Entraigues's merchants and muleteers.

The villagers who actually ran the communal government, held the offices, and exercised the most influence formed a much smaller group. The assembly was very selective, for instance, in choosing its consul, the chief executive of the village. In the years between 1641 and 1703, only eighteen families provided consuls.^[38] Certain individuals held the post frequently. Jean Bernard was consul in 1672 and served three years in a row between 1686 and 1688. Guigues and Jean Buisson, Guillaume's sons, shared the post in 1670 (because of the occasional absences of one or the other), and Guigues held it again in 1678 and 1683. In fact, either a Bernard or a Buisson held the consulship no less than fifteen times during the second half of the century.^[39]

The consulship was not necessarily a popular post. It carried some

[36] The papers describing the suit are in ADI 1J.512.

[37] These figures were compiled from the village assembly records in ADI 4E.442 bb1 and bb2.

[38] Information is lacking for seventeen years in this period.

[39] The exact number could, in fact, be larger than fifteen, since a number of assembly records are missing. In addition, Guillaume Buisson and his antagonist, Jean Bernard's father (also named Jean), held the post before 1650, a period for which few records survive.

onerous liabilities. Consuls were responsible for the collection of taxes and the payment of communal debts. They had to advance money of their own to cover these expenses when the community was not forthcoming. This fact alone limited the office to the community's wealthiest inhabitants. But most men coopted into the consulship accepted the post. It gave them a prestigious position in the community; it enabled them to safeguard and possibly advance their family's position by controlling local power for a year; and although they earned no salary, they did get a portion of the money collected for taxes.^[40]

With such a tight grasp on communal institutions, it must have been tempting for the elite to manipulate village politics for advantage over their poorer, less-powerful neighbors. Evidence for such manipulation is not plentiful, but one incident indicates both its existence and the restraints upon it. On 29 October 1692 the assembly authorized consul Pierre Brunel to divide the costs and responsibilities of lodging soldiers according to the villagers' tax estimations. Two days later the assembly met again; only this time the châtelain and the consul had not called the meeting. Instead, another group of men, of middle or lower economic status, assembled on their own.^[41] These villagers protested that Brunel had not apportioned the troops fairly according to the tax assessments. They claimed that the officers and other wealthy villagers had not accepted their proper share of the burden and that the poorer inhabitants had been assigned more soldiers than they could afford. Brunel and his fellow notables including his son, Jacques (a notary), Jean Bernard, Jean Buisson, Jean Leyraud, and Pierre Helme, joined the meeting after it started. They argued that the assembly was illegal because the consul had not called it. Brunel, however, was not prepared to stand up to those who opposed his handling of the troop billeting. He offered to turn over the task to someone else and resign his office. The villagers agreed to let the châtelain reassign the troops, but they refused to accept Brunel's resignation. He still had two months to serve, and no one else would accept the office in the middle of such a crisis.^[42]

The dispute strained the seams of Entraigues's society, but its resolution suggests that the community was aware of its internal divisions and strove to avoid an open break. The notables had colluded in fixing the troops' lodgings. The smaller property owners, who were not de-

[40] In 1670, the community agreed to give consul Guigues Buisson and his brother Jean 5 percent of the tax they were ordered to collect (assembly of 8 December 1670, ADI 4E.442 bb1; see also Bonnin, "Terre et paysans," pp. 348-349).

[41] This group included men who ranged from approximately thirtieth on the 1663 parcellaire to about ninetieth.

[42] Assemblies of 29 and 31 October 1692 ADI 4E.442 bb2.

void of political clout, resented the abuse of power. They did not, however, challenge the notables' right to hold the most important offices, and Brunel defused the situation by backing down. Confrontation and negotiation settled the conflict and restored order.

Any such attempt by the village elite, acting as a group, to abuse communal power was likely to meet with similar opposition, if it had not already foundered on the notables' own rivalries. But tension between rich and poor revealed in individual cases was certainly apparent, especially as aggressive moneylenders sought to increase their own estates at the expense of their creditors. Indeed, to judge from the documents the Buissons left (admittedly, court documents would more likely contain a record of conflict than harmony), their relationships with their fellow villagers were marked by long-running lawsuits and outright feuds. Guillaume Buisson, for example, stalked Daniel Pra of nearby Périer for over thirty-five years. The case finally came to a head when Buisson received some of Pra's land in lieu of a debt payment. Pra claimed that Buisson had taken more than his due and accused Buisson of usury. Buisson, for his part, refused to present an account of the land he had taken.^[43] The merits of the case are hard to assess, but the bitterness is evident.

Even more rancorous, however, were the disputes between equals. The lawsuit between Guillaume Buisson and the châtelain Antoine Nycollet became particularly vindictive. Buisson accused Nycollet of chicanery, of having ruined a number of families by misusing his offices of châtelain and notary, and of having brought lawsuits simply for the purpose of extracting large sums of money from the defendants. Further, Buisson insisted that Nycollet had declared his father's estate insolvent to avoid his creditors but had since grown rich by his "malversations." And he added that Nycollet had vowed to ruin the "maison dudict Buisson" by investigations and lawsuits as well as by purchasing testimony against Buisson and his children. When he was not successful in getting witnesses to testify according to his "fantaisle," he threatened to ruin them as well. We do not have Nycollet's side of the story, but all this spite stemmed from an original suit over fifteen livres.^[44] Such feuds, when played out in the courts, could drag on for generations.

This was the case with the Bernard-Buisson conflict, which goes back at least to the 1620s. In fact, Guillaume may well have inherited it from his father-in-law, Gaillard. In 1628 Gaillard and Buisson lodged a com-

[43] Acts of 1625, 1663 in ADI 1J.511.

[44] Act of 1662, ADI 1J.513.

plaint with the Parlement claiming that the consul, Jean Bernard, had levied an illegal tax on the community. The disagreement did not create an irrevocable split between the families, for they continued to cooperate on various communal issues over the next decade. In 1640, however, they had another falling out, this time over the estate of Jean and Louis Poncet. The Poncets had owed money to Bernard, who was a "marchand d'Entraigues" and a "lieutenant en la châtelainie de Valbonnais." Buisson came into possession of the Poncet estate and incurred the Bernard charge as well. Although the debt amounted to only twenty-one livres, the two sides required over a decade to settle the issue. The case was complicated because Bernard had acquired a debt to Buisson through his ownership of yet another estate.^[45] The fight over these sums launched the Buissons and Bernards on a never-ending series of disputes. Barely was the Poncet issue settled when Jean and Ambroise, sons of the previous litigant Jean, embarked on yet another suit against Buisson. This time they fought over the estate of Jean Grisail, which Buisson had purchased. Again the sum at stake was small, less than forty-five livres, which Buisson was ordered to pay the Bernard brothers.^[46]

Within another year, the families were again at odds. The Bernards claimed that Buisson's livestock had ruined one of their meadows.^[47] The proceedings show how a small lawsuit could provoke tensions throughout Entraigues's society. When the court wanted to appoint inspectors to assess the damage, it had trouble finding local men who were not in some way associated with one of the parties. As always, the suit dragged on for years, increasing not only the costs of trying it but also the animosity between the two families.

By the late 1650s, the time of the meadow dispute, the Bernard-Buisson battle had already entered its second generation. It would continue for at least one more—some six decades altogether—and possibly farther; the documentation grows skimpier in the eighteenth century. The families were at times capable of cooperation in the assembly and in Entraigues's affairs with neighboring communities. And there were even attempts to patch things up. Guigues Buisson (Guillaume's oldest son) married Jean Bernard's daughter, Marguerite. But this alliance did not create a lasting peace. The tensions always lay close to the surface, and anything that threatened the position of one family or the other

[45] Acts of 1640, 1643, 1644 and 1645 in ADI 1J.511; Acts of 1648 and 1651 in ADI 1J.512.

[46] Act of 1664 in ADI 1J.512.

[47] ADI 1J.512.

could bring them out into the open. One particular incident from a communal assembly meeting of 1701 shows just how strained the relationship could be.

The assembly met on 1 March 1701 because the provincial intendant had ordered Entraigues to choose one boy for the local militia. The choice was to be made from "garçons" (unmarried men) twenty-two to forty years of age. Jean Buisson, head of the family since the death of Guigues, asked the assembly to excuse his son from the lottery. He said that his older boy had been sent to an earlier militia gathering, had returned home ill, and died soon after. Buisson claimed he now had only one son left and, because he was too old to manage his own affairs, needed his last boy to remain at home. The village, he argued, had plenty of others from whom to choose. Ambroise Bernard, grandson of the first Jean and head of his family, took issue with Buisson's request. He pointed out that the intendant's order mentioned nothing about exemptions, so Buisson's son would have to enter the lottery with all the other young men in the village. Buisson's reply illustrates the gulf of ill-will that such a crisis could provoke between competitive families. He retorted that Bernard had seven or eight eligible sons, none of whom had ever rendered any military service. What was more, Buisson claimed, it was only out of "malice because he is my enemy" that Bernard wanted to march Buisson's last son off to the militia. His objection to the exemption was beyond all reason.^[48]

In the pursuit of their rivalry, the Bernards and Buissons exploited institutions and individuals both outside the community and within it. From the outside, they availed themselves of royal officials, courts, law, and, as we shall see, the bishop. Inside the community, they had recourse to the assembly but also played on the lines of loyalty or obligation created by kinship, neighborliness, and debt. They would, in addition, enlist village religion, the primary expression of the village's culture, by employing or deploying the religious symbols and meanings taken from the village and from outside it. These powerful tools would enable them, especially the Bernards through the Rosary confraternity, to mobilize communal support behind them even as they stepped into cultural currents beyond Entraigues.

[48] ADI 4E.442 bb2. It is not clear whether the exemption was granted or not. In the lottery, Pierre Bernard, son of Ambroise, drew the "billet noir," but the militia captain sent him back to the village because he was too small to serve. A second lottery chose Moize Touchet.

Religion in Entraigues

To understand village religious change, we must examine it against the background of a village life encompassing communal solidarity and family competition, economic cooperation and familial advancement, and internal harmony and the inhabitants' desire to take advantage of opportunities in the outside world. Village religion offered a means for saving the soul through the proper living of one's life and for easing everyday problems through the intercession of saints. Within this duality lay another, for village religion too had its communal and familial sides. In this way it provided a model of and for the tension in village life and allowed for the possibility of both community involvement and familial competition.^[49]

The parish church, center of religious life, was the main theater for both communal and familial religious activities. Here the community came together for the celebration of the mass and festivals. But here also villagers observed family events: baptisms, marriages, and burials. The church building was the concern of the entire political community. Dauphinois parishes did not have fabriques (church councils) in the seventeenth century, so village assemblies tended to church affairs, especially repairs and ornamentation. And despite the impression Le Camus's reports convey, parishioners took this responsibility as seriously as their financial means allowed. In 1625, almost half a century before Le Camus appeared, Entraigues responded to the need for extensive church renovations including the purchase of a new bell.^[50] Again in 1655 and 1661, the assembly gathered funds for repairs. The people of Entraigues did not require orders from ecclesiastical authorities to maintain their church. Their efforts continued through Le Camus's years, though the difficulty of raising money delayed renovations so much that, in 1680, the bishop threatened to place the church under an interdict. Nonetheless, after long communal deliberations, Entraigues did gather funds for a new chalice in 1678, for restoration of the bell tower in 1687, and for work on the roof ten years later.

Although church maintenance was a communal concern, it also provided a means, through legacies, for individuals to make a religious gesture, to show evidence of personal piety, and to express their family's attachment to the hub of village religious life. A list of legacies that Entraigues's curé drew up in the early eighteenth century reveals that

[49] The notion of religion as a model of and for social reality is borrowed from Geertz ("Religion as a Cultural System," p. 95).

[50] The record of expenditures is in ADI 4E.442 gg1.

these demonstrations of piety and attachment to the church came from all levels of village society.^[51] The gifts, consisting of oil, candles, and money, ranged from the ten sous of shoemaker Jean Peyrard to the thirty livres of Marguerite Roman Marin. Over three-quarters of the testators named in the list (thirty-six of forty-seven) were women, a point implying that leaving gifts to the church was a particularly female form of piety. We might assume that men found themselves drawn more to public displays in which they could do the most to augment their families' standing in the village, leaving to women private religious acts. The curé's mémoire alone is not sufficient support for this conclusion. The paucity of notarial registers for Entraigues makes a systematic study of giving difficult. Perhaps women left money to the church when they had no heirs. Other evidence suggests the need for caution in assessing gender differences in religious sensibilities. Although it may be true that men took a much larger role in public religious activities, women often participated in pilgrimages and confraternities. And women fought as forcibly as their male relatives for the religious trappings of prestige, such as the right to maintain benches in the church.

Entraigues's experience with clergy was mostly limited to the undistinguished inhabitants of the priory at Valbonnais and the parish curés. The Cluniac priory had been largely destroyed during the Wars of Religion. At one time it had sheltered six clerics, but during the seventeenth century it could manage to support only two. The priors were content to collect their share of the remaining revenue and did little to restore the house. The sacristans, however, engaged in more grievous abuses. Le Camus had to listen to numerous complaints about the incumbent, Pierre Aillaud, when he visited the area in 1672. Even Ail-laud could not compare with his predecessor, Pierre Turc, who had been convicted of sacrilege and desecration of the sacrament of confession. He was hanged in Grenoble's place Grenette in 1660.^[52]

Aside from exacting an annual tithe of 320 livres, the priory had little impact on Entraigues.^[53] It was left to the curés to represent the Church in the village, and the picture of Catholic clergymen they presented was decidedly mixed. We have only a few details about Entraigues's priests during the first half of the century, but they suggest that these men were of a higher quality than their successors. During the 1620s, Didier

[51] Ibid. The mémoire lists legacies made between 1671 and 1717.

[52] Emmanuel Pilot de Thorey, "Les prieurés de l'ancien diocese de Grenoble compris dans les limites du Dauphiné," Bulletin de la société de statistique, des sciences naturelles et des arts industriels du département de l'Isère 3d s., 12 (1883): viii-450, esp. 401.

[53] The figure comes from Le Camus's 1672 visit (ADI 4G.272, p. 143).

Barruel engaged in public debates with the Protestant pastor of la Mure. The two debaters published pamphlets on their disputations, though the Protestant claimed that Church officials in Grenoble had actually written the one published under Barruel's name.^[54] It is impossible to say much about Barruel's successor, Pierre Honnoré, but his replacement, Louis Molaret, had a more lasting impact. During his tenure the inhabitants joined the Confraternity of Saints Sebastian and Roch and founded a Rosary confraternity. It is difficult to know if Molaret motivated either activity or if the impetus lay with his parishioners. Given the general involvement of villagers in constructing their religion and the usually disreputable state of the clergy in the diocese, it seems reasonable to suppose that the community's inhabitants took the initiative.^[55] But it is clear that the 1640s were eventful years in Entraigues's religious history, and without evidence to the contrary we must assume that the village's religiosity owed something to its priest.

The same claim cannot be made for the next two curés. The meager communal documents from the 1650s suggest that Claude Thomas tried to fulfill some of his responsibilities. After all, in 1655 he received money from the assembly to attend a synod, buy holy oil, and celebrate the fête of the parish titular saint, Benedict. Two years later, he participated in the founding of a chapel in the church. But we also know other facts about the life of this particular priest. Thomas was married. The ceremony had been performed properly before the Blessed Sacrament with two witnesses. He had defended his nuptials by saying that if Saint Peter could marry, so could he.^[56] His demise, however, suggests that his marriage, or perhaps other faults, weighed heavily on his conscience. When Le Camus announced his 1672 visit, Claude Thomas reportedly dropped dead. His parishioners—he was then curé of Villard-Aymon in the Oisans—were certain that fear of the bishop's discovering his scandalous life had caused his fatal delirium.^[57]

André Gautier replaced Thomas in Entraigues, but he was not much better than his predecessor.^[58] He had a long series of problems with his parishioners, including a fight with the assembly over his travel ex-

[54] Victor Miard, La Mure et la Matheysine à travers l'histoire (Bellegarde, 1965), p. 136.

[55] Villagers' part in establishing the Rosary confraternity will be discussed below.

[56] Solé, "La crise morale," p. 187 n.12.

[57] ADI 4G.272, p. 52.

[58] One document from 1668 refers to a Jean Barruel, "prêtre d'Entraigues." He may have served a short term between Thomas and Gautier, but I found no further information on him.

penses for synods. He eventually obtained a legal constraint on the community to pay the three livres for that purpose, though the assembly appealed the ruling. The community and the curé also went to court over the offerings made at the chapel of the Holy Savior. And they clashed over the meadow around the cemetery. The assembly usually rented it to the highest bidder, and the community came to blows with Gautier when he tried to appropriate it for his own use.^[59] His personal relations with his parishioners were also poor. Le Camus received a long list of complaints when he passed through Entraigues in 1672. The villagers claimed that the priest was deaf and incapable of hearing confession. He had refused sacraments to those villagers he did not like. He was violent, quarrelsome, and guilty of a variety of flagrant sexual offenses. He also had two children and disposed of them by paying others a total of fifty écus to take the children under their names. In addition, the villagers accused Gautier of exacting too high a price for marriages and burials, of engaging in commerce, and of grazing his livestock in the cemetery.^[60] As always, complaints such as these need to be treated with caution.^[61] But the very detailed account of names and incidents in this case argues against fabrication. Le Camus forced Gautier to resign and put in his place one of the new seminary-trained priests, Jean-Jacques Coste.

Coste was the bishop's man, and he was a considerably more capable priest than either Thomas or Gautier. But his training and dedication did not enable him to avoid problems with his parishioners. Villagers complained to Le Camus that he would not allow them to ring church bells at their customary times.^[62] The community and the new curé also continued the fight over the cemetery meadow. In 1680, the assembly leased it to Coste for eight years. When the term was up, the assembly took bids and rented the meadow to Reymond Blanc. Coste immediately protested the decision. Although the outcome was not reported, he seems to have won his point because in 1698, when the assembly again asked for bids, Coste was still the renter. This time several villagers— Jacques Bernard, Jean Bernard George, and Ambroise Bernard—competed for the lease. Coste again protested, and now he had a powerful ally. Le Camus, in his most recent visit, had ordered the land to remain in the curé's hands to provide for the rnarguillier (church warden). The

[59] Assemblies of 29 June and 8 December 1670, ADI 4E.442 bb1.

[60] ADI 4G.272, p. 143.

[61] See above, chapter 1.

[62] ADI 4G.279, pp. 114-115.

community threatened to take the issue to court, but by the next year it had given in and allowed Coste to keep the meadow.^[63]

Even though the conflict over this piece of land does not resonate with the sounds of great spiritual conflict, it does echo, in a mundane way, the struggle between the bishop and communities for the governance of religious activities in rural parishes. The bishop's intervention in the meadow dispute indicated his willingness to fight not just for control of the church and cemetery, but also for the bits of communal property that were attached to the religious center of the parish and, more important, that contributed to the church's income. The bishop sought to secure the parish's sacred institutions and space and in this small issue to further his authority over them. The community had always acknowledged the special status of this parcel by assigning its revenue to the church, but it wanted to control the land as it had controlled the church. It only grudgingly surrendered communal prerogative over the physical—and for that matter the spiritual—aspects of village religion.^[64]

Entraigues had few encounters with regular clergy (aside from those in the priory) before the arrival of Le Camus. The Capuchins had a home in la Mure where villagers might have had some contact with them, but no record exists of the friars having sent preachers into the Valbonnais region. The community did receive a visit, in 1644, from an official of the archconfraternity of Saints Sebastian and Roch in Perugia. Scarron had authorized him to promote the confraternity in the diocese, and the people of Entraigues signed up, but there is no further record of the organization in the parish.^[65] Associational life centered instead on the Rosary confraternity that the inhabitants had founded two years earlier. The spread of the Rosary devotion is usually identified with the work of the Dominicans. But no trace exists of Dominican missionaries passing through Entraigues. Probably the parishioners took the initiative and had the establishment of their confraternity ratified by the Dominicans in Grenoble. Entraigues's Huguenot population was too small to attract the attention of the Jesuit missionaries who were working to convert Protestants elsewhere in the Dauphiné. Le Camus made use of missionaries from various orders in parishes he deemed especially in need, but never in Entraigues.^[66] Only after 1685

[63] Assemblies of 1 December 1680, 13 December 1688, 8 May 1698, and 6 December 1699, ADI 4E.442 bb2; 4G.279, p. 114.

[64] See the discussion of this territorial conflict in chapter 2.

[65] ADI 4E.442 gg1.

[66] For examples, see the visits of Sassenage and Avalon, where he noted that missionaries were necessary because the curé was not trusted (ADI 4G.273, pp. 512, 740).

did he employ them extensively although aimed at Protestant rather than Catholic villagers.^[67]

In Entraigues, the Protestant minority shared all aspects of village life except religion. Little is known of Calvinist worship in Entraigues, or of the internal life of the Huguenot congregation there during this period. But we do know who the Protestants were and can thereby surmise something about their impact on the Catholic villagers. In the 1620s, Entraigues had nine Protestant households led by Jean Blanchard, Guigues Grisail, Antoine Chattard, Pierre Chattard, Jacques Chattard, Claude Touchet, Pierre Touchet, Jayme Touchet, and Laurent Pra.^[68] Most can be found on the 1628 parcellaire , where they ranged from the top to the bottom; Grisail ranked seventh, Jayme Touchet was eighty-ninth.^[69] A 1645 list reveals only seven Huguenot homes.^[70] The Touchers and the Chattards were still accounted for, but the Protestant congregation had lost the Grisails, Pras, and Blanchards, though only the Grisails had disappeared from the community. We must assume that the Pras and Blanchards had converted. But a new Huguenot family, the Mazets, had moved into Entraigues. Pierre Mazet was a shoemaker, and some of his co-religionists were also artisans—the Chattards were masons and the Touchers blacksmiths.^[71]

Entraigues's Protestants continued to decline in number. When Le Camus arrived in 1672, he found only five "maisons d'hérétiques." Slowly over the course of the century conversions had eroded their ranks. Protestants undoubtedly felt tremendous pressure to convert in urban areas where tensions between the two religions remained high and in those rural areas where Catholic missionaries constantly reminded the Huguenots of their minority status and the legal restrictions on their religious practice. But the missionaries were not active in Entraigues, and the Catholics did not exclude Protestants from full participation in the politics and economy of the village. In fact as shoemakers, masons, and blacksmiths, they were necessary to the community. Their involvement in village political life in the second half of the century was commensurate not with minority status, but

[67] Bolle, "Le Camus et les protestants," pp. 153, 155.

[68] The names are listed on a petition to the Parlement in 1625 (ADI 4E.442 gg1).

[69] Only Antoine Chattard's name does not appear on the list, but his son ranked fifty-third on the 1663 parcellaire .

[70] ADI 4E.442 gg1.

[71] Whether their sixteenth-century forebears were artisans who converted to Calvinism we cannot say. If so, the reasons for their attraction to Calvinism might have resembled those of rural artisans elsewhere; see Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Peasants of Languedoc , trans. John Day (Urbana, 1974), pt. 2, chap. 1.

rather with middling social standing. The Touchets, Chattards, and Mazets sat in the village assembly and offered their opinions on most of the matters that came before it. Apparently only one Protestant, Jacques Touchet, served as consul. He was well-to-do, thirteenth in the 1663 parcellaire , and a member of the village elite. No other Protestant ranked that high.

Protestants in the community did not deliberate on at least one of the assembly's concerns, the parish church. They excluded themselves from decisions about Catholic religious life and the expenses these decisions entailed. The confusion and controversy this self-exclusion created attests to the anomaly of having a religious minority in a village where religion was a communal affair. According to the edicts that governed the religion prétendue réformée , Protestants had to contribute to their parish's tithe, but they were not liable for any other costs of Catholic worship.^[72] In 1625 Entraigues's Huguenots complained to the Parlement that the community had included in its taille assessment 150 livres for a new church bell. Since they paid the taille , they also would be paying for the bell. The judges decided in their favor and discharged them from that portion of the tax. The Catholics did not relish the idea of shouldering the entire burden of church repairs. But more to the point, they continued to approach the issue of religious expenses as a communal problem. In 1661, the Protestants again complained that, despite the previous court ruling, the community had repeatedly included the cost of church repairs in the taille assessment.^[73] Entraigues's Protestants were in an ambiguous position. They were a part of all aspects of communal life except one, the one that shaped and gave meaning to much of the interaction between villagers. They could not fully participate in the exchange of religious symbols and meanings that constituted the village's cultural system. That is why Entraigues's Protestant group suffered a slow attrition. And perhaps it is why twenty-two villagers, the major share of the remaining Protestant population, quickly abjured their Calvinism in 1685. They were reabsorbed into the community, as were the symbols of their former separateness. The Huguenot cemetery once again became communal land. In 1698, the assembly treated its meadow the same way it treated the Catholic one, by renting it to the highest bidder for six years.^[74]

The impact of the Protestant presence on Catholic religious sensibility in the village is difficult to ascertain. It may have moved the Cath-

[72] Bonnin, "Terre et paysans," p. 306.

[73] Both the 1625 and the 1661 complaints are in ADI 4E.442 gg1.

[74] Assembly of 26 October 1698, ADI 4E.442 bb2.

olics to a more determined attachment to their religion and to a greater public display of religious feelings. Confessional tension inspired the public debates between Entraigues's curé and the Protestant minister of la Mure in the 1620s. It may also have fostered the reestablishment of the Saint John the Evangelist chapel in the same decade and possibly even the founding of confraternities in the 1640s. But by midcentury the Protestant challenge to Catholicism in Entraigues was weak.

So the impetus for religious change in Entraigues, at least from the 1630s or 1640s on, came not from a rival religious group nor from outside pressure by religious reformers. Instead it came from village society itself, and particularly from one group within it, the village elite. The families at the top of Entraigues's society, those who dominated communal politics, were also the most prominent in religious change. The success of enterprises like the Rosary confraternity indicates that their initiatives found fertile ground in the community as a whole. But the wealth of village notables allowed them to finance new chapels and confraternities, their control of the communal assembly enabled them to maintain and encourage new religious endeavors, and their connections beyond the village brought them into contact with the religious innovations fermenting elsewhere in France and in neighboring countries. They motivated religious change inside Entraigues and mediated between it and the larger religious culture. The new concepts and practices they imported expressed their piety and enhanced their prestige. Two families played the largest roles as motivators and intermediaries, the Buissons and Bernards.

Religious Rivalry and Change

As in politics and economic life, these families battled in religion. Indeed, their religious rivalry was an inseparable part of their combat for prestige, with profound consequences for the community's religious life. It opened an avenue through which new institutions and observances entered and took hold in the community. Members of the village elite did not wait for a Le Camus to impress new ideas upon them. In shaping village politics and culture, they sought out or came into contact with new practices on their own. After all, the Buissons traveled widely before they returned to marry and settle in Entraigues. The Bernards, merchants and officials, also experienced the world outside the community, and so had various other villagers. When they returned to Entraigues, they were ready to use what they had gained to promote their families' position in the community.

We cannot describe tensions in village religion as simply the carryover from disputes in politics and commerce. The search for status motivated participation in religious activity, but so did the search for salvation. The two were inextricable. The pursuit of position in a community that was a religious body (excluding for the moment the Protestant minority) entailed action in all spheres of human endeavor, including religion. Pious gestures and the symbols through which they were represented invested all spheres with meaning. And yet Entraigues was not simply a unified religious entity, it was also a group of families in frequent competition with one another. The territory of grace that was the community encompassed smaller territories, the family homes, also seeking grace. When the Bernards, Buissons, and their neighbors took part in communal observances, and when they outdid one another in individual acts of piety, they dramatized the tension between communal solidarity and familial competition inherent in the village's cultural system. Village religion offered, thus, a plan through which the community as a whole could seek sanctification while families pursued their particular redemption. Major religious events, like the establishment of chapels or confraternities, were expressions of both communal and familial spirituality.

Even smaller familial gestures, however, could impinge on the religious activities of other families or of the whole community. For example, the erection of benches in the parish church was a cherished means by which the village's wealthy families displayed their status through showing attachment to the church. Generally, the right to a bench depended on a donation to the church. But because the community controlled the church, it had to agree or acquiesce in its construction. The bench would require the privatization of a certain amount of communal space. In a small church like that in Entraigues, space was limited; conflict among families or between them and the priest seeking to control the church could be fierce. When the community founded a chapel in 1655, the primary contributor, Guillaume Buisson, insisted on building a bench and establishing a family tomb beneath it. Not to be outdone, the Bernards and the Brunels demanded the same right.^[75] No one raised objections at that time, but the benches were eventually challenged. In 1672, Guigues and Jean Buisson complained to Le Camus that the curé had ordered their bench removed even though the

[75] This chapel foundation will be discussed below.

chapel foundation granted them the right to maintain it.^[76] The bishop countermanded the curé's order.

Marguerite Bernard, sister of Jean and Ambroise and widow of Poncet the notary, faced a different situation in 1686. Le Camus, in his visit that year, gave her permission to erect a bench in return for a donation of forty livres to the church. But the community had to approve. The assembly agreed that it would permit a small bench to be used only during Bernard's life. She would not be able to pass the right to her heirs. An angry Ambroise Bernard objected to these restrictions. He claimed that the community had no right to pass judgment on the issue because the bishop had already given his order—an interesting example of the way villagers could use a bishop's authority as a weapon in their own feuds. Furthermore, he complained, several others in the community who were of no greater "qualité" than his sister had benches in the church. The assembly persisted and threatened to demolish the bench. Bernard retorted that if his sister's bench were destroyed, he would insist that all the others be dismantled as well. The reasons behind the community's opposition to the bench are unclear, especially since Jean Bernard, brother of Marguerite and Ambroise, was consul at the time.^[77] Someone or some group in the village objected to a second Bernard bench.

Entraigues's saints and devotions also had an important role in village religious contests over familial prestige. The saints with whom the community had historically been most closely associated were Benedict and John. Benedict was the titular of the parish, and John had a chapel of medieval origins in the church. The 1497 pouillé lists the altar as being dedicated to John the Baptist, but seventeenth-century documents sometimes refer to the Evangelist or just to Saint John without further qualification. Perhaps the villagers did not really distinguish between the two.^[78]

The fifteenth-century pouillé also mentions several other chapels: in the church one dedicated to the Holy Cross and one to Mary, and outside the church one to Our Lady of Pity. All had disappeared by the seventeenth century. The spark of enthusiasm that had attended each chapel's foundation had run its course. The chapel of Saint John, Entraigues's other medieval foundation, survived because villagers pre-

[76] Letter of 1672 in ADI 1J.514.

[77] Though, of course, the assembly might also have been objecting to an attempt by Jean Bernard to abuse his position (assembly of 7 July 1686, ADI 4E.442 bb2).

[78] ADI 4G.390. The pouillé of 1730 refers to the Evangelist (ADI 4G.391).

served the memory of an earlier, though lapsed, devotion, and because the chapel preserved its revenue. According to an inventory made in 1624, the chapel still had a sufficient landed endowment to support the saying of masses.^[79] The curé Didier Barruel had requested the inventory, possibly with the intention of defining the chapel's service, but also likely with the hope of increasing his own income.^[80] Thirty-seven years later another curé, André Gautier, also attempted to determine the chapel's income and service. He went to Pierre Bernard, who was by then over seventy, and several others who were the oldest men in the village and "le plus digne de foy." He relied on their memory of the earlier investigation of the chapel and of the reverence that was once offered there to Saint John. Gautier was able to fix the service at one mass every other week.^[81] Nonetheless, neither the vicaire-général , Saint-Jullin, who visited Entraigues in 1665, nor Le Camus, who traveled there in 1672, were satisfied. The chapel had no ornaments, and its foundation and service were still not firmly settled. Saint-Jullin ordered all the appropriate papers to be forwarded to Grenoble. Le Camus ordered effaced the altarpiece in which the chapel's rector had had himself painted. Both men insisted the proper ornaments be provided.^[82]

The chapel's revenue would keep it functioning until the Revolution.^[83] And since the villagers guarded the memory of the service, they may have retained some interest in Saint John. But the community's lack of care for the chapel and the curé's reliance on the memory of the oldest inhabitants show that their interest was quite weak. Most likely the villagers were not overly concerned with the devotion because it had never really been theirs. Neither the community nor any single family within it had founded the chapel. The patronage belonged to the seigneur of the Valbonnais. Thus the villagers may have seen the chapel as a seigneurial symbol rather than as a manifestation of communal religious life. It was never central to Entraigues's village religion.

The workings of village religion with its crisscrossing of collective religiosity and spiritual aspirations with familial piety and competition were most apparent in Entraigues's major communal foundations. Even if the initiative came from a single family, it included others. The endowment and construction of a chapel was a large task, difficult for one family to undertake. The necessary funds had to be drawn from a bigger

[79] Act of 1624 in ADI G.663 (cote provisoire).

[80] The fragmentary pastoral visit of 1637 mentions the chapel's income but says nothing about the number of masses to be performed.

[81] Act of 1661 in ADI 1J.503.

[82] ADI 4G.270, p. 27; ADI 4G.272, p. 143.

[83] ADI G.663 contains the documents pertaining to the sale of its property in 1791.

group. Chapel founders, however, pursued their familial undertakings within a communal framework because they also needed to obtain community approval and support for a project that would so greatly affect village religion, the parish church, and the standing of families within village religion.

In 1642, a group of inhabitants presented a request to the bishop and the prior of the Frères prêcheurs in Grenoble for permission to start a Rosary confraternity in the village. The founders were the familiar leaders of Entraigues: Jean Bernard and his brother, Pierre (father and uncle respectively of Jean and Ambroise), the notary Benoit Poncet, Jacques Brunel, Guigues Leyraud, Barthélemy Rey, and Guillaume Buisson, among others. They stated that they acted on behalf of all the inhabitants who desired to enter into the devotion and the society of the "très sainte confrérie du Saint-Rosaire." The inhabitants pledged to build a chapel with a painting of Our Lady giving the chaplet to Saint Dominic. And they promised to honor the festival of Our Lady of the Rosary by having a mass and a "Salve regina" said at the chapel altar. Following the service, the confrères and consœurs would march in a procession behind the confraternity's banner, in good order, two by two, holding candles. In addition, they undertook to provide hospitality to any Dominican preacher passing through Entraigues, though no evidence indicates they ever had to fulfill the obligation.^[84]

The confraternity was an enormous success. During the first year, 244 people joined, 73 of whom were men and 171 of whom were women (including 8 men and 29 women from nearby villages). Of the 90 people who joined the next year, 70 were women. Over the first six years, women outnumbered men as new members in every year but one—the exception being 1647, when the numbers were equal. Jean-Claude Schmitt suggests that women found an outlet for their religiosity in a Rosary confraternity because its activities were private and because women could accommodate the long prayer repetitions to their domestic lives; men, with their demanding economic activities, could find less time to say the prayers.^[85] But such an interpretation does not hold for Entraigues. First, as we have seen, Rosary confraternities in the diocese of Grenoble had very active public ceremonies as well as the more private prayer repetitions.^[86] Second, Schmitt's description of women's lives does not correspond to those of women in villages like Entraigues. They were active in the community's economic life as contributors to

[84] The confraternity's register is in ADI 1J.1042.

[85] Schmitt, "Apostolat mendiant," p. 86.

[86] See chapter 1, pp. 39-40.

the family economy. They owned land. They managed crops and livestock. They did not leave the village as muleteers and merchants, as men did, but a few women were involved in directing commercial trade. Nor did women shy away from public involvement in religious life, as we have seen with Marguerite Bernard and her bench. Nonetheless, it is true that women in Entraigues had no other institutionalized opportunities to exercise their political or religious energies or their organizational talents. The Rosary confraternity enabled them to pursue the pious act of saying the prayers, to assume a meaningful role in an organization with other women, and to engage in associational politics to improve their families' positions in the community. Entraigues's Rosary confraternity had offices for women that were counterparts to the men's offices of prior, subprior, and choristers. And in 1686, the group adopted the practice of designating certain women to recite the rosary in the chapel on Sunday afternoons and during festivals.

Men also affirmed their spirituality through the recitation of the rosary prayers. But we cannot separate the men's, or women's, expressions of spirituality and involvement in this religious institution from the familial contests that characterized all other aspects of village religion. The Bernards and Guillaume Buisson all joined the organization at its beginning in 1642, but the Bernards always dominated confraternal politics. The members named Jean Bernard prior in 1642 and 1643. Guillaume Buisson obtained no post in the confraternity during those two years; he was not even listed as one of the many conseillers . Bernard, his sons, and his grandsons held the priorship numerous times over the rest of the century. Guillaume Buisson never held an office, and it was not until 1686, when Guigues was named a chorister, that any Buisson became an official of the group. Only in 1701 did a Buisson, Guillaume's grandson, finally obtain the priorship.^[87] Despite Guillaume Buisson's original donation of twelve livres, which ranked him fourth on the list of eleven donors, surpassed only by Jean Bernard (who gave the largest gift) and Jean and Jacques Brunel, he gained no position of power within the confraternity. Jean Bernard and his family—for his wife and daughters frequently were prioresses or subprioresses—dominated the organization.

Guillaume Buisson was intimately involved in the direction of other aspects of Entraigues's religious life. In 1638 he was delegated to reimburse the curé for the service performed at the chapel of Saint John the

[87] The annual election records are not complete, but Guillaume's failure to become even a conseiller in the confraternity's early years makes his position clear.

Evangelist, and in 1641 he traveled to Grenoble to seek the bishop's approval of Louis Molaret as Entraigues's new priest.^[88] So Buisson's lack of stature in the confraternity must have had its explanation in the growing enmity between him and the Bernards who dominated the group. The Buissons did not easily give up on their attempt to display their piety and to gain stature through devotion to the Rosary. In 1667 Guigues, the heir of Guillaume and Marguerite Gaillard, responded to his parents' testamentary behest that he tend to all pious and charitable works done in their memory by endowing six annual masses at the Rosary chapel. He was moved, the act relates, by devotion to the parish church. We might add that he was moved also by the example of his parents' religious concerns and by the desire to establish his own position in the community after his father's death.^[89] By the 1660s, however, the major Buisson family religious endeavors lay in other directions. It would be an exaggeration to consider the confraternity simply a Bernard family institution; most other major families participated in its direction. But the Bernards established themselves as the Rosary's chief patrons in the parish. Their influence remained strong enough for decades to deny their rivals any major part in its governing.

The Rosary confraternity provided Entraigues's inhabitants with a means of displaying an attachment to both the spirituality of the Catholic reform—as characterized by prayer vigils, for instance—and that of the village—typified by the monthly processions. It thus permitted the villagers, and especially the founders, to achieve a more intricate articulation of the ties between the village and the world beyond and at the same time to reorder cultural life within the community. The Bernards gained honor and prestige from standing astride and directing both sides of the process. By bringing the Rosary devotion to Entraigues, they demonstrated their openness to cultural developments outside the community. By serving as its premier financial benefactors, they reminded their neighbors of their position within the community. And by controlling confraternal offices, they organized what became the community's most prominent pious activity with themselves securely at its head. The Bernards had maneuvered themselves into a position as Entraigues's religious leaders and its most effective cultural intermediaries with the outside world. Of course by doing so they also exacerbated their relations with the Buissons.

[88] Act of 1638 in ADI 1J.511; act of 1641 in ADI 1J.503.

[89] Act of 1667, ADI 1J.513. Various later documents also record this foundation, some attributing it mistakenly to Guillaume. Guillaume and Marguerite's 1660 will is in ibid.

Guillaume Buisson's response to the foundation of the Rosary confraternity came in 1657. In April of that year, ten men of the village went before notary Pierre Buisson, Guillaume's son, to draw up a contract for a new chapel in the church.^[90] They dedicated it to the Holy Savior and the Transfiguration of Our Lord. The founders were the wealthiest men in the village and included Guillaume Buisson and the Bernard brothers, Jean and Ambroise.^[91] They established the chapel in the name of the community and appointed the curé its rector. The assembly ratified the contract and accepted responsibility for maintaining the chapel. It was even willing to appropriate church funds to do so. In 1661, when it ordered a painting for the altar, it used a church legacy to pay for it.

Nonetheless, just as the Bernards had been the first among equals in the establishment of the Rosary confraternity and chapel, so now were the Buissons in this foundation. Guillaume gave far more money than any of the other contributors—thirty livres to buy property for the chapel's endowment and sixty more to help build it. Pierre Brunel gave a total of thirty-one for both purposes, while Jean Bernard gave a total of twenty-six and slate for the construction. The other donors gave substantially less than these three. In return for his large gift, Buisson demanded the right to build a bench in the chapel and underneath it a tomb for the burial of those family members who succeeded him and who lived in the family house. Three years later in their will, he and his wife, Marguerite, would request their burial in the chapel. Not to be outdone, Bernard also insisted on excavating a tomb for his successors beneath a bench he had elsewhere in the church. Though nominally a community endeavor, the large donation and the installation of the bench and tomb suggest that the establishment of the chapel was Buisson's idea all along. It was supported by a community interested in increasing its opportunities for spiritual expression and by a curé eager to promote a new sign of his parishioners' piety as well as his own income. But Buisson was the force behind the chapel. Even its placement in the church implied the intention not just to provide an outlet for the community's spirituality but also to promote the salvation and social advancement of the Buisson family. The contract specified that the chapel would be constructed on the right side of the church, directly across from and with exactly the same dimensions as the Rosary chapel.

[90] Various copies of the foundation exist; see ADI 4E.442 gg1, ADI G.663, and ADI 1J.503.

[91] According to the 1663 parcellaire , those establishing the chapel were the seven wealthiest inhabitants, along with the ninth, seventeenth, and eighteenth.

The symbol of the Buissons' position and religiosity was to be in no way inferior to that of their rivals, the Bernards.

The vocable of the Holy Savior and the Transfiguration of Our Lord represented a combination of older but still christocentric devotions. Entraigues's chapel belonged to a very localized upsurge in interest in the Transfiguration; it is likely that Buisson was one of those regional religious entrepreneurs who brought the devotion to the area.^[92] He would, in the wake of Le Camus's first visit, help save from interdiction a chapel dedicated to Our Lady of Consolation in the nearby parish of Chantelouve (which, perhaps not coincidently, also had a Transfiguration chapel, though I found no connection between it and Buisson).^[93] Catholic reformers would have approved the choice of the Transfiguration, but it is important to remember that, as of the 1650s, they had made few, if any, appearances in Entraigues. So it is most probable that Buisson himself brought the devotion to the village, perhaps when returning from one of his commercial voyages. Its meanings were not as thick as those of the Rosary. It brought no confraternity to Entraigues and could not, therefore, rival the Bernards' cult as a means of organizing communal piety. But it did offer Buisson the advantage of its christocentrism and hence its prestigious association with the spirituality of the Counter-Reformation. It also allowed him to act as a broker between village religion and the wider cultural realm. And the Transfiguration chapels here and elsewhere did attract a following, as indicated by the endowments of masses at their altars.^[94]

The foundation of this chapel marked the apogee of the religious feud between the two families. Each now had a chapel, a most conspicuous symbol of its influence and spirituality. From now on the Bernards and Buissons would content themselves with founding masses and fighting over benches in the church. The establishment of the altars, though, grew out of more than their dispute. The foundations were also a manifestation of the community's piety. In little more than a decade, Entraigues had experienced a remarkable flowering of religiosity resulting in the establishment of a confraternity and two chapels. Although the village's leading families motivated the new institutions, the community's religious activities were not confined to them. Other inhabitants went on pilgrimages, offered gifts at chapels, founded masses, and gave charity.^[95] The continued success of the Rosary confraternity and

[92] See chapter 5, pp. 163-164.

[93] Act of 1674 in ADI 4G.101 (25).

[94] See, for instance, the Transfiguration chapel in Chantelouve (ADI 4G.270, p. 30).

[95] It is clear, for example from the wills I have been able to find for Entraigues, that the people of the community engaged in all these activities, though the paucity of notarial registers prevents a systematic study of them.

the growing discontent with bad curés (resulting, for instance, in the denunciation of Gautier to Le Camus) suggest a heightened religious sensibility.

Seen in this light, Le Camus's arrival in 1672 was not the beginning of religious revitalization in the community but only the latest episode in this new stage of Entraigues's religious history, which, the available sources suggest, started in the 1640s. The bishop's impact reinforced the ongoing religious ferment. Although the inhabitants were sometimes slow to follow his orders, they could not but be impressed by his authority and piety; by the pageantry of his entry into the village, laden with religious symbols; and by the power of his sermonizing. Nor could Entraigues's religious and social life remain unaltered by his assiduous investigations or by his replacement of the curé with a new, better-trained priest. His efforts did not by themselves spark religious change in Entraigues. But they combined with the community's internal developments, such as the Bernard-Buisson feud, to promote it.

The religious foundations of the last decades of the seventeenth and the early decades of the eighteenth century echoed both Le Camus's teachings on proper religion and the internal agreements and arguments over village religion. In September 1680 seventeen inhabitants of the hamlet of Villard, "par un mouvement de charité et dévotion," resolved to build a small chapel to have a nearby place of worship during the winter months. Le Camus was, as always, suspicious of succursal chapels that might detract from the parish church's centrality in religious life. But Villard's inhabitants promised to use the chapel only on the days the bishop authorized. As a sign of their devotion, they provided funds for a mass to be said there the second Tuesday of every month.^[96]

Ten of the chapel's seventeen founders had a compound name that included Bernard, as in Bernard-Brunel, Bernard-George, Bernard-Peyre, Bernard-Guillon, and Bernard-Fartaille. They did not belong to the central Bernard family but were probably related in some way to Jean and Ambroise. They clearly thought of themselves as Bernards. Nearly all who could sign the contract did so simply by writing Bernard rather than their full compound name. And for a notary to draw up the contract, they chose Pierre Bernard, just as Guillaume Buisson had picked his notary son to record the establishment of the Transfiguration chapel. These men exhibited a strong sense of the weight the Bernard

[96] The contract is in ADI 4G.103 (10). On succursal chapels, see chapter 4.

name carried in the village. In choosing a vocable for the new altar, they demonstrated their desire to pay homage to the name: they dedicated their chapel to Saint Bernard.

In 1714, a group of inhabitants from Entraigues's other hamlet, Gragnolet, requested permission from the bishop, Le Camus's successor, Ennemond de Montmartin, to found Entraigues's second succursal chapel.^[97] Several of Gragnolet's Bernards were present, but they did not form a majority or dominate the proceedings. The founders placed their chapel under the invocation and protection of the Holy Infant Jesus (one of only four such chapels in the diocese), but they celebrated its fête on 14 September, the day of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. Future documents would sometimes refer to the chapel under one title and sometimes under the other, though the Holy Infant Jesus was the official vocable. The interest in the Holy Cross harked back to Entraigues's former chapel under that dedication. But any connection between the two is unlikely, because the first chapel had been located in the church, not in the hamlet, and it had disappeared at least a century earlier. The Holy Infant Jesus devotion was christocentric, in tune with the piety the Counter-Reformation wished to emphasize, and therefore it epitomized the sort of devotion Le Camus had hoped to promote in four decades of work in the diocese. But no one imposed this devotion on Gragnolet. Its selection resulted from the hamlet's own religious life. The decision of Gragnolet's inhabitants to found a chapel and dedicate it to this devotion grew out of the work of reformers but also out of seventy years of religious activity in Entraigues, activity prompted by the village's internal workings and its own religious aspirations.

The history of Entraigues's saints illustrates this point repeatedly. Religious change in the village depended heavily on local circumstances such as the Bernard-Buisson feud, or more generally on the desire of Entraigues's families to advance both their social and religious standing. The efforts of the religious reformers combined with the internal motivations for religious change, but change did not wait for the reformers. A full thirty years before the arrival of Le Camus and the Counter-Reformation in the diocese of Grenoble, the people of Entraigues were hard at work importing new religious ideas, establishing confraternities, and founding chapels. They did not work in a vacuum. Their curés encouraged them, though the character of these priests was usually not very encouraging. They may have felt the impact of missionaries, though little evidence exists of any missionaries in the area. The village's

[97] Registre du secrétariat de l'évêché, ADI 4G.324, p. 551.

most important connection with cultural developments in the outside world was through its own inhabitants, people like Guillaume Buisson, who had traveled widely as merchants. The horizons of these individuals extended beyond the village. But after their travels, they returned to Entraigues, established themselves there, and began to compete with their neighbors for economic advancement, political influence, and social prestige. They brought with them the ideas and the forms of religiosity they had encountered elsewhere. These people served, therefore, as contacts, as intermediaries, between the religion of the village and that of the outside world.

The process of cultural change on the local level required such mediation. The authorities of the Counter-Reformation could not force on rural parishes their concept of religion, their favored saints' devotions, or their total control over village religion. They could successfully constrain communal assemblies to raise the money for church repairs. They could, a good deal less successfully, cultivate a more "decent" or less "superstitious" form of worship by attempting to prohibit certain local practices. But they could not root the new conceptions of religious authority or styles of worship in the minds of the faithful unless the faithful were ready to adopt these conceptions and styles. The Catholic reformers could play on the social divisions within villages in an effort to attract the elite to their side. But they risked, in turn, being manipulated by villagers for their own purposes. The Buissons, Bernards, and their counterparts in other villages saw advantages in using the bishop as well as his religion. They chose the new religious ideas and adapted them to village life. Other villagers, though less evident in the historical record, joined the new institutions or promoted the new spiritual conceptions for their own purposes. In other words, the people who participated in village religion were all constantly, actively engaged in re-ordering their own religious lives. The devotions they chose to honor—the Rosary, the Transfiguration, the Infant Jesus—the Counter-Reformation Church also favored. But they entered Entraigues at the behest of its people.

Conclusion

In Entraigues, familial competition within communally organized village religion spurred change more than the efforts of a reforming bishop. Villagers did not, as the reformers wished, practice a religion centered on the parish church, the curé, and the dictates of the bishop but one that revolved as well around new confraternities, new chapels and saints' devotions, and the leadership of certain families. Other communities would have blended the elements of village religion differently. Some, especially in the Vercors and Chartreuse, were more isolated from larger cultural changes. Others had noble or bourgeois landowners from Grenoble to influence the communal construction of religion. Not all communities experienced feuds such as that of the Bernards and Buissons, though we have no reason to suppose they were rare. Entraigues was not, therefore, typical.

Instead, the general lesson the people of Entraigues teach us is that villagers took a very active role in religious and cultural change in early modern France. They did not passively accept the ideas of outsiders seeking to impose a new spirituality and more restrained forms of behavior on them. They did not necessarily reject the ideas of reformers but combined with them their own sense of proper social and religious conduct and their own understanding of common religious symbols and practices. It is the means they chose to pursue this process of cultural change that make them representative of people throughout the diocese and, indeed, throughout the rural world of early modern Europe. The villagers of Entraigues and other parishes exerted their will and political

talent to construct their village religions. They matched the efforts of outside figures, namely Le Camus, by resisting his demands, manipulating him, or adapting his message. And he sometimes gave in to their wishes. Of course, the bishop was not a mere tool in villagers' hands. He exploited communal social divisions and drew village notables to his program by encouraging them to establish exclusive Confraternities of the Blessed Sacrament (though these were not very successful) and by helping them to found, near the main altars of parish churches, chapels for approved saints (symbolic representations of the Counter-Reformation).

Historians have long recognized (and perhaps overstated) the impact of bishops. We have been slower to realize that the meanings new saints or confraternities had for villagers may not have been simply those the reformers intended. Rosary confraternities, for example, might carry a certain significance for Le Camus as the way to promote an austere and decorous piety focused on the Virgin Mary. But villagers could create alternative understandings of the Rosary's importance. For the Bernards, who established Entraigues's Rosary confraternity, the association proved to be a method of organizing village religious life under their patronage. For their neighbors, who eagerly joined, it meant a novel, exciting way to celebrate religious communality in monthly processions. For the women, who adhered in greater numbers than men, it provided a formal outlet for the display of piety as well as political and organizational skills. And the confraternity gave all members an innovative way to honor a vital protector of their earthly existence and, they hoped, of their heavenly future. The significance with which villagers invested the Rosary did not exclude the meaning the bishop preferred but added to and reinterpreted it.

Likewise, the new chapels near the parishes' main altars represented not just the authority of the Counter-Reformation but also the prestige of their patrons. As the examples in chapter 5 showed, the progress of the new saints' cults was neither inevitable nor irreversible. But even when new cults did survive in communities, they could carry a variety of connotations. The Rosary is one example, but recall also Joseph with his multitude of new and old meanings, or the christocentric Transfiguration, which found fertile ground in the sacred territories of Entraigues and its neighboring communities. The construction of meaning was an essential part of the process of religious change. Reformers realized this when they reinterpreted or reemphasized doctrine and the symbols through which it was communicated. We must under-

stand, however, that they were not the only ones reemphasizing and reinterpreting.

Thus one step to comprehending religious and cultural change is to appreciate the active role villagers took in reshaping the influence of authorities from outside their communities. A second step is to recognize that villagers created a variety of meanings for the symbols and practices on which they drew. The third is to understand that their motivation often lay in the exigencies of their communal experience. They did not jealously guard an age-old culture that helped them cope with a harsh environment and smooth over village political and economic conflicts.^[1] Religion did not, in this way, simply create an equilibrium in communities. Village society was constantly poised between the competing demands of communal solidarity, class conflict, and familial competition. Villagers did use the resources available in the religious realm to draw themselves together. That is one reason why inhabitants of Entraigues joined the Rosary confraternity, or those of Auris-en-Oisans made annual processions around the community and up the steep slope to Saint Gerald's chapel, or parishioners of Notre-Dame-de-Mésage restored old processions in a time of trouble.^[2] At the same time, villagers deployed symbols and practices in contests with one another. The Rosary procured prestige for the Bernards; the Buissons countered with the Transfiguration chapel. Louis Faure re-funded the Gerald procession in Auris to secure his standing in the village even as he revived a communal custom. In Notre-Dame-de-Mésage, too, it is not hard to imagine (though no documents reveal) jockeying for familial position—perhaps in the order of the procession—as part of the village's decision to restore its communal harmony with sacred powers. Religion, then, might bring villagers together, or it might pull them apart. It could set village notables against each other, as in Entraigues, or it could unite them in opposing their social inferiors, as in la Grave where the principaux habitants called on Le Camus to enforce moral standards.^[3]

The examples of la Grave and of the Bernard-Buisson feud in Entraigues also indicate how such social and cultural divisions actually created new forms of communal order. The principals of la Grave sought, after all, to reconstruct social behavior in a manner more ac-

[1] For a similar view see Chartier, "Ritual and Print"; but whereas he describes the impact on festivals of urban oligarchies, ecclesiastical reformers, and political officials, I stress a more dynamic interaction between authorities and participants.

[2] On Auris-en-Oisans and Notre-Dame-de-Mésage, see chapter 3; on Entraigues, see chapter 6.

[3] Chapter 3.

ceptable to them. And the Bernards and Buissons struggled not to place themselves beyond the cultural system of their fellow villagers but at its head. In both cases, notables wished to reorder village religion, not destroy its communality. The leading inhabitants of villages used their resources to reorganize communal life in a way that would strengthen their position over inferiors and social equals alike. Hence they were as concerned with religious and cultural strategies as they were with making good marriages, ensuring the proper lines of succession, investing profitably, and harrying debtors.

Religion presented another arena for pursuing familial advantage and communal order, but it also provided the realm of symbols in which all these activities took on meanings, thereby tying them to what was most fundamental in the villagers' beliefs and values. Disagreement among villagers, as much as their accord, created the village cultural system.^[4] The interaction of tensions and solidarities within the village shaped other spheres—political and economic—of community life. Recognizing this interplay may help us reformulate interpretations of such issues as peasant economic mentality, now split between scholars who argue that peasants were rationally oriented individuals seeking to maximize personal gain and those who see villagers as living within a "moral economy" of shared obligations and communally imposed restraints on economic behavior.^[5] The moral order was not egalitarian; it could serve particular interests. It did not obstruct the search for individual or familial advancement. And the pursuit of advantage did not prevent the construction of a sense of moral order. Rather, individual gain took on meaning within a communal order and contributed to its continuous formation.

[4] I refer here again to Sabean's comment, "What is common in community is not shared values or common understanding so much as the fact that members of a community are engaged in the same argument, the same raisonnement , the same Rede , the same discourse, in which alternative strategies, misunderstandings, conflicting goals and values are threshed out" (Power in the Blood , p. 29).

[5] See the classic statement on the moral economy within village communal relations by James C. Scott (The Moral Economy of the Peasant [New Haven, 1976]), which differs from Thompson's emphasis on the traditional relationship between the community and a paternalist gentry or state ("The Moral Economy of the English Crowd"). The major criticism of Scott is that of Samuel L. Popkin, The Rational Peasant (Berkeley, 1979). Hoffman applies Popkin's ideas to religious change in seventeenth-century French village society (Church and Community , pp. 68-69). Hoffman and I differ somewhat on the role of religion. He argues that communal religious institutions could tie together "disparate, selfish individuals," and I believe them just as likely to divide villagers. A similar call to study the moral economy through its internal communal tensions and its multifold "significance for various members of the community" is that of Suzanne Desan ("Crowds, Community, and Ritual in the Work of E. P. Thompson and Natalie Davis," in The New Cultural History , ed. Lynn Hunt [Berkeley, 1989], pp. 47-71, esp. 59).

Each group in society contributed to cultural development by sharing, adapting, and resisting the symbols, practices, and meanings they all created. Culture was not an integrated, smoothly operating machine in which everyone and everything had a designated, functional niche. Neither was it neatly divided in two. The model of elite versus popular was a simplification that helped us understand what nonliterate people thought and did, but as a number of historians now realize, it has outlived its usefulness.^[6] We must not create arbitrary distinctions between the experiences and perceptions of earlier peoples, even though we must remain capable of seeing variations among them. Looking at culture as an ongoing process of creation rather than a fixed entity will help. Hence, the description of culture here emphasizes the activities of groups at all social levels, the differences among villagers as well as what they had in common, and the variable meanings of symbols and practices they shared with one another and with people beyond the community.

If this study has emphasized the role of a particular elite it is not that of the state, city, or Church, but rather that of the village. The Bernards, Buissons, and the like were not the only villagers who found new uses for religious symbols and practices and who invested them with new meanings. They do appear, however, as the cultural brokers or intermediaries between village religion and the larger culture of which it was a part. The principaux habitants had the contacts and experiences necessary to tap cultural currents outside their villages and the resources, financial or political, to turn these currents into new chapels, confraternities, devotions, and other religious practices inside their communities. We must, nonetheless, guard against the assumption that an elite, including one within the village, could simply impose its will on others without having its intentions resisted, deflected or modified. Each complex of symbols, practices, and meanings could be used to resist domination even by people politically subjugated, economically deprived, and socially humbled. Yet resistance was not the only response. People also adopted or adapted the symbols, practices, and meanings of others for their own purposes, for the construction of their village culture.

A model that describes local cultural innovation as the villagers' reordering of their own communal lives presents at least one potential danger. It can too easily leave the sense of a village forever evolving but owing little to wider social, political, or cultural developments. This impression is incorrect. The growth of state power offered new oppor-

[6] See introduction, notes 10, 29.

tunities for families such as the Bernards to strengthen their positions at home, and to intensify their connections to central political authorities, by obtaining local royal offices. With increased state power, however, came heavier taxes, which strained a rural economy chronically short of money. This burden, coupled with a generally worsening economy in the latter half of the seventeenth century, provoked social tensions in communities and encouraged the political and cultural ambitions of village notable families, for instance the Bernards and Buissons.^[7]

The Counter-Reformation also presented villagers with new opportunities to renew their religious lives and gave them tools, in the form of symbols and practices, to deal with religious issues such as the continuing challenge of Protestantism, ineffective priests, and demoralized ecclesiastical institutions. Furthermore, villagers could wield these tools in regulating their relations with outside powers; in establishing and enforcing community norms and values; in controlling unruly groups, especially young men; in constructing village solidarity; and in competing for prestige or honor. The developments exterior to the village altered the pace and direction of local change. Le Camus strengthened the outside influences during his tenure in Grenoble. But the initiative in cultural change lay with villagers, not outsiders.

This study, then, seeks to recognize the capabilities and creativity of all people in early modern France and, most especially, those who composed the vast majority. I have tried not to draw an arbitrary line between the cultural experiences of villagers—too often in the past simply called the inarticulate—and those who left us the written records of their society. Although we must rely on those documents, we need not be limited by the point of view of those who wrote them. We can, in the final analysis, read the texts of Le Camus's visits for both his intentions and the responses of villagers to him. In that way, we do not close off possibilities for interpretation and do not assume that those who left few or no written records were powerless, passive, or unable to construct their own culture or control their own beliefs and values. This is not to claim that the people of early modern France all shared the same cultural experience, far from it. But in their religion—the most

[7] Laurence Fontaine's current research on the economic and social history of the Oisans is doing much to explain village dynamics from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century: see Le voyage et la mémoire ; "Le reti del credito." For the impact of economic change on village social divisions more generally, see Jan De Vries, The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis, 1600-1750 (Cambridge, 1976), chap. 2; and Pierre Goubert, The French Peasantry in the Seventeenth Century , trans. Ian Patterson (Cambridge, 1986), esp. pp. 110-121.

important form of cultural expression, the central source of values—people drew on symbols and practices shared with others and then gave them new significance. They took the measure of their particular sacred territories—whether chapels, family homes, village communities, regions, nations, or the entire body of those who adhered to their faith—and through their actions and beliefs imbued them with grace.

Appendix
Saints' Cults in the Diocese of Grenoble, 1497-1728

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Warner, Maria. Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary . New York: Vintage Books, 1983.

Weaver, Elissa. "Spiritual Fun: A Study of Sixteenth-Century Tuscan Convent Theater." In Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and

Historical Perspectives , edited by Mary Beth Rose, pp. 173-205. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986.

Weinstein, Donald, and Rudolph M. Bell. Saints and Society: Two Worlds of Western Christendom, 1000-1700 . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

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Index

A

Abridged Christian Doctrine, 148

Acculturation, critique of, 11

Agonisants, 40 , 127 , 140 , 159

Aillaud, Pierre (sacristan of Valbonnais), 185

Ailly, Pierre d', 127 n.73

Aix-les-Bains, 26 , 27

Alacoque, Marguerite-Marie, Saint, 135

Albertville, 27

Alex, Jean d'Arenthon d', 56 n.6, 58 n.14, 75 , 75 n.9

Allemand, Laurent (bishop of Grenoble), 54 , 138 , 153

Allemand family (bishops of Grenoble,1452-1482, 1484-1561), 59 n.18

Allemont, 112

Allevard, 151

Alpages , 170

Ambrose, Saint, 127 n.73

Angers (diocese of), 42

Anne, Saint, 93 , 110 , 127 -28, 160

Annecy, Lake, 131

Anne of Austria, 128

Annonciades célestes, 46 n.96

Anthony, Saint, 90 n.55, 106 , 147 , 148 ;

chapels dedicated to, 107 ;

and communal identity, 109 ;

cult of, 107 -8, 126 , 153 , 154 , 157 ;

in Goncelin, 144 -46;

images of, 122 ;

relics of, 30 , 107 ;

in Saint-Pierre-d'Albigny, 140 -42

Anthony of Padua, Saint, 108 n.5, 152 n.29

Antonine order, 108

Apostles, 110

Apre, Saint, 116 , 147

Arvillard, 81

Assemblies, communal, 70 .

See also Entraigues

Assumption, 143 -44

Augustinians, 32

Auray (shrine of Saint Anne), 127

Auris-en-Oisans, 31 , 91 -93, 159 , 175 n.29, 205

Austria, 154

Autrans, 49

Autun (diocese of), 42

Auvergne, 175

Avalon, 188 n.66

B

Balzac, Honoré de: Le médecin de campagne , 27 n.19

Barbara, Saint, 141

Baroque spirituality, 38

Barraux, 122 n.61

Barrillon, Henry de (bishop of Luçon), 65 n.34, 88 n.50, 102 , 124

Barruel, Didier (curé of Entraigues), 186 , 194

Barruel, Jean (curé of Entraigues), 186 n.58

Bartholomew, Saint, 147 , 154

Basilidian heresy, 147 n.16

Basoche (in Montmélian), 95 .

See also Reinages; Royaurnes ; Youth abbeys

Beaufort brothers (of Oris-en-Rattier), 84 -85

Beaumont, 169

Belsunce (bishop of Marseille), 115 n.26

Benches, church, 85 -86, 192 -93

Benedict, Saint, 186 , 193

Bernard, Ambroise (of Entraigues), 176 , 187 , 193 , 198 -99

Bernard, Jacques (of Entraigues), 187

Bernard, Jean (I) (of Entraigues), 173 , 176 , 179 n.39, 195

Bernard, Jean (II) (of Entraigues), 176 , 179 , 180 , 198 -99

Bernard, Marguerite (of Entraigues; wife of Guigues Buisson), 182

Bernard, Marguerite (of Entraigues; sister of Jean II and Ambroise Bernard), 193

Bernard, Pierre (of Entraigues), 194 , 195

Bernard, Saint, 141 , 200 -201

Bernard-Buisson feud (in Entraigues), 181 -83, 191 , 196 -97

Bernard family (of Entraigues), 174

Bernard George, Jean (of Entraigues), 187

Bernardines, 45

Bernardino da Siena, 127 n.73

Bernières-Louvigny, Jean de (theologian), 124

Bérulle, Pierre de (theologian), 7 , 128 , 132 , 132 nn.95 and 97, 134

Besse, 64 , 93

Besse, Saint, 94 n.64

Bissy, 148

Blaise, Saint, 41 , 142 -43, 148 , 152 n.29

Blanc, Reymond (of Entraigues), 187

Blanchard, Jean (Protestant of Entraigues), 189

Blanchart, Saint, 121

Blessed Sacrament: benediction of, 40 , 97 , 100 , 101 ;

as counter to Carnival, 73 ;

cult of, 86 , 158 -59, 164 -65

Blessed Sacrament, Company of the, 13 , 16 , 40 , 52

Blessed Sacrament, Confraternities of the, 5 , 37 -38, 133 -34, 146 , 164 , 204 ;

in Bourg-d'Oisans, 37 ;

in Chambéry, 40 , 40 n.75;

in Grignon, 33 n.38;

in la Chapelle-Blanche, 33 n.38;

in Montmélian, 33 n.38

Blessed Sacrament, Penitents of the, 33 n.38, 38

Bollandists, 116 , 127

Bossuet, J.-B. (bishop of Meaux), 124 n.67, 154 n.35

Bossy, John, 113

Bourchenu, Pierre Moret de (seigneur de Valbonnais), 172

Bourg-d'Oisans, 26 , 169 ;

festivals of, 90 n.55, 97 -98;

penitents of, 35 n.52, 36 , 37

Bourget, lac du, 27

Brandes, 77 -78

Brandons: definition of, 42

Bread, blessed, 78 , 84 -85, 94

Briançon, 28

Bridget, Saint, 41 , 141 , 143 -44

Brothers of Charity (of Vizille), 144

Brown, Peter, 112 -13

Brun, Sieur (of Saint-Ismier), 82

Brunel family (of Entraigues), 173 , 177 , 180 -81, 195 , 198

Bruno, Saint (founder of the Grande-Chartreuse), 27

Buisson, Antoine (of Eybens), 81

Buisson, Guigues (of Entraigues), 197

Buisson, Guillaume (of Entraigues), 175 ;

and Chantelouve, 199 ;

in conflict, 179 , 181 ;

consul, 179 n.39;

and religious life, 195 , 196 -97, 198 -199;

will of, 197

Buisson, Jean (of Entraigues), 179 , 180 , 180 n.40

Buisson, Pierre (of Entraigues), 198

Buisson family (of Entraigues), 174

Burcin (site of Notre-Dame-de-Milin shrine), 30

C

Calvin, Jean, 118 n.39

Calvinism, 114 n.21.

See also Protestantism

Canel, Claude (associate of Le Camus), 142

Capuchins, 33 n.38, 45 , 46 , 62 , 188

Carmelites, 62 , 126 , 132

Carnival, 73 , 74 , 74 n.5

Carthusians, 86 . See also Grande-Chartreuse

Catechisms, 4

Catherine of Alexandria, Saint, 152 , 153 , 154 , 156 -57

Catholic League, 34 n.45, 44

Caulet, Jean de (bishop of Grenoble, 1726-1771), 39 n.71, 100 , 158

Caylus, D. de (bishop of Auxerre), 64 , 79

Cérat, Saint, 147

Chabottes, 77

Chambéry, 25 , 27 , 36 , 67 , 73 -75, 102 -3, 108

Chambre des comptes, 25 , 44

Chantelouve, 67 n.41, 163 n.62, 199

Chapareillan, 86 , 86 n.42

Chapels: altars of, inspected in pastoral visits, 71 ;

burial in, 112 ;

of confraternities, 68 ;

Counter-Reformation attitude toward, 5 , 68 -69;

donation of, 112 ;

furnishings of, 138 ;

income of, 150 ;

of noble families, 44 ;

number of foundations, 151 ;

patronage of, 138 -39, 150 , 192 ;

position of, 139 -40, 150 ;

regional location of, 150 ;

and saints' devotions, 5 , 20 , 91 , 138 ;

succursal, 91 n.57, 109 , 170 ;

as territories of grace, 94 ;

in village religion, 138 -40.

See also Blessed Sacrament; Confraternities; Holy Spirit; Penitents; Rosary; and under names of individual saints

Charivaris, 14 , 42 , 57 , 91 , 119

Charles Borromeo, Saint, 130 , 130 n.86;

cult of, 1 , 141 , 160 ;

on dancing, 95 ;

pastoral visits of, 60 ;

and program of the Counter-Reformation, 1 , 61 ;

on saints' cults, 117 ;

on superstition, 119 n.46

Chartreuse, 27 , 50 , 150 -51

Château Dauphin, 172

Chattard family (of Entraigues), 179 , 189

Chaulnes, Paul de (bishop of Grenoble,1720-1725), 149

Chevrières, Alphonse de la Croix de (bishop of Grenoble,1619-1620), 44

Chevrières, Jean de la Croix de (bishop of Grenoble, 1607-1619), 44

Chissé family (bishops of Grenoble, 1392-1450), 59 n.18

Chome, Françoise (of Saint-Ismier), 82

Christ, 107 , 114 , 131 -35.

See also Blessed Sacrament; Eucharist; Jesus

Christian, William, 8 , 134

Christopher, 41 , 93 , 120 n.52, 147 , 152 n.29

Churches, spatial hierarchy of, 69 , 130 -40

Cistercians (of the abbey des Ayes), 46 n.96

Clarafond, 31 , 158 n.50

Claude, Saint, 41 , 141 , 154 , 155 , 156

Clement VIII (pope), 66 , 69 n.45

Clergy: as agents of the Counter-Reformation, 4 ;

as mediators, 79 ;

problems of, 48 -51.

See also Entraigues

Cluniacs, 32

Colbert, C.-J. (bishop of Montpellier), 70 n.49

Confession, 4 , 14

Confessional, 148

Confraternities: banquets of, 2 ;

chapels of, 68 ;

Counter-Reformation attitude toward, 5 , 29 , 32 ;

of crafts, 5 , 41 , 146 , 154 , 159 ;

and lay intitiative, 32 -33, 39 ;

and penitents or Holy Spirit groups, 83 ;

and religious vitality, 18 ;

and saints' cults, 110 , 137 , 140 , 192 ;

women's participation in, 185 .

See also Agonisants; Blessed Sacrament; Holy Spirit; Jesuits; Joseph, Saint; Mary; Penitents; Roch, Saint; Rosary; Sebastian, Saint

Congregation of Rites, 117 , 130

Consanguinity, 27 , 63 , 80 , 80 n.22

Corenc, 34

Corpus Christi, 35

Coste, Jean-Jacques (curé of Entraigues), 187 -88

Coublevie, 80 -81

Coulaud, Jean Rey (of Entraigues), 176

Counter-Reformation: and aggravation of social tensions, 15 -16, 83 , 133 ;

attitude toward images, 30 -31;

program of, 2 , 3 , 4 -5, 54 .

See also Chapels; Charles Borromeo, Saint; Clergy; Confraternities; Eucharist; Festivals; Le Camus; Pastoral visits; Penitents; Pilgrimages; Processions; Protestantism; Relics

Cours (hamlet of Auris-en-Oisans), 91

Crispin, Saint, 41 , 141 , 145 -46, 154

Cruet, 161

Cultural change: and construction of meaning, 13 , 204 -5;

explanation of, 2 , 12 -16, 205 -7;

and Le Camus, 3 , 72 ;

and saints, 107 , 135 -36, 154 ;

and social divisions, 11 ;

in villages, 2 , 203 -4

Cultural system, 10 , 10 n.25

Culture: definition of, 2 -3;

elite and popular, 1 , 6 -7, 9 -10, 207 ;

local and central, 8 ;

of villages, 55 , 102

D

Dauphiné, 11 , 16 , 21 -23

Dauphiné, Gaston de, 108

Davis, Natalie Z., 10

Décimateurs , 43 , 48

Denis, Saint, 152 n.29

Desiderius, Saint, 90 n.55

Die, diocese of, 51 , 80

Disputes, marital, 80 -82

Domène, 32 , 39 n.70, 88

Dominicans, 39 , 46 , 162 , 188 , 195

Dupuy brothers: literary coterie of, 121

E

Echirolles, Saint James relics in, 31 , 153

Economy of salvation, 69

Ecouges, 31

Edict of Nantes, revocation of, 52 , 58 , 64 , 171

Eligius, Saint, 41 , 120 , 129 , 154

Engelas, 49

Enlightenment, 9 , 118 n.38

Entraigues: church repairs in, 184 -85;

communal assemblies, 170 -71, 178 -79, 184 ;

communal finances of, 172 -73;

conflict over church benches in, 86 , 192 -93;

consuls of, 179 -80;

Entraigues (continued )

curés of, 185 -88;

description of, 169 -170;

dispensation of consanguinity in, 80 n.22;

economy of, 170 -72;

literacy in, 178 n.35;

poor of, 176 -77;

Protestants of, 169 , 188 -91;

saints' cults of, 163 n.62, 193 -201;

social structure of, 176 -78;

troop billeting in, 172 -73

Erasmus, Desiderius, 114 n.19, 117

Eucharist, 12 , 13 , 100 ;

and Counter-Reformation, 5 , 71 ;

cult of, 69 , 131 -32, 132 n.98;

devotion of penitents to, 35 , 36 ;

miracles of, 13 , 134 ;

and pastoral visits, 59 , 69 .

See also Blessed Sacrament

Eutrope, Saint, 121

Ex-votos, 100 , 148

Eybens, 81

F

Fabian, Saint, 141 , 148

Fairs, 70

Faure, Louis (of Auris-en-Oisans), 91 -93, 94

Fay, Claudine (of Arvillard), 81

Felix, Saint, 104

Fénelon, François de Salignac de la Motte, 124

Ferjus, Saint, 147

Festivals: Counter-Reformation attitude toward, 5 , 96 -97;

and economic activities, 96 -98;

fights on, 93 -94;

Marian, 39 -40;

of parish patrons, 42 ;

uses and practices of, 89 -100, 103 -4;

villagers' understanding of, 43 .

See also Confraternities; and under names of individual saints

Figuier, Pierre (of Arvillard), 81

Firmin, Saint, 103 -4

Fléhard, François (bishop of Grenoble,1575-1606), 44

Fontaine, 147 -48

Forty Hours' devotion, 35 , 36 , 73 , 133 , 134

Fountains, sacred, 5

Fourteen Holy Helpers, 152 , 152 n.29, 154

Franciscans, 126

Francis de Sales, Saint, 132 ;

cult of, 142 -44, 155 , 157 , 161 ;

on dancing, 95 n.68;

exorcisms and miracles of, 131 ;

local and universal significance of, 110 ;

and religious orders, 45 ;

writings of, 56 n.6, 62 n.25, 130

Francis of Assisi, Saint, 143 -44

Francis Xavier, Saint, 58 n.14, 160

Franco-provençal, 23

French school of spirituality, 132

Functionalism, 10 , 11 n.26, 168 , 168 n.3

G

Gaillard, Claude (of Entraigues), 175

Gaillard, Marguerite (of Entraigues), 175 , 197

Gap, 28 , 30

Gautier, André (curé of Entraigues), 186 -87, 194

George, Saint, 145 -46, 152 , 156

Gerald, Saint, 31 , 91 , 92

Germany, 154

Gerson, Jean, 59 , 117 , 127 n.73

Giberti, Matteo (bishop of Verona), 60 n.19

Ginzburg, Carlo, 10

Godparentage, 137 , 179

Golden Gate (of Jerusalem), 127

Goncelin: chapels of, 144 -46, 147 ;

cult of Saint Anthony in, 157 ;

cult of Saint Roch in, 158

Gragnolet (hamlet of Entraigues), 169 , 170 , 201

Grammont, Pierre de (bishop of Besançon), 58 n.14

Grande-Chartreuse, 27 , 45 n.94

Grat, Saint, 110 , 155

Grenoble (city of), 24 -25

Grenoble (diocese of): compared to China, 53 ;

geography of, 23 ;

poor conditions of institutions of, 29 ;

Protestantism in, 51 -52

Grésivaudan, Bailliage of, 25

Grignon, 33 n.38

Grisail family (of Entraigues), 177 , 182 , 189

Guerre, Martin, 81 n.26

Guyon, Mme M. Bouviers de La Mothe, 124

H

Helme, Pierre (of Entraigues), 180

Herbeys, 45 , 89 , 151

Holy Cross, 131 , 163 , 193 , 201

Holy Cross, Exaltation of, 201

Holy Family, 110 , 128 -29, 132 , 160

Holy Infant Jesus, 132 , 201

Holy Name of Jesus, 163

Holy Savior, 90 n.55, 163 , 187 , 198 -99

Holy Spirit, 131 , 141 , 142 , 143 , 163 ;

confraternities of, 33 -34, 37 , 83 , 95 , 133 , 163 ;

cult of, 154 , 154 n.37

Holy Thorn, confraternity of (in Grenoble), 40

Holy Trinity, confraternity of (in Chambéry), 40

Honnoré, Pierre (curé of Entraigues), 186

Honoratus, Saint, 41

Hôpital général, 82 n.27

Host. See Blessed Sacrament; Eucharist

Hubert, Saint, 120

Huez, 77 , 154

Hugh, Saint, 31 , 116 , 129 , 147

Humanism, 132

I

Ignatius of Loyola, Saint, 62 n.25, 130

Immaculate Conception, 127 , 145 -46, 163

Incarnation of the Word, 163

Infant Jesus, 163

Innocent XI (pope), 127

Isolani, Isidorus: Summae de donis Sanctae Joseph , 127 n.73

Italy, 28 , 29 , 107 , 150 , 154 , 171

J

Jacobins, 123

James, Saint, 41 , 145 -46, 147 , 153 ;

festival in Auris-en-Oisans, 91 ;

festival in Notre-Dame-de-Mésage, 104 ;

relics in Echirolles, 31 , 153

Jane de Chantal, Saint, 45 , 130

Jansenism, 61 n.22, 75 n.9, 115 n.26, 122 n.57, 128 , 132 , 135 ;

and Le Camus, 25 , 116 , 118 , 119 , 123 ;

and Jean-Baptiste Thiers, 118 , 119

Jaucourt, Chevalier de (encylopédiste), 118 n.38

Jean Eudes, Saint, 132

Jesuits, 32 n.38, 46 , 122 n.57, 126 , 135 ;

congregations of, 7 , 40 , 40 n.74, 134 n.105;

and Le Camus, 29 , 46 , 65 ;

as missionaries, 46 , 188 ;

in Savoy, 25 , 75 , 123

Jesus, in earthly trinity, 126 n.72.

See also Blessed Sacrament; Christ; Eucharist

Joachim, Saint, 127

Joan of Arc, 135

John, Saint, 143 -44

John of the Latin Gate, Saint, 121

John the Baptist, Saint, 98 n.81, 142 -43, 153 -54, 156

John the Evangelist, Saint, 141 , 154 , 170 , 191 , 193 -94, 196 -97

Joseph, Saint, 41 , 90 n.55;

confraternity in Saint-Pierre-d'Albigny, 140 -42;

cult of, 126 -27, 143 -44, 145 -46, 158 -60, 165

Joyeuse (cardinal, bishop of Toulouse), 61

Jude, Saint, 147

L

La Buissière, 138

La Chapelle-Blanche, 33 n.38

Laffrey, lac du, 28

La Garde, 93

La Grave, 66 n.36, 83 , 205

La Mothe Le Vayer, François de: Hexaméron rustique , 120 -22;

Mémorial de quelques conférences , 120 n.53

La Motte-Saint-Martin, 87

La Mure, 28 , 34 -35, 87 , 169 , 188 ;

Protestants of, 26 , 51

Lans-en-Vercors, 87

La Roche (hamlet of Valbonnais), 175

La Terrasse, 116

La Thuile, 86

Lauteret, col du, 28

Laval, 31

Lavaldens, 109 , 163 n.62

Lawrence, Saint, 90 n.55, 145 -46

Lazarists, 62

Lazarus, Saint, 153

League of Augsburg, War of, 59

Le Bras, Gabriel, 19

Le Camus, Etienne (bishop of Grenoble, 1671-1707): arrival in Grenoble, 1 ;

association with libertinism and Catholic rationalism, 122 ;

attitude toward Communion, 12 -13;

authority and moral stature of, 18 ;

and Chambéry, 25 ;

and Confraternities of the Blessed Sacrament, 37 ;

construction of self-image, 63 -65;

and cultural change, 2 , 3 , 17 ;

death of, 72 ;

early life of, 21 ;

and Jansenism, 25 , 46 ;

manipulation of, by villagers, 75 -79, 84 , 99 -100, 101 ;

as mediator, 64 -65, 76 -79, 79 -89;

model for Simonides in the Hexaméron rustique , 120 -22;

pastoral visits of, 58 -59, 149 ;

and penitents, 35 ;

on relics, 122 -24;

and saints' cults, 42 -43, 122 , 147 ;

and sanctuaires à répit , 7 n.12;

social divisions aggravated by, 18 ;

and start of Counter-Reformation in Grenoble diocese, 16 ;

writings of, 4 , 79

Le Freney, 93

Lenain de Tillemont, Louis-Sébastien (hagiographer), 126 n.70, 127

Lepanto, battle of, 39 , 129 n.82

Le Peletier (bishop of Angers), 42

Lesdiguières, François de Bonne, duke of, 29 , 172

Lesdiguières family, 28 , 49 , 142 , 142 n.10

Les Marches, 93

Leyraud family (of Entraigues), 180 , 195

Libertins érudits , 118 , 118 n.38, 120

Limousin, 175

Literacy, 150 -51, 178 n.35

Louis IX (saint), 92

Louis XIII, 44 , 127 , 128

Louis XIV, 16 , 135 , 171 n.14, 174

Lucy, Saint, 145 -46

Lupus, Saint, 99 -100, 143 -44

Lutherans, 54 n.4, 59 n.13, 85

Lyon, 171

M

Madeline hospice (of Grenoble), 82 n.27, 88

Magot, Claude Helme (of Entraigues), 177

Main altar: and Eucharistic cult, 133 , 134 , 140

Maison de piété (of Grenoble), 82

Marcieu, 86 -87

Marcou, Saint, 121

Margaret, Saint, 145 -46, 152 n.29, 154

Marin, Marguerite Roman (of Entraigues), 185

Marseille, 115 n.26, 153

Martha, Saint, 153

Martin, Saint, 122 , 141

Mary: chapels of, 107 , 193 ;

cult of, 126 n.72, 128 -29, 152 ;

and Saint Francis de Sales, 131 ;

and Rosary, 39 ;

shrines of, 6 ;

statues of, 30 , 30 n.25, 40 ;

visions of, 30 .

See also Our Lady; Notre-Dame-de-l'Osier; Notre-Dame-de-Milin; Notre-Dame-de-Myans; Notre-Dame-du-Laus

Mary Magdalen, Saint, 121 , 129 , 142 -44, 153 , 156

Mass, 14

Matthew, Saint, 97 -98, 147

Matthias, Saint, 147

Maur, Saint, 110 , 154 , 155 n.39

Maurice, Saint, 141

Mayenne, duke of, 29

Mazet, Pierre (of Entraigues), 189

Michael, Saint, 99 -100, 141 , 153 , 156

Milan, 130

Minimes, 39 n.70

Miracles, 2 , 115 , 116 , 117 , 124

Miribel-les-Echelles, 158

Missions, 46 , 73 , 188 , 188 n.66

Mizoen, 64 , 93

Moirans, 32

Molaret, Louis (curé of Entraigues), 186 , 197

Molines, Matthieu des (of Oris-en-Rattier), 84 n.34

Molinos, Michel, 124

Montagnole, 101

Mont-de-Lans, 88

Montfleury, 45 n.94, 47

Montmartin, Ennemond (bishop of Grenoble, 1707-1719), 149 , 201

Montmélian, 26 , 27 , 33 n.38, 95 , 140 n.8

Moral economy, 82 n.28, 206 , 206 n.5

Moulin-Vieux (hamlet of Lavaldens), 109

Mouxy, 158

N

Nantes-en-Rattier, 85

Napoleon Bonaparte, 28

Nativity, 128

Nicholas, Saint, 142 -43, 145 -46, 152 n.29, 154

Notre-Dame-de-Commiers, 162

Notre-Dame-de-la-Salette, 169

Notre-Dame-de-l'Osier (shrine), 30 , 31 , 42 n.92, 45 , 47

Notre-Dame-de-Mésage, 103 -4, 111 , 163 -62, 205

Notre-Dame-de-Milin (shrine), 30

Notre-Dame-de-Myans (shrine), 30 , 93 , 93 n.62

Notre-Dame-du-Laus (shrine), 30 , 31 , 31 n.29

Nycollet, Antoine (châtelain of the Valbonnais), 181

O

Oisans, 28 , 50 , 51 , 150

Olier, Jean-Jacques (theologian), 132 n.97

Oratory, 21 , 132

Oris-en-Rattier, 84 -85, 134 n.106

Ornon, 163 n.62

Oulles, 90 n.55

Our Lady, 92 , 145 -46. 152, 161 ;

of the Altars, 103 -4;

of Angels, 91 , 92 ;

of August, 162 ;

of the Carmes, 40 -41, 141 ;

of Claix, 161 ;

of Compassion, 128 , 161 n.53;

of Consolation, 128 , 145 -46, 161 , 199 ;

of Graces, 161 ;

of Lachar, 161 -62;

of Mercy, 128 ;

of Mount Carmel, 37 , 40 -41;

of Pity, 128 , 141 , 143 -44, 145 -46, 152 , 161 , 162 , 193 ;

of Protection, 128 ;

of the Rotunda, 161 ;

of the Seven Sorrows, 128 ;

of Suffrage, 40 .

See also Confraternities; Mary

P

Palm Sunday, 97

Paray-le-Monial, 135

Parcellaires (of Entraigues), 175 -77, 189 -90

Parlement (of Grenoble), 16 , 21 , 25 , 44 , 80 , 87 , 142 ;

and Protestantism, 52

Passion, 132

Pastoral visits, 16 -17, 208 ;

as "archives of a repression," 57 ;

bishop's intentions revealed in, 55 ;

and chapels, 148 -51;

description of, 55 , 59 -62;

in Grenoble diocese, 58 -59;

and resistance to Counter-Reformation, 57 ;

ritual of, 54 , 63 , 66 -72;

and saints' cults, 19 , 138 ;

and villagers, 17 , 76 .

See also Counter-Reformation; Le Camus

Paul, Saint, 41

Pax, 14

Penitents, 34 -37, 83 , 133 , 164 ;

in Chambéry, 25 , 40 , 75 ;

in Chapareillan, 86 ;

in Goncelin, 146 ;

in la Mure, 34 -35;

relation to community of, 36 -37;

robes as disguises, 74 ;

in Sassenage, 33 n.38;

in Vif, 33 n.38;

in Vizille, 143 -44.

See also Confraternities

Pénitents blancs de Notre-Dame-du-Gonfalon (in Grenoble), 34 n.45

Penitents of the Blessed Sacrament, 33 n.38, 38

Pénitentes de Sainte-Madeleine, 46 n.96

Périgord, 175

Perpetual Adoration, 133

Perugia, 188

Peter, Saint, 90 n.55, 160

Petites écoles , 4

Peyraud, Jean (of Entraigues), 185

Philip, Saint, 147

Philip Neri, Saint, 130

Piémond, Eustache (memorialist), 29 -30, 107

Pilgrimages, 5 , 30 , 115 , 116 , 137 , 185 .

See also Notre-Dame-de-l'Osier; Notre-Dame-de-Milin; Notre-Dame-de-Myans; Notre-Dame-du-Laus

Pius V (pope), 127 , 129 n.82

Plays, mystery, 23 n.4

Poitou, 175

Poligny, Pierre de (seigneur de Valbonnais), 172

Poncet family (of Entraigues), 182

Pontcharra, 32

Pontchateau, Sébastien Camboust de (correspondent of Le Camus), 24 n.7, 29 , 53 , 56 n.8

Pont-en-Royans, 26 , 51

Portion tongrue , 48

Port-Royal, 21 , 29 , 46

Portugal, 171

Pouillés , 149 , 149 n.23, 151 , 152 , 161 , 193

Pra, Daniel (of Périer), 181

Pra family (of Entraigues), 176 , 189

Pragelas valley: anti-Protestant missions in, 46 n.99

Presle, 80

Procès des tallies , 22

Processions: in Auris-en-Oisans, 31 , 159 ;

to Brandes, 77 -78;

around cemeteries, 70 ;

in Clarafond, 31 ;

communal order displayed in, 14 ;

on Corpus Christi, 35 ;

Counter-Reformation attitude toward, 2 , 5 , 101 , 123 ;

to Echirolles, 31 , 153 ;

to Ecouges, 31 ;

of penitents, 36 ;

as resistance to reformer, 57 ;

rogation, 31 -32, 77 , 78 , 78 n.14, 168 ;

of the Rosary, 40 , 129 , 195 ;

to Saint-Antoine, 30 ;

and saints' cults, 91 , 137 ;

in Tullins, 41 .

See also Confraternities; and under names of individual saints

Propagation of the Faith, Congregation of, 40 , 52

Protestantism: in the Chablais, 130 ;

and christocentrism, 132 ;

and communion, 134 n.106;

conversions to, 57 , 59 , 87 ;

debate between minister of la Mure and curé of Entraigues, 186 , 191 ;

destruction of Grenoble temple, 65 ;

in Entraigues, 169 , 188 -91;

in Grenoble diocese, 51 -52;

in la Mure, 26 , 45 ;

and La Rochelle conflict, 127 ;

Le Camus and, 64 -65, 149 ;

and Mary, 128 -29, 129 n.81;

missions against, 16 n.38;

and Notre-Dame-de-l'Osier, 31 ;

in pastoral visits, 58 ;

in Pont-en-Royans, 26 ;

preachers, 28 ;

relations with priests, 50 ;

relics attacked by, 116 , 124 ;

and saints' cults, 114 -15;

and village religion, challenge to, 208 ;

and village schools, 178 n.35

Provençal, 22 , 23

Provence, 37 , 165

Pure Love, doctrine of, 124

Q

Quietism, 124

R

Rancé, abbé de, 21

Rationalism, Catholic, 117 -18

Recollets, 45

Reconnaissances , 22 , 172

Régale , 61 n.22

Reinages , 95 .

See also Basoche; Youth abbeys

Relics, 2 , 91 , 116 , 122 -24

Religion: and communal conflict, 14 ;

integrative interpretation of, 14 ;

popular, 18 , 89 n.52.

See also Functionalism

Rencurel, 31

Révision de feux, 170

Revolution, French, 153 , 194

Rey, Barthélemy (of Entraigues), 176 , 195

Richelieu, Armand du Plessis, cardinal de, 16 , 22 , 174

Rites of passage, 41 , 42

Rives, 158 n.47

Roch, Saint, 90 n.55, 141 , 143 -44, 145 -46, 157 , 158 ;

confraternities of, 186 , 188 ;

foundations to, 104 n.93;

in Notre-Dame-de-Mésage, 103 -4;

as plague saint, 108 ;

and Thiers, discussed by, 120

Romans, 22 , 24 , 74 n.4, 107

Rome, 80 n.22, 123 , 124

Rosary: chapels of, 143 -44;

confraternities of, 5 , 32 , 38 -40, 129 , 134 ;

cult of, 145 -46, 158 -59, 162 , 164 -65, 204 ;

in Entraigues, 186 , 188 , 191 , 195 -97, 205 .

See also Confraternities

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: Le Camus compared to, 56

Royaumes , 95 . See also Basoche; Youth abbeys

Ruchier (curé of Bourg-d'Oisans), 56 n.9, 66 nn.35 and 37

S

Sabean, David, 82 n.28

Sacred and profane, 2 , 9

Sacred Heart of Jesus, 134 -35

Sadoleto, Jacopo, 114 n.19

Saint-Antoine, abbey of, 107

Saint-Augustin, sisters of, 46 n.96

Saint-Cassin, 101 , 102

Saint-Christophle-en-Oisans, 56 n.8

Sainte-Marie-d'Aloy, 86

Saint-Gervais, 157

Saint-Hippolyte, 78

Saint-Ismier, 13 , 34 , 81 -82

Saint-Jean-de-Dieu, brothers of, 46 n.96

Saint-Jullin, Joseph de la Poype (vicar general of Grenoble diocese), 45 , 58 , 138 , 140 , 149 , 151 , 194

Saint-Just-de-Claix, 26 , 161

Saint-Laurent-du-Pont, 159

Saint-Léger, 66 , 138

Saint-Marcel (conseiller of the Parlement), 87

Saint-Marcellin, 26

Saint-Martin-du-Cornillon, 27 n.18

Saint-Martin-d'Uriage, 148 , 157

Saint-Ombre (Chambéry-le-Vieux), 102

Saint-Paul-de-Varces, 156

Saint-Pierre-d'Albigny, 140 -42, 146 -47, 148 , 159

Saint-Pierre-de-Genebroz, 153

Saint-Pierre-de-Mésage, 103 -4

Saint-Pierre-sous-le-Château, 148

Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy, duke of, 21

Saint-Vincent-du-Plátre, 157

Saints: choice of, 112 ;

and communities, 20 ;

Counter-Reformation and, 117 ;

craft, 152 ;

and cultural change, 20 ;

of the door, 139 , 139 n.6;

false, 116 ;

as friends, 112 -13;

images of, 111 , 112 ;

location and number of devotions, 152 ;

and naming, 112 ;

parish patron, 69 , 90 n.55;

protecting, 152 ;

as symbols, 19 , 125 , 125 n.68;

therapeutic, 152 ;

visions of, 111 .

See also Chapels; Confraternities

Saints, cult of, 12 ;

and canonization, 116 -17;

and chapels, 20 ;

collective and personal meanings of, 110 -13;

and Counter-Reformation, 5 , 114 -125;

instrumental and spiritual meanings of, 113 -14;

local and universal meanings of, 109 -110;

and pastoral visits, 19 , 137 -38;

and vows, 110 -11

Sages-femmes , 59

Salt, blessed, 63 n.26, 78 n.14, 84

Sanctuaires à répit , 6 -7, 7 n.12, 42 , 42 n.79, 161

Sappey, 27

Sarcenas, 66 n.37

Sassenage, 33 n.38, 42 , 188 n.66

Savoy (deanery of), 27 , 30 , 38 , 75 , 150

Savoy (duchy of), 22 , 74 , 87

Savoy, duke of, 57 n.11

Scapular, 143 -44, 148

Scarron, Pierre (bishop of Grenoble,1620-1667), 33 , 44 -45, 58 , 79 , 138 , 151 , 163

Schmitt, Jean-Claude, 195

Scientific revolution, 9

Sebastian, Saint, 90 n.55, 141 , 148 , 152 , 162 ;

in Clarafond, 31 ;

in Entraigues, 186 , 188 ;

foundations to, 104 n.93;

images of, 122 ;

in Notre-Dame-de-Mésage, 103 -4;

as plague saint, 108 .

See also Confraternities

Séchilienne, 163 n.62

Seissenet, 86

Sénat (of Chambéry), 25 , 74

Ser, Nicolas du (of Auris-en-Oisans), 159

Sermons, 4

Sévigné, Mme de, 56 n.6

Sexual behavior, 5 , 5 n.6, 36 , 48 -49, 55 , 81 -82, 92 , 94 -95

Shrines, 18 .

See also Notre-Dame-de-la-Salette; Notre-Dame-de-l'Osier; Notre-Dame-de-Milin; Notre-Dame-de-Myans; Notre-Dame-du-Laus

Siévoz, 163 n.62

Simon, Saint, 147

Skepticism, 118 n.38, 122 n.57.

See also Libertins érudits ; Rationalism, Catholic

Soanen, Jean (bishop of Senez), 120 , 120 n.52

Solminihac, Alain de (bishop of Cahors), 58 n.14

Sourdis, François (cardinal, bishop of Bordeaux), 61

Spain, 134 , 171

T

Tartuffe , 47

Territorial struggle, over communal religion space, 2 , 68 -72, 85 , 94 , 188

Theban martyrs, 116 , 154 n.39

Theodulus, Saint, 155 , 155 n.40

Theresa of Avila, Saint, 58 n.14, 130

Thiers, Jean-Baptiste, 95 n.68, 118 -20;

on saints' cults, 119 -20;

Traité des jeux , 119 ;

Traité des superstitions , 118 , 119

Thomas, Claude (curé of Entraigues), 186

Thomas, Saint (apostle), 147

Thompson, E. P., 82 n.28

Touchet family (of Entraigues), 183 n.48, 189

Tour sans venin, 121

Tousquan, François (of Entraigues), 177

Transfiguration of Our Lord, 90 n.55, 163 -64, 163 nn.61-63, 198 -99

Trent, Council of, 1 , 59 , 60 , 117

Trinity, 141 , 163

True Cross, 124

Tullins, 26 , 39 n.70, 41 , 42 n.79, 161

Turc, Pierre (sacristan of Valbonnais), 185

Turin, 22 , 25 , 46

U

Universa (papal bull of 1642), 42 n.83

Urbin, Saint, 141

Uriol, 99 -100

Ursulines, 32 , 45 , 47

V

Valbonnais, 90 n.55, 148 , 150 , 169 ;

priory of, 185 ;

seigneury of, 28 , 172

Valence, 24

Valentine, Saint, 148

Valjouffrey, 169

Varces, 98 , 161

Vaulnaveys, 81 , 81 n.26

Verbe incarné, 132

Vercors, 26 , 27 , 27 n.16, 31 , 150 -51

Versailles, 22 , 25 , 46

Vienne, 24

Viennois, Arnaud de (of Vizille), 142

Vif, 33 n.38, 64 , 99

Vigne, Alexandre (Protestant minister of Grenoble), 65 n.33

Village notables, 82 ;

as cultural and religious intermediaries, 8 , 83 , 191 , 202 , 207 ;

French-speaking, 23 ;

and Le Camus, 56 -57, 83 .

See also Counter-Reformation, and aggravation of social tensions

Village religion, 17 , 90 , 167 ;

and chapels in Entraigues, 194 -95;

and clergy, 32 ;

Counter-Reformation and, 56 , 56 n.7, 164 -65;

definition of, 8 -9, 18 , 124 , 168 , 183 -84;

in Savoy, 155 ;

saints as symbols in, 125 -26.

See also Cultural change; Culture; Religion, and communal conflict

Villard (hamlet of Entraigues), 169 , 170 , 200 -201

Villar-d'Arêne, 86 n.41

Villard-Aymon, 186

Villard-de-Lans, 27 n.16

Villard-Reculas, 78

Vimines, 80 n.22, 101 , 102 , 158 n.49

Vinay, 26 , 30 , 151

Vincent, Saint, 41 , 119 , 147

Vincent de Paul, Saint, 58 n.14, 130

Virgin, the. See Mary; Our Lady

Visions, 11 , 115

Visitandines, 45 , 130 , 131 , 135

Vizille, 142 -44, 146 , 151

Vogues, 42 , 43 , 57 , 96 , 158 , 158 n.49, 159 , 162

Voiron, 26

Voragine, Jacob: The Golden Legend , 127 n.72

Vovelle, Michel, 165

W

Wars of Religion, 29 , 43

Water, blessed, 78 , 84

Y

Youth abbeys, 93 .

See also Basoche; Reinages; Royaumes

Preferred Citation: Luria, Keith P. Territories of Grace: Cultural Change in the Seventeenth-Century Diocese of Grenoble. Berkeley:  University of California Press,  c1991 1991. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft6n39p11n/