Transgressive Devotion: How Pilgrims Confronted and Shaped European Border Culture in the Revolutionary Era

By Kilian Harrer

In the Napoleonic Rhineland and more broadly in Europe’s revolutionary borderlands, pilgrimage was a mass phenomenon. Pilgrims contributed significantly to reshaping Catholicism and the politics of religion. Their bitterly contested actions shed light on the things that people did with borders – as well as what borders did to people.

In 1804, as the city of Mainz on the Rhine was rapidly turning into one of the French Empire’s major border fortresses, the most powerful man in town was an ex-terrorist. Back then, of course, “terrorist” had a very different meaning than today: the word had been invented in the mid-1790s to denounce many of those who had governed France during the most radical phase of the French Revolution, the “Terror” of 1793–94. The man in question was Jeanbon Saint-André (1749–1813). From 1801 to his death, he served as Napoleonic prefect of the Mont-Tonnerre département, the French territorial unit whose capital was Mainz.

As one of Napoleon’s underlings on the left bank of the Rhine – France’s northeastern border in those years – Jeanbon Saint-André was eager to secure and control this new imperial boundary as tightly as possible. This task involved building fortifications as well as tracking down smugglers and deserters. Perhaps more surprisingly from today’s perspective, the prefect also targeted pilgrims. In an order issued on July 3, 1804, he denounced pilgrimages across the Rhine as raucous rather than devout trips, as “momentary emigrations” through which Catholics wasted their time and squandered their savings abroad. And he decided:

“Pilgrimage across the Rhine is prohibited. Therefore, whether pilgrims travel individually or in groups, the regulations of administrative police regarding passports shall be observed especially and rigorously during the seasons in which this kind of emigration is known to take place.”

Far from a unique curiosity, this order represents just one among countless legal measures aimed at restricting pilgrimage – and particularly pilgrimage across borders – in the revolutionary decades around 1800. In this period of European history, making a pilgrimage often amounted to an act of spatial transgression, which challenged new designs of religious and political order.
Why did pilgrimage become such a contested, frequently illicit practice? The first part of the answer is that pilgrimage was spatially salient, even provocative, as a mass phenomenon. In particular, communal pilgrimage processions called Wallfahrten in German were flourishing in Catholic culture at the dawn of the revolutionary era.

The communities organizing these processional pilgrimages could be parishes, urban citizenries, or confraternities. Timing and rhythm followed the church calendar, which fixed the feast days of Mary or any particular saint that the community would venerate at a shrine, usually once a year and based on an ancestral vow. Men, women, and children would march across the countryside in liturgical order, praying the rosary and singing religious hymns together for extended stretches of time. The group might be led by one or several clergymen, but that was by no means always the case. Many Wallfahrten were short-distance trips, so the pilgrim group would leave in the early morning and return before sunset, but longer pilgrimages were common as well, which regularly triggered clerical concerns about nocturnal sexual excesses among participants. In sum, Wallfahrten were public, collective, and pervasive: many Catholic communities undertook more than a handful of them each year; many shrines attracted dozens of large processions annually; most dioceses could boast at least one shrine that was visited by more than fifty thousand – or even more than one hundred thousand – pilgrims per year.

Yet, it is not enough to say that pilgrims were numerous and therefore impossible to ignore. Rather, their religious practice seemed especially transgressive to enlightened, revolutionary, and Napoleonic elites because pilgrims embodied three things that these elites almost universally despised: so-called superstition; mostly lower-class mobility; and a proclivity for forming crowds. These three aspects were inextricably linked: the issue of superstition was not just about pilgrims’ general belief in miracles, but more specifically about the belief that God was prone to dispense special grace in special places, that is to say at shrines housing specific miraculous images or relics. The desire to reach those places triggered pilgrimages and therefore mass mobility, which in turn led inevitably to the formation of crowds moving toward and around shrines.

The transgressive potential of pilgrimage was growing rapidly, moreover, because of a process that I call the “transformation of border culture” in my forthcoming monograph, entitled Devout and Defiant. This transformation had four major and interlocking components. First, the Partitions of Poland-Lithuania (1772, 1793, 1795) and the French revolutionary wars (1792–1815) created a sense of extreme territorial volatility and instability of borders across most of Europe. Second, reformist and revolutionary governments also completely reorganized internal, administrative territorial subdivisions, from the parish and the canton to the diocese and the département. Third, in spite or maybe because of all this instability, state administrators were all the more eager to securitize and naturalize whatever new territorial boundaries had come into being. Here, topics such as anti-emigration laws, passport controls, and customs patrols are crucial. And as a result, the fourth component is that, for elites but especially for ordinary people living in borderlands, crossing borders (or even just arguing about the meanings of borders) became more salient as social strategies and as means of political expression. Within this transformation of border culture, pilgrimage acquired new implications and sometimes even new momentum – in spite or because of tow-down attempts at repression.

As Jeanbon Saint-André’s order suggests, passports played a key role in this context. There is evidence that many Catholics got passports before going on pilgrimage, but most of those who wanted to go abroad probably did not, even in places where pilgrimage abroad had not been formally prohibited. For poor people in rural areas, it was expensive to get passports for travel abroad; it was logistically difficult, too, because this kind of document could not be issued by local authorities, but only by often distant prefectural ones. Hence, in order to cross the Rhine without passports and visit such famous shrines as Bornhofen and Walldürn, pilgrims had to resort to specific tactics. These were necessarily clandestine, so we glimpse them only occasionally in Napoleonic police dossiers. For instance, in the spring of 1810, a group of pilgrims without passports obtained free passage across the Rhine from an indulgent mayor – finally, after they had tried their luck in several neighboring villages and gotten rejected each time. And in 1812, a police commissioner in Mainz reported that Catholic pilgrims from the Mosel Valley were attempting to cross the river in many places between Bingen and Bacharach, using local guides on their illicit journeys.

In this situation, the boundary between pilgrimage and other forms of subversive mobility was becoming extremely blurry. In one well-documented instance from the summer of 1808, a customs officer at Boppard – a town on the left bank of the Rhine, right across from Bornhofen – seized three packages of contraband tobacco from two pilgrims. In response to this incident, the prefecture in nearby Koblenz lamented that pilgrimage to Bornhofen often constituted a mere pretext for smuggling.

A year later, the bishop of Mainz Joseph Ludwig Colmar (1760–1818) complained that some Catholics kept pretending to go on pilgrimage while actually attempting various forms of escape from the French Empire, whether draft-dodging or familial emigration. According to Colmar, some hoped to reach distant settler frontiers like Crimea, which had been annexed by the Russian Empire in 1783 and opened to agricultural colonists from all over Europe. Other people from France’s Rhenish départements tried to emigrate to less distant regions such as Bavaria.

In short, countless “true” and “fake” pilgrims were figuring out how to deal with frequently hostile authorities and navigate the shifting terrain of the borderlands. The Napoleonic imperial order was meant to tightly contain people – in terms of both mobility and devotion. Irritating and subverting that order was one of the ways that pilgrims were making a difference in border culture. In my book, I shed light on several other ways as well: during the decades around 1800, pilgrims partook in transnational demonstrations of their faith, learned how to circumvent state-sponsored anticlericalism, and spearheaded new rounds of confrontation between Catholicism and Protestantism. In short, pilgrims contributed significantly to reshaping Catholicism and the politics of religion in the revolutionary era.

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Kilian Harrer is member of the scholarly staff at the IEG and wrote his dissertation about pilgrimage and borders in Western Central Europa, c. 1770–1810.

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Header illustration: Example for a stylized eighteenth-century depiction of a Wallfahrt. Diözesanarchiv Luxemburg, GV.Betreffserien, GV.Betreff 31, Description du jubilé, célébré à l’honneur de Marie, consolatrice des affligés, choisie depuis plus de cent ans pour patronne & protectrice de la ville & du duché de Luxembourg: avec le récit des décorations qui y ont paru, héritiers d’André Chevalier, Luxembourg 1781; engraving by J.N. Schütz. © Diözesanarchiv Luxemburg.

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