Fighting for the afterlife: spiritists, catholics, and popular religion in
Nineteenth-century France
Journal of Religious History, October 1999
Lynn L. Sharp
ABSTRACT
This article examines the position of nineteenth-century French spiritism in relation to
the Catholic Church. Spiritism offered an alternative 'religion' to French Catholics
dissatisfied with the Church's traditionalism in a modernizing world. I begin by describing
the conflicts between the adversaries. Spiritists, unfettered by dogma or even logic in some
cases, freely incorporated the supernatural into the nineteenth-century acceptance of
Enlightenment values such as reason and science. The Church, unable to deny the reality of
supernatural phenomena claimed by the spiritists, limited itself to asserting the devil's hand
in these phenomena. It thus could not fully address the challenge of spiritism.
The article moves next to analyze the spiritists' position on Catholic dogma and the
movement's place as an urban popular religion. Spiritist critiques of heaven and hell
incorporated liberal and republican values, thus making it appealing to these groups who were
often hostile to the Church. Both Catholic and spiritist positions illustrate the way
religious thought participated in social and political movements of the time. The spiritist
movement, with its attempt to combine religion and rationality, science and superstition,
recalls us to Durkheim's teachings that the sacred and profane continue to influence
and shape one another. Spiritists created a melange of old and new, combining 'miracles'
with 'reason' and including popular traditions. Spiritism as a popular religion complicates
the assumption by many folklorists regarding the disappearance of popular beliefs in the
face of the modern. The article concludes with a call to modify these theories in order to
understand an evolving, often urban, popular culture which integrated 'tradition' and
'modernity' and continually created new forms of the marvelous.
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Copyright 2003, Lynn L. Sharp
revised: 27 August 2003