Most histories of the Congregation of the Mission (the Lazarists) concentrate on the founding of the organization by Vincent de Paul, and then its primary activity: teaching the rural poor the doctrines and practices of Catholicism. In this book, a revised dissertation, Seán Alexander Smith places the history of the Congregation in a broader context and examines the goals and activities of the institution into the eighteenth century, focusing on the particular missions that took the Lazarists away from the initial goals of their founder. The lens he uses to study the activities of the Congregation is Roland Mousnier's concept of fidélité—an organizing mechanism for social and political relationships during the early modern period. Smith finds that the Lazarists had to constantly negotiate between fidelity to the king and fidelity to their mission, yet they were in no way forced to abandon that mission in the face of royal pressure. De Paul's successors and the Lazarist members themselves consistently made decisions based on their ideas of fidelity to their founder; these ideas permeated the organization and, for the most part, steered it away from the distracting influences of the royal court. Nevertheless, their activities did present challenges to the institution's goals.
The first challenge to the Lazarist conception of mission came during de Paul's lifetime, when he agreed to send missionaries to Madagascar to administer to the Malagasy natives as well as the French population living there. This mission failed; the Congregation left the island in 1671. Two factors influenced this failure. First, the Congregation's secular patron, the Compagnie de l'Orient, did not provide enough support. Second, the Lazarists were completely unprepared for this type of work—teaching the rural poor in France was nothing like missionary work among the Malagasy or the colonist population. This disappointment caused leaders and members alike to revisit their goals, and they used the concept of fidelity to make sense of their failure. As Smith points out, the Congregation was forced to recognize that the mission to Madagascar was not quite compatible with the organization's goals, and decided to focus their energies elsewhere.
The next major challenge to the organization came with their involvement in a number of royal activities. Ironically, because the Congregation had taken so much care not to be involved in political issues in the way that the Jesuits and other orders had, the Crown soon began to see the Lazarists as the ideal administrators for their religious activities. During the last decades of the seventeenth century, the Crown appointed the Lazarists as administrators for a number of royal institutions, and they were given the responsibility to serve as parish priests for Versailles, and thus the royal family itself. Then, in the 1680s, the Crown created missions to the royal galleys and gave those missions to the Lazarists. The Congregation began supervising hospitals and other establishments for the galleymen, as well as some state prisoners who were unable to work in the galleys. These men could certainly be considered poor, and thus the work was not entirely incompatible with the founding goals of the organization. However, once the Edict of Nantes was revoked, the galleys began to serve as the punishment of choice for unrepentant Huguenots, and the Lazarists were charged with converting them. The missions to the galleys became more and more political, and the Crown interfered more heavily with the organization than they had in the past. Some missionaries even found themselves with a reputation for abuse of religious prisoners, which was rather troubling to leaders and members alike. Smith is careful to show that many of the accusations of abuse were unfounded, and then perpetuated in the historiography through biased sources. He notes that many of the chaplains with the worst reputations were not actually Lazarists—they had only been appointed by the Congregation to fill the ever-growing need for more religious personnel on the ships and in the hospitals. But Smith does acknowledge that these activities did cause the organization to stray from its original goals, and the scandals on the galleys created a further need for re-evaluation and self-correction.
The final chapter of the book deals with the mission to the Mascareignes in the first part of the eighteenth century. This mission was supposed to make up for the failure in Madagascar, but involvement with the slave societies produced numerous complications. Like other religious orders, the Lazarists ended up owning slaves and holding stock in slave-run plantations, creating devastating conflicts of interest; in addition, their work as missionaries suffered from many of the same problems that they had encountered in Madagascar. Overall, their difficulties here paralleled the difficulties in other arenas. Through all these challenges, the Congregation realized that they could not follow the goals of their founder completely, but they did continue to emphasize that mission again and again in their literature, letters, and training materials. Even when the Crown tried to exert pressure, the Congregation was not completely subsumed by political machinations.
Smith's narrative focuses on the Lazarists themselves, using primarily internal, Lazarist sources. His emphasis on the idea of fidelity is a useful one, although there are connections to other historiographies (of absolutism, the French empire, and so on) that could have provided more context for the reader. Furthermore, despite the fact that Smith uses sources from the missionaries themselves, we hear little about their views or activities in their own words. Bringing the Lazarists’ non-traditional activities into the narrative certainly adds a vital perspective on the organization, but leaving out details about individual overseas missionaries seems like a missed opportunity. Despite this, the book is an excellent piece of historical scholarship, and will be much appreciated by scholars of religious history.
