Beggars Becoming Choosers. An Autobiographical Account of Deconversion and Atheism among the Rural Poor in 19th-Century France

Biographies of secularists usually focus on urban people, middle- or working class, but rarely on the rural poor. This article uses the notion of ‘turning points’, coined for new ways of writing problem-based biographies, to analyse a rupture with Catholicism, as related in memoirs of an almost destitute Breton villager in the 19th century. Questioning the role of emotions in this process (e.g. anger at a dominant clergy), it was nevertheless through intellectual transformations that this rupture occurred. However, much more was at stake than a mere reflection on contradictions and falsehood in the scriptures. The article shows how, in this particular case, the gradual integration of villagers into the French nation-state (through institutions like the army) and the transformations of their language habitus, partly triggered by the clergy itself, paved the way for deconversion.