If it is the case that, as the editors of this volume claim, the forces of moderation in history have been subject to ‘une forme d'invisibilisation historiographique’ (p. 15), this says something about the priorities and practices of modern historians. For good or for bad, historians turn to the past for the concepts they see as inadequately formed in the present. They tend to do so with a dichotomous gaze. In this context moderation, conceptually indistinct, often viewed as passive, has been neglected. In pursuit of the neat ideologies and the individuals, processes and institutions which overtly shaped history, historians have struggled, as Ethan Shagan has remarked, to ‘think with moderates’.Footnote ¹ Perhaps more significantly, they have rarely seen the need to attempt to do so.

But the conditions which led to the ‘invisibilisation’ of moderation are passing. As concerns with polarisation in contemporary society mount, as the legacies of western modernity have been pulled apart, moderation has conceptually materialised just as its crisis has been acknowledged. It has revealed itself as absent. This has invited a turn to moderation's past.

This edited volume presents itself as a contribution to this ‘forme de tournant historiographique’ (p. 18). Its editors have in their sights a grand agenda, ‘une forme de modération globale des enjeu théologico-politique’ traced across different ‘logiques locale’, and rooted in ‘une épistémologie du politique … touchant à la fois à la théorie et à la pratique, à la morale et à la politique’ (p. 12).

In reality, the nineteen essays collected here map out a more modest panorama, a moderation not global in scope but tightly bound to early modern France, with a few forays into surrounding countries, and almost entirely rooted in Catholic church history. If the volume's broader context for engaging ‘la moderation politico-religieuse’ is today's neglected moyenneur, its immediate stimulus is a revision of ‘l'infortune historiographique’ of a seminal work on early modern Catholicism: Émile Appolis's 1960 Le ‘Tiers Parti’ catholique au XVIIIe siècle.

Appolis argued that there was an under-acknowledged moderate stratum within eighteenth-century Catholicism. This tiers parti sought to mitigate the theological divisions between Jansenists and Molinists which took root after Trent by exercising political compromise within ecclesiastical structures. As the Catholic world saw a rush towards theological extremes the tiers parti strove to rehabilitate a ‘centre plus nuancé’, reasonable, tolerant and quintessentially moderate.Footnote ²

Around half of the essays in Les Forces de la moderation read best as commentaries on Appolis's tiers parti hypothesis. Key eighteenth-century ecclesiastical and theological figures furnish closely-researched case studies: Albane Pialoux addresses Benedict xiv, for Appolis's ‘le type parfait du catholique de juste milieu’;Footnote ³ Olivier Andurand focuses on the mediation of French cardinals in the fallout from Unigenitus; essays by Sylvio Hermann de Franceschi, Leonard Hell and Philippe Martin look at theological moderation in Lodovico Antonio Muratori, Johann Sebastian Drey and Dom Antoine Calmet respectively. Other contributions focus on regional contexts – Philippe Moulis on the north of France, Claude Muller on Alsace, Damien Savoy on Switzerland – drawing upon provincial archives to present new stages for the tiers parti to play its moderating act.

A second strand of contributions is more directly concerned with the politics of moderation in the context of ascending absolutism, confessionalism and Church-State tension. Moderate rulers, such as Maximilian ii, in Clarissa Roche's essay, or Stanislas Leszcynski, in that of Stefano Simiz, sought compromise between the confessional, political and ecclesiological pressures which they faced. This compromise could proceed through a measured pragmatism or through an appeal to an absolute standard rising above the parties, whether that be a divinely-ordained monarch, the primitive Church or, as in Thierry Issartel's depiction of Pierre de Marca, a compound of the two.

The innovation of Les Forces de la moderation lies in its proposal to place these two distinct strands of research in dialogue with one another. Its limitations turn upon whether a loosely-defined concept of moderation is able to accommodate both meaningfully.

The tiers parti invoked in a second strand of essays is pursued as a means to secure political authority: moderation, here, is about governance. This feels qualitatively distinct from the religious accommodation and ‘chaleur humaine’ recognised by Appolis. Monique Cottret, in her short, dense concluding essay, suggests that, in having brought to the fore the dissonance between political and religious moderation, the editors have ‘ouvert cette boîte de Pandore’ (p. 393). This is surely a box worth opening, and there is, across many of the essays collected here, a sense of the political-theological moderation they seek to unearth, driven by ideals of concord and conciliation, of self-discipline and self-governance, of impartiality, civility and toleration. But this moderation remains largely spectral, and never receives full articulation.

The organisation of this volume does not help. The essays are categorised into six sections, with no chronological order and a strained thematic logic to their division. This has the perhaps unintended effect of placing seemingly unrelated sixteenth- and nineteenth-century Catholic moderates side-by-side: loose continuities within a species of moderation peculiar to early modern Catholicism rise to the surface. There is little sense, however, of progression, either historical or conceptual, as one section fades into the next.

It is also the case that the forces of moderation here remain, as they did for Appolis, largely a historiographical device: in spite of the intentions proposed in the introduction to move ‘plus près des mots choisis par les acteurs eux-mêmes’ (p. 21), few of the essays engage moderation as an actor's category, either directly or through near-synonyms such as temperance or prudence. Rarely are the methodological issues involved in uncovering a ‘phantôme’ tendency which defined itself negatively, if at all, confronted in earnest (an exception here is the essay by Lana Martysheva).

The risk of such methodological laxity is that definitions of slippery concepts tend to revert to current usage, and on these terms are easily universalised. Aspirations to a political epistemology of a ‘modération globale’ should, then, be met with caution. This volume's principal contribution is its insight into a construction of political-religious moderation in Catholic Europe, mainly in France, between the Renaissance and the early nineteenth century. This insight is welcome. A more profound sense of its historical specificity would, however, have better facilitated its insertion into deeper Christian traditions of moderation, as well as its dialogue with political theologies of moderations cultivated in other times and other places, including the present day.