French Revolution – Writing European History / Europäische Geschichte schreiben

5 Questions for Kilian Harrer

What kind of story does your new book about pilgrims tell?

Kilian Harrer is a postdoc researcher at the Institute of European History (IEG) in Mainz. His book “Devout and Defiant. How Pilgrims Shaped the Franco-German Borderlands in the Age of Revolutions” has just been published by the University of Virginia Press in the series “Studies in Early Modern German History”. We asked him five questions about his new book.

1. What was the initial impulse to deal with this topic precisely?

I was in my second year of graduate school, searching for a good dissertation topic, when I came across mentions of several French citizens who were guillotined in 1794 for going on pilgrimages to Switzerland. It was not so much the state violence of the French Revolution’s radical years that intrigued me, but rather the clash between the claim of territorial sovereignty and the pilgrims’ quest to reach certain holy places. While those cases of guillotined pilgrims were exceptional, clandestine and contested pilgrimages more generally were a common phenomenon in the revolutionary era. I was energized by the realization that I had found not only a topic but a clear angle, too: I was going to interrogate how pilgrims navigated and shaped tensions between territorial space and sacred space. Looking back, I also think I was semi-consciously inspired to pursue this project because it was abundantly clear by 2017 that I myself was living in an age obsessed with borders—and especially obsessed with various forms of border-crossing mobility.

“Social transgressions are not always intended as such. Yet, when they are intentional, they can amount to politicized acts of defiance.”

2. What do you mean by “defiant”, “borderlands” and “the age of revolutions”? Can you contextualize these terms and explain how and why you use them?

I initially planned for the book to be titled “Transgressive Devotion” before settling on the catchier phrase “Devout and Defiant.” In fact, the term “defiant” does not carry a great deal of conceptual weight in my book. It is worth noting, however, that many pilgrims did openly defy the structural (legal, political) obstacles that various authorities had designed to stifle the practice of pilgrimage in the decades around 1800. As I point out in the introduction of the book, social transgressions are not always intended as such. Yet, when they are intentional, they can amount to politicized acts of defiance.

This issue gains in complexity because of my choice to focus geographically on a set of border regions along the Moselle, Saar, and Rhine (from Luxembourg in the north to Alsace in the south). While the distinguishing characteristics of borderlands are difficult to pin down at a theoretical level, one thing was crucial for my purposes: in the borderlands of the revolutionary era, pilgrimage was not just a socially transgressive practice. Rather, border-crossing pilgrims also engaged in distinctly territorial transgressions, due to the proximity and the intense political significance of state boundaries. Put differently, from the perspective of authorities that were hostile to pilgrimage, it was not only a matter of combatting Catholic ‘superstition’; they were also extremely preoccupied with border security.

The phrase “age of revolutions” raises the issue of periodization. I believe that my book can help clarify the historical profile of European Catholicism in the messy interstitial decades that separate “the baroque era” (late sixteenth century to roughly 1770) from “the age of ultramontanism” (mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, according to most historians of Catholicism). I prefer, however, to view periodization as a heuristic means to an end, rather than as an end in itself. In some small way, I hope to have signaled this personal distaste for the reification of historical periods by choosing not to capitalize “the age of revolutions” throughout my book. Finally, I attach some importance to the plural form—“the age of revolutions” rather than “the age of revolution.” For one thing, while the French Revolution of 1789 certainly looms large in my book, I also consider the ramifications of the Brabant Revolution in Belgium and the Helvetic Revolution in Switzerland at specific points of my narrative. Moreover, I view the plural of “revolutions” as another small reminder that this historical period is best studied as a time of numerous, heterogeneous upheavals across Europe and beyond, not to be reduced to a monolithic essence of “Revolution.”

“I ultimately gleaned relevant information in roughly twenty-five different archives (in places ranging from Einsiedeln to Brussels and from Paris to Koblenz), which was an exciting experience in its own right.”

3. Was there a moment in your research that grabbed you personally? Did anything about your protagonists particularly surprise you and change your view of the topic?

I was pleasantly surprised by the richness of the archival materials I sifted through for this book. When I embarked on the project eight years ago, I knew I wanted to write on the Swiss shrine of Einsiedeln and on pilgrimage to Luxembourg City. Two of the book’s five main chapters have ended up reflecting those early hunches. But the book as a whole could never have come together if it hadn’t been for all the unexpected finds in state and church archives, all the dossiers that revealed to me the significance of other shrines and other pilgrim movements. I ultimately gleaned relevant information in roughly twenty-five different archives (in places ranging from Einsiedeln to Brussels and from Paris to Koblenz), which was an exciting experience in its own right. Above all, without those moments of surprise, I would not have been able to unlock such important aspects of my topic as confessional rivalries, mass mobility, waves of Marian apparitions, pilgrim tactics versus police strategies, and much more.

*Cover of “Devout and Defiant. How Pilgrims Shaped the Franco-German Borderlands in the Age of Revolutions” .© *University of Virginia Press*.*

4. What kind of story do you tell in the book? Is there a happy ending?

The story I tell is about the ability of (mostly) non-elite, small-town or rural people to make a difference in an age of political and spiritual turmoil—not by participating in explicitly revolutionary acts, but by creatively adapting their practices of worship and mobility. For some of these people, pilgrimage did have a happy ending. For example, there are reports about several miraculous healings that occurred in 1799 at the Good Well of Hoste, an apparition site in northeastern Lorraine. One anonymous woman regained her voice upon placing her foot in the well water, after having been unable to speak for four months. Another one was delivered from convulsions—said to have been caused by demonic possession—when the people who had transported her to the Good Well succeeded in having her swallow a sip of the sacred water.

“I touch on ‘happy’ as well as on darker or more tragic aspects of pilgrimage, and while I argue that the actions of pilgrims and pilgrimage organizers were ultimately quite consequential, my goal in writing the book was also not to romanticize these actions.”

I assume that some readers will be particularly intrigued by these stories. Others will ponder the violence of many encounters between pilgrims and police, or between Catholics and Protestants, or the assault by members of a pilgrimage procession against two Jewish men who happened to be traveling on the same road and who allegedly refused to remove their hats as a gesture of deference. In short, I touch on “happy” as well as on darker or more tragic aspects of pilgrimage, and while I argue that the actions of pilgrims and pilgrimage organizers were ultimately quite consequential, my goal in writing the book was also not to romanticize these actions.

5. What would you like readers to take away from the book?

One main take-away is incapsulated in the subtitle of the book: pilgrims wielded enough collective power to actively shape the borderlands. This point is worth emphasizing because scholars have viewed pilgrimage in the decades around 1800 primarily as an object of enlightened scorn and repression. But to write about pilgrims in this way is to only ask how the age of revolutions impacted pilgrimage. My book flips this question and shows the impact of pilgrimage on the age of revolutions—in other words, how pilgrims helped redefine the politically crucial place of Catholicism in the borderlands through their changing religious practices. They reoriented Catholicism as they confronted the state-led policing of borders and worship. For example, they crossed provocatively into Protestant territories and went abroad to visit shrines beyond the reach of anticlerical revolutionaries. In the process, pilgrims helped create the framework within which nineteenth-century Catholics would navigate nationalism, empire, religious diversity, and secularism.

“I hope that my book will inspire readers to reflect on how so many different kinds of people have engaged with shifting borders and their equally malleable meanings—in the past and all the way into the present.”

Another major point is that pilgrims’ devout and defiant acts gained their political meaning in a wider context, which my book describes as a transformation of border culture. The new politics of the revolutionary era relied heavily on securitizing borders and supercharging them with ideological meaning, even as dramatic territorial shifts kept signaling the extreme instability of those very same borders. These contradictory dynamics mattered to pilgrims, police, and politicians but also to many other people, from merchants and migrants to deserters and draft-dodgers. I hope that my book will inspire readers to reflect on how so many different kinds of people have engaged with shifting borders and their equally malleable meanings—in the past and all the way into the present.

For more information see also Kilian Harrer’s blog post “Transgressive Devotion” and his article “Pilgrimage” on EGO | European History Online.

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

The questions were asked by Manfred Sing, research coordinator of the IEG.

Header image: Kilian Harrer. © IEG Mainz, photographer: Barbara Mainz.

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

Kilian Harrer discusses the challenges that pilgrims faced in the decades around 1800.

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.”

Ferdinand Bodmann, Code de Police administrative, etc.: Gesezbuch der administrativen Polizei, oder Sammlung sämmtlicher neuern und ältern Gesezze […]. Mainz: Kupferberg, 1810. Vol. 1, p. 200 (detail). Source: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.