Consuming Visions: Mass Culture and the Lourdes Shrine (review)

Lourdes was, Suzanne Kaufman declares, both "religious and modern," (1) and she takes on historians' almost reflexive association of religious phenomena with the "persistence" of archaic traditions in modern Europe. Far from an atavistic throwback to some religious pre-modern world, Lourdes was firmly anchored in fin-de-siècle mass culture. Kaufman convincingly and engagingly shows us a Catholicism that was absolutely at home on the railway and at ease in the shopping arcade. Lourdes, Kaufman argues, was constitutive as well as reflective of modern consumer culture; for many French people, especially rural women, a pilgrimage to Lourdes was their first encounter with market-driven spectacle and leisure.

Kaufman begins with the creation of the Lourdes pilgrimage, and she usefully focuses on the remaking of the town itself. Lourdes became a "distinctly modern" pilgrimage by "erasing its identity as a local holy site" (18). Urban renewal transformed the surroundings of the sacred Pyrenean grotto, making it a city much like other French cities rebuilt during the nineteenth century. Guidebooks and picture postcards taught visitors to experience its sights – from the train station to the sanctuary – "like modern tourists" (36). Bernadette's quaint and authentic peasant life was not what Lourdes offered its visitors; as Kaufman points out, many of the rural faithful knew all too well what Bernadette's life had been like. They wanted the miracles of modern technology as well as the miracles of God's grace; they sought out the railway and the motorcars, the hotels with electric elevators, and mass-produced souvenirs.

Kaufman turns from the enthusiastic pilgrim-tourists to Lourdes' critics in a particularly strong chapter on the "rhetoric of debasement." She explores the origins of our modern sense that commercialism, particularly of the type surrounding Lourdes, is somehow deeply irreligious. Both anticlericals and many Catholics assumed that commerce tainted religion. Third Republic anticlericals, not surprisingly, condemned the aggressive hawking of souvenirs and cures at the shrine. Miracle cures, they argued, were produced by the same irrational desires that fueled consumerism, and women were particularly susceptible to both. Focusing on the incompatibility of religiosity and commercialism, Kaufman argues, "enabled republicans to portray religion as antithetical to modernity" (80). Catholic intellectuals shared these assumptions about commerce contaminating religion. Here Kaufman discusses Léon Bloy and Joris-Karl Huysmans who similarly saw Lourdes as a symptom of debasement. Again women were at the root of the problem of a religious experience rendered sentimental, soft, and corrupt.

The final three chapters focus on the miracle cures. Seeking, witnessing, and praying for cures were central to the Lourdes experience and to public debate. Chapter three describes the elaboration of the "new medico-miracle tale" (111), a genre in which the medical case history intersected with melodrama and in which language parading its scientific credentials shaped stories of undeserved suffering and triumphant healing. The next chapter turns to the testimonials of women healed at the shrine, which Kaufman reads as "literary performances in which the women drew on and combined multiple discourses to assert the truth of the cure and thereby articulate a public identity for themselves" (136). Their stories followed the conventions elaborated in the previous chapter: virtuous women bore illnesses, which they described in the language of scientific diagnosis, and they suffered further from the torturous treatments of unbelieving doctors. Overcoming medical skepticism, these women took themselves to Lourdes, where a final crisis resulted in their transformation "from hopeless cases into active heroines" (149). The final chapter deals with debates in the mass press over the "truth" of the cures. Although all sides sought to establish "science" as the neutral arbiter that would adjudicate truth, ultimately, these well-publicized spats revealed the limits of medical knowledge and its dependence on the world of the market. Arguments about whether cures should be attributed to "miracle," "hysteria," or "suggestion" displayed the uncertainties of medical science and the power of the press to shape medical discourse.

A pilgrimage to Lourdes did...