Reliques et reliquaires à Paris (XIXe–XXe siècle), and: Un objet religieux et sa pratique: Le chemin de croix “portatif” aux XIXe et XXe siècles en France (review)

These two works explore elements of “material culture” of French Catholicism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The relics and reliquaries studied by Yves Gagneux and the “portable” ways of the cross examined by Waltraud Hahn provide fascinating evidence on the devotional practices of ordinary Catholics. Both works also address important questions on the ways in which religious objects should be approached and on the judgments that are made about them. Although some of the methods and conclusions reached by Gagneux and Hahn can be questioned, these are serious works that display both erudition and sensitivity in grappling with materials that demand the attention of anyone interested in modern French religious life.

Gagneux’s volume is based on his Sorbonne thesis in which he identified and categorized more than 800 reliquaries and 3,400 relics in Paris. Gagneux occasionally ranges outside of the capital to consider, for example, the crypt holding more than 180 reliquaries constructed at Reims in the early-twentieth century, a Catholic response to the republican Pantheon. But Paris takes center stage in his work, an appropriate choice given its significance as a religious as well as political capital. After reviewing the historiography of his subject, which has concentrated almost exclusively on the Middle Ages, Gagneux establishes a definition that avoids the standards for authenticity established by the Church in favor of an anthropological perspective. The relic for Gagneux is the material trace of a person or objects he or she used that establish a relationship between the object of the cult and the devotee. Gagneux acknowledges that such a definition covers opera singers, athletes, and other celebrities, as well as saints, but apart from brief treatments of the tomb of Napoleon at the Invalides and of the Pantheon, he restricts his study to Catholic saints. Although his definition might have taken him in a different direction, Gagneux focuses primarily on the ways in which the official Church used relics and reliquaries to help reconstruct the Catholic culture that had been devastated by the French Revolution.

No reader of this journal will be surprised to learn that the revolution marks a break in religious history, but it is nonetheless telling that none of the many silver or gold reliquaries held by Paris churches managed to survive the revolution. The cult of the saints does not depend on relics, as Gagneux notes, but the Parisian clergy saw recovering the remains of the saints and displaying them appropriately as an important element in the restoration of Catholicism. Gagneux traces this story with impressive and sometimes overwhelming detail, showing how Paris churches managed to locate and import relics of their patron saints, and to supplement them with the remains of Christian martyrs from the Roman period, most famously and perhaps notoriously those of St. Philomena, who was officially removed from the calendar of saints in 1961.

The thematic rather than chronological approach of this study makes it difficult to track changes over time in a systematic way. Nonetheless, certain moments emerge as particularly important. Gagneux calls attention to the important work of the Jesuit architect Arthur Martin, who reconstructed shrines holding the remains of St. Genevieve and St. Vincent de Paul during the decade 1845–55. Martin’s designs illustrate the complicated tensions dividing ultramontanes and Gallicans, which were resolved in the second half of the nineteenth century with the spread of the Italian fashion for wax effigies, most of which have now disappeared. Gagneux...