ABSTRACT
Arnold Van Gennep's analysis of rites of passage lies at the heart of contemporary pilgrimage studies thanks to the influential study by Victor and Edith Turner, but other French authors have received little attention from non-French scholars. This chapter begins with religious historians and folklorists like Arnold Van Gennep, Robert Hertz and Alphonse Dupront and then explore their relationship to more contemporary anthropological and sociological approaches to pilgrimage. It focuses in particular on two interconnected fils rouges that emerge from the French tradition of pilgrimage studies: the sometimes violent, sometimes balanced opposition between clerical and spontaneous devotion; and Alphonse Dupront's descriptive category of cryptic, which addresses all those elements related to pilgrimage that escape and sometimes even oppose the rigid and generalised cults and rituals defined by religious institutions. Both of these themes emerge in more recent French approaches to pilgrimage that is analysed in the chapter, even if they are not always explicitly referred to.
