Against what might have been our commonsensical expectations, we have been sidetracked and taken by the fleur-de-lis to the United States of America in the twentieth century. Instead, we should have sought out a global navigation system for wayfinding within France. Within a few years after the end of World War II, and decades after the Franco-Prussian War, the religious sought again to raise the spirits of their fellow Frenchmen by bringing home the French connection with the Mother of God—or the Marian connection with France. In emphasizing the Marianism of their country, they looked back to the favoritism that the Virgin had shown to their nation repeatedly during the nineteenth century.
A card printed by the Benedictines of Bayeux (see Fig. 2.12), stamping Catholic France as the special realm of Mary, features her image superimposed upon a cartographic representation that depicts most of the country. The diagram itself is squashed between Latin captions for “Realm of Gaul” at the top and “Realm of Mary”
at the bottom. Quoted in French upon the map itself is a Gospel verse, “Whence comes this happiness to me, that the mother of my God should come to me?”
Fig. 2.12 “Regnum Galliae—Regnum Mariae.” Commemorative card, date unknown.
Bénédictines, Bayeux, France.
Four stars pinpoint the localities where apparitions of the Virgin that met with acceptance from the Vatican took place in France. One marks the chapel of the convent of the Sisters of Charity, situated on the left bank of Paris, where Mary appeared in 1830 to Sister Catherine Labouré, later a saint. A second commemorates a showing in La Salette, in the French Alps, in 1846. The full secret of this showing was published only in 1870. The third star rests on the spot of the vision of Lourdes in 1858. Finally, a fourth signals Pontmain, where Mary showed herself in 1871.
Out of hundreds upon hundreds of sightings that have been documented worldwide, these from the nineteenth century in France are four of only seven that have won approbation from the local bishops after investigation by diocesan commissions. The others, all subsequent, took place at Fátima (with its famous and mysterious messages) in Portugal in 1917, at Beauraing in Belgium in 1932 and 1933, and in Banneux in Belgium in 1933. Each of these episodes involved visionaries who were children and peasants. All will recur in this book. The French event in 1871 and the two Belgian episodes in 1932 and 1933 relate loosely but significantly to the reception of the medieval tale about the tumbler.
The apparitions in France helped to lay the foundation for a powerful emphasis on the veneration of the Virgin within the whole Catholic Church. With the cult of Mary Immaculate displaying exceptional vigor in nineteenth-century France, the popularity of the first sighting, which resulted in the so-called Miraculous Medal of Catherine Labouré, contributed in at least a roundabout way to the communiqué of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception by Pope Pius IX. The dates when the nineteenth-century events either took place or were made public all fell within his papacy. More broadly, the promulgation of the doctrine gave rise to similar experiences in other countries throughout the world.
Marian visions came thick and fast in France both during and immediately after the war in 1871, 1872, and 1873. Believers sought solace for their fear, humiliation, grief, and anxiety. They yearned for reassurance. Beyond consolation, they sought insight into the future. We should not forget too that sightings of the Mother of God played a major role in the long process of canonization that rendered many visionaries into saints. Sainthood is an exceedingly rare distinction for even the most pious individuals, and in nineteenth-century France, undergoing an apparition of the Virgin was a promising first step on track toward becoming a holy woman. Put bluntly, Mary made saints.
This later pattern stands apart from the tale of Our Lady’s Tumbler as it comes down to us from the Middle Ages. In the medieval French poem, the beneficiary of the miracle remains rigorously and resolutely anonymous, is not even necessarily aware of the corporeal comfort that is extended to him, dies partly of his devotion rather than receives healing from it, and is portrayed as being not a holy man to be sainted but a sinner to be redeemed. In fact, the salvation of his soul requires all of
Mary’s largesse. She must engage in a do-or-die, toe-to-toe (or is it toe-to-hoof?) duel with the devil. Furthermore, we are not given to believe or hope that others would benefit from miracles to be performed on behalf of the tumbler. He is no saint—but he is exemplary.
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From September of 1872, pilgrims thronged to La Salette and Lourdes, as well as other destinations. These devout travelers were allied with the forces in French society committed to deliverance rather than enlightenment. Often the phenomena that motivated them centered upon messages spoken or otherwise enunciated by Mary. At the first location in 1846, the communication took place in patois spoken to shepherd children, while at the second, in 1858, it was conveyed to an illiterate fourteen-year-old daughter of impecunious millers.
Yet the foremost example would be the three-hour manifestation to peasant youths that occurred on January 17, 1871, in Pontmain. The vision happened in the last-ditch stages of the Franco-Prussian War. The advancing German army rumbled so near to the village that the teeth-rattling boom of cannons in the distance came within earshot. Two brothers, aged twelve and ten, were immersed in odd jobs in the family barn with their father. When a female neighbor dropped by, the elder sibling took a break to check on the weather (see Fig. 2.13). While studying the sky, he noticed a portent. Suspended in the heavens was an image of a lady in a long robe. Her raiment was indigo blue and studded with golden stars, like the ceiling of some churches. To complete the effect, she wore a black veil under a gold crown. Although this showing of the Virgin was invisible to the two adults who were present, the younger boy also witnessed it. A succession of other villagers came to the scene but the Mother of God could be seen only by the youths. Simultaneously, the image went through a gauntlet of last-minute changes—and nearly doubled its original size. A total of five young people detected the lady, whereas grownups could not see her. Eventually, written messages took shape, letter by letter, in a white space in the sky beneath Mary’s feet (see Fig. 2.14 and 2.15). After the apparition, the German front line halted just short of a nearby town. Eleven days later, the army accepted the armistice without ever invading Pontmain. The cessation of the invasion was taken as a miracle. The lesson drawn, as it had been for centuries, was that prayers to Mary can bring peace.
Afterward, the visionaries were subjected to a sort of sculptural lineup. In this process, the local church authorities flashed them mugshots of Madonnas and asked them to identify those that most and least closely resembled the woman they had perceived in their celestial visions. Some of the photographs, together with the notes of the interviewers, survive in the ecclesiastical dossier. In the aftermath, Pontmain became a major regional pilgrimage site. Soon a sanctuary was constructed, which eventually got the stamp of approval for elevation to a basilica.
Fig. 2.13 Postcard depicting the visionary children of Pontmain (Pontmain, France:
Pilorge, after 1871).
Fig. 2.14 Illustration of the vision at Pontmain (Bruges, Paris, Lille: Société de
Saint-Augustin, after 1871).
Fig. 2.15 Postcard depicting the vision at Pontmain, painting by Pierre Machard in grange, first half of twentieth century.
Such phantasms follow their own epidemiology. Clusters take shape at specific times in response to the stresses of war and its aftermath, political crisis, economic slowdown and collapse, outbreaks of disease, or combinations of the preceding. In the protracted rainy day that ensued immediately upon the Franco-Prussian War, other appearances of the Virgin reportedly took place in France. These events were regarded by contemporaries as being related to each other. A special category is formed by Mariophanies in Alsace in the 1870s. The border zone, which was annexed by the new German empire after the French had been trounced, experienced a surge of visions that tapered off after a clampdown in March 1873. The only Marian apparition in France that gained any sort of traction with the ecclesiastical authorities after Pontmain happened in Pellevoisin. There a woman in her early thirties was miraculously healed after seeing the Virgin in the bedroom of her house fifteen times over nearly three months (see Fig. 2.16 and 2.17). Sightings of Mary have been mapped to show their geography. A diagram could be made to correlate the apparitions by both time and place with notable incidences of literature about such Marian miracles and Mariophanies. In turn, the coincidence of sightings and related literature could help to explain spikes in the reception of the tumbler story. Many uncontrived and often lackluster reworkings of the tale date from the early 1950s, when appearances of the Virgin abounded (or rebounded) in Europe.
The Mariolatry had inevitable consequences for reading and writing—and accordingly for profits, since at the time publication was big business. For example, Henri Lasserre was among the first to report effervescently on the apparitions and miracles of the Virgin in Lourdes (see Fig. 2.18). In 1862, this French Catholic went so far as to ascribe to the water there a cure for blindness. Following many subsequent pilgrimages there, the same journalist and writer wrote voluminously, although not to universal delight or acceptance, on Notre Dame of Lourdes. He focused especially on her showings and healings. His books made the fortunes of the publishing house that the bookseller Victor Palmé had founded in 1858. The editions totaled millions of copies (see Fig. 2.19). As a cultural phenomenon, Lourdes seized the imaginations of intellectuals for decades to come. Visionaries, doubly disadvantaged in socioeconomic class and gender for being peasants and girls, set the great Church in motion. Their little Lourdes community enlarged explosively and reported miracle after miracle that occurred as pilgrims flooded in. In one sense, the trek there was a thoroughly modern phenomenon. It resulted from all the resources of nineteenth-century marketing, and it relied on a consummately unmedieval mode of transportation. In the decade leading up to 1880, more than 500,000 pilgrims wended their way to the town by rail.
Yet despite the slick promotion and chugging trains, the pilgrimage had aspects that were felt by contemporaries to be redolent of the Middle Ages.
Parallels can be easily discerned between the foundational miracles of Lourdes and the story of the tumbler: he came from a lowly stratum, was regarded as childlike by his nineteenth-century readers and reworkers, was held at arm’s length by the
Fig. 2.16 Postcard depicting the “house of apparitions” in Pellevoisin (1910).
Fig. 2.17 “This is where I will be honored—they may pray.” Postcard depicting the bedroom of Estelle Faguette, who experienced her Marian visions and miraculous healing in 1876 (Paris: D. A.
Longuet, late nineteenth century).
Fig. 2.18 Henri Lasserre. Engraving on wood by Henri Brauer, 1899. Published in Figures contemporaines, tirées de l’album Mariani, vol. 4 (Paris: Henri Floury, 1899).
Fig. 2.19 Title page of Henri Lasserre, Mois de Marie de Dame de Lourdes, abrégé de Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes (Paris: Victor Palmé, 1873).
ecclesiastical hierarchy in which he operated, and benefited from an intervention by Mary. Although today his name lies in oblivion, who knows what hopes may have been nurtured in the thirteenth century for further miracles to take place or for pilgrims to arrive and share in the favor he enjoyed from the Virgin?
Interestingly, apparitions comparable to those in Lourdes were experienced in Germany at roughly the same time. The foremost German case was visions of Mary claimed by three eight-year-old girls from Marpingen in July of 1876. Despite recursive efforts on their behalf over three quarters of a century, the visionaries in the Saarland failed to nail down the support of the Church. At the same moment, they ran afoul of the so-called Kulturkampf, the “culture struggle,” which refers to the set of policies promoted between 1871 and 1878 by Prime Minister Otto von Bismarck of Prussia to rein in the power of the Roman Catholic Church and to enhance secularism. In sum, Marpingen had no high-level ecclesiastical backing and faced active opposition inside Prussia. Nonetheless, the town seemed likely at times to become a German Lourdes.
Yet kudos was not to be the case.
Within France, the anticlerical writer Émile Zola scouted Lourdes in 1891, and the phenomenon of pilgrimage there. His evidence-based observations made him bent on probing the dependence of human beings upon manifestations of the miraculous. He recognized the unstoppable importance of faith in both the miracles themselves and pilgrimage to the place where they occurred. Furthermore, he seemed in his way astir at the mass candlelit processions that took place in the municipality. For all that, he was not moved to place any credence in the wonders himself.
A few years after his visit, Zola brought out Lourdes (1894). In this novel on the town of Bernadette Soubirous, the writer delves into the motivations behind the belief of the sickly in miracles. In his skepticism, he envisaged reliance upon supernatural intervention as forming the opposite pole to science. To him, apparitions resulted from hysteria rather than God. Thus, the novelist formulated his own equivalent to the relationship between the Virgin and the dynamo that Henry Adams constructed a decade later. The strongest refutation to the French author from the faithful came not in writing, but in the human traffic there on the fiftieth anniversary of the apparitions.
In 1908, one and a half million believers voted with their feet by making the journey to the shrine. If pilgrimage had been an electoral process, this one would have been a landslide.
A dozen years after Zola, the novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans also traveled to the site.
After visiting in 1903, he harnessed naturalism to describe its supernaturalism, and in 1906 he published Les foules de Lourdes (The crowds of Lourdes). The medievalizing man of letters emerged from his firsthand immersion with a keen but unastonished appreciation for the degree to which appearances of Mary influenced his time:
“Lourdes is, in the history of France, neither an exception nor a novelty; the Mother of Christ has always considered this country as her fief.” According to him, only the eighteenth century witnessed a rupture in the personal presence of Mary in France.
Such seeming devoutness on the writer’s part failed to quell the distrust that he had earned through his earlier fiction. In 1910, Huysmans’s book endured a counterblast for its impiety, when Raymond Vroncourt, regretful at living in the “licentious night of our depraved times,” sought to defend Catholicism from “pseudo-pious cacography”
(see Fig. 2.20). Huysmans was out to praise the Virgin and the visionary of Lourdes, not to blame them, but in Marianism passions often run strong.
Fig. 2.20 Front cover of Raymond Vroncourt, Huysmans et l’âme des foules de Lourdes: Notes de critique suivies d’un répertoire de l’oeuvre catholique de Huysmans (Tours: E. Menard et Cie, 1910).