Accused of numerous scandalous affairs—from cavorting with women, beating a beggar, and dressing his dog up as a jester, to failing to teach children the Catechism—Nicolas Hyacinthe Vernier, the curé (parish priest) of Mareuil-sur-Ay, submitted to questioning from the officialité (the ecclesiastical tribunal) in 1770. Scandal in the Parish narrates stories from Vernier's case, focusing on the curé as well as parishioners’ behavior over several decades. The case reveals mundane religious practices in a small village along with salacious gossip at the end of the eighteenth century. Using these details as case studies, Karen E. Carter reveals that in rural France, the Catholic Reformation was still a work-in-progress well into the Age of Revolutions.
Countering much of Enlightenment historiography that has overlooked religious experience in the late eighteenth century, Carter demonstrates how “religion, in its various forms, was still fundamental to rural life” (8). This argumentative vane is growing in scholarly inquiry, with historians like Bryan A. Banks and Erica Johnson providing nuance to the study of religious experience in the French revolutionary period through their edited volume The French Revolution and Religion in a Global Perspective: Freedom and Faith (Palgrave McMillan, 2017). According to Carter, despite the supposed growing secularization in France, “religion mattered,” with “the regular rotation of mass, prayers, sacraments, and rituals” (8). In exploring how religion was still a fundamental part of rural life, Carter also argues that the Catholic Church remained communal in nature, as medievalists have long contended. These related arguments provide readers with a different, more complex understanding of the revolutionary period in regard to religious practice and experience.
Scandal in the Parish gives some titillating stories, but as Carter explains in an articulate methodology section, this work is not a history of exceptional characters. Instead, through six chapters that each reveal different perspectives and aspects of the Vernier case, Carter writes a history of “obscure individuals” (13). Scandal in the Parish serves as a model of how to write this type of popular history, giving recognition to the majority of history's otherwise unnoteworthy individuals. Graduate seminars and undergraduate methods courses will find Carter's book an excellent addition to their reading lists and discussions.
The first three chapters illustrate how religion in rural France deeply mattered to individuals and was a communal experience. For example, chapter 1, “Priest, Behaving Badly,” contends that people cared about the quality of their local curé. Parishioners in Mareuil-sur-Ay were deeply concerned about their children's lack of catechism instruction since Vernier had refused to teach the village children (32). Parents, according to their testimony to the officialité, saw the role of curé as sacred and fundamental to their local society and sense of spiritual well-being. Carter argues that villagers desperately wanted, needed, and demanded quality spiritual guidance up to and through the revolutionary period.
Although villagers’ desire for this type of religious guidance helps prove Carter's communal church argument, the real crux of her thesis on religious experience takes center stage in chapter 3, “Scandalous Sacraments.” Using the Vernier case, Carter examines various sacraments, including baptism and confession, showing how tensions often existed between priests and the laity over these rituals and practices. Carter illustrates how sacraments deeply mattered to individuals during a supposedly more secular period. The actual practice of religious sacrament did not seem to wane in late eighteenth-century rural France as others have suggested.
Furthering her communal church thesis, chapter 5, “The Affairs of the Curés,” explores how the “laity themselves saw it as their duty and their right to hold curés to . . . higher standards” (199). Priests served the community, answerable to the villagers. Not only does this chapter explore the responsibilities between priest, community, and laity, but it also illuminates the long history of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church. In particular, this chapter struck me as a missed opportunity to delve more deeply into a gendered analysis of religious sexual abuse. Perhaps that would have distracted too much from Carter's central theses, though it would have added an important perspective. Readers will certainly draw their own connections between these stories of abuse in the eighteenth century with those from the twentieth century, seeing Carter's discussion of parishioners’ continued struggle with sexual assault, harassment, and the revelation of this abuse by church officials as a historical continuity. Considered “men apart” and “held to higher standards” than the lay man, Carter states that priests’ sexual transgressions were that much more shocking (198). But this is a modern perception as well. Acknowledging this in greater detail would have been appreciated.
Additionally, chapter 5 does not address the contemporary Enlightenment critiques of the Catholic Church. Throughout the 1750s, 1760s, 1770s, and 1780s, Enlightenment writers endlessly maligned convents and monasteries as sites of illicit sex and debauchery. Popular literature was filled with obscene stories, illustrations, and poems with priests and nuns as central characters. Carter's examination of the Vernier case and other officialité records like it proves that some church members were, in fact, engaging in illicit sexual activity. Carter could have included a bit more discussion of how these officialité details were weaponized against the church in order to create a social critique of the institution. Balancing the philosophes’ critiques with a view of actual religious practice would have allowed for further historiographical intervention into Enlightenment studies.
Despite these minimal shortcomings, Scandal in the Parish is an engaging and thoroughly researched book. Carter provides an exceptional view into the daily religious practices of an eighteenth-century village. At the same time, she makes important interventions into the historiography of the revolutionary period, the Enlightenment, and religious history. Instead of viewing France's religious experiences as waning during the last half of the eighteenth century, Carter and others are leading a growing field of research that sees religion as much more central to the story of the revolution and daily life.
