Regular readers of Church History should be forgiven if they have missed the sea-change that has recently occurred in the historiography of missionaries in the French empire. Long a neglected field, especially when compared with the abundant scholarship on missionaries in the British empire, the study of French missionary activity has seen a resurgence in the last ten years. In God's Empire: French Missionaries and the Modern World is a marvelous collection of essays that explores “the variety of ways missionaries and other religious workers complemented and complicated French engagement with non-European societies around the globe” (6).

The editors, J. P. Daughton and Owen White, have been at the forefront of this new research agenda. Daughton's path-breaking work, An Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880–1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) argued that the secular French Third Republic's colonial ideology of the “civilizing mission” was paradoxically shaped by interactions with French missionaries working throughout the empire. Using archival sources in Paris, Rome, Hanoi, and Tahiti, Daughton illustrated the tensions between colonial authorities, French Catholic and Protestant missionaries, and the indigenous peoples they attempted to “civilize” and convert. White has made a similar case for French missionaries in West Africa, extending the chronological frame to include the decolonization movements of the twentieth century (“The Decivilizing Mission: Auguste Dupuis-Yakouba and French Timbuktu,” French Historical Studies 27 [Summer 2004], 541–68).

Daughton and White have brought together an outstanding group of scholars from the United States, France, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and China who all employ a similar methodological approach toward missionary activity. In their introduction, Daughton and White provide four broad themes that unite the essays: the complicated relationship between missionaries and the modern world, the tension between national and religious loyalties, the development of a global civil society, and the transition from colonial to postcolonial missions. The twelve essays that follow are relatively short (approximately twenty pages each) and have abundant endnotes. They are grouped into four parts divided by geographic regions: the Atlantic World (Michael Pasquier, Troy Feay, and Philippe Deslisle); North Africa and the Middle East (Sarah Curtis, Julia Clancy-Smith, Jennifer Dueck, and Bertrand Taithe); East and Southeast Asia (Ji Li and Charles Keith); and Africa and Oceania (Jean-François Zorn, Kenneth Orosz, and Elizabeth Foster). A particularly useful afterword by Norman Etherington compares the experience of French missions with those in the British Empire, arguing that “underlying similarities outweighed eye-catching differences” (280). The volume concludes with a select bibliography of secondary sources in French and English—though without a list of the archival collections used—as well as a helpful index.

For such a broadly framed project, this volume is surprisingly internally cohesive. What links these essays together are a similar set of archival sources and common thematic threads. These scholars rely primarily on the archives of fifteen missionary orders and organizations located in Paris, Lyon and Rome, including the Congrégation des Pères du Saint-Esprit (the Spiritans), the Frères de l'Instruction Chrétienne, the Filles de la Charité, the Sœurs de Saint-Joseph de l'Apparition, the Missionnaires d'Afrique (the White Fathers), the Œuvre de la Propagation de la Foi, and the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide. Several of the authors also use the diplomatic, military, and colonial archives of the French state. Only Pasquier, Clancy-Smith, Keith and Li use archival sources located outside of France. Though the reliance on these sources provides an excellent portrait of the “lived experiences of French missionary priests” (30) (and women religious), it does so at the expense of indigenous voices.

A common thread is the “contention or collaboration” (47) that “complicated” or “complemented” (6) relations among missionaries, colonial administrators, host governments, and rival religious orders. Conflict often centered on control over local marital, labor and educational practices, such as cohabitation, polygamy, forced labor, slavery, and indigenous schooling. Pasquier's study of ecclesiastical politics in early nineteenth century New Orleans shows “what happened when French missionary conceptions of Catholicism collided with the accumulation of over one hundred years of local religious customs and traditions.” (30) Similarly, Delisle describes the “incompatible visions” (73) of Haiti's ruling elite and of Breton clerics invited to the independent republic after 1860 (69), as well as the Bretons’ own “quasi-military spirit of conquest” (73) that fed their competition with local Protestants. Taithe locates a similar “missionary militarism” after 1889 in the violent encounter between literal “soldiers of Christ” mobilized against Islamic slave traders in the Sahara and the Congo (129). Orosz vividly details the “catechist war” in interwar Cameroon between Spiritan Fathers and an aggressively anticlerical French colonial governor, a conflict echoed in Keith's essay on church and state tensions in Indochina during the Great War.

Other essays show surprising cases of cooperation. Zorn shows how the Protestant Paris Mission attempted with varying degrees of success to mediate Franco-British tensions in the Pacific and Indian Oceans by taking over the control of missions formerly operated by the London Missionary Society. Curtis and Clancy-Smith explain why the Muslim rulers of the Ottoman Empire and precolonial Tunisia welcomed the presence of French women religious.

In several cases, conflict and cooperation increased opportunities for the colonized. In his study of the slave emancipation of 1848, Feay argues that “the desire for utopia . . . was an underlying element that united administrators and missionaries while locking them into conflicts over motivation and authority. These conflicts allowed colonized peoples the space to use religious experience to create communities that could challenge European political and cultural authorities” (47). Feay's answer for how and why freed slaves in the French empire readily adopted Catholicism strongly resonates with the essays by Li, Foster, and Dueck on the development of indigenous Catholicism in northeastern China, Senegal, and Syria.

Daughton closes An Empire Divided with the hypothesis that “the most profound legacy of French republican imperialism may well be, ironically, Christianity” (266). The research in these pages seems to bear him out.