Maxwell Institute Podcast #157: Latter-day Saints in the French Imagination, with Corry Cropper, Daryl Lee, and Heather Belnap

Joseph Stuart: Welcome to the Maxwell Institute Podcast. I'm Joseph Stuart. In the nineteenth century, a fascination with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints made mormons in mormonism a common trope in French journalism, art, literature, politics and popular culture. Heather Belnap, Corry Cropper and Daryl Lee, all professors at BYU, bring to light French representations of mormonism from the 1830s to 1914, arguing that these portrayals often critiqued and parodied French society. mormonism became a pretext for reconsidering issues such as gender, colonialism, the family, and church/state relations, while providing artists and authors with a means for working through the possibilities of their own evolving national identity. I'll note before we begin that “mormonism” is the term used by nineteenth century French people, and that, as we see it, it represents best something that they're seeing. In fact, mormonism isn't necessarily the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or its teachings. It's something discursive, it stands in for other ideas. In other words, mormonism stood for things attributed to Latter-day Saints, but that made particular sense in a time and place to French people. For that reason, we use mormon and mormonism throughout the interview, as well as Latter-day Saints and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Heather Belnap, is an associate professor of art history and European Studies coordinator at BYU, and an affiliate of the Global Women's Studies program. Her research focuses on women in post-revolutionary France, art, fashion and culture, religion and art in the modern era, Transatlantic culture and mormonism around 1900, and mormon women's history. Corry Cropper is the Associate Dean in the College of Humanities and professor of French at BYU. His research focuses include nineteenth century French literature and sports. He served as co-chair of the nineteenth century French Studies Association from 2010 to 2017. And as chair of the department of French and Italian at BYU from 2009 to 2018. Daryl Lee is professor of French at BYU, and an affiliate of BYU Global Women's Studies, International Cinema Studies, and Comparative Literature Programs. He is currently the chair of the department of French and Italian, and his work in cultural studies addresses two broad areas: late nineteenth century France and post-war cinema. Welcome, the three of you, to the Maxwell Institute Podcast!

Daryl Lee: Thank you.

Corry Cropper: Thanks for having us.

Heather Belnap: Yeah thanks. It's a pleasure to be here.

Stuart: It is our joy to have you here. So, the first thing that I noticed when I picked up your book, “Marianne Meets the Mormons: Representations of Mormonism in Nineteenth Century France”, I was pretty surprised to see that there were three authors, whereas in history, often publications are solo-published. So, how did you all come to write the book? And how did you write it as a triumvirate rather than as solo authors?

Lee: That's a good question. This was a relatively new kind of experience for us, writing a book together. Corry had done some collaborative projects, but this was new to the three of us. And it began quite simply with Corry’s recommendation that we do a panel on mormons and mormonism in our professional organization, nineteenth century French studies, which holds an annual conference. And a colleague of ours, Maurice Samuels, who had organized a panel on the figure of the Jew in nineteenth century French fiction, inspired that. So we got together about a decade ago, and started presenting on topics that we were interested in. Corry had already been working on a French author named Mary Mae, who had written an essay called Mormones, or the Mormons” in the 1850’s. He had written an article on that early in his career. Heather has been working for a long time on members of the church who went to Paris in the nineteenth century to study art, and in particular, women artists who did this and brought back really wonderful experiences to the state of Utah, and helped to develop curriculum in its education system in church. And then I had happened across mormons in this wildly fantastical book, a futuristic novel called “The 20th century” by an illustrator and novelist named Albert Robida, and that's how it began. We started working on this over time, and really, we've done three panels together at conferences over time, and it began to coalesce into something much, much more than we realized that there was so much more going on with regards to knowledge about the Church, and the way that the French were using references to mormons and mormonism across all aspects of their culture. It meant that we needed to delve more deeply and to develop these. So, it began that way, and it took us 10 years of work. And I'll point out too that it really was co-written in the sense that we had these joint Google sessions and we shared our drafts with each other, we would be there for hours on end, particularly during the pandemic, on a Google Doc or a shared Microsoft Word doc writing and as Heather puts it really well overwriting, and underwriting, and correcting, and going back over each other's work to the point where we're not sure who wrote most of the book, which there wasn't a single person per se, you know, we didn't divide up chapters. It really was a joint effort. We'll call it a Hydra.

Stuart: In thinking about this, too, I was also intrigued by the title of your book. Corry, could you tell us about how you ended up choosing it?

Cropper: Yeah, I should point out that Marianne is the symbol of France, of the French Republic, there are images of it starting around the French Revolution. And Marianne is to France, what Uncle Sam might be to us here in the United States. So we were interested in, in this idea of how Marianne or the French, and particularly in the Republic, understand, interpret, create the image of the mormon. And we really were aiming at two different audiences here. We come from French studies, as Darryl mentioned, and one of our arguments was that the traditional narrative of rising secularism against and its tug of war with the Catholic Church in France, that's what creates modern France. And we wanted to suggest that's true, but there are other smaller religions that also played a role in the construction of what it means to be French and in contemporary thought. That was our argument to French studies people, but on the other side in LDS studies, what we noticed is that, not all, but many of the works about the Church outside of the US focus on the number of branches, and when the mission was create, and this kind of thing, and how many members were there. Or how often, when this first stake was formed? This kind of thing. We wanted to look instead, what is the idea of mormonism doing in other countries? How does it work? How are people interpreting it and using it to their own ends? And so, that to notice that it's very different, what's happening in France is very different than what's happening in the US, for example, that's what we wanted to focus on.

Stuart: Yeah, I was really struck by this idea, because the context, as you would imagine, are so different between the United States and its colonies. There's actually quite a large literature on how the idea or the image of the mormon has been deployed in American history, and I was really thrilled to see this taken outside of the United States.

Cropper: One thing I could add, Joe is, you know, we looked at say Spencer's book on the image of the mormon to help define what it means to be American, right. A good American is everything that a member of the LDS church isn't; they're white, they're monogamous, they're capitalist, they're democratic. Yes. And they're Protestant, right? But in France, the tendency is to say, “Hey, look at some parts of our culture and how similar we are to these people in the far west, and what does that mean?” And to sort of use mormonism as a foil to laugh and look at themselves.

Stuart: I'm really curious, what sort of sources did you all rely on to be able to complete your research? As you mentioned, this was during the pandemic, so I imagine a lot of them were online, but what sorts of things were you using to construct your argument?

Lee: So this is very much an archival project, we used all kinds of archival documents. We used printed matter books from the nineteenth century and the early 20th century, manuscripts. Corry worked in the National Archives in France, and retrieved several vaudeville plays, and even some scores. So we read prose fiction, long-form essays, newspaper accounts. Many of these were, in fact, in digitized scannable newspapers and journals. And that's a sub-story to the project, which is that in the early 2000’s, Google announced its library project and said that it was going to digitize the world's books, you know, 130 million books. And the French did not take this lightly. They didn't like the idea very much. They thought, this is our cultural patrimony that you're talking about. And so, by the end of the first decade of the century, they were channeling tens of millions of dollars towards digitization for their own cultural patrimony. And this happened to be about the time that we started our project. So they began scanning books out of this fear that a Google-led kind of library would privilege English language documents, and that that would end up with a kind of imperialist scenario where English dominated everything. And in fact, that's what could have happened. We benefited then from the French saying, Okay, we're gonna go ahead and scan all of these documents. And a lot of that comes from the nineteenth century where you've got this new media culture, new print culture, the French are very curious, lots of professional journals that were emerging with new kinds of sciences, anthropology, sociology, history and geography. I want to add to that then, from a different angle, we have views that are represented by men who are writing mostly, but also women. We have authors and illustrators, we have people who are contributing from both the left and the right of the political spectrum. We have religious thinkers, we have anti clerical thinkers, we have scientists and professors and social critics. We even use the memoirs of an early French convert to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Louis Bertrand, who may be known by some of our listeners out there. So really, it's a compilation of so many kinds of documents that we assembled together and reconstructed. It ended with, I think around 750 footnotes. So it's very well-documented, typical, I think of history, but maybe less so when we're dealing with literary or cultural analysis. But it's a richly, richly archival piece of work.

Belnap: And I'd like to add too, that the image databases that have increased in the last 10 or 20 years, made this possible. So, and we're talking about France and in the United States, so that individual prints, illustrated magazines, and the like, that we could search through the indexes of mormon, and come to light in ways that we'd never would have been able to find before. So, museums and others, especially around the world, but especially in France, because of these reasons that Daryl has talked about how the idea that they need to do it first, in order to make sure that it is done well are really at the forefront of doing this. And so we found artworks in particular, as well as literature and theater and the like, that would not have been available otherwise. So this project could not have been done 20 years ago. And in the course of the 10 years as we were working on this, we’d type in as you know, a search term like “mormon” into the database of the French National Library, and we'd get maybe 2000 hits. Now, if you were to do this, we're probably at 8000.

Lee: That number is artificially inflated, because 20% of them are about a racehorse named Mormon, that they only started digitizing these, like the odds and the start lists of various horse race more recently, and so this is something we've got to add another volume- just to study this phenomenon.

Belnap: That's a slight exaggeration, but it is true that that race horse was very popular!

Stuart: Thanks so much for that. I'm also struck that a lot of folks may think to themselves, how does one use art to make a historical argument? And Heather, you're an art historian, but how are you rather than using texts or the written word, how are you using art to interpret how French people were using the idea of a mormon or mormonism within French culture?

Belnap: Thanks for that question. So, art historians see art, visual culture, material culture, as texts that you need to do interpretive work with; that they are not just mere illustrations. And so you know, the analysis of how something is represented, the various symbols that might be used, the… you know, bringing to bear what you see, but also what discourses it's engaging in the culture at large. So for example, we start with this fantastic image of Victor Hugo, who is being approached by these three mormon men with a silver platter upon which are a couple of miniature mormon women. And the idea is that he is approaching them about joining the church and perhaps siring some progeny that will make mormons you know, more intellectually and and literarily great. And he shies away from that. And you can read what's happening there, but it's so important to know the context around it. So who was Victor Hugo? What is being talked about sort of politically about him? These representations of women- do they look like dancers in Paris? Or, you know, are these like sort of authentic ways of representing mormon women? How do these mormon men, what kind of gestures that they're making or their use of their body language that is there go to conversations, that are really not conversations, but are fear mongering about what mormon missionaries are doing and their approach in either seducing or mesmerizing women. So it's looking very carefully at you know, what one sees, but also understanding that they use various elements in culturally specific ways. And in fact, as you go through and you look at the illustrations, you know, one of the the meta-arguments is, in order to make mormons legible to the French who are not surrounded by many actual members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, they use a lot of the kind of conventions of representing French women, French men, French genre scenes, because they will be able to relate to those.

Lee: And I want to jump- in one of the great binds, the contributions that Heather made was to show how these images of LDS characters are the caricatures of mormons in 1830s France parallel what's happening in the salon art of France. That they're sort of forcing mormon imagery into French-established French tropes. And if I can bring this up, is there's an image of Brigham Young talking to a mormon woman and saying, “Hey, you, it's been revealed to me that you need to marry me,” and this is in an 1850 book in France. And it looks so much like the famous painting by Delaroche, where he depicts the Cardinal of Winchester looking at Joan of Arc before she's about to be burned at the stake, right? But the visual similarities are striking. And Heather pointed this out. And our book goes into these images quite a bit and shows parallels between classical French artwork and then the illustrations of mormonism to show they are playing on those established tropes or varying from them. And we explained why and how that's happening.

Stuart: Yeah, in a very non-intellectual way, this makes me think about meme culture, where if you actually have to pick apart what's going on inside the meme that someone shares, you're sort of ruining the humor, that's a part of it. And I guess I can say this as a historian, maybe this is why we aren't as fun at parties as art historians are.

Belnap: No, no, we do the same thing too. So, to go back to that Hugo image, you know, nineteenth century French folk of a particular class and education would look at that and immediately kind of understand all of the inside jokes, all of the cultural nods, the political and social discourse, it's around that and find it humorous where it is, we might look at that today and have no idea what is going on. And in fact, without the title that includes mormon, we might have missed it.

Stuart: We are here discussing the book, “Marianne Meets the Mormons: Representations of Mormonism in Nineteenth Century France,” and would love to dive in a little bit into the meat of the book. I'm really curious, as in diving in and thinking about the ways that French socialism or utopianism is imagined using Latter-Day Saints or mormonism to get at the heart of ideas. Daryl, how are the French doing that?

Lee: Well, let's provide a little bit of context first. You have a lot of regime changes in France in the nineteenth century. From Napoleon becoming Emperor at the beginning of the century, there's Waterloo, we go back to monarchy, a restoration of monarchy between 1815 and 1830. 1830, There's a revolution and the fall of that line, monarchical line, and a new monarchy 1830-1848. And there's another kind of double revolution in 1848. And then you have Coup d'etat. And we move to the second empire 1852 to 1870, and then we finally get to the Third Republic. In the midst of all that France is industrializing, and you have all of these working class folks, and the emergence of the middle class, and their strife between these classes. And then you have, of course, this battle going on over the Catholic Church. In this kind of turmoil context, there are these groups that emerge, that are saying, we need to build a better society. And we can do that in a variety of ways. One of those things that we need to think about is what the French called the social question. That is the plight of the working class, and this, this new kind of economic industrial world. And you have the creation of these utopian figures, excuse me, these utopian imagined societies and these efforts at utopias under the work of Foyer, a man named the count of St. Simone. St. Simeonens you might think of Robert Owen, in an Anglophone context, and then another group that, some members of the Church may recognize the Ikarians. These are a lot of French groups, and they're pushing for something more Christian and socialist at the same time. This is Pre-Marxist socialism. This is before what we imagined socialism to consist of. And what the French are doing is debating these ideas in their public sphere, and they're talking about, sometimes mocking, but then also kind of trying to imagine new kinds of ways of organizing society, especially a Republican society that might be fairer, more just economically, more just for women. They could have civil rights and a role there. All of these things are pretty radical for the time, and conservatives are generally pushing back against this and fighting against it. What happens is these observers of you know, people living this in their own country and then observing these other movements abroad, see mormonism as this really compact society that has economic communitarianism. Right? That has democratic form of government. Theodemocratic form of government in Nauvoo, and they're following this very closely. That has a new social structure coming along at a certain point with polygamy. That has a new kind of vision of God and the church. And the French see, this is both threatening but then in some cases actually possible, an alternative among many others to model their own new societies after in each of these successive revolutions and changes to their society. So the French seize on this multifaceted movement in ways that say a particular church like the Baptist Church couldn't represent. It didn't have all of these aspects, was nearly not as complex. It's almost like a small society. And that's where mormonism comes into the discourse early on in the 1830s and 40s and 50s, early 50s in France before some of its other iterations.

Stuart: I love that you're mentioning this because there's really a young historian named Eric Freeman who's looking at French socialism and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And one of the things that he found, well that others have found, but that he really dives into in the French context, are the French utopians who moved to Nauvoo after the Latter-day Saints leave in the mid-nineteenth century.

Lee: Yeah, this is a really fascinating story in terms of encounters, and what's in the zeitgeist at this time. So you have French groups who are going to the United States, Foyerists and others trying to establish these communities. And Eric Freeman's work helped inspire our first chapter where he talks about this encounter between French Ikarians. So you have this man named Atien Cabaye, who writes his own version of Thomas More's Utopia. He is a very, very popular figure with the widely circulated newspaper called “La Populaire” (The Popular) and one of his journalists and editors is a man named Louis Bertrand, who is dispatched to interview the representatives of this new church on its soil, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He writes a series of articles for this journal in 1849, I think it is, and eventually joins the church actually, he converts and as a matter of fact, is fired for his conversion, and then goes on and is instrumental in translating the Book of Mormon into French. Despite the fact that John Taylor's name is on it, Bertrand is really, we know, behind this. Now, at the same time, the Ikarians as they're calling themselves, this group under Cabaye, are sent over to the United States, they've purchased land in East Texas, it ends up being a fiasco, 1,500 people left there. In between their departure from France in January and their arrival in the New World, France has a revolution and becomes a republic all of the sudden. Half the people, this project collapses, half the people returned to New Orleans and half of those returned to France. But the others think we want to keep doing this, where can we go? And so they send some emissaries up the Mississippi River and lo and behold, there's this abandoned city, just up the way, and they end up purchasing the main core of properties held by the Church after their departure for Salt Lake Valley. Brigham Young had left representatives there to carry out that legal work with the properties and the Ikarians take over Nauvoo from the Mormons in this perfect matching of French and American utopianism and communitarian life.

Stuart: So one of the sources that we haven't discussed yet are the series of lectures and what are some of the favorite lectures that you all relied on as sources in Marianne meets the Mormons?

Cropper: We don't have the transcripts of these lectures, but it's true that there were a number of authors and thinkers that came to the U.S., visited with mormons, and then returned. The most famous of, and lectured in Paris, the most famous of those is undoubtedly Natalie Anadubua, feminist author who travels to the US with the support of Alexander Dumas, the famous French novelist who turns and gives these lectures. And one of her arguments is that I think is fascinating, and she says, yes, the Mormons have polygamy. But guess what, the men there recognize their wives, unlike in France, where men have mistresses, and don't acknowledge them. And the children of those wives are supported, unlike in France, where you have these children wandering the streets because they don't have a name, that becomes really important for her. So she kind of flips it around and says, you know, we practice a bad form of polygamy here in Paris, with the way they're doing it in the US, at least provides a certain autonomy for women, and it provides support for the children of those unions as well.

Belnap: And there's a marvelous illustration of this lecture that she gives, it’s a full page illustration where she's up at the lectern, and you know, pontificating, and then there's a banner above her that says, “Mormonism in Paris”. And then there are all of these vignettes of what is going to happen now that Mormonism has come to Paris. And you have husbands who are faced with these extraordinarily long bills that their wives have run up as they're shopping for dresses and you have some domestic disputes. And then it finishes at the very end with this hilarious figure of a cherub sorts, this oversized cherub who is hovering above the sky, the recognizable skyline of Paris, and he is also holding his banner right that says “Viva la Mormonisma,” so “LONG LIVE MORMONISM,” with this idea that this institution and this faith is going to take over Paris.

Stuart: And something else that really caught my eye in reading the book is thinking about the caricatures of Latter-day Saint women and women in Mormonism in the United States. And in history books that have been written in the last 20 years, there's been a lot of work showing that most Americans thought about Latter-day Saint women as powerless dupes, so they don't have any sense of agency in their lives. Or they’re hypermasculine authoritative actors where they're the ones actually running everything within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, were those sorts of caricatures true of the French? Or was the image of the Mormon woman deployed differently in Europe?

Belnap: There certainly were similarities between the Anglo American and the French traditions of representing women, but I would say by and large, they're more sympathetic. And it was particularly the figure of the Mormon woman that captured the imagination in France. And we see this in the illustrations, but also in the literary caricatures and representations in the theater and elsewhere. So the earliest French imagery or iconography of mormons is a translation of Maria Ward's Female Life Among the Mormons, which appeared in 1856. And had 17 illustrations that were very interesting in terms of our French illustrator, which moments he elects to illustrate, and how he uses the image to maybe amplify some of the characterizations or the plot, and the like. And in there, you do see mormon women represented, I wouldn't say they're powerless dupes so much as innocent victims, and there's a difference there. But it's mostly at the hand of these power hungry, religious leaders. And then we also are going to see this hypermasculinity looks different too in France, and has more to do with sort of mind control than it's going to be with some sort of physical demonstration of prowess, or whatever. But that quickly shifts in the second half of the nineteenth century, where we see a lot of representations of mormon women, that look quite French, in terms of their dress, their demeanor, their interests of and the like, and particularly as the Separatist movement rose in the United States, and the French are watching, the women in Utah receive their vote, she almost comes to represent, you know, the new woman, and all of the possibilities and possible problems that she might introduce. And in fact, there's a wonderful text that Daryl alluded to that prognosticates, that by 1953, mormon women are essentially going to be ruling the colony that is now in England, and that they are the politicians, and they are the police women, and they are even the prison guards that if men refuse to marry and remain celibate, they're going to be thrown in prison for this. You know, I see a much more, as I said, sort of sympathetic and nuanced representation of the mormon women in France than I do elsewhere.

Lee: If I could add to that, remember, the point that we're making is that this also holds this mirror up to French society. And so, you're seeing this at a time when the French are debating the role of women in their society. And Heather, brings that dimension to the entire book, helping us to see how, at this moment you have women saying, “We belong in the public sphere, we belong, we deserve civic rights, we deserve the right to vote, we deserve the right to educate ourselves, we deserve the right to be our own teachers and university professors. We deserve the right to have roles as lawyers and as politicians.” As traders, they have their own “bourse,” stock market, right, in this fantastical novel. And so the French are using these mormon women who seem to be liberated, right, they get the votes in 1870 and utilize it early on. This is kind of strange news for the French and they're saying, Oh, we could model our own society. Or maybe we could or maybe we couldn't. We use it to criticize or we use it to celebrate those, that different view of women's roles in society through this allegation of mormons.

Stuart: Marvelous, so I'm also interested in the idea that Mormonism was used as a way to talk about religion. And as I read it, I saw it as a way of thinking about the dangers that are presented by religion, or maybe what might be called religious excess in the United States. So how are the French imagining Latter-day Saints within the general religious context of nineteenth century France?

Cropper: Yeah, I think that's partly true. Epodite Thenn who's a social theorist who writes in the mid 1860s about this, or of religion in the US. He says, I think I'm so grateful that they're doing this in this sort of closed environment over there. We can sit back and watch what happens. Let's get the popcorn, and let's just see how this plays out. We don't have to do it ourselves. We'll let them do it. There's not this idea of kind of fear that I think there is in the U.S., people who are observing the church from France, view it with a bit of amusement. And one way to the, you know, the obviously the big religion in France is Catholicism. And it's hard to talk about Catholicism without generating immediate knee-jerk reactions from the left or the right and France in the late nineteenth century. So mormonism becomes a kind of stand-in for that, in different plays, in some, some novels as well. And what the authors tend to do or the illustrators tend to do is to draw parallels between Mormonism and Catholicism. I'm thinking of some of the images that we found that take some pretty well-known American images and Catholicize them when they're trying to depict Mormonism.

Belnap: Absolutely. Or also going to look at the Jewish tradition of representation or Muslim and so there's enough about Mormonism that is unknown, or kind of malleable, we talk about being fungible, that they are seeking for resemblances and similarities. And so often what we're going to see in these representations of mormons is a mash-up of different world religions.

Cropper: And they can do that with Mormons because where Islam, there's a lot of baggage with the Jews, there's a lot of historical baggage and obviously, Catholicism is, you know, too near the surface, right and too controversial a topic to bring up, but Mormonism is easy to bring up, there isn't this sort of long historical tradition of representation of mormons in France, so they can make up whatever they want about it, essentially, and then use that as a stand-in for these other religious groups.

Belnap: And while there certainly were those that would criticize the Mormons for this excess, and abuse of power, and the like, there was also some admiration. I just was reading this morning of one of the only women that comment extensively- French woman on mormonism. And, you know, she had met Brigham Young Jr, whom she calls Young, Younger, and says that, you know, he's very witty, and even makes fun of the Parisians in a way that shows a kind of French humor, and this self-deprecatory way, and he was, you know, of course referring to polygamy. Or yet another reporter, who again, with Brigham Young Jr. met him when he was there for the World's Fair in 1867, who admired his oratorical skills, and he called him a propagandist. But it wasn't necessarily with all of the negative connotations that we have here. It's like, you know, this man can promote anything. And that was seen, it is, you know, seen that the power of speech is very important in France. And so, I think it's important to recognize that some of that zeal was not necessarily seen as a negative thing.

Cropper: And along those lines of Brigham Young Jr. seeing is that idea of him being a propagandist is a positive thing, it's the idea that he embodies American capitalism, right? And the French view Mormonism as the ultimate American religion, which is obviously quite different than the way Americans are viewing it at the time. And so with all the good and the bad, right, that this capitalist experiment that's being played out, let's see where it goes. And we can decide how much of that we want to emulate or not.

Belnap: And to close our discussion of Brigham Young Jr., when he leaves France in 1867, he concludes, you know, “the French are fascinated with our prosperity, but not interested in our religion.”

Stuart: And in speaking about polygamy, of course this factored into discussions in France and was of interest to French people. But I was also curious that it wasn't only debates over marriage that the idea of Mormonism was used, but also for divorce. Why did Mormonism contribute so much to the ending of marriages, not just new unions?

Cropper: Divorce had been legal under Napoleon in France, it became illegal, but the debates around divorce pick up again after the start of the Third Republic, and divorce becomes legal in France in the mid 1880s. When the senators are meeting to discuss this new proposed law, they used mormons as a point of reference saying things like, if this dissolute and dissoluble marriage that we're discussing leads to Saint-simonianism to mormonism, polygamy first and promiscuity next, you should not be surprised or complain. And the idea, and there are other senators that chime in along these lines in the French Senate. The argument is that if we allow divorce, people can get divorced and remarried becomes a sort of serial polygamy. And this plays out, there are a couple of musical plays, comedies that are staged and one of the most important theaters in Paris called the Théâtre des Variétés in 1870’s. And the problem that the main characters have is that they're over-married, they go to Salt Lake and they come back and they've got too many wives, and that’s illegal. In the 1890s, it changes. You have a French character, this great musical 1890 called Japheth’s Twelve Wives. A Frenchman goes to Salt Lake, comes back to Paris with 12 wives, but now he's able to divorce them. He can inherit from his uncle and be in line with the French law. And he has to just find suitable husbands for them. But you can see in the way Mormons are used there, you have this sort of excess of marriage, but then you also have an excess of divorce, as the law changes in France. Shameless plug, but if you want to hear the music from Japheth’s Twelve Wives, go to mormonsinparis.byu.edu and I've had a recording put up there of the music from that.

Stuart: Yeah, so certainly check that out. Well, we've discussed a lot and there's still far more to digest that goes on in your book, but what are some of the big picture ideas that you'd like readers, Latter-day Saints or academics, or Latter-day Saint academics to know after reading, “Marianne Meets the Mormons”?

Belnap: You touched on this earlier when you mentioned that we're moving the focus out of Utah and even out of the United States to thinking how the French were perceived, and represented in other areas of the world. And I think that that move is very important to recognize, we are a global church, and that globalizing has been part of of our identity from the very beginning. And that it's useful to understand how a particular country or region has received us, whether it's accurate or not, so that we can begin to maybe disabuse them of some of their stereotypes or their prejudices. And it also just goes to show that Mormonism was of interest to people outside the United States; that we just had a lot to offer in terms of thinking about some of these new ways of approaching the world theologically, you know, but also, in terms of some of our institutions-government and marriage and some of these other things that we have rehearsed before.

Cropper: I think it's interesting that the figure of the Mormon in France is used a lot like, say folklore is. You know, folklore allows us to explain parts of our some of our beliefs and our culture that we can't explain maybe scientifically, and that even sociology doesn't allow us to explain, but we use these other narratives to help come to terms with that and the French are using Mormonism a lot like that. And in particular, pre-World War One in France to help deal with all these issues from socialism and utopianism to gender roles to colonialism. We haven't talked about, but that's an issue that the French observers, they look at Salt Lake and they see this multiracial community, a fictitious one, but they imagine it and then that allows them to turn back and say, “What about our colonial project? What's going well with it? What's wrong with it?” And people on both sides of the political spectrum use Mormonism as a way to discuss those issues in France.

Stuart: Yeah, one of the things that I took away from your book, and it's just a reminder to me that texts do not interpret themselves, they can be used by a wide variety of people for a wide variety of purposes. And in closing out, following the Lord's admonition to Latter-day Saints and Doctrine and Covenants 88, to learn out of the best books, what are three books that each of you would recommend to our audience? Daryl, if it's alright, we'll start with you.

Lee: Well, for one thing, I'd like to say that I believe in the power of history. I would recommend Paul Reeves book “Religion of a Different Color.” I think it's critical to understanding how members of the church were perceived by outsiders in a very similar way that our book tries to demonstrate. And I believe that it's germane to gaining greater empathy in a world of racialized divisions. I'm also going to disrupt your your habit here and I'm going to say, point to two separate Nobel Prize winning authors who are French, one is Annie Ernaux, who won the Nobel Prize this year, and recommend her novel “La Place” or “ A Man's Place.” And Patrick Modiano’s “Dora Bruder.” I think they're outstanding pieces of French writing for family history and genealogy buffs. They lead us to think about how to write and research with imagination and self awareness, how to incorporate memory and memories and alternative ways of writing. Think that's really critical. You see, in both cases, a kind of poignance when you're trying to retrieve the meaning of someone who's been lost, these forgotten lives in both cases. And then lastly, as a film scholar, I'm going to recommend a film by the French new wave filmmaker Agnès Varda. And in this case, a joint project with a street artist with the name J.R., and the film's title is “Faces Places,” which tells us about the power and poetry of everyday communities in France. It's not really a documentary. It's not a fiction film. It's just this lovely portrait brimming with charity and Christ-like views of other people in France.

Cropper: I want to recommend, if people haven't read it, Moteigne’s essays late sixteenth centuries writing during the religious wars in France between Protestants and Catholics. One of his essays called “Cannibalism” is for me an inspiration for this book, because what he does is he looks at this foreign culture and asks the question: how much are we actually like that or even worse? You know, what do we do in the name of religion? What we do in the name of religion, burning people alive is actually worse than what the cannibals do by eating their enemies after they're dead, right? It's a brilliant kind of reversal or way of thinking, changing the way of thinking in Moteigne’s essays. I also have to recommend “Carmen” the opera. Bieze’s opera is great, and we talk a little bit about it in the book, in fact, because of the number of plays and comic operas that feature Mormons in France. And finally a film too, “The Dinner Game” by Francis Veber is like a classic comedy. If you want a funny laugh, hour and a half long. And the reason I bring that up is because it is in the same genre as the Mormon bodbills from the nineteenth century. By Francis Veber, “The Dinner Game.”

Belnap: I'm going to break with my colleagues and recommend three non-French works. The first is the novel by Virginia Woolf, “To The Lighthouse,” which struck me when I was 20, and continues to tutor me now at age 50. And one of the things that drew me to it then and now is, we see women who are seeking to find meaning in various ways, whether it's as an artist or as a mother, or as a community figure. And it's this very moving, intimate consideration of how one finds plenitude. And in fact, that's the through line for the three texts that I'm going to suggest is plenitude, connection, community. Which are also very important values that we see within our own culture, and faith. And the second is admittedly an academic book by Kaya Silverman called “Flesh of my Flesh.” She's a cultural theorist who argues that one of the great things that ails us in the modern time is the sense of individuality, our individualism, and almost a kind of competitiveness with one another instead of forging meaningful partnerships and relationships, and drawing on why we are human and what brings us together, and shows that this is a fairly modern invention, this rampant individualism and goes back to the beginning of time, especially spends a lot of time with Greek myth, kind of showing us that our foundational stories emphasize that connection, that dependency, even as being far healthier, and more productive. And then the last is Bell Hooks, “All About Love: New Visions,” which is also concerned about how we've trivialized the concept of love in contemporary society. And we use it very flippantly, and we also ignore all of its dimensions and how that could also help us heal as individuals. So she talks about love being about commitment, and care, and connection, and community, and that we need to work to develop this, and that this is really an antidote to many of our social problems. And, of course, this is at the center of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Stuart: Heather Belnap, Corry Cropper, Daryl Lee. Thanks for coming by the Maxwell Institute Podcast!

Thank you for listening to the Maxwell Institute Podcast. Could you please rate, review, and subscribe to the podcast wherever you're listening to this podcast? And recommend it to others so that we can fulfill the Maxwell Institute's mission to inspire and fortify Latter-day Saints and their testimonies of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ and engage the world of religious ideas? Thank you, and have a great week.