ABSTRACT
After eight years of pastoral work in Paris starting in 1863 the abbé François Courtade was deeply pessimistic about the religious state of Paris workers. Writing in 1871, Courtade asserted that ‘The labouring population of Paris is on the way to becoming atheistic. … The people of Paris are without faith and without God. The notion and the feeling of the divine seem to have entirely withdrawn from them.’1 Courtade’s response was typical of the Catholic clergy, who complained of the rising wave of indifference throughout the nineteenth century, an indifference that could on occasion turn into hostility and violence, as in the sacking of the Church of St-Germaine-l’Auxerrois in 1831, and the murder of clerical hostages, including the Archbishop Darboy, during the Commune in 1871.
