Reading Thomas Kselman's Conscience and Conversion brought to mind one of my favorite anecdotes from post-Revolutionary France. After the fall of Napoleon in 1815, the Catholic Church in France waged a campaign to turn back the clock of dechristianization. Missionaries spread out across France, holding revival meetings, brandishing vivid illustrations of hellfire, and berating anyone who had dared to profit from the Revolution's auctions of seized church property (see Kroen, 2000; Merriman, 2006). Occasionally, in an attempt to win back more educated doubters, these missionary-preachers would stage a debate. They would plant a patsy in the audience, a fellow clergyman in disguise, to stand up in the middle of the sermon and challenge the evangelist with prearranged questions. But this was a dangerous game; sometimes the devil's advocate would enjoy himself too much and start winning the argument. And sometimes the simple fact that doubts were being expressed at all, even by a straw man, could undermine the authority of the church. So, the story goes, an adolescent Pierre-Joseph Proudhon witnessed one of these staged dialogues. For the future anarchist and atheist, the first time he realized it was even possible to question the existence of God was in a church (Sevrin, 1948). Restoration France, in other words, seems a textbook case of Charles Taylor's definition of secularism: not necessarily the decline or absence of belief, but the existential awareness (even among priests and evangelists) that belief was now a matter of opinion, needing justification, “one human possibility among others” (in Kselman, 2).

For Kselman, studying the individual lives of a series of post-revolutionary converts (and apostates) reveals the dynamics of this newly “secular age”—the complexities of religious choice and identity—far better than focusing on institutional church-state politics would. Kselman's first chapter is a sophisticated history of the concept of religious freedom in French political discourse, from Montaigne up through the Revolution. Kselman distinguishes between “tolerance” (religious freedom for state-sanctioned religious communities) and “liberty of conscience” (religious freedom as an individual right), and traces how the latter ideal of individual liberty slowly began to disentangle itself from collective “tolerance.” During the Revolution, the Count de Mirabeau and the Protestant Rabaut de Saint-Etienne were the first to explicitly attack mere “tolerance” and demand individual liberty instead, but other revolutionaries (and later regimes) maintained the “fuzzy” conflation between these two and reserved for the state the right to repress religious practices in the name of “public order” (13–15). The second chapter explores the trope of the “Wandering Jew,” from Eugène Sue's famous novel to operatic adaptations, a trope which reveals nineteenth-century France's obsession with the conflicting themes of religious wandering and “family solidarity” (55).

In the five remaining chapters, Kselman narrates a series of high-profile conversions: the Ratisbonne brothers—Jewish converts to Catholicism who established a congregation specializing in the evangelization of fellow Jews; Ivan Gagarin—the Russian Orthodox convert to Catholicism, whose crisis of faith was mediated by the feminine sociability of Paris salon life, and who found a “surrogate family” in the Jesuits (151–152); Felicité de Lamennais—the counterrevolutionary Catholic who embraced democracy after 1830 and, finding his political opinions condemned by the pope, articulated a more radical, individualistic conception of the liberty of conscience; George Sand, whose struggle for female emancipation, Kselman argues, was “[intimately connected]” to her commitment to the liberty of conscience, the “sacred right” to doubt (193, 227); and, finally, Ernest Renan—who, not unlike Proudhon, first began to doubt the truth of Christianity while participating in staged debates as a seminary student, and whose training in Semitic languages led him to author a historical-critical Life of Jesus. Each of these case studies in conversion (or disenchantment) stands alone, but, taken together, they suggest that in the course of the nineteenth century, the ideal of liberty of conscience as an individual right slowly triumphed over the ideal of tolerance as a mere collective privilege.

One recurring theme in these conversion narratives is the newfound fluidity of religious identity, the instability of the border between belief and doubt in a secular age. Some Jewish converts to Catholicism, for example, remained loyal to their Jewish identity, refusing to believe that their families would be condemned to hell (105) or causing stress and confusion about which religion's last rites they wished to receive (108). Famous doubters, like George Sand and Ernest Renan, still self-consciously performed their nostalgia for the certainty and belonging of Catholic belief. Another leitmotif is the gender and class constraints on the exercise of religious liberty. For example, the Ratisbonnes succeeded mainly in converting younger Jewish women of working-class backgrounds, who may have had economic motives for accepting Catholic support, but whose conversions provoked public crises within their communities (113). Upper-class women like the salon hostess Madame Swetchine, by contrast, could express their religious liberty and explore their doubts within the semiprivate confines of the salon.

This book is less about conflicts between individuals and institutions, and more about conflicts between individuals and their families. Conversions resulted in family dramas, mothers heartbroken, spouses betrayed. (As Kselman points out, anticlerical writers like Sue and Michelet hated priests so much because they viewed religious meddling as destructive of family life.) It might be fruitful, then, to place Kselman's findings in conversation with Camille Robcis’s work on “familialism” in French history. According to Robcis, political theorists after the Revolution sought to overcome republicanism's inherent individualism by privileging the family as the fundamental building block of society, the school where future citizens would learn “to reconcile social solidarity and individual liberty” (Robcis, 18). This suggestion only serves to sharpen the paradox studied by Kselman: perhaps the postrevolutionary, secular age invests the family with greater social meaning and anxiety at the precise moment that it also makes rejection of the familial faith possible.

Kselman's book is also sure to be of interest to historians and theorists of secularism, although his evidence and analysis are too complex and nuanced to fit neatly into any one camp. On the one hand, those (Talal Asad, Joan Scott, and others) who have criticized secularist governments for the ways they circumscribe, surveil, and intervene in religious matters will find some confirmation. For example, the liberal July Monarchy, precisely in order to guarantee religious liberty, found itself in the business of evaluating the sincerity of deathbed conversions in state hospitals (46–47). On the other hand, in the early days of the French Revolution, it was not overly aggressive secularists but Catholics who first demanded that religious liberty be constrained by “public order”—enshrining the state's “right to monitor and control the public expression of religion” (14).