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

Travel to a cathedral, a pilgrimage site, or the tomb of some ancient worthy and there they will greet you: those ubiquitous hawkers of holy souvenir trading in I-was-there picture postcards, Marian key chains, Saint Paul spoons and Saint Francis thimbles and every other conceivable incarnation of throwaway religious paraphernalia. Surely this crass commodification of piety for profit signals the utter debasement of what is left of religion in the modern world. Suzanne Kaufman of Loyola University in Chicago does not agree. In a well written and theoretically compelling study of the Lourdes cult in Third Republic France, she argues that the lively purchase of religious goods along the roads leading to the famous grotto was not debased spirituality. In fact, it expressed a quintessentially modern popular devotion enabled as well as shaped fundamentally by the capitalist market practices of France's industrializing economy.

Kaufman rattles the entire theoretical apparatus of the study of modern religion when she collapses the boundary between "sacred" and "profane" in this way. This hard Durkheimian boundary has flexed paradigmatic influence by insisting that historians recognize in commercialized religion little more than corrupted sacred experience or vestiges of authentic faith in a secularizing world. Yet studies of religion that employ such essentialist dichotomies, Kaufman argues, are likely to miss or mistake the dynamism of piety in societies that were increasingly implicated in pervasive markets. She prefers a suppler conceptualization of religious practice instead, which derives from Robert Orsi's innovative and widely influential studies of "lived religion" as well as sensitive interpretations of material culture in religious contexts by other American scholars like David Morgan. By pursuing the Lourdes story along an analytical axis that does not rest upon definitions of real or fake, authentic or contrived, Kaufmann is liberated more intricately and convincingly to describe how the market structured the imaginative world of French Catholics and how the media the market produced altered the substantive content of pilgrimage piety to satisfy the spiritual needs of modern men and women.

This description of the role of physical objects even as implausible as napkin holders in Catholic worship argues powerfully that popular religion accompanied rather than retarded the development of industrial capitalism in France. Pilgrim-tourists with disposable income to accumulate pious items advanced technology by demanding rail lines to and electrical systems in and around the Lourdes "boom town" holy site. Their spontaneous consumption of religious collectibles through comparison and window shopping threaded their leisure and the marketplace more tightly together. Perhaps most importantly, Kaufman observes, the controversy over what occurred at Lourdes intensified traffic in published opinion. Lourdes was a boon to the mass press, France's new "ultimate public arbiter of truth," which trained accusations of fraud and charlatanry on the one side against charges of impiety and shabby atheism on the other to sell a sensationalized product to a nation keenly interested in the competition of absolute truth claims at the fin-de-siècle (p. 192). For Kaufman, then, Lourdes was not a pathetic gasp of a declining and materially compromised religion, nor was it an isolated retreat into pre-modern fantasy by an atavistic church. It was about ardent devotional experience made all the more explosive by the commercial exchange and spectatorship that lent it so much color and pregnancy. "At Lourdes," she writes, "sacred and profane—religious practice and the secular world—never stood in opposition but, rather, commingled in a process of constant cross-fertilization" (p. 14). This process both infused French devotional life with contemporary meaning and integrated Catholics, especially rural women, whose attraction to the objets de piété affirmed their roles as "caretakers of their family's salvation," into mass society and consumer culture (p. 50).

Kaufman's analysis of this integrative process unfolds in five thematically controlled chapters. These address the Lourdes pilgrimage as it developed in rapidly industrializing French society, the acrimonious public debate over the "debasement" of piety by...