Civilizing Habits: Women Missionaries and the Revival of French Empire

Sarah. A. Curtis

Civilizing Habits: Women Missionaries and the Revival of French Empire

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)

 

Abstract

Civilizing Habits explores the life stories of three French women missionaries—Philippine Duchesne, Emilie de Vialar, and Anne‐Marie Javouhey—who transgressed boundaries, both real and imagined, to evangelize far from France's shores. In so doing, this book argues that they helped France reestablish a global empire after the dislocation of the Revolution and the fall of Napoleon. They also pioneered a new missionary era in which the educational, charity, and health care services provided by women became valuable tools for spreading Catholic influence around the globe. Philippine D ... More

Civilizing Habits explores the life stories of three French women missionaries—Philippine Duchesne, Emilie de Vialar, and Anne‐Marie Javouhey—who transgressed boundaries, both real and imagined, to evangelize far from France's shores. In so doing, this book argues that they helped France reestablish a global empire after the dislocation of the Revolution and the fall of Napoleon. They also pioneered a new missionary era in which the educational, charity, and health care services provided by women became valuable tools for spreading Catholic influence around the globe. Philippine Duchesne, who began her religious life in a cloistered convent before the Revolution, traveled to former French territory in Missouri in 1818 to proselytize among Native Americans and open girls' schools on the frontier. Emilie de Vialar established missions throughout the Mediterranean basin, from Algeria to the Ottoman Empire, and worked among Muslim populations. Anne‐Marie Javouhey made her life's work the evangelization of Africans in the French slave colonies, including a utopian settlement in the wilds of French Guiana. Freed from physical enclosure, these women were protected from worldly corruption only by their religious habits and their behavior. Paradoxically, however, through embracing religious institutions designed to shield their femininity, these women gained increased authority to travel outside of France, challenge church power, and evangelize among non‐Christians, all roles more commonly ascribed to male missionaries. Their stories teach us about the life paths open to religious women in the nineteenth century and how both church and state benefited from their initiative and energy to expand the boundaries of faith and nation.

 

Keywords: Philippine Duchesne, Emilie de Vialar, Anne‐Marie Javouhey, women missionaries, French empire, Catholic missions, Native Americans, Muslim, slave colonies