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.