ABSTRACT
France presents a more complex problem at the very outset. It is well known that a process of dechristianisation was both widespread and well advanced by the nineteenth century. For some reason French women resisted the trend towards dchristianisation. Data establish that women were much more likely than men to conform to the Easter duty requirement. Marcilhacy found this to be true everywhere in the department of the Loiret. The attachment of women to religion annoyed mid-nineteenth-century anti-clericals, and led them to dwell upon the discrepancy between the sexes in matters of religion. They charged that curés were using the confessional to lure French women away from their husbands. The preponderance of religious fidelity, we may conclude, was shifting towards women in the nineteenth century. The trend was sufficiently pronounced by the time of the revolution of 1830 to allow government officials to mention it explicitly in their 1834 dispatches to the ministry on the state of religion and politics.
