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.