Creating the Nation in Provincial France: Religion and Political Identity in Brittany.

Although religion has often been pressed into the service of defining national identities in Western Europe, in post-revolutionary France religion has generally been regarded as an impediment to national integration. Focusing on Brittany, a region marked by its profound religiosity and cultural difference, Caroline Ford shows that religious institutions, which often questioned the unity claims of the French nation, promoted a process of national assimilation by the early twentieth century. Through a study of Breton social Catholicism, she reveals why and how the inhabitants of provincial France came to resist, appropriate, and create national allegiances as they voiced new political ideologies and identities fashioned from local understanding. Ford challenges prevailing center-based analyses of nation formation, in which the center is believed to impose a fixed set of attributes that define the nation at the periphery, by arguing that national identity is created through a continual process of negotiation. In placing the Breton case within a comparative European perspective, this book contributes to a broader reexamination of the relationship between religion and nation formation in old and new states. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of history, religious studies, political science, anthropology, and contemporary European politics.