ABSTRACT
There was little in Italian piety that was wholly alien to the French, as opposed to what they misunderstood. Nor were there many battles which had not been fought before between the Italian laity and, successively, Trent, the Jansenists and the Enlightened reformers of the mid-eighteenth century. Indeed, French officials had fewer problems in recognizing the more archaic aspects of Italian religiosity – those of ‘nuestras Indías’ – than in disentangling them from Baroque orthodoxy. It was often Tridentine rituals like the Forty Hours that seemed new to them, not those rooted in archaism. The new regime emerged from a world full of popular superstition, a multiplicity of Madonnas and, at least in the Midi, the lay confraternities, which embodied that ‘meridional sociability’ Agulhon calls ‘a valid global intuition’.1 Although the associative life of male confraternities had declined over much of France by the end of the ancien régime, particularly in the north,2 most other forms of popular devotion, and the cults of local Madonnas and saints, were widespread well into the nineteenth century, alongside the quasi-Christian folk beliefs that sustained them.3
