Saintete et Lumieres. Hagiographie, Spiritualite et propagande religieuse dans la France du XVIIIe siecle

Sainthood and Enlightenment have not been conventionally associated. Eric Suire’s important book comprehensively displaces that disjuncture. His is an exhaustive study that learnedly covers every conceivable aspect of sainthood in eighteenth-century France; it is rich in statistics throughout, with careful consideration and classification of sources. The keynote theme is one of evolution, not disappearance, for Saints were still ubiquitous. They were in hagiographies, liturgies, panegyrics, even in new building schemes, such as the choir of Bourges cathedral, completed in the 1760s, a suitable resting place for the relics of Saint-Etienne, but with canons’ stalls celebrating the minor, local saints of the Berry and its first evangelists. Suire establishes the super-abundance of literature on saintly subjects showing that hagiographical editions were not in decline, with numbers produced in 1761–88 actually superior to those of 1680–1715. He dates the renewal of production to the 1720s when public interest was intense in that apparently most unenlightened of manifestations—miracles. And taking issue with Catherine Maire, he argues that this interest was sustained for decades, otherwise the huge celebrity of the vagabond healer, Benedict Joseph Labre, immediately before and after his death in 1783 is inexplicable. For the eighteenth century was also a time in which canonisation recommenced with alacrity beginning in the long pontificate of Clement XI (1700–21) as Counter-Reformation holy men and women received the ultimate recognition, a reflection of the extraordinary growth of interest, lay interest, in their lives. And, since relatively so much was known about their lives and their faith, there was every incentive to publish about them, and authors (Suire is insistent that they were far from second-rate) could expect a good return from sales. Among the literate bourgeoisie, legendary saints may have been in decline, the sanctified of the last three centuries were not; the marvellous was out, holiness was now the fashionable preference, as glimpsed in such instances as the Jesuit novice Aloysius Gonzaga, who died aged 23 in 1691, was canonized in 1726 by Benedict XIII, and was proclaimed the patron of students three years later. Among women, the Virgin’s mother, St Anne, came back into fashion as well as a renewal of interest in saintly figures from the Old Testament. Enlightenment historians may have distanced themselves from hagiographical models but French hagiographers were quick to learn from worldly authors, adapting devices such as the epistolary novel to frame their own narratives.

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