Max Weber identified the “disenchantment of the world” as a defining characteristic of modernity, but a profusion of books over the past five years has unveiled another side of the modern. Following Alex Owen's case for The Place of Enchantment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) in modernizing Britain, Corinna Treitel's location of occultism in an emergent “German modern” in A Science for the Soul (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), and Lynn Sharp's interpretation of nineteenth-century French spiritism as Secular Spirituality (Lanham, Md.: Lexington, 2006), John Warne Monroe sees a modern French religious landscape dotted by Laboratories of Faith. A “crisis of factuality” (3), he argues, elicited, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a flurry of innovative religious movements that sought—ultimately unsuccessfully—to ground spirituality in empirical science, and which left a lasting mark on French life.

The book's particular strength is not in its basic interpretation of modernity—which is not new—but in its cogent narrative and solid grounding of spiritism in its political and social context. Through five lengthy chapters, it traces the development and transformation of religious heterodoxy amid the rising authority of scientific empiricism, the emergence of a secular French republic, ideological conflict between secular leftists and the Catholic right, and the advent of experimental psychology. Monroe begins in the 1850s as American spiritualism's tables tournantes, newly arrived in France, became “ciphers” (16) through which several groups addressed their anxieties in the wake of the Revolution of 1848 and the decline of the Second Republic. Conservative Catholics sought to transform them from agents of moral decline and political subversion into empirical proof of Catholic dogma; scientists used the bugbear of an unrestrained amour du merveilleux to bolster their claims to technocratic authority and virtuous objectivity; and demoralized leftists looked to them for a rational alternative to Catholic orthodoxy and a consoling affirmation of their revolutionary hopes. The second chapter (1853–1859) identifies a widening split during the 1850s between therapeutic mesmerists and spiritualist mesmerists, the former defending what they considered pure objectivity and mesmerism's medical mission against spiritualism's dangerously emotional subjectivism, and the latter countering that scientific objectivity required openness to such metaphysical possibilities as spirit intervention. The spiritualists won the day, watching organized spiritism develop during the 1860s while mesmeric medicine faded. Chapter 3 (1857–1869) traces the “invention” of spiritism, against the backdrop of the authoritarian Second Empire, by Hippolyte Léon Dénizard Rivail. Rivail, who took the name Allen Kardec, intended spiritism to be a thoroughly modern and respectable religion: rational, codified, centralized, progressive, democratic, empirically grounded, consoling, shorn of revolutionary content, appealing to an emerging professional bourgeoisie, and consonant with the Catholicism it proposed to supplement. It would be “fundamentally masculine” (120) in practice as well as in doctrine, with objective and sober male séance interrogators attempting (not always successfully) to uphold gender conventions by controlling the ecstatic behavior, unruly subjectivity, and potentially disruptive power of female and working-class male mediums.

Chapter 4 (1870–1880) examines spiritism's troubles amid the anxieties generated by popular urban uprisings in a new but conservative French republic. Now led by the pugnacious, radically republican, anti-Catholic Pierre-Gaëtan Leymarie, spiritism began to appear subversive to French authorities. Spiritists touted their religion as ideal for a modern and rational French republic, but the Catholic right saw in it evidence of the revolutionary disruption and religious chaos spawned by a secular France, and thus of society's need for clerical authority, while leftists feared that it, like Catholicism, constituted an attack on reason, republican liberty, and modernity by “feminine” mental weakness and irrational superstition. The resulting tensions peaked in 1875. Seeking further empirical support, spiritists had turned both to psychical research, which affirmed the reality of séance phenomena, and to spirit photography, which promised to counteract psychical researchers' psychological explanations. But republican and Catholic critics tried and condemned spiritism in the press after Edouard Buguet was caught producing fraudulent photographs. Chapter 5 (1880–1914) finds spiritism enjoying a fin de siècle resurgence but struggling with the new challenges posed by the rise of experimental psychology and emerging theories of a subjective subconscious—a “multivalent self.” While psychologists agreed that trance phenomena made the subconscious self empirically accessible, some saw there only pathological impulses and sought to purge their field of metaphysical implications, while others, joined by spiritists and occultists, saw there the key to the soul and the basis for a tangible, fact-based, modern form of spirituality. By the 1930s, the ascension of Freudian psychoanalysis undermined both psychical research and the spiritist quest for scientific recognition. In a brief epilogue, Monroe sketches the twentieth-century incorporation of subjective heterodox spiritualities into a highly personalized “cultic milieu” and “ideology of seekership” (262) that remain prominent on the French religious scene. He leaves it to later scholars to complete this story.

There is, indeed, more to tell. Monroe notes that spiritism became “exuberantly diverse” (220) after 1880 but reduces this vitality to a waning of Kardec's authority and the emergence of distinct “moral” and “scientific” spiritisms. More fundamentally, Monroe's study, based largely on published sources, is more an intellectual history than a social or cultural history. It locates spiritism squarely in its social and political context and is duly attentive to the movement's opponents, but it spotlights bourgeois male leaders, their ideas, and their institutions. While he makes it clear enough that these leaders never closed the deal on their claims to authority, we learn little of the experiences or agendas of female mediums, working-class male mediums, or the mass of séance-goers, and we learn more about how spiritist doctrines and rituals were intended than how they were received. But Monroe's mission was not to write that kind of history; it was to correct interpretations of late-century France as militantly secular, and in that he succeeds. This is an excellent and compelling study of how religious heterodoxy developed in and engaged the pressing intellectual issues of modernizing France. If Monroe moves subsequent scholars to explore the variety of spiritist belief and experience, to apply the methods of cultural history to the ground he has covered, and to continue his story through the twentieth century, so much the better for our understanding of “modern” religion.