'A troubled, Godless place': Catholic practice and local politics in the communes of the central Vaucluse, 1830-1905

In the final quarter of the nineteenth century, men and women in the communes of the central Vaucluse began to defer or neglect vital Catholic rites of passage. Against a backdrop of turbulent regional politics and economic upheaval, formal adherence to Church doctrine declined sharply, never again to regain its previous levels.;This dissertation assesses the religious gestures of individuals and communities through the analysis of their sacramental participation, the only recorded response of Catholics to the Church's presence in their lives. A consideration of these gestures addresses the central question to emerge from forty years of painstaking national and regional studies in religious sociology: how did alienation from formal practice operate? Who was most likely to be among the first to discard old patterns of sacramental participation, and at what point in history did they break away from the Catholic practice of previous generations?;The implementation of the Lay Republic in the community by means of both local and national secularizing policy from 1878 to 1905 was the primary precipitant of general, dramatic decreases in formal Catholic practice. It was only upon the official secularization of communal society and politics that significant numbers of central Vauclusiens began to relinquish their attachment to Catholic rites of passage surrounding birth, marriage, and death. The many acrimonious, anticlerical outbursts recorded in the central Vaucluse prior to 1877 were not the actions of a majority but most often stemmed from private or narrow, factional quarrels over status and influence between parish priests and local lay authorities.;From 1877, no variable was more strongly associated with degree of Catholic conformity than voting tendencies; without exception, the greater the number of local electors who supported leftist candidates (the standard-bearers of the secularist Republic), the more indifferent the level of communal Catholic practice. As the Lay Republic in the community created the impetus for a generation of men and women to distance themselves from the Church, no element of communal culture had a greater, more defining impact on the collective life and identity of nineteenth-century central Vauclusiens than religion.