ABSTRACT
The textbook myth that nineteenth-century peasant France remained fervently Catholic is not without some foundation. The roots of the Counter-Revolution in the 1790s lay in the hostility of Catholic peasants to an urban-based, apparently irreligious, revolution. The weakening of the power of the rural cure, the unilateral imposition of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, the anticlerical excesses of the armees revolutionnaires which drank communion wine or melted church bells down for cannon balls all produced resentment in rural France. Although historians such as Bois and Tilly have focussed on peasant hatred of land-grabbing urban bourgeois as the key to counter-revolution, Tackett has argued that the hold of a numerous, well-trained and stronglyrooted clergy on the countryside of western France explains geographical location of population resistance to the Revolution. Half a century later France's first universal (male) suffrage elections, in April 1848, appeared to confirm the power of the rural clergy who led parishioners direct from Easter mass to elect Catholic-royalist grands notables.
