Satanic France: The Figure of the Devil and the Transformation of French Catholicism in the Fin-de-Siecle

FAIN: FT-53548-05

John Monroe
Iowa State University of Science and Technology (Ames, IA 50011-2000)

This project will center on one of the major religious scandals of the late nineteenth century: the Satanism scare the journalist Leo Taxil created in French Catholic circles with his invented stories of Devil-worship among Freemasons. A major event in the period's cultural history, this singular story has yet to receive a serious scholarly analysis. An investigation of the complex reasons why Taxil undertook his hoax, and why Catholic audiences were so willing to believe it, will enrich our understanding of both the tensions that underlay French society during the era of the Dreyfus affair, and the ideological climate from which the twentieth-century extreme right emerged.

Associated Products

Laboratories of Faith: Mesmerism, Spiritism, and Occultism in Modern France (Book)
Title: Laboratories of Faith: Mesmerism, Spiritism, and Occultism in Modern France
Author: John Warne Monroe
Abstract: At a fascinating moment in French intellectual history, an interest in matters occult was not equivalent to a rejection of scientific thought; participants in séances and magic rituals were seekers after experimental data as well as spiritual truth. In an evocative history of alternative religious practices in France in the second half of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, John Warne Monroe tells the interconnected stories of three movements?Mesmerism, Spiritism, and Occultism. Adherents of these groups, Monroe reveals, attempted to "modernize" faith by providing empirical support for metaphysical concepts. Instead of trusting theological speculation about the nature of the soul, these believers attempted to gather tangible evidence through Mesmeric experiments, séances, and ceremonial magic. While few French people were active Mesmerists, Spiritists, or Occultists, large segments of the educated general public were familiar with these movements and often regarded them as fascinating expressions of the "modern condition," a notable contrast to the Catholicism and secular materialism that prevailed in their culture. Featuring eerie spirit photographs, amusing Daumier lithographs, and a posthumous autograph from Voltaire, as well as extensive documentary evidence, Laboratories of Faith gives readers a sense of what being in a séance or a secret-society ritual might actually have felt like and why these feelings attracted participants. While they never achieved the transformation of human consciousness for which they strove, these thinkers and believers nevertheless pioneered a way of "being religious" that has become an enduring part of the Western cultural vocabulary.
Year: 2008
Publisher: Ithaca: Cornell University Press
Type: Single author monograph

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