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  • Regulars and the Secular Realm: The Benedictines of the Congregation of Saint-Maur in Upper Normandy during the Eighteenth Century and the French Revolution
  • Nigel Aston
Regulars and the Secular Realm: The Benedictines of the Congregation of Saint-Maur in Upper Normandy during the Eighteenth Century and the French Revolution. By Mary Kathryn Robinson. (Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press. 2008. Distrib. by University of Chicago Press. Pp. xx, 179. $35.00 clothbound, ISBN 978-1-589-66175-2; $20.00 paperback, ISBN 978-1-589-66176-9.)

This well-researched book by Mary Kathryn Robinson makes a significant contribution to the more sympathetic and nuanced reading of eighteenth-century European monasticism currently underway. The Maurist Benedictines in Upper Normandy (they had thirty-one monasteries in the province in 1760, including the great houses of Bec, Fécamp, and Jumièges) were, despite the squabbles that occur in any form of institutional life, in an essentially healthy state on the eve of the French Revolution. As the local Cahiers suggest, they were not perceived to be living at a remove from the rest of the nation or the locality. The Maurists also enjoyed a continued reputation for scholarship that was not detached from Enlightenment currents with figures such as Dom Fran&ccedilois Philippe Gourdin of Jumièges contributing to scientific debates on electricity that brought him regional celebrity. Monk-savants readily struck up friendships outside the cloister (Gourdin recommended Jean-Paul [End Page 590] Marat for membership of the Académie de Rouen) and were often involved in masonry. When the French Revolution came the monks were not unwelcoming, yet found themselves presented as readily dispensable by the mass of anticlerical politicians in the National Assembly who assumed— wrongly—that the majority of them were fettered by their vocation. The law of February 13, 1790, was designed to empty the religious houses, and the reluctant Maurists were either forced into secular life or moved into one of the houses of union with strangers. Robinson shows in detail how, despite the depredations inflicted on them, relatively few monks became militantly counter-revolutionary. In some districts such as Caudebec, Maurists accepted preferment in parishes left vacant through the resignation of refractory priests, and others took part in local government. Even the execution of the king was not too much for some former monks to stomach; at Auzebosc, the curé Dom Grognet planted trees of liberty and fraternity after evening vespers in March 1793 before reciting his Liberty-Equality oath. Throughout Normandy there was intimidation on both sides of the question so long as the Civil Constitution was in force, but the start of Dechristianization in 1793 had the effect of closing the distance between jurors and nonjurors. Both parties were capable of putting their lives at risk to protect the Christian heritage. Thus at Fécamp Dom Letellier, the constitutional curé of the former abbey, kept the silver vial of Christ’s blood up to his arrest in March 1794 (and subsequently had it returned to him), while Gourdin traveled through the Seine-Inférieure department collecting books and manuscripts from religious houses and stored them at Saint-Ouen with official permission to carry a loaded pistol in case of attempted robbery. Robinson completes her measured text with a look at how former monks tried to re-establish themselves despite the erratic religious policies of the Directory and notes the numbers appointed to parishes on the post-Concordatory Church. This is a modest book that constitutes a serious achievement, and its conclusions rest on sound archival labors. Unfortunately, although there are useful appendices, printing errors have disfigured Robinson’s survey, and there is no index.

Nigel Aston
University of Leicester
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