Now in the middle of my current scholarly project, I take much comfort in Einstein's preceding quote.

Perhaps it’s because of the enormity of my task, which is to examine the practices, beliefs, and politics of Catholics in approximately fifty-two small towns located in eight diverse regions of France during the French Revolution.  To non-specialists these parameters might seem rather strange.  Why is the study shaped in such a way?

Why, for example, consider religion as opposed to politics, economics, or art?  A predominantly Catholic country at the outset of the Revolution, France had a relatively unified religious culture that served as one of the kingdom’s few common bonds before 1789.  Catholicism was not only a basis for much French sociability; it was also a frequent source of economic and cultural interchange among individuals.  Even more important, it was integral to the comprehensive cosmology of the French people, in part through its prescribed norms of public and personal morality.  Yet for these reasons Catholicism quickly became politicized during the French Revolution, resulting in acute divisions not only between the revolutionary state and the people, but also among Catholics themselves.  Indeed, some of the most protracted internal struggles characterizing the Revolution revolved around what Catholicism had been, what it was to be vis-à-vis the new political order, and what role it ultimately should play in people’s lives.  Despite this, the topic of religion has been frequently overlooked by revolutionary scholars over the past forty years or so.

But that still leaves the matter of studying religion in small towns, as opposed to bigger cities or entire regions.  What was so special about these locales?  The Revolution was urban in origin, at least in the sense that it was led by those in major cities—most notably Paris—and many ideas propelling it had long germinated there as well.  Still, in the eighteenth century the vast majority of the French resided in the villages and small towns (the latter called in French bourgs or petites villes) of the countryside and was less conscious of elite political culture, meaning that there often was a disconnect between the Revolution’s leadership and the majority of individuals for whom it claimed to speak.  Small towns occupied a critical space—an explosive nexus, in fact—where the revolutionary impetus from urban areas and the rural masses came face-to-face. Yet nowhere was this more true than in communities having administrations for new political jurisdictions called districts.  These seats of local power not only stood at political and cultural crossroads, but also because of this became microcosms of the revolutionary maelstrom as a whole.  Somewhat like the topic of religion, however, most recent scholars have sidestepped small towns in preference to larger urban communities or, conversely, predominantly rural ones.

Even so, why examine the small towns of eight regions, instead of those in just one or two?  While Catholic culture was a unifier before 1789, France remained highly variegated—including the ways in which Catholicism was understood, institutionally defined, and even practiced and observed.  Some regions, such as provinces in the west, far north, and far east, had proportionally more Catholic clerics and institutions than those provinces of the center, southwest, and southeast.  France became more centralized and homogenous after 1789, but many of its provincial distinctions persisted into the revolutionary years.  Thus if one were to confine the research of religion during the Revolution to small towns merely located in one or two regions, the resulting study might be informative but less than revealing about the entire nation.  Meant to transcend regional variations, my study considers small towns in eight regions: the departments of the Ille-et-Vilaine (West); the Haute-Garonne (South); the Isère (Southeast); the Gironde (Southwest); the Côte d’Or (East); the Puy-de-Dôme (South-Central); the Meurthe (Northeast); and the Seine-Inférieure (Northwest).  In this way I seek to tell a story about France as a whole.