Le Dimanche, une histoire

The Sabbath has not been a day of rest for French historians in recent years. Rather, it has been the subject of research and debate, heated by the spotlight focused upon it by debates around the neo-liberal loosening of Sunday trading regulations in France. Jean-François Barrielle’s Quand dimanche était un jour de fête (1982) was just the first to present a somewhat rosy picture of the republican Sunday, incarnated in France by the law of 13 July 1906, a day devoted to family and leisure. Robert Beck’s Histoire du dimanche (1997) furnished an altogether more substantial study of the French Sabbath as a succession of mutations, from Lord’s Day to popular feast, through republican rest-day to a thoroughly secularised present. These are just two of a score of books in French devoted to the subject since the late 1980s, and which serve as an unwritten subtext to the work under review. Alain Cabantous’ study distinguishes itself from these other publications in three ways. Firstly, it concentrates on the preceding period (though the dates in the title are interpreted loosely) from 1600 to 1830. Secondly, it does so in the broad and comparative context of Western Europe. Thirdly, it manages to combine a sensitive synthesis of available studies with a significant amount of newly pieced together evidence—the freshest of which comes from a study of fifty or so published diaries from throughout this period. The result is an interesting, sophisticated, original and well-balanced text, which is also very readable. In a subtle way, Cabantous’ chronology resituates the French debate about Sunday back to the earlier period, providing a denser chronological and interpretative perspective to what he sees as a continuing battleground. At the heart of a common Christian culture, even its name (‘Sabbath’; ‘Sunday’; ‘Lord’s Day’; ‘décadi’—the last being the Revolutionary Sunday adopted in 1793) evokes the heated debates around it. In the wake of the religious changes of the sixteenth century, religious authorities (Protestant as well as Catholic) sought to turn Sunday into a moment of Christianising praxis for communities and individuals. They found themselves confronted by all sorts of difficulties, ones that illustrate to perfection the difficult road of ‘acculturating’ a Christianising Sunday in the lives of ordinary people. But their efforts were not entirely wasted, and Cabantous’ analysis (chs. 5 and 6) of the impact of sermons, of Sunday schooling and catechismal classes, of parochial meetings and of domestic piety, is a remarkably nuanced picture of assiduity on the part of some, counterpointed by the sullen reluctance of others. The second half of the book turns to the even more complex relationship between the sacral and unsacral Sunday. Confessional differences mingled with national distinctiveness to produce different responses to the problems that a heavily Christianising Sunday posed to older traditions (of feast and carnival, of allowable work, etc.), and the emergence of new ones (the section on eighteenth-century dominical promenades is particularly interesting here). By the eighteenth century, how you dressed for Sunday, what you ate, and how you entertained yourself (or not) were being integrated into distinctive national consciousnesses and expressed by social groups in very different ways. Cabantous has read widely and synthetically, and some of the comparative dimensions of his conclusions are interesting (and surprising, e.g. the prevalence of Sunday criminality—p. 247). He certainly manages to place English sabbatarianism into a wider context, though he perhaps fails to capture adequately its significance in Scottish culture. The post-1700 ‘dominical discordances’ are, alongside the divergent efforts and patchy impact of political and ecclesiastical authorities to enforce Sunday observances, the deeper background for his conclusion. The religious contentions of the sixteenth century turned the Sabbath into a temporality where people were expected to become other and better than they would be on other days. The social resistance to that reformed temporality in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries created different sorts of Sundays for different sorts of people: ‘À chacun son dimanche à chacun sa nuit’ (p. 273) he concludes, an allusion to his preceding Histoire de la Nuit (2009; rev. ante , cxxv [2010], 1252–4). Read together with the latter text, Cabantous’ present book makes an impressive case for considering the cultural construction of time as one of the crucial, but often overlooked, determinants of our historical consciousness

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