LOURDES: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age
By Ruth Harris
Viking, 474 pages, $34.95
Scholars of French religious history have lamented the absence of in-depth analysis of what happened at Lourdes in 1858. Their long wait is over. Ruth Harris, a fellow in modern history at New College, Oxford, has written a remarkable book that takes seriously the apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary to Bernadette Soubirous, a poor girl who lived in a town “buried in the Pyrenean foothills and virtually unknown to the rest of France.” In a beautifully written narrative free of academic jargon, Harris argues that the apparitions and the great pilgrimage center that developed in Lourdes are not vestiges of “a remote, impoverished and illiterate world.” On the contrary, they reveal “the continued vibrancy of peasant belief and the sustained appeal and evolution of modern Catholicism.”
While gathering firewood near a grotto outside Lourdes on Feb. 11, 1858, 14-year-old Bernadette encountered a “smiling child in white” who held a rosary and made the sign of the cross. Belief that the mysterious figure was the Virgin Mary spread quickly, especially after March 2, when Bernadette conveyed the message that she was to, “Go and tell the priests to come here on procession and to build a chapel.” A crowd of 20,000 gathered two days later to observe Bernadette, and the last of 18 apparitions occurred March 25, when the figure in white announced she was the Immaculate Conception (the mother of God conceived without original sin).
Harris readily concedes that although mainstream historians have eagerly investigated rituals that represent signs of secular progress in the French Republic, there has been unease–and distaste–when it comes to Marian piety. This is a shame, she argues, because belief in the Virgin Mary was a “living, dynamic tradition” that cut across class lines and, in the case of Lourdes, provided “a realm for spiritual reflection and practical activism that the secular republic was rarely able to match.”
Social and urban historians, as well as general readers, will be particularly interested in the attention Harris pays to place, character and narrative. Using maps and photographs, she establishes Lourdes’ location on the great pilgrimage routes from France to northern Spain, and the long tradition extending back to the Middle Ages of sacralizing the landscape with shrines and grottoes. Equally important, she evokes the social, economic and political forces that shaped Lourdes and the shrine, discussing in detail the effect of anti-clerical laws, the scientific debate over the authenticity of Bernadette’s visions, anti-Semitism and the Dreyfus Affair, which “transformed political allegiances for decades to come.” But Harris never forgets the human dimension to this complex story, providing helpful biographical information on, and a listing of, the dramatis personae.
Harris has mined a rich lode of archival material to make her case that young girls and women were central to the story of Lourdes and the pilgrimages that developed into “elaborate rituals of touch, consolation and care” for the sick and dying. She demonstrates how Marian devotion broke down barriers between rich and poor, and the inversion of the social order that occurred when upper-class women cared for the ill who arrived in Lourdes suffering from infectious diseases and tuberculosis, “(dirtying) their hands with work normally performed by servants.”
One of the most compelling chapters in “Lourdes” is Harris’ discussion of the popular cult surrounding Bernadette, the “first saint photographed in her lifetime.” The public fascination with the Lourdes shepherdess was immediate–sick and dying pilgrims “ransacked her house for even the most paltry relics”–and continued long after Bernadette had left her village in 1866 to enter the Convent de Saint-Gildard in Nevers, where she died in 1879. Contemporary photographs depicted her wearing a Pyrenean peasant garb, reinforcing the popular belief that in selecting Bernadette, “the Virgin had singled out the ignorant, the poverty-stricken, the rural and the dispossessed.” But as Harris points out, this image was “filtered through an urban, romantic prism,” because Bernadette’s clothes were in fact “already far superior to the woollen wrappings she had probably worn during the apparitions.” Ironically, the images that contributed to her celebrity status “transformed her popular cult out of all recognition.”
The Grotto at Lourdes also experienced a profound transformation, from a “wild and even unprepossessing site” in 1866 into a massive basilica, completed in 1872. Harris documents these dramatic changes over time with bird’s-eye views of the town showing the vast crowds on pilgrimage to the shrine. A contemporary observer in 1940 decried the desecration of the landscape, claiming that “valleys have been raised and hills lowered to accommodate a grandiose assemblage of debased and costly ecclesiastical buildings, promenades, ramps, flights of steps and statues.” Yet, Harris notes, the expansion of the Lourdes shrine was inextricably linked with the national pilgrimage, which owed its success to “mass circulation press, train links and the managerial techniques of hospital administration.” In 1908, the 50th anniversary of the apparitions, more than 1 million pilgrims visited Lourdes. Harris asserts, “The labour movement could only rarely mobilize such crowds, and no republican institution even conceived of bringing so many women out into the public arena.” Indeed, she argues persuasively that the pilgrimages to Lourdes not only challenged Republican symbols such as Bastille Day and the Eiffel Tower, but they reversed “the traditional pattern of Catholicism constantly reacting defensively to secular incursion.”
At the outset of “Lourdes,” Harris declares her intention “to build a bridge between scholarship and the general reader.” She has succeeded, spectacularly, in “addressing aspects of historical experiences that seem beyond retrieval and hopeless of understanding.” This important book makes a strong case that “history is contained as much in bodies as it is in texts.” All the more reason, then, to include larger photographs in the next edition.
