Religion constitutes a further factor that would have thrust Our Lady’s Tumbler into the limelight, despite the story’s intrinsic bashfulness. Not only the initial publication and promotion of the tale by Gaston Paris, but in fact all the early paraphrases, its incarnation as a short story, and the subsequent composition of the opera based on it took place from 1870 to 1914. During this spell of not quite fifty years, France underwent what has been defined as “the crisis of Church and State.” Catholicism’s role within the nation was reexamined and renegotiated, with extremism from both ends of the political spectrum.
Tensions over the role of Catholicism and the clergy within French society had begun to crackle nearly a century earlier with the Revolution of 1789. In time, the frictions dissipated or at least were forced to disappear. Controversially, a collective commitment was made to construct a social order that would scrupulously compartmentalize religion and government. The government took a long step toward this resolution in 1905, by imposing an official divorce upon Church and State. Before then, the two main opposing camps in politics within France were Republicans and monarchists. A major symbol of Republicanism is the female figure of Marianne, who personifies free choice and reason. The best-known representation of this national symbol is undoubtedly the bare-breasted belle of Eugène Delacroix’s painting from 1830, Liberty Leading the People, a canvas that celebrates the Second French Revolution of July 28, 1830 (see Fig. 2.1). Church and State in the nineteenth century France were locked in a prolonged contention for the hearts and minds of the people between the reasonable Marianne and the miraculous Virgin Mary. Onomastically, Mary occupied center stage: in a bit of gender-bending that continues here and there even to this day, devout Catholics in France and elsewhere would intercalate the vernacular form of Mary as an appendage to other personal names for both women and men. Among the
© 2018 Jan M. Ziolkowski, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0143.02
well-known “classic” cultural figures affected by this “Boy Named Sue” syndrome was Erich Maria Remarque, the German author of All Quiet on the Western Front. More relevant to our topic, the full name of the novelist who gave us Notre-Dame de Paris was Victor Marie Hugo. Should we parse such names as being in their modest way matronyms?
Fig. 2.1 Eugène Delacroix, La Liberté guidant le peuple, 1830. Oil on canvas, 260 × 325 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre. Image from Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
File:Eug%C3%A8ne_Delacroix_-_Le_28_Juillet._La_Libert%C3%A9_guidant_le_peuple.jpg
Calendrically, the counterpoint between Mary and Marianne plays out in the summertime counterbalance between two major holidays. First is Bastille Day on July 14, which could be styled Marianne’s day, and then follows the Assumption on August 15, Mary’s holiday. When one of the two women was then in the ascendant, the other may well have been inevitably on the defensive, and in decline. Joan of Arc may have risen in popularity as a middle way of give-and-take between the two extremes. Amalgamating features of both the other female figures, she embodied religion by being a saint and nation by being a patriot. To seal the deal, she was, like both the others, a virgin maid.
The crisis of Church and State, roughly one-half century long, had its formal onset with the Franco-Prussian War. The tale of Our Lady’s Tumbler experienced in its reception throughout this period at least one great redeeming quality: it could be perused with equal plausibility as being either pro or con in regard to organized
religion. Committed Catholics could take note that the tumbler is drawn to leave the world and to enter a monastery, while secularists could point out that once there he cannot integrate within the institution. Furthermore, unlike all the choir monks, he achieves special recognition from Mary almost despite his egregious unsuitability.
By themselves, lack of Latin and liturgy might suffice to make the entertainer a questionable poster child for the Church. His other chief disqualification would be his seeming indifference to complying with established ecclesiastical customs and hierarchy. Both really and metaphorically, as the tumbler performs his dancing devotions, he looks as unclothed as a man of the cloth can be.
After the national indignity of the Franco-Prussian War, many French were not yet ready to adopt a detached or even lightly ironic standpoint on the roots of Catholicism.
On the contrary, the chastening catastrophe of the defeat had consequences in the realm of faith by redirecting the devout toward Mary. For many centuries, Catholics have called upon the Virgin in myriad capacities. The underlying assumption behind these petitions is that God cannot say no to the Mother of God, but this conviction can assume a thousand different forms. Thus, many specific manifestations of the Virgin are associated in complex and crisscrossing ways with the spiritual states of the individuals or communities who turn to her, the spiritual results they wish to attain, and aspects of Christ’s and her own lives. A multiplicity of Our Ladies has existed, enough to populate a large club; to name only a few, we find Our Lady of Atonement, Good Remedy, Good Success, Grace, Hope, Mercy, Peace, and Sorrows. At the grass roots, the tendency to pray to Mary has run particularly strong for many centuries, even in preference to Jesus or the Father. The proclivity arises out of a sense that when help is most needed, she can best provide it. She has the capacity to intercede with Jesus, for the very human reason that a loving and respectful son will never say no to his mother.
The relationship of the Virgin, the Church, and the cathedral is intimate and even inextricable. In her guise as mediator, the Mother of God represents the Church. Like her, the clergy too is supposed to mediate between individual Christians and God.
The mediation of both Mary and Catholicism takes place in the physical church, the foremost exemplum of which has become the cathedral. Here we have another reason why so many cathedrals in France are named in honor of Notre Dame, not just the most famous one in the heart of Paris.
Much like the late Middle Ages from the twelfth century on, the expanse from 1850 to 1950 has been cast as “the age of Mary.” During these ten decades, the cult of the Blessed Virgin experienced a comeback and exercised a renewed appeal that unified both learned clergymen well-schooled in the fine points of theology and illiterate devotees of popular religion. Within Catholicism, the Marian age is bounded at either extremity by a controversial dogma about the Mother of Christ. The Immaculate Conception became doctrine in 1854, the Assumption of the Virgin in 1950. The first
belief holds that Mary was born without original sin, the second that rather than dying, she was swept up directly into heaven. The institution of these creeds had real-life consequences. For instance, after 1854 every parish blessed a statue of the Virgin with the special title of the Immaculate Conception. When carvings already existed, they were crowned in formal coronation ceremonies.
In Catholic France, the Golden Age of Marianism lasted even longer than in the rest of Europe. The date for its beginning must be pushed back by nearly twenty-five years to 1830, since the Marian apparitions for which the nation became known started then in Paris. The Parisian vision gave way to others in La Salette in 1846, Lourdes in 1858, and Pontmain in 1871. The revival of devotion to Mary embodied a counterweight to a set of changes that swept not only France but also Europe as a whole: industrialization, secularization, nationalization, and atheism.
The modern French movement of mass pilgrimages marks its beginning at the latest in 1872. From the establishment of the Third Republic, record-shattering numbers of the faithful undertook communal journeys by train to sites associated with the Mother of God. By 1900, more than one-half million people made the voyage each year to the miraculous spring at Lourdes. The Virgin Mary had revealed herself and the fountainhead only in the uncontroversially modern year of 1858, but the phenomenon of devotion that ensued was viewed as a resumption of medieval Marianism. As such, from 1875 onward the visits of the devout were cast explicitly as peregrinations. The atmosphere among the pilgrims to the town in southwestern France was couched in the same terms that were applied time and again specifically to the protagonist of Our Lady’s Tumbler and generally to medieval art, literature, and culture. Adjectives such as primitive, simple, and naïve stand out.
The piety of the wayfarers afforded a means of achieving two objectives. One was to do penance for the sins that had resulted in the rout by Prussian forces. The other was to attain relief through the intercession of Mary with her son. Marianism gave a safety valve for the expression of guilt and even complicity in the collective sins that had prepared the ground for the retribution of the nation. Through worship, the people could make amends that with the blessing of the Virgin would lead to restitution of French success. More broadly, devotion to the Mother of God accompanied misgivings about modernity, and even a turn toward a primitivism associated with the countryside as well as with the Middle Ages.
In the medieval period, the regions that today form the unity of France were stippled with the steeples of cathedrals and churches dedicated in honor of Mary. This is to say nothing of all the Cistercian foundations devoted to her as well (see Fig. 2.2).
In sum, France was, and remains, the country of cathedrals par excellence. Her great churches of this sort represent close to three quarters of all such buildings constructed during the Gothic era. As a rule, cathedrals may be made of stone, but for all that they are far from monolithic. Their variety beggars belief. Yet in one regard they are nearly
Fig. 2.2 Map of French cathedrals of the Virgin from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries. Hand drawn by Maurice Vloberg, no date. Dayton, OH, University of Dayton, Marian Library, Maurice
Vloberg Papers. Image courtesy of the University of Dayton, Dayton, OH. All rights reserved.
uniform. As said above, the vast majority of these edifices, not only the cathedral of Paris, were built in the name of the Mother of God, and accordingly, they are called Notre-Dame. As a result, Gothic cathedrals—especially the French Gothic ones—are equated by an almost automatic and unconscious process with the worship of Mary:
in the reception of the jongleur or juggler, pointed arch, spire, and Virgin commingle in so intimate an equation that the relationship among them needs no explanation (see Fig. 2.3). In the nineteenth century, the age of Mary was felt nowhere more strongly and triumphantly than in France. The country had traditionally laid claim to being called “the eldest daughter of the Church,” and prided itself long before and afterward on enjoying special favor from the Mother of God. Now its confidence was proven well founded in sightings of the Virgin, the boosted visibility of Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris, and in other images as well. Even after the separation of Church and State, Marianism did very well in the land of Marianne.
Fig. 2.3 Card commemorating the reopening of Onze-Lieve-Vrouw Kathedraal in Antwerp on April 2, 1993 (Antwerp: Gemeentebestuur Antwerpen, 1993).