Violence and the Sacred in Nineteenth-Century France

In a trenchant analysis of postrevolutionary religious conflict, Claude Langlois argues that the sectarian violence associated with the sixteenth-century Wars of Religion, the revolt of the Camisards, and the French Revolution largely disappeared in France during the nineteenth century. He attributes this decline both to the civil peace inaugurated by the Concordat and to the gradual displacement of religious violence by political and social As the articles in this forum attest, religious violence did change in important respects, but I would argue less for its disappearance than for its fundamental transformation. This transformation can be fully appreciated only by situating it in a longer history of religious violence, from the Wars of Religion to the Third Republic, and by assessing that violence not only in terms of its frequency but also in terms of its changing forms of expression. In recent years historians have devoted a tremendous amount of attention to the subject of sixteenth-century religious rites of violence. 1 There has, however, been a profound lack of consensus among

Ancient history · Political science · European Political History Analysis · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Religion and Society Interactions

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