Conscience and Conversion

Abstract

This book explores how the French responded to the right of religious choice acquired during the revolutionary era. Religious liberty is usually part of a larger discussion about church-state relations, a context that veils the way it plays out in the lives of individuals. After establishing the legal and cultural framework for religious liberty during the Restoration (1814-1848), Kselman studies a number of prominent converts whose stories are documented in letters, memoirs, novels, and newspapers. These individuals, including Ivan Gagarin, George Sand, and Ernest Renan, moved both into and away from the Catholic Church, revealing the variety and complexity of religious choices in the modern era. Through an examination of their lives the book asks what it means for individuals to be allowed, as a normal aspect of life, to choose their own religious commitments, and how such choices affect personal identity and the process of fashioning a self. This book sheds light on the psychological, social, and religious reasons underlying their decisions to convert, the effects of their conversion on family and community, and how this sense of liberty informs our secular age.