Guillaume Cuchet writes that from about 1955 to 1995 religious history was one of the most flourishing branches of historical writing in France, with the 1960s and ’70s being a particularly rich period. But he believes that the subdiscipline is now in crisis, with few university posts becoming available, and a lack of interest in history on the part of the Catholic Church. In the earlier golden age many of its leading practitioners were liberal Catholics, influenced by Vatican II, and open to a newer kind of religious history, more ecumenical than the ‘ecclesiastical history’ of earlier times, more critical of the dominant orthodoxies of earlier periods, and influenced by social history. As with historians of any other kind, these convictions influenced the questions that they asked and, to some extent, the answers that they provided. However, Cuchet repeatedly emphasises the extent of the ‘rupture’ in French religion and French society between the years 1965 and 1980. Subsequent generations have been distanced from France's Catholic traditions to an extent scarcely possible in earlier times. Yet, potentially, he suggests, this has advantages for religious history, if conceived in broader terms. Cuchet in fact prefers to speak of a ‘history of beliefs’. Born in 1973, he himself says that his Catholic upbringing left little impression upon him, but that he has always been interested in religion, and especially in belief. His own work has focused mainly on the history of spiritualism and of purgatory. A major theme in the present book – part of a series on history as a discipline – is the change in what is believable. He offers a series of reflections on the ways in which this has happened, while offering many observations in passing. (For example, that book reviews should be taken much more seriously and treated as a major element in historical debate.) Two periods especially interest him. One is the 1850s, in which he sees a decline of preaching on hell, a more intense interest in purgatory, and a boom in spiritualism. The other is the 1950s and ’60s. A turning-point came around 1962–3, when missing mass ceased to be treated as a mortal sin. In an extended discussion of Jean Delumeau's work on ‘Sin and fear’, Cuchet notes that from Delumeau's liberal Catholic perspective the ‘pastoral strategy based on fear’ was ultimately counter-productive and a factor in deChristianisation; from Cuchet's own more detached perspective it was very effective in ensuring that Catholics stuck to the rules, and the gentler approach introduced during the 1960s contributed to the decline in mass attendance in the years following. Other chapters deal with the debates surrounding Claude Langlois's work on St Teresa of Lisieux, and, back in the 1850s, de Broglie's allegedly ‘rationalist’ history of the Church and the Roman Empire. I was especially interested in the chapter on the sociologists who made a meticulous study of Catholic religious practice in the 1940s and ’50s, but failed to predict its collapse in the later ’60s and ’70s. Though the causes of this collapse, which was common to most of the countries of Western Europe at this time, are not his main concern, it is interesting, in view of the ongoing debate, to note that he puts his money on a combination of changes within the Church and the far-reaching social changes described by Henri Mendras in La Seconde Révolution française, rather than ‘1968’ (a favourite in the French literature), or gender and sex (highlighted in much of the English-language literature). Cuchet concludes with a visit to a Paris bookshop, comparing the relatively modest section on ‘Religion’ with the huge section labelled ‘Psychology’, including books on such topics as how to be happy, how to deal with our neuroses, near death experiences, and much else. Humanity's problems, he notes, remain the same, but ways of dealing with them have completely changed. Historians of beliefs, he suggests, should be switching their attention to the vast field revealed in the bookshop, and away from Catholicism.

Although the ‘rupture’ of the 1960s and ’70s has obvious British parallels, the changes at that time were less dramatic, as Britain was already an overwhelmingly urban society, and there were few British parallels to the rural ‘Christendoms’ of 1950s France. The context is certainly different is other ways too. The centuries-long history of British religious pluralism means that there is no equivalent to the inescapable presence both of Catholicism and of the laïc tradition in French society. There are many and diverse ways of being Christian and of being secular and this is reflected in the historiography – think, for instance, of the powerful and distinctive contribution of Methodist historians, of Marxist historians whose writing was influenced by their Nonconformist roots, or more recently the emergence of a distinct school of Evangelical historians belonging to an international community of like-minded scholars. It is also significant that whereas French universities (except for Strasbourg) are strictly secular, British religious historians work in departments of both history and of theology, and sometimes switch between the two. I would guess that the boom in religious history started a little later than in France, and has remained on a more modest scale, but that it has lasted longer. Cuchet's observations about the Paris bookshop would no doubt apply to many British bookshops too. His call for scholarly study of the beliefs reflected there is being answered by such scholars as Paul Heelas, Linda Woodhead or Steven Sutcliffe, though mainly from the point of view of sociology and religious studies rather than history. It must be hoped that Cuchet's book will inspire historians of ‘religion’ or ‘beliefs’ in other countries to reflect on how their field has evolved under the influence of religious and social change – and that equally fascinating volumes on these other countries will be the result.