Today, we are happy to bring you our conversation with Kilian Harrer, author of Devout and Defiant: How Pilgrims Shaped the Franco-German Borderlands in the Age of Revolutions
What inspired you to write this book?
I was in my second year of graduate school, searching for a good dissertation topic, when I came across mentions of several French citizens who were guillotined in 1794 for going on pilgrimages to Switzerland. It was not so much the state violence of the French Revolution’s radical years that intrigued me, but rather the clash between the claim of territorial sovereignty and the pilgrims’ quest to reach certain holy places. While those cases of guillotined pilgrims were exceptional, clandestine and contested pilgrimages more generally were a common phenomenon in the revolutionary era. I was energized by the realization that I had found not only a topic but a clear angle, too: I was going to focus on the ways that pilgrims navigated and shaped tensions between territorial space and sacred space. Looking back, I also think I was semi-consciously inspired to pursue this project because it was abundantly clear by 2017 that I myself was living in an age obsessed with borders—and especially obsessed with various forms of border-crossing mobility.
What did you learn and what are you hoping readers will learn from your book?
One main insight I gained is incapsulated in the subtitle of the book: pilgrims wielded enough collective power to actively shape the borderlands. This point is worth emphasizing because scholars have viewed pilgrimage in the decades around 1800 primarily as an object of enlightened scorn and repression. But to write about pilgrims in this way is to only ask how the age of revolutions impacted pilgrimage. My book flips this question and shows the impact of pilgrimage on the age of revolutions—in other words, how pilgrims helped redefine the politically crucial place of Catholicism in the borderlands through their changing religious practices.
Another major point is that the pilgrims’ devout and defiant acts gained their political meaning in a wider context, which my book describes as a transformation of border culture. The new politics of the revolutionary era relied heavily on securitizing borders and supercharging them with ideological meaning, even as dramatic territorial shifts kept signaling the extreme instability of those very same borders. These contradictory dynamics mattered to pilgrims, police, and politicians but also to many other people, from merchants and migrants to deserters and draft-dodgers.
What surprised you the most in the process of writing your book?
I was pleasantly surprised by the richness of the archival materials I sifted through for this book. When I embarked on the project eight years ago, I knew I wanted to write on the Swiss shrine of Einsiedeln and on pilgrimage to Luxembourg City. Two of the book’s five main chapters have ended up reflecting those early hunches. But the book as a whole could never have come together if it hadn’t been for all the unexpected finds in state and church archives, all the dossiers that revealed to me the significance of other shrines and other pilgrim movements. I ultimately gleaned relevant information in roughly twenty-five different archives (in places ranging from Einsiedeln to Brussels and from Paris to Koblenz), which was an exciting experience in its own right. Above all, without those moments of surprise, I would not have been able to unlock such important aspects of my topic as confessional rivalries, mass mobility, waves of Marian apparitions, pilgrim tactics versus police strategies, and much more.
What’s your favorite anecdote from your book?
This question makes me wonder about the distinction between anecdotes and miracles. Past and potential future miracles were (and are) often key to the reputations of shrines and the hopes of pilgrims. So, one thing that I hope will appeal to readers of the book is that it’s packed with analyses of miracle stories: the Virgin Mary that appears along with baby Jesus inside of bottles filled with sacred water; the incapacitated woman who experiences sudden healing while praying in front of a relic; the man who says thanks to Mary because he managed to escape from prison by jumping down twenty-three feet into a small river without injuring himself. Perhaps, readers will also appreciate revolutionaries’ ironic appropriations of miracle talk. Consider a report by the French general whose troops sacked Einsiedeln Abbey in 1798. He announced that he had captured the statue of “the famous Virgin of Einsiedeln, whose transport into France will undoubtably be the most astonishing as well as the last of her miracles.” The extra twist to this anecdote is that he was wrong: he mistook a replica of the statue for the original, which had been evacuated in time by the monks!
What’s next?
Over the past few years, I have grown increasingly interested in the history of work. I have done some postdoctoral research on how ideals of work, worship, and asceticism intersected in eighteenth-century Catholicism, with a focus on Poland-Lithuania. For example, how did enlightened campaigns to reduce the number of work-free holy days play out in the east-central European context? I currently have a couple of chapters on these issues forthcoming in collective volumes. But my next big project is about industrious animals—specifically honeybees and silkworms—and the human beekeepers, silk farmers, and naturalists who interacted with these insects in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Through this new research, I’m hoping to contribute to an emerging multispecies history of work and political economy.