Karen Carter's study of Catholics in the French countryside during the seventeenth and eighteenth century focuses on catechism instruction in the rural parishes in three dioceses (Auxerre, Châlons-sur-Marne, and Reims). She takes an apparently obvious premise—that education of children in the period of Catholic Reform succeeded in producing a more knowledgeable and more doctrinally correct generation of adults—and demonstrates the many subtleties and complexities in this premise, infusing it with new evidence and insights in what should be required reading for historians of religion, society, and education in France before the Revolution.
Children's catechisms have not, as Carter observes, gotten much respect from historians; she gives them the attention they deserve. These sources provide a wealth of information on standards, education, rural religious practices, and even gender differences. To determine the effectiveness of catechism instruction, she uses parish visitations, which improved in historical usefulness in the 1650s. To offset the potential pitfalls here—anxiety, occasional manipulation of results to make the curé look better, and so forth—she adds correspondence to bishops, written both by curés and by “village notables,” and questionnaires sent out by bishops to the curés. This combination of print and manuscript sources, with different intended audiences and different points of view, provides remarkable insight into Early Modern rural France.
The study of confessionalization has among its consequences a significant challenge to the thesis of de-Christianization during the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment: as Carter notes, “The programs of the Catholic Reformation could not be implemented with any sort of effectiveness until the eighteenth century, when schools and catechism classes became a regular part of parish life” (16). Studying childhood education brings into focus not merely the “Reformation from above” model in which catechism classes were required by a hierarchy, but the relationship between the laity and the clergy in a cooperative endeavor. Parents were instrumental in hiring schoolmasters, in seeing that their children attended schools, and in either reinforcing or undermining catechetical instruction at home, so even if clergy were the teachers, they were far from independent.
Carter focuses on local catechisms, and investigates a total of 100 issued by bishops for use in their dioceses. Bishops wanted young children to memorize and recite the questions and answers while simultaneously learning discipline and good behavior. Rote was common to all forms of education at the beginning of the Catholic Reformation, but new forms of teaching, emphasizing reasoning, were introduced during the Enlightenment. What Carter correctly notes about this is that Enlightenment thinkers did not seek to impose the new method on religious educators, nor did this new method influence the rural areas much. Thus the bishops were, in fact, staying current, and their introductions show that they thought deeply about their charge: they “often included . . . material outlining [their] ideas about religious education and instructing [their] curés in catechetical pedagogy” (69), and pointed out the improvements they had made over previous versions. This raises more questions, though: what would happen to students who had memorized one version (in their own or a different diocese) and were questioned on another? Had they actually learned anything, or only memorized a text? Carter concludes that memorization was privileged over understanding, even during a period of dramatic challenges to this pedagogy.
On the subject of behavior, Carter demonstrates that catechetical instruction was often more subtle than an emphasis on memorization would suggest. Weekly classes with specified seating arrangements, rewards and punishments based on behavior rather than learning, and other behavioral concerns were as central to the classes as the subject was, and had more obvious long-term effects. Honesty, morality, and respect were inculcated in the context of religious lessons, but would last beyond them and thus create model Christian citizens.
Part two of the book turns to primary education in the three dioceses and proceeds from the premise that clergy had to be reformed before reforming their parishioners. After a brief review of seminary and university education available to priests, Carter moves to the discussion of how curés improved in the performance of their duties by using the tools of the bishops: visitation records, synods, and correspondence. Here she shows remarkable results: in five deaneries in Auxerre during 1716, she finds that approximately 75% of the curés were “intelligent, educated, and capable men who performed their religious duties” (121). By 1774, 94% of the curés were teaching catechism every Sunday (126). Attendance, though, was another matter: in the 1720s and 1730s, about 15% of curés complained that parishioners were not sending their children to the classes (127–8). Of course, not all religious education took place on Sundays, as the village schoolmasters were also responsible for formal instruction in doctrine and behavior; bishops oversaw this as well, and often asked for more time and emphasis on such matters in the classroom while expecting the schoolmasters to serve outside their official duties as well, modeling good behavior and actively engaging in community devotions. This, particularly in the rural areas, turned lay schoolteachers into parochial assistants, which could be quite valuable in areas where priests were rare: they served, among other things, as choir masters, funeral assistants, and record-keepers. It also blurred the jurisdictional lines between curés and teachers, and sometimes caused conflicts over how duties were performed or how often they might be expected, but these rarely became bitter, likely (as Carter speculates) because the curés really needed the teachers, so they kept mum.
Laypersons within the villages paid much of the burden of the schools, and during the period in question they increasingly sent their children to be educated outside the home. As a result, Carter concludes that the petits écoles were responsible for a significant amount of catechizing and therefore helped to enact the Catholic Reformation. They taught literacy, but in the context of doctrine and behavior sanctioned by bishops—and therefore were instruments of reformation. Creating Catholics is a very successful argument for a broader understanding of both the chronology of the Catholic Reform and of the cooperation between laity and parish priests in enacting it.
