Repression and Autonomy: Christians and Christianity in the Historical Work of Jean DelumeauLa peur en Occident, XIVe-XVIIIe siècles: Une cite assiégée. Jean DelumeauLe péché et la peur: La culpabilisation en Occident, XIIIe-XVIIe siècles. Jean DelumeauRassurer et protéger: Le sentiment de sécurité dans l'Occident d'autrefois. Jean Delumeau

Abstract

Jean Delumeau was born in 1923. His academic career has taken him, by way of such central French cultural institutions as the Ecole Normale, the Ecole Franqaise de Rome, and the Sorbonne, to the chair at the College de France which he has held since 1975. His historical work carries the stamp of the Annales school and, to an increasing degree, of his commitment o a liberal and sophisticated Catholic faith. His first major monograph (published in 1957) studied the social and economic life of sixteenth-century Rome; it has obvious affinities with the work of Fernand Braudel. His voluminous writings on the history of religion echo the concerns of Lucien Febvre, as does the title of his professorship (The History of Religious Mentalities) at the College de France. And like many of the Annales school, too, Delumeau has shown little interest in the history of what might be called politics. In the course of the 1960s, Delumeau's attention was already turning to the subject of de-Christianization. The Catholic intellectual and the historian of popular sentiment alike needed to know how, and why, contemporary Western Europe has become in important respects post-Christian Western Europe. And already in the 1960s a number of lectures and essays, together with his contributions to the textbook series Nouvelle Clio, were supplying the elements of an answer. To inquire why we have become de-Christianized, Delumeau increasingly insisted, was in effect to formulate une question mal pose'e, since nothing he was prepared to accept as true Christianization had been achieved in the first place. He began to write off medieval Christendom as a contradiction in terms, since only a tiny clerical minority had acquired the rudiments of religious understanding. So the reformers of the sixteenth century-Delumeau taking Catholic and Protestant leaders as engaged in essentially the same acculturating enterprise-had to set about transforming a largely pagan popular culture. But good intentions were vitiated from the start by authoritarian clerical institutions and a repressively puritanical (as well as specifically Puritan) outlook. Hence, for