ABSTRACT
The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars were the last of the European ‘wars of religion’. During these years, popular resistance to the French occupation, assimilation, and annexation of European territories was often driven by a rejection to the secularizing principles of the Revolution, engendering what can be described as a religious-centered violence, that is, violence motivated by faith. Not all violent resistance to the French was religiously motivated, just as not all counter-revolutionaries were religious, but religion played a larger role, both as a direct cause for revolt and in inspiring revolt, than has hitherto been admitted by historians of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Focusing on a number of key Catholic regions where the French armies clashed with the local populations, this chapter contends that violent resistance to the French was often driven by, and placed within, a Catholic worldview that defended such violence as spiritually necessary, pious, and devotional. This violence was very much a product of its time, but it also helped to shape a distinctive nineteenth-century Catholicism.
