Les religieux en chansons. Béranger et Desrousseaux, témoins de leur temps

Abstract

When historians consider religious vocations, popular songs are rarely scrutinised. Indeed, in most cases the ecclesiastic figures are marginal, and indeed even absent. Yet the songs testify, in their way, to the nature and the place of religion in the life of people. This is why it seemed worthwhile to investigate, from this perspective, two bodies of work - the songs of Pierre-Jean de Béranger (1780-1857) and his competitor from the Nord, Alexandre Desrousseaux (1820-1893). While the ‘national singer’ spoke to the people that had made the Revolution during a period of exacerbated political reaction and alliance of the sceptre and the alter, Desrousseaux spoke to the workers of Lille whose life he shared. While Béranger wrote polemical songs, Desrousseaux approached religion as a horizon of popular life. The importance of that theme in each corpus and the songs they chose, enable us to question the reception of these imaginaries in the milieux which they addressed, from the liberal salons to the singing societies of Lille’s metropolis.