The French Catholic Church, after the revolutionary and Napoleonic decades, made a concerted effort to recover its former position of political and social supremacy. This latest instalment by Roger Price picks up the story of this remarkable reconstruction from where he left off in his first volume, The Church and State in France, 1789–1870: ‘fear of God is the basis of social order’ (London–New York 2017). While this previous work had charted the complex relationship between Church and State in post-Napoleonic France, the volume under review is much more sociological/anthropological in its focus. It seeks to analyse how a less elitist ultramontane Church sought to reconnect with its increasingly wayward parishioners. The chapters are structured in a logical fashion, starting with an analysis of the hierarchy, moving sideways to discuss the transition to more ultramontane allegiances, while the main body of the book is composed of four hefty chapters detailing the daily realities and problems of ministering the sacraments and teaching the faith to the many heterogenous communities of France. The conclusion outlines growing anticlericalism and the Church's fragility in the face of modernity.

Price has researched deeply in the archives, and has been through dozens of dossiers from the ministries of religion, justice and education. The bulk of the material covers the Second Empire (1852–70) which makes sense as it is not very well known in terms of anglophone scholarship. This volume shows that the nineteenth-century Catholic Church in France could be viewed as a success story in terms of the growth in numbers of clergy and parishes. Yet, from a more qualitative perspective, assessing such growth is no easy matter. The archives are brimming with complaints about ignorant bigoted pastors who behaved like petty tyrants venting their frustrations and delusions of grandeur on their parishioners. The conclusion that emerges is that the need for sustained growth meant that ‘bad priests were better than no priests at all’. The institution that is portrayed in these pages is one that was greedy for power and status, and deaf to calls for liberalisation in terms of politics, society and mores. This is a thought-provoking and well-researched book, but I did wonder whether it tended to caricature rather than reflect realities. The state archives have been mined thoroughly for negative information, while diocesan and parish records have been left untouched. Admittedly, visiting over eighty cathedral cities (let alone 40,000 parishes) would be impossible but the picture produced is slanted too much towards the disgruntled consumer rather than the satisfied customer. There is undoubtedly some mileage in this negative reading of the Catholic renewal during the nineteenth century, but one wonders whether an institution as self-referential and anti-social would have been able to grow and attract followers as steadily as it clearly did. Price's work, especially the controversial (highly speculative) section on child abuse, opens many intriguing questions which future scholars will need to address. Although this study does not exhaust the subject by any means, it is the mark of a good book that leaves its readers wanting to know more. One hopes that future PhD students and scholars will pick up the challenge, explore further and test Price's conclusions.