Cliques and Participation

Cliques and Participation: Organizational Dynamics in the Penitents Bourras Penitential confraternities first appeared in thirteenth-century northern Italy. By the sixteenth century, they had diffused to southern France. There they reached their height in popularity in the seventeenth century, spreading from the major cities to the smallest villages and hamlets. Marseille was the premier city for penitential confraternities in France. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there were at least twelve confraternities functioning at any given time in that city, approximately twice as many as Limoges and Avignon, Marseille's closest rivals in terms of the number of penitential associations. How many men actually joined Marseille's confraternities is hard to estimate. The registers for the larger confraternities available for the period I600-I790 show that membership fluctuated between 500 and I,ooo men for any given year. The smaller confraternities had statutes which limited their sizes to less than 150 members. A fair estimate would put the number of men enrolled in penitential confraternities somewhere between 6,ooo and 9,ooo at any given time during the eighteenth century, a period when the total population of the city hovered around oo,000. 1 Confraternities were lay brotherhoods dedicated to the idea that collective prayer and the performance of religious rites could

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