Recent scholarship has insisted on the plurality and complexity of the de- and re-sacralizations that swept across France in the decades around 1800. This complexity was most evocatively condensed into a paradox in the title of Paul Chopelin’s 2010 book on Lyon, Ville patriote et ville martyre. Maxime Hermant seems to echo that theme in the title of his reworked dissertation, De la ville régénérée à la ville impie. Yet, his contribution also diverges from what has come before in at least two interesting ways. First, by focusing on a small town (Provins, about 80 kilometers south-east of Paris), he illuminates a social setting that differed clearly both from France’s bigger cities and from its rural communities. Second, his narrative places unusual emphasis on the years 1814‑15: in Provins, Hermant asserts, the biggest moment of religious trauma occurred not in 1793 or 1794 (i.e., at the time of greatest revolutionary radicalism) but rather during those later two years of Napoleonic defeat, occupation, and monarchist restoration.

The book’s nine chapters cover almost half a century of urban history in regional context and against the backdrop of national regime and policy changes. After surveying the vitality as well as the weaknesses of Catholicism in late-Old-Regime Provins (Chapter 1), a town of roughly 5 000 inhabitants, Hermant explores in detail the dramatic changes of the Revolution’s first five years (Chapters 2–5). His deep familiarity with the relevant archives enables him to give a precise account of the scope and local repercussions of the abolition of monastic communities and canon chapters, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, and the First Republic’s campaign of »defanaticization«. In the wake of Chopelin’s more recent research, Hermant argues that this term captures radical revolutionaries’ religious vision and policies and should thus be preferred to the more familiar and far-reaching concept of dechristianization. Nevertheless, the majority of Provins’s church buildings and bells did not survive the 1790s, and as late as August 1796, no fewer than thirty-seven priests remained locked away in one of the town’s former abbeys. On the whole, however, pragmatism prevailed in Provins. In other words, conflicts involving the clergy and different groups of laypeople (confraternities, parish communities) kept popping up but never truly escalated. This relative calm continued after 1794, facilitating ecclesial reconciliation and renewal during the later Revolution (Chapter 6) and after the Concordat of 1801 (Chapters 7–9).

For readers who are not directly interested in the history of Provins per se, the question arises of how Hermant’s findings change the bigger historiographical picture of French Catholicism in the revolutionary era. His doctoral advisor, Monique Cottret, suggests in the book’s preface that Provins’s »quiet revolution« (11) was a rather exceptional trajectory. To be sure, as social and cultural historians have known at least since the early days of microstoria, the study of exceptional cases can have great analytical purchase. However, Hermant’s introductory chapter only briefly gestures toward microhistory, and in the Conclusion, he rests his case with an equally vague plea for »nuance« (257). Throughout, he largely leaves to his readers the task of reassessing the general in the light of the particular.

Consider, for instance, Hermant’s boldest claim – that what upended Catholic life in Provins more than any previous events were Napoleon’s defeats after 1812, the repeated occupation of the town by Cossacks and other foreign troops, and the Restoration clergy’s eagerness to frame these calamities as manifestations of divine wrath against an »impious town«. Hermant would have sharpened the argument if he had extended his inquiry to the years after 1815, the better to gauge the actual impact of this »traumatism« (242). He also might have drawn more systematically on the burgeoning secondary literature on the post-Napoleonic occupation of France (Christine Haynes’s important book is absent from the bibliography) to explore how the situation in Provins did or did not resemble that in other French towns or regions. I raise these points not to belittle Hermant’s achievement, but rather to indicate that future scholarship will need to work out the full implications of his fascinating local study.

That said, De la ville régénérée à la ville impie demonstrates what becomes visible once we shift our focus away from the well‑known epicenters of revolutionary-era religious conflict, such as the bigger cities (Paris, Lyon, Nantes), the Vendée and the South-East, or the bastions of the Petite Église that resisted the Concordat. Precisely because the author did not have any cataclysms of violence to grapple with, his book makes it easier to appreciate the importance of various other, less spectacular phenomena. I was impressed, for instance, with his analysis of how seriously revolutionary reorganizations of parish territories and cemeteries strained the religious and political fabric of urban society in Provins. In the 1980s and 90s already, work on different parts of France by Jean de Viguerie, Françoise Panhaleux, Régis Bertrand, and a few others hinted at the weight of these issues; Hermant’s research highlights how much more can and needs to be learned about them. More generally, De la ville régénérée à la ville impie contributes intriguingly to the ongoing revitalization of historical scholarship on Catholicism and the politics of religion in the age of the French Revolution. In addition, Hermant provides valuable glimpses into the history of non-violent political action and reconciliation in the Revolution and its aftermath.