Schonpflug, Daniel and Wessel, Martin Schulze (eds) (2012) Redefining the Sacred. Religion in the French and Russian Revolutions. Berlin: Peter Lang. - 226 p.

Religion and revolution are complex, rich, and vibrant topics; and if you allow yourself to go beyond neutral academicism, dramatic and sinister. It attracted and will continue to attract interest of various properties. Ideologues and politicians can construct countless mythological constructions; philosophers can create explanatory schemes; journalists can give these ideas popular interpretations.

But there is also the experience of historians, and one of them is before us. This book is an attempt to highlight the progress made in the study of the two great revolutions, the French and Russian revolutions, and the changes that have taken place over the past decades in understanding the "religion - revolution" link. We are talking about a rethinking that began, in relation to the French Revolution, in the 1970s, and in relation to the Russian Revolution - in the 1990s. Although there is a gap of twenty years, the direction of analytical and interpretative shifts is similar. What are these changes?

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The first thing that determines the dynamics of historiography is the introduction of new sources. In the case of the French Revolution, in recent decades, historians have turned to those layers of sources that previously did not reach their hands (for example, provincial archives). In Russia, where the historical memory of the revolution is still relatively fresh, there was simply the discovery of a whole array of sources that were inaccessible. Historians were given the right to describe, in the spirit of Leopold Ranke's classic formula, wie es eigentlich gewesen war - "as it really was."

In the case of France, even earlier historians relied on archives, the press, memoirs, and statistics. But it turned out, as is often the case, that the old "actually" differs from the new "actually", partly depending on which sources are used, which are emphasized. But this raises the following question: why do priorities change? What explains the special interest in this or that array of sources? In such cases, other things interfere with the research process - a change in optics, new methodological tools, new historiosophical concepts and intuitions, and even ideological preferences. In the case of Russia, the mass discovery of sources coincided with similar meta-shifts in historiographical consciousness; and, in the Russian case, the ideological component is much more important-simply because the direct legacy of the revolution is still alive in the flesh.

What exactly happened in rethinking the place of religion in revolutions? The structure of the book itself provides the first clue. It has four sections, each of which consists of two articles - "French" and "Russian". These four sections are called: "Rethinking Secularization"; "Religious and Political Dissent"; "Revolutionization of the Church"; "Revolutionary cults". So, the logic of the compilers of the book is as follows: first, to understand the degree of (non -) religiosity of both societies, i.e., those initial circumstances that could presumably be the cause or background of revolutions; then, to understand the deep lines of division within the pre-revolutionary religious field in order to test the hypothesis of possible involvement of it (or part of it) in revolutions; then, to to show the attempts of the leading churches, or a part of them, to adapt to the revolution; and finally, to show how the revolutionary regimes, consciously or unconsciously, have been able to adapt themselves to the revolution.-

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elements of the "old sacred" follow and transform them into new, revolutionary forms.

All these twists and turns of interpretation are very interesting. However, there is one basic common denominator, a certain factual background that seems indisputable and from which the editors of the book begin: both revolutions were a time of mass violence against the dominant churches - the Catholic in one case and the Orthodox in the other. No one can dispute these facts and the corresponding figures. In France, 2,000 - 3,000 priests were killed and 18,000 abdicated during the French Revolution. In Russia, out of about 40,000 parish churches, approximately 4,000 remained by 1941, and the scale of repression against the clergy was incomparably higher; and so on (p. 7).

Violence in every sense is the inevitable content of revolutions. That the violence was directed against the institutions and symbols that sanctified the Ancien regime is perfectly understandable. However, as the long historiographical tradition of the French Revolution and the not so long one of the Russian Revolution attest, not everything is as simple as it seems at first glance.

The first programmatic assessment of the Great Revolution in hot pursuit, made by Joseph de Maistre, was that the Revolution was God's punishment for the sins of the Enlightenment; and Philippe Buchet, a Socialist and Catholic, at about the same time, on the contrary, declares the Revolution to be the embodiment of the Divine mission of France - to bring the Christian spirit of brotherhood to the world. The great historian Jules Michelet offers another interpretation: the Revolution replaced the Christian system of values with a system of law, but he cautiously suggests that the revolution partly reproduced the Christian model: it simultaneously " continued Christianity and denied it." Alexis de Tocqueville develops this idea of ambivalence by doubling down on the concept of "religion": The Revolution was not directed against religion as such, but against all earthly institutions of the Ancien regime; the Revolution itself was the embodiment of the religious spirit, because it was inspired by ideas carried by "political missionaries".

Then, at the end of the XIX century, the real work of historians with archives begins. Sorbonne professor Alphonce Aulard draws a skeptical conclusion based on new sources: the attack on the church was explained by the atheism of the elite and the" non-Christianized " mentality of the peasantry, and the new cults of the Revolution -

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they were only theatrical productions for mass mobilization. Albert Mathiez, a student of Aulard, on the other hand, concluded that "revolutionary politics is fundamentally religious" (thus continuing Tocqueville's line).

Then, after a long lull, a new interest in this problem begins in the 1970s. Michel Vovelle, in his books" Baroque Piety and De-Christianization in Provence in the eighteenth century "and" Revolution against the Church", establishes an unconditional causal link between the decline of religion and revolutionary anti-religion. Roger Chartier confirms this diagnosis of de-Christianization as the cause of the Revolution. At this point, however, the American historian Dale van Kley breaks into historiography with a book with the telling title "The Religious Origins of the French Revolution" (his article is also in the peer-reviewed book). Van Klee radically challenges the established consensus in French historiography about secularization (the decline of religion) in the 18th century as the cause of the Revolution. It is not so much the decline of religion that is important, he believes, as its pluralization and internal divisions-especially between the Jesuits and the Jansenists - as a result of which religious ideas and related actors and groups were the most important component of the social ferment that led to the Revolution. Other historians have continued this line, even if they do not agree with the absolutization of" religious origins"; they have focused more deeply on such aspects as revolutionary rituals and the agonizing attempts to incorporate part of the Church into the new regime.

What about in Russia? From the very beginning, understanding the connection between religion and the revolution was a central issue, regardless of the political or ideological camp. And then there were the inevitable analogies: the shadow of the French Revolution hung over Russian minds. In the depths of the Silver Age roamed complex stories, with strong eschatological overtones. Already in Vekhi (1909), Nikolai Berdyaev and Sergei Bulgakov drew attention to the religious patterns of thinking and behavior of Russian revolutionaries. Berdyaev's later generalizing work "The Origins of Russian Communism" (1948) became a classic for framing this idea of ambivalence (which was reminiscent of some interpretations of the French Revolution). Authors of the review mention-

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There are also Western historians John Curtis and Dmitry Pospelovsky, who have focused on anti-religious persecution; and Glennis Young and Daniel Paris, who have described anti-religious policies at the local level. In parallel, studies of "revolutionary sacredness" - the cult of Lenin and Stalin, mass festive rituals, and so on-were developed.

Inevitably, as in the French case, the question arises about the influence of protest secular culture, the degree of mass religiosity, the strength or weakness of the institution of the Church on the eve of the Revolution, as well as the reasons for the mass departure from religion (if any) after the Revolution. Developing Berdyaev's intuition, some modern authors - partly echoing the thesis about Van Klee's "religious origins" - show that "the language of the revolution was attractive to many believers, because it was strongly consonant with Christian semantics and ethics" (p. 14). The editors of the book emphasize that many studies show complex and bizarre connections between religious and revolutionary ideas, social actors, and patterns of mass behavior. In their notes, they provide a fairly comprehensive list of the works of the last two decades devoted to these complex combinations.

But the same thing happens in the historiography of the French Revolution. What is the result, what is the paradigm shift, if any? These are the generalizations that we can make by following the book's editors. First, the thesis of serious secularization (decline of religion) as a deep and obvious cause of revolutions in both cases, it seems, in the light of new research, exaggerated. Secondly, in the current historiography, religion is no longer just an object of state (Jacobin or Bolshevik) policy, but a dynamic area of social relations that can "transform" in different ways in the conditions of a revolutionary vortex. Therefore, third, revolutions were not so much fundamentally anti-religious phenomena, but rather "events that took place within religious societies and were the point of rethinking the sacred" (p. 8).

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In the part devoted to the thesis on secularization, there are two articles - by Danial Schonpflug on France and Gregory Freeze on Russia. Schonpflug examines in detail all existing approaches to the problem

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secularization in theory, and-specifically - to the question of secularization in eighteenth-century France. He sympathizes with the recent revision of the "decline of religion" narrative. But to what extent does this criticism correspond to the empirical reality of pre-revolutionary France? It is clear that the author finds it difficult to reconcile his criticism with the facts: for example, when asking the question "how secular was Voltaire", he separates the fierce criticism of institutions and practices on the part of encyclopedists, on the one hand, and their commitment to "religion as such" (in particular, in the deist version of Christianity), which does not look like quite convincing. The author cannot object to the fact that Jansenism really seriously undermined the unity of the Church. He cannot but see a strong confrontation between the parish clergy and the episcopate. It is difficult for him to turn a blind eye to the drastic reduction in priestly ordinations from the middle of the century to the beginning of the Revolution. He has nothing to object to the reduction of the formulas of piety in wills; the fact that Masonic fraternities increased at the expense of Catholic ones; the de-Christianization of the imagery of votive paintings; the fact that there was an intra-family "contraceptive revolution" (the emergence of something like "family planning") and, conversely, an increase in illegitimate children, which meant a weakening of the authority of the commandments; and so on. However, the author tries to justify another explanation: it was not so much about the decline of religion, but about a certain new model of Christianity. Further, the author asks the question: to what extent did religious processes influence the political crisis that led to the Revolution? He identifies two approaches: the thesis of " the interconnected decline of religion and the state "and the thesis of"political-religious dynamics". The second thesis is a more complex hypothesis that reflects the above shifts: It proceeds from the fact that the Revolution radicalized all types of protest, including religious ones (Jansenists, Protestants, etc.), and therefore it cannot be denied that the revolution, in addition to political and social ones, also had religious roots.

Gregory Freese's article on Russia before the Revolution is an example of strict, clearly documented historical positivism. Frieze cannot rely on a long historiographical tradition, as in the case of France, and it trusts only archival sources: communion statistics; reports of deans in diocesan archives; letters from priests and laity in the Synod archives, etc. Rejecting the scientific idea that religion is "irrelevant" or that Russia is" irreligious " in the pre-revolution period-

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During the revolutionary period, Friese tries to prove that the position of religion was strong. Therefore, he believes that religion, as he writes, was the most important "subversive factor" that led to the Revolution (p. 52); and religion may have played such a subversive role precisely because, as Friese writes, there was no de-Christianization as such, and the level of observance of religious practices remained very high. His main argument in assessing the high level of religiosity is the high percentage of confessing and receiving communion-according to the general imperial and diocesan statistics (80-90%). Frieze, however, does not focus on the question of the obligation of the annual communion, and after all, such a mandatory nature of the key rite can seriously weaken its argument. In any case, Frieze sees the problem of the pre-revolutionary church in something else: he identifies "three crises" during the last reign: (1) the crisis in state-church relations - the disintegration of the "union of altar and throne"; (2) the internal church crisis-between the lower and higher clergy, between the laity and the priesthood; (3) the crisis associated with the formation of religious pluralism - the alienation of Orthodox people within a multi-confessional empire, where the state was guided more by raison d'etat than by support for Orthodoxy.

The second section of the book is about the relationship between religious and political dissent that led to revolutions; here we find articles by Dale Van Clay and Alexander Etkind. Van Clay's article is the longest and most complex in the book: it confronts hypotheses about the intellectual and social maturation of the great Revolution during the long XVIII century. Van Klee conceptually connects this problem with the emergence of modern nationalism, which, however, in the XVIII century. It took the form of "patriotism" and was a cross-national, i.e. pan-European movement, directed against despotism in general. Note, by the way, that the meaning of the word "patriot" has changed dramatically after the era of nationalism...

So, in this movement of "patriots" Van Clay finds religious origins. These are subtle and deep plots. For example, as the "sense of sinfulness" is softened in religious culture, "human nature is rehabilitated," and hence the reception of the idea of natural rights among broad strata of dissenters, and then the idea of equality, and finally the whole enlightenment idiom as a whole. Van Klee rejects Jurgen Haberm's classic thesis-

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sa on the fundamental secularism of the" public sphere " of the Age of Enlightenment (pp. 99-100). On the contrary, he finds many important religious actors and devotes an entire section to the confessional factor in disputes between "patriots" and "anti-patriots." He mentions the Jansenist-Jesuit controversy in France (referring to Jansenism as "the Catholic form of Calvinism"); the role of Pietism in the German Enlightenment; the religious overtones of the Whig-Tory debate in Britain, particularly the important role of Protestant dissidents and nonconformists; the Mennonite-Orangist conflict in Holland, etc.

One point in Van Klee's text remains unclear. He is talking about a deep dispute between the Augustinian, more radical attitude, and what he calls neo-Pelagianism or neo-Arminianism. It is the stricter, dualistic "Augustinianism" that turns out to be the ideological ferment of radical "patriots", while the milder versions of Protestantism (in particular, the Arminian version of Calvinism) look more conservative and loyal. On the one hand, it seems natural. On the other hand, the "rehabilitation of human nature", the deaccumulation of sinfulness, which the author himself mentions as the origins of new social ideals, seem more consonant precisely with the softening of Augustinian-Calvinist rigorism. There seems to be some paradox here that needs to be explained.

While Van Klee finds many obvious and hidden connections between religious and political dissidence in eighteenth-century Europe, Alexander Etkind shows that the connection between Russian sectarian mysticism and the Russian Revolution is not entirely clear. He subtly traces some unmistakable connections: he speaks of a significant proportion of former seminarians or children of priests among the Narodnaya Volya and revolutionaries; or shows the latter's enthusiastic attitude towards runners, eunuchs, khlysts, or Old Believers. The Narodnaya Volya (especially) and (partly) other revolutionaries tried to "play" with the sectarian social apocalypse, the communal structure, their practices of bodily and matrimonial transgression, and their rebellious radicalism (p. 146; 149). What is important is that Russian sects were imaginary (passive) rather than real (active) subjects of the revolutionary movement: Etkind emphasizes that in Russia there was nothing like the direct political involvement of religious dissent that we see

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in England in the 17th century or in America in the 18th and 19th centuries. Etkind concludes: no, in the end it cannot be said that the Revolution grew out of religious dissent. However, the points of contact - real or imagined - that the author himself describes are still enough to recognize the seriousness of the" sectarian "factor and complement Fries 'conclusions about the" subversive " role of the dominant church itself.

Two subsequent articles speak of attempts to adapt the dominant churches to the revolution. They were written by Bernard Plongeron and Mikhail Shkarovsky. Plongeron shows how the hurricane of Revolution sweeps away the old church and "revolutionizes" a part of it, giving rise to ideas like "clerical democracy"; he traces the inexorable dynamics of the Revolution from the Constitution civil du clerge (July 1790), which created a new type of "citizen priest" and ordered priests to take the "civil oath", to the law on secularization (September 1792), which declares priests simply citizens, permanently deposing the status of the priesthood. Repressions against the Church are in full swing. However, as the author shows, active religious life continues in different provinces, and in the center of events is such a bright personality as the famous abbe Gregoire (1750-1831), an ardent defender of Catholicism, but at the same time a zealous advocate of a secular state and freedom of religion.

Shkarovsky's less analytical article traces the history of Renovationism in the Russian Church - from the beginning of the 20th century to attempts at a Renovationist schism, which by and large failed. Some of the themes of Russian Renovationism are in tune with those in which the French "clerical democrats" (the same Abbot Gregoire) were involved; the tensions within both churches, sharpened by the revolution, are also similar. The renewal of Russian Orthodoxy, Shkarovsky concludes, was interrupted immediately after it was seriously declared at the Local Council of 1917-1918 (p. 194).

Finally, the last two articles examine the correlation between traditional church cult practices and new cults created by the revolution. The text by Jean-Claude Bonnet is devoted to the cult of Jean-Paul Marat; the article by Frithjof Benjamin Schenk is devoted to early Soviet cults, especially the cult of Lenin. Bonnet shows that the secular "cult of great men" began as early as the time of the monarchical Academy in the mid-eighteenth century, only to flourish fully during the revolution, when the Church of St. Genevieve was still in use.

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turned into a Pantheon-temple of the new "civil religion" with its new "gods". The Comte de Mirabeau was the first of them. Marat was also buried in it. It is not so important that, due to the changing situation, his body was removed from the Pantheon after only five months; it is important that the invented Cult of Reason and the Cult of the Supreme Being clearly did not work, and Marat's martyrdom was a strong influx of emotions, despite the fact that religious feelings were intertwined with this secular cult - in some cases up to identification with Christ (p. 205).

The pantheon of heroes of the revolution was also formed in Russia. At first, however, the revolution was fundamentally iconoclastic: according to orthodox Marxism, in the spirit of the historical school of Mikhail Pokrovsky, sanctioned by Lenin personally, history is decided by the people, not by individuals (p. 215). But, according to the author, there was also the influence of another book - Tommaso Campanella: in his "City of the Sun" there were images of heroes everywhere, and this idea of "monumental propaganda" was finally supported by Lenin (p. 219). But the true cult was created around the leader himself after his death; he found himself at the center of a "political religion" that was opposed to traditional Orthodoxy, just as the "red" memorial calendar was opposed to the old church calendar. Here the author speaks of parallelism and alludes to the similarity of revolutionary heroism and the Christian cult of saints; but he does not give sufficient evidence. And is the idea of continuity so obvious here? Apparently, it still requires proof.

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There is no afterword or conclusion to the book. The main questions formulated in the introduction constantly come up in the course of empirically rich texts and gain new acuteness due to the comparison of two epochs and two revolutions. Generalizing this comparison is an even more difficult task, which the editors refrained from doing. Maybe reasonable.

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