History of Religion

Civilizing Habits explores the life stories of three French women missionaries—Philippine Duchesne, Emilie de Vialar, and Anne‐Marie Javouhey—who transgressed boundaries, both real and imagined, to evangelize far from France's shores. In so doing, this book argues that they helped France reestablish a global empire after the dislocation of the Revolution and the fall of Napoleon. They also pioneered a new missionary era in which the educational, charity, and health care services provided by women became valuable tools for spreading Catholic influence around the globe. Philippine Duchesne, who began her religious life in a cloistered convent before the Revolution, traveled to former French territory in Missouri in 1818 to proselytize among Native Americans and open girls' schools on the frontier. Emilie de Vialar established missions throughout the Mediterranean basin, from Algeria to the Ottoman Empire, and worked among Muslim populations. Anne‐Marie Javouhey made her life's work the evangelization of Africans in the French slave colonies, including a utopian settlement in the wilds of French Guiana. Freed from physical enclosure, these women were protected from worldly corruption only by their religious habits and their behavior. Paradoxically, however, through embracing religious institutions designed to shield their femininity, these women gained increased authority to travel outside of France, challenge church power, and evangelize among non‐Christians, all roles more commonly ascribed to male missionaries. Their stories teach us about the life paths open to religious women in the nineteenth century and how both church and state benefited from their initiative and energy to expand the boundaries of faith and nation.

A collection of thirteen chapters by leading scholars in the field, this book examines the complex ways in which the spread of Christianity by French men and women shaped local communities, French national prowess, and global politics in the two centuries following the French Revolution. More than a story of religious proselytism, missionary activity was an essential feature of French contact and interaction with local populations. In many parts of the world, missionaries were the first French men and women to work and live among indigenous societies. For all the celebration of France’s secular “civilizing mission,” it was more often than not religious workers who actually fulfilled the daily tasks of running schools, hospitals, and orphanages. While their work was often tied to small villages, missionaries’ interactions had geopolitical implications. Focusing on many regions—from the Ottoman Empire and the United States to Indochina and the Pacific Ocean—this book explores how France used missionaries’ long connections with local communities as a means of political influence and justification for colonial expansion. This book offers readers both an overview of the major historical dimensions of the French evangelical enterprise, as well as an introduction to the theoretical and methodological challenges of placing French missionary work within the context of European, colonial, and religious history.