Hearty Transactions: The Emotional Practices of Sacred Heart Devotees in the Francophone World, 1673–1794

Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) – Project number: 565390056

This project retraces the history of the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus in metropolitan France and its formal and informal overseas possessions from its beginnings in the 1670s into the early years of the Revolution. The goal is to use this cult as a lens through which to examine eighteenth-century Catholicism as a series of gendered and embodied affective transactions between God and devotees, as well as among devotees, that played out against a backdrop of shifting spatial practices.

The project reads the cult of the Sacred Heart as a transactional network between heaven and earth: its proponents promised believers worldly riches and spiritual wealth in return for the expiation of sins and unconditional love of God. Adopting a gender and praxeological approach to the study of emotions, the project focuses on collective and individual material practices that actualized God’s love. It shows how devotees used consumer goods ranging from books to paintings and objects to purify their hearts and manifest their willingness to repent for the sins of others. It also reveals how the increased reliance on consumer goods facilitated a shift from confraternities to domestic interiors as the main site of devotional practice.

Building on this insight, the project aims to test the hypothesis that this domestication and individualization of piety not only reshaped believers’ relationship to the supernatural but also altered their ties to fellow human beings. Physically separated from others, devotees were exposed to hagiographies and the periodical press featuring emotive stories about both fellow devotees and the cult’s many opponents. The positive and negative emotions these media elicited led many to conceive of themselves as religious virtuosos taking on a world in moral decay. As the eighteenth century drew to a close, this new identity was rematerialized in semi-private associations, whose members longed to die as martyrs as they plunged headlong into armed resistance to the French Revolution. By studying this process, the project complicates our understanding of both the rise of political religions and the growing marginalization of religion in modern societies.

The project draws on a unique set of sources, including manuscript and printed texts, paintings, and material objects, to offer the first academic reconstruction of the early history of the cult of the Sacred Heart in the French-speaking world. By looking at the emotional potential embedded in material practices and spaces, this study in religious history offers novel perspectives on phenomena such as the consumer revolution, the rise of the private sphere, changing gender identities and relations, and the virtualization and politicization of (pre)revolutionary French society. In so doing, the project develops a new framework for conceiving religion as the sum of emotional transactions between heaven and earth.