Anxiety, Identity, and the Displacement of Violence during the Annee Terrible: The Sacred Heart and the Diocese of Nantes, 1870-1871

Abstract

Monseigneur Felix Fournier, bishop of Nantes, spoke words of consolation: In your anguish you will ask me if there is no refuge against this tempest of divine anger.... There is one. We have just shown it to you, and we beseech you to close yourself within it. The opening of the war of 1870 brought the abrupt collapse of the Second Empire and weeks of unrelenting news of military defeat. The people of Nantes, like people throughout France, felt shock, dismay, and fear. Fournier's refuge was the Sacred Heart ofJesus, and he called on the faithful to retreat to its mysterious recesses. ' Soon he made this invocation official by solemnly dedicating the diocese of Nantes to the Sacred Heart, an act imitated in dioceses across France.2 Fournier's Sacred Heart had a maternal quality which contrasted sharply with its aggressively masculine invocation a few weeks later. Early in December soldiers known as the Volunteers of the West, many of them from the diocese of Nantes and environs, cried out, Vive le Sacre-Coeur! as they launched a suicidal charge against German troops. Behind a banner that bore the name and image of the Sacred