Oxford University Press
The Invention of Catholicism
A Global Intellectual History of the Catholic Counterrevolution, 1780–1849
Catholicism did not simply survive the Age of Revolutions: it was remade by it.
From the reforming campaigns of the late eighteenth century to the revolutions of 1848, Catholics confronted a world in which the old alliance between church and state was coming apart. They did more than defend inherited beliefs or seek to restore the old religious and political order. Across Europe and the Atlantic world, writers, clerics, and activists refashioned Catholicism as a modern language of politics and society—one capable of organizing collective life and mobilizing believers on an unprecedented scale.
A Different Story of Modernity
Modern history is often told as the story of religion’s retreat. The Invention of Catholicism tells a different story. Secularization altered the conditions under which religion operated, but it also pushed Catholics to invent new ways of acting in public life.
Following networks that stretched across Europe and the Americas, the book shows Catholics rethinking liberty and rights, placing religion at the heart of emerging nations, experimenting with mass politics, and crafting responses to capitalism and social change. Catholicism emerged not as a relic of the old world, but as one of the major forces competing to shape the new one. The book also recasts counterrevolution as more than resistance to change: as a source of political innovation in its own right.
The result is a new account of both Catholicism and modernity—one in which religion did not merely resist the modern world, but helped make it.
Inside the Book
Six scenes from the book, pairing images from the volume with excerpts from the text.
As to Martyrdom
When Cardinal François-Joachim de Bernis, the French ambassador to Rome, warned him that the journey was “a faux pas that would compromise the dignity of the papacy without any benefit,” Pius reportedly gave him a very telling answer: “I am going to Vienna as I would go to martyrdom.” The trip, in other words, was not to be understood within the conventional logic of diplomacy. There would be talks with the emperor, certainly, but their outcome was never the pope’s real wager. Martyrs know perfectly well what awaits them. Their gesture is not meant to convert the executioner, but to move the spectators. Pius’s remark implied the existence of a third force to be reckoned with, beyond pope and emperor alike: the public.
Chapter 1, “Reform and Its Discontents,” pp. 21–22
A Lost Alliance
Among those who stormed the Bastille on July 14, 1789, was a priest, Claude Fauchet. As a member of the Paris Commune, Fauchet took part in the delegation that tried unsuccessfully to negotiate with the fortress’s governor. He probably never saw the Bastille’s cannons firing over his head, as he later recounted, but his participation in the event nonetheless anointed him as the prototype of the patriot priest. His eloquence, once placed at the service of the Revolution, did the rest, for Catholicism and the Revolution were not bound to be enemies. […] No one imagined that, four years later, as the Revolution turned against Catholicism and France descended into the Terror, Fauchet’s head would fall beneath the guillotine not far from where the Bastille had stood.
Chapter 3, “Dangerous Liaisons,” p. 51
Deal with the Devil
Rome nevertheless had much to gain from the agreement. To be sure, the new regime of surveillance threatened to turn priests into “subordinates of the secular government,” as Cardinal Michele Di Pietro warned. But France, the relentless enemy of the previous ten years, had now become an ally, however uneasy, and the specter of renewed dechristianization receded. In parishes so disordered that laypeople had begun to conduct services on their own—a development the Curia regarded as nearly as grave a threat as the burning of churches—the concordat promised, as one observer put it, a “return to religion.” Just as importantly, Bonaparte’s decision to negotiate directly with Pius VII, bypassing the French episcopate, enhanced papal control over the Gallican church. In accordance with the treaty, the pope requested the resignation of all French bishops, and most complied. Although Bonaparte selected the new hierarchy and reappointed many of those same men, this was nonetheless the first time a pope had been empowered to determine the fate of an entire national hierarchy. The assertion of papal primacy, the end of the schism, and the settlement of religious conflict were gains well worth a mass.
Chapter 5, “The Age of Concordats,” p. 109
Nations under God
As French soldiers crossed the Pyrenees in 1808, Spanish preachers reactivated the crusading rhetoric that had sustained resistance in 1793–95. Their enemies, they insisted, were bent on dechristianizing Spain. Napoleon was portrayed, quite literally, as the Beast of Revelation; no matter how the letters of his name were rearranged, they always seemed to yield the fatal number 666. Between 1813 and 1815, Diego de Cádiz’s 1794 El soldado católico en guerra de religión, the great manifesto of counterrevolutionary crusading, went through four new editions. As conspiracy theories ran amok—Barruel’s Mémoires appeared in Spanish in 1808, while Hervás y Panduro’s Causas de la Revolución de Francia had already been reprinted in 1807—Antonio de Capmany, a former collaborator of Pablo de Olavide, warned his compatriots that the struggle against the French was “holier than the crusades,” because not religion alone but the nation itself was at stake.
Chapter 7, “Nations under God,” pp. 143–44
Liberty Will Save the World
Liberals, [Lamennais] conceded, had grasped something real: peoples rose in the name of liberty because they suffered under regimes that were illegitimate and unjust. But liberalism could not satisfy their longing. “Liberty,” he wrote, “consists of two things: the legitimacy of power and the conformity of its actions with immutable justice.” Because liberals ignored natural law and proclaimed “the sovereignty of individual reason,” they merely replaced one despotism with another. There was no reason, however, for Catholics to surrender the language of liberty to the liberals. “Liberals are right,” Lamennais explained to a friend, “liberty will save the world—just not their liberty.”
Chapter 8, “God and Liberty,” pp. 185–86
Catholic Masses
In 1844, when 500,000 Catholic pilgrims flooded the Rhenish city of Trier in a public display of force, Görres celebrated the “thread of harmony and love” that “wove them all into one fabric” and placed Catholicism at the center of the public sphere. “It will be up to the masses,” Görres concluded, “to decide our future,” and Catholic masses had indeed risen.
Chapter 9, “Catholic Masses,” p. 208
Contents
Introduction
Part I. The Catholic Counterrevolution
- Reform and Its Discontents, 1763–89
- Dress Rehearsal, 1786–89
- Dangerous Liaisons, 1789–95
- The Counterrevolutionary Constellation, 1790–99
Part II. The Invention of Catholicism
- The Age of Concordats, 1799–1820
- Modern Times, 1815–30
- Nations under God, 1808–48
- God and Liberty, 1825–34
- Catholic Masses, 1832–48
Conclusion: Catholicism, Modernity, and Lamennais’s Grandchildren
Publication Details
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- Publication date
- December 1, 2026
- Length
- 328 pages
- Formats
- Hardback, paperback, and ebook
- Hardback ISBN
- 9780197872376
- Paperback ISBN
- 9780197872383