Religious liberty and civisme morale: Alexandre Vinet, French Protestantism, and the shaping of civic culture in nineteenth-century France

During the first half of the nineteenth century the question of the relationship between religion and political culture took on its initial modern, public character with a unique urgency in France. In an era when a plethora of competing voices debated the nature and character of the French nation, an innovative ideal of civic culture took shape which was influenced by transnational civic traditions of public virtue and participation developed within the Protestant diaspora. I describe this as a civisme morale, a moral and civic nationalism based not on ethnic ancestry nor on the historical memory of a national founding moment, but on Protestant public actors' conception of conscience as the duty to conform public actions to personal convictions. I trace the origins and development of that ideal to a network of writers, journalists, and social and political activists in France and francophone Switzerland that grew out of the associational life they fashioned during the Restoration and coalesced around the multidisciplinary journal Le Semeur during the July Monarchy. The growing Protestant public presence is centered on the Vaudois literary critic, journalist, and professor of French literature and practical theology, Alexandre Vinet, and on his disciples in France. Vinet's actions and calls for separation of church and state during the democratic revolution in the Swiss canton of Vaud in 1845 were closely followed in France, and inspired a similar debate there in 1848 that contributed to the removal of references in the French Constitution to Catholicism as the religion of the French. Their ideal of an inclusive, nonconfessional civic nation helped to shape the way French liberals thought of themselves and the laic character of the Third Republic. The organization of this dissertation follows the development and dissemination of these interconnected ideas of religious liberty and civic responsibility. The first part traces the development of Vinet's thought and example in the Swiss context. The second part examines the Protestant community in Paris, its reception of Vinet's thought, and the lasting influence of the groupe du Semeur leading up to separation of church and state in 1905.