THE FRENCH CHURCH AND THE REVOLUTION Jansénismes et Lumières: pour un autre XVIIIe siècle. By Monique Cottret. Paris: A. Michel, 1998. Pp. 418. ISBN 2-226-10475-5. 160 Fr. Frs. Catholic Revival in the age of the Baroque: religious identity in Southwest Germany, 1550–1750. By Marc R. Forster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xiv+268. ISBN 0-521-78044-6. £40.00. Church and society in eighteenth-century France,I: The clerical establishment and its social ramifications;II: The religion of the people and the politics of religion. By John McManners. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. Pp. xviii+817, xiv+866. ISBN 0-19-827003-8 and 0-19-827004-6. £59.90. Christianity under the ancien régime, 1648–1789. By W. R. Ward. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. xii+269. ISBN 0-521-55361-X. £13.95.

Extract

If few historians of the French ancien régime and Revolution entirely ignore the role of the Church, most treat it perfunctorily and many make crass errors in writing about it. To start with examples of error, J. F. Bosher declared in his generally admirable The French Revolution: ‘at least nine abbots wrote for the Encyclopédie’. Actually, at least twenty-three abbés did so, but no abbots. J. C. D. Clark, in his recent edition of Burke's Reflections, attempts to explain Burke's discussion of French commendatory abbots by defining commendam as it was used in England, which makes Burke's argument incomprehensible. Until now it has not been easy to find a work, at any rate in English, which would settle such matters authoritatively. McManners's Church and society in eighteenth-century France will certainly do that. A delightful chapter deals with the vast majority of abbés who were not abbots, that is, those who had taken the very first steps towards an ecclesiastical career, probably to enhance their educational prospects, but never taken vows or significant orders. To this group belonged such notorious philosophes as the abbé Diderot and the abbé Raynal.