Bernadette Soubirous might appear, at first blush, to be an unusual candidate for divine revelation. Small for her age (14, but she looked 11), Bernadette was among the poorest of the poor in the little French town of Lourdes, on the foothills of the Pyrenees. Her mother allowed her some modest indulgences: lice-ridden, malnourished, plagued by asthma, Bernadette alone among her siblings was treated to the luxury of stockings—she was particularly vulnerable to cold—and, because she could not digest the corn-mash bread that was the staple of the Pyrenean poor’s diet, she occasionally was given a slice of wheat bread.
On February 11, 1858, while searching for wood with her sister and a friend near the river on the outskirts of Lourdes, Bernadette saw the first of 18 Marian apparitions that would catapult her and her hometown of Lourdes to international fame.
The white-clad female figure Bernadette saw in a grotto near the river was petite: Bernadette called her bien mignonnette, more little girl than lady. On the second day, Bernadette splashed the figure with holy water, a test the apparition, who calmly waited until Bernadette had run through almost an entire vial, passed with ease. Although by the fourth apparition sizable crowds were gathering at the Grotto, no one but Bernadette could see or hear the figure, whom Bernadette referred to as Aquero, patois for someone who was clearly not human but not definitely divine. On the day of the ninth apparition, the usually dignified visionary shocked the crowd: she clawed at the earth, and, uncovering a spring, gulped down mouthfuls of muddy water. At the thirteenth apparition, Aquero instructed Bernadette to tell “the priests” to come to the Grotto in a procession and to build a chapel there. On the Annunciation, March 25, Bernadette, encouraged by local authorities to determine the identity of the apparition, asked the white girl four times who she was. Finally, she replied “Que soy era Immaculada Councepciou,” I am the Immaculate Conception, a strange and stilted phrase, as if, in the words of Ruth Harris, “the apparition had said she was beauty rather than that she was beautiful.”
Lourdes has occasioned scads of books. Catholic apologists championing the veracity of Bernadette’s visions and hostile secularists seeking to debunk the phenomenon have picked up the pen to defend or desecrate. Among the most influential of these chroniclers was Henri Lasserre. His Notre Dame de Lourdes, which appeared a decade after Bernadette’s visions, exemplifies the first impulse; in Lasserre’s account, Bernadette and “the people” stand opposed to villainous officials who tried to stamp out the apparitions. Faith takes the day over skepticism, ordinary folks triumphing over authority. Some years later, Jesuit Leonard Cros published Histoire de Notre-Dame de Lourdes, taking on Lasserre’s account. In Cros’s version, Bernadette’s family was not the innocent, pious ideal Lasserre had depicted; “the people,” gullible and naive, posed a far greater threat to the Grotto at Lourdes than did any officials; and the “false visionaries” who followed on Bernadette’s heels revealed more about Lourdes than any member of the Soubirous clan did. By the midtwentieth century, Benedictine scholars sought to put an end to the debate over Lourdes once and for all. Rene Laurentin and Bernard Billet, in two massive documentary collections (Lourdes: Histoire authentique des apparitions and Lourdes: Documents authentiques), tried to “reserve a space for the divine within a rigorous … history.” But simply demonstrating, for example, the trials and tribulations that Bernadette and those devoted to her suffered hardly confirms, as Laurentin and Billet hoped it would, that Bernadette in fact saw the Virgin Mary 18 times.
Although Laurentin and Billet tried to use history to determine whether or not Bernadette’s visions were real, nowadays it is commonplace for historians writing about the miraculous to eschew such questions. Assessing the veracity of Red Sea partings or blind man seeings is not, they note, the prerogative of Clio. Ruth Harris is no exception. “[W]hether or not Bernadette Soubirous saw the Virgin Mary,” she writes, “is not a matter a historian can decide.” Most historians play such sentiments like an opening move in a game, claiming no interest in the miracles themselves only to produce a narrative shot through with cynicism. It is therefore all the more noteworthy that Harris succeeds in not bogging down her narrative with hidden assumptions about Bernadette’s visions. In stead of passing judgment, she restores the complicated and tumultuous past of the shrine.
Nonetheless, Harris sat down to write her book with a de facto opinion about Marian miracles. Not a believer, Harris found her interest in Lourdes piqued when she was writing a book about French medicine in the fin-de-siecle. How, she wondered, did it happen that the cult of Lourdes flourished at the precise moment when “Parisian physicians confident[ly] as sert[ed] that a new scientific age had dawned and that religious belief was to be swept away like many cobwebs from a musty closet”? And, though Harris the historian did not share the pilgrims’ beliefs in the Virgin Mary, Harris the woman shared one very important characteristic with the sick and desperate people who thronged to Lourdes each year: she too was in the throes of an ailment her doctors could not cure. “What, I asked, do ailing people do when science can offer nothing?”
A secular Jew, Harris eventually went on a pilgrimage herself. The pilgrimage did not convert her, she tells us in the introduction, but it proved “vital” to her writing about Lourdes. The differences between Harris’s experience of pilgrimage in the late twentieth century and the experiences of nineteenth-century pilgrims notwithstanding,
at the core there was the same intense physicality, backbreaking labour, and centrality of pain and suffering. The body in pain was the focus of our collective and personal ministrations, a world that was rendered spiritual by ritual. This spirituality was invested in rites such as the Eucharist processions and bathing in the pools, activities that seemed to have a timeless, unchanging character. In fact, they originated out of specific nineteenth-century conditions, and encapsulated a particular vision of body and spirit. This vision, and the religious imagination underlying it, be came the central theme of this book, around which all the other elements of political and social history revolved.
In short, Harris is the uncommon historian who understands that religion is a complex of the political, socio-economic, geographical, and familial without forgetting that it is sometimes also about faith.
The standard take on Lourdes revolves around questions of modernity: Lourdes represents “anachronism and superstition, a dying world trying to resuscitate itself with the techniques, but not the spirit, of the modern age.” Nineteenth-century French historiography continues to tell the story of secular (and republican) triumph over Catholic superstition. Perhaps best typified in the work of Eugen Weber, the study of modern France has, in the words of Harris, “been understood as a process of ‘disenchantment,’ where school, ballot box and barracks ultimately triumph over superstition and backwoods provincialism, with peasant belief studied only to see the process of its eradication.” In this scheme, Lourdes figures merely as a stubborn pocket of resistance, its pilgrims clinging tenaciously to an increasingly outmoded world-view.
Although Harris refuses to pit modern science and rationalism against retrograde faith, modernity has a role in her story. Recalling Grace Hale’s re cent argument that the spectacle of lynching in the New South was not, as often assumed, an out-of-date antimodern practice of backwards rednecks but rather a fundamentally modern phenomenon enabled by radio broadcasts and railroads, Harris argues that “[n]ational pilgrimage was made possible by mass circulation press, train links, and the managerial techniques of hospital ad ministration; it cannot, therefore, be dismissed as the final appearance of anachronistic superstition.” Similarly, the image of the Immaculate Conception presented at Lourdes was not some timeless, transhistorical BVM but rather very much a product of the moment. The Mary of Lourdes was “remarkably similar in some ways to the idealized bourgeois woman of nineteenth-century Europe.”
Reveling in her understanding that the religious practices and beliefs she patiently reconstructs were “evolving,” Harris emphasizes again and again that the Catholicism of Lourdes was not ossified and “on the defensive,” but vibrant and adaptable. Harris insists that to claim otherwise is to imply that the nineteenth-century pilgrims’ beliefs were “based on some naive misunderstanding, or the need to find solace in the supernatural to compensate for the miseries of their everyday life.” To the contrary, she asserts, “French peasants were neither gullible nor superstitious.” Her effort to rescue ordinary French people from historical condescension is to be applauded, but her celebration of faith that is fluid, even protean, needs qualification. Harris assumes that the alternative to fluid is stale. But ossification is not necessarily a dirty word; without stability and continuity there can be no orthodoxy, nothing to pass on from generation to generation.
If Harris does justice to the “spirit” of her subtitle, she also masterfully ad dresses the “body.” Lourdes will hush the naysayers who dismiss history of the body as nothing more than historians’ flavor of the month. As the “body in pain” was at the center of Harris’s own pilgrimage experience, so it is also at the center of her book. Especially fascinating is her treatment of the body during Bernadette’s visions. Claims of apparitions were not uncommon, and observers, be they lay people or members of the cloth, needed some means to assess the veracity of the visionaries’ claims.
The starting point was the number of witnesses—two or three were more reliable than one. Also, observers re lied heavily on the spoken words of the apparition: Did what the supposed Mary say ring true? The apparitions at the Alpine commune of La Salette in 1847 are illustrative: two children witnessed the lady in white, and the Virgin of La Salette held forth at length, first in French and then in patois, predicting apocalyptic disaster unless the Alpine people repented.
Bernadette, on the other hand, was the only person to see the bien mignonnette, and the Virgin of Lourdes did not speak much. In scrutinizing Bernadette’s claims, the Lourdais could not rely on traditional litmus tests. Instead, Harris argues, Bernadette’s own body became the central factor in “building up general belief in the reality of Bernadette’s experiences. … Her physical reactions, rather than her words or the messages relayed … provided the proof of her sincerity and, even more importantly, of the authenticity of her experience.”
From the very first, the Lourdais who gathered to watch Bernadette took special note of how she carried herself. Detractors de scribed her as hysterical, reporting that her “lips shook convulsively,” that she was prone to “nervous twitching,” and that she sometimes burst into “a short, broken, nervous laugh.” But most observers saw nothing off-putting in Bernadette’s comportment. As the story of Bernadette’s vision spread, people focused on the fact that “she crossed the swift-moving [River] Gave barefoot, a significant act denoting humility”; that she fell to her knees before the apparition and genuflected. Ac counts highlighted her angelic visage and pacific pose during prayer. Pere Leonard Cros, the Jesuit chronicler of Lourdes, was taken at once with Bernadette’s modesty. She possessed, Cros wrote, “a celestial simplicity! … complete simplicity and guilelessness … above all simple in a way that earthly nature could never imitate.” But her physical response to the apparition itself was most telling. During the second apparition, “Bernadette was on her knees, very pale, her eyes wide open and fixed on the niche,” in the words of one contemporary report. “[H]er hands were joined, the rosary was between her fingers, and tears streamed from her eyes.” Bernadette, asthmatic, seemed to have no trouble breathing as soon as the apparition appeared.
Bodies, in particular bodily pain, are also at the heart of Harris’s treatment of the pilgrimages to Lourdes that were so popular by the 1880s. After 1875, when a sizable cadre of malades joined the national pilgrimage for the first time, Lourdes was increasingly seen as a place with miraculous healing powers. “The sick and dying,” Harris writes, “usually relegated to the unseen margins of society,” were the focus of the pilgrimage experience. Elite women, usually protected from even visual contact with the gross and wracked bodies of malades, volunteered to work at the hospitals and pools of Lourdes. In a provocatively Christlike inversion, the rich became the servants of the poor.
At the center of the entire experience was the broken body of the pilgrim. Harris does not fail to connect the bodily experience of pilgrimage with its spiritual import. “[H]ow the sufferers conducted themselves, how others in turn treated and cared for them was the most perfect expression of the spirituality they sought.” It is a lesson not only historians of Christianity, but also its practitioners, would do well to take to heart.
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