Thomas Kselman. Conscience and Conversion

What can conversions tell us about religion, and freedom of conscience, in nineteenth-century France? This is the question at the heart of Thomas Kselman’s book Conscience and Conversion: Religious Liberty in Post-Revolutionary France. It is a question that allows Kselman to bring to light and explore an important tension governing life after the French Revolution: the sense of a continuing need for some legitimate authority to bind society, and the privileging of freedom of conscience, which was a right won in the Revolution. Kselman focuses the playing out of this tension on religion, centering his discussion on the Catholic Church. Despite its losses in the Revolution, “the pull of the Catholic Church remained powerful” (7). But adherence to Catholicism required submission of one’s own conscience. So what place could religion, in the form of Catholicism, now occupy? Kselman’s two opening chapters establish a context, exploring the evolution of the idea of religious liberty over three centuries and commencing with the Reformation. Kselman first follows changing philosophical debates and state policies, to establish “the complicated political and spiritual landscape” within which the subjects of his book “lived and moved” (16). His second chapter gives a broader context, exploring the question of religious liberty as it was represented in the arts. Here, Kselman argues that religious liberty was an idea that involved and fascinated the French in a broad sense, not just those for whom it became deeply personal.

Conscience · Context (archaeology) · Freedom of thought · Political science · Politics · Religious freedom · Sociology · State (computer science) · European Political History Analysis · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies