Breaking Habits: Identity and the Dissolution of Convents in France, 1789-1808

This dissertation uses the concept of identity to investigate the ways religious women navigated the French Revolution. Even as their religious identities were thrown into question, these women’s religious commitments remained important to them. As the French revolutionaries began to reform aspects of the ancien régime, the Catholic Church came under attack. The fate of priests, monks, and nuns came into question. Traditionally, religious women cared for orphans, the sick, and the poor, educated young girls, housed widows, rehabilitated prostitutes, and provided a respectable alternative community for aristocratic women. Despite every effort by the revolutionaries to dissolve their patterns of living, certain nuns adjusted themselves to the changing political climate, and their practice of faith survived the religious legislation that suppressed their convents and congregations. Adapting to new circumstances after the dissolution of their religious houses was complicated for women who could not own property because of the vow of poverty, could not marry because of their vow of celibacy, and could not swear the required oaths to liberty and equality because of the vows of obedience to the Catholic Church. Nearly every nun broke at least one of these vows. The nuns were able to navigate the uncertainty of the Revolution by relying on their religious identity as devotees of an unchanging deity. Anchoring their identity in religion did not preclude changes to their sense of self and their relationship with the secular world, but it allowed them to retain some sense of stability in the face of challenges. As unlikely harbingers of revolutionary changes, female members of monastic institutions took an active role in shaping the practice of Catholicism and crystalizing the changes wrought by the Revolution. By adapting the performance of their identity to survive severe religious persecution, the nuns redefined what it meant to be a woman, a Catholic, and a member of French society. Religious belief helped some Catholics to answer the essential question of self, morality, and community when fundamental bases of identity were in flux. Religious women solidified the revolutionary changes, wittingly or unwittingly, through the daily practice of new responsibilities, by engaging in the world outside the cloister, and by making, breaking, and leveraging different aspects of their identities. Former nuns were expected to become laywomen in a short period of time, and the special status of religious women disappeared. New rights to own property or to live wherever they chose, however, conflicted with the rules of the convent and their permanent vows. Historians must reconsider what liberty, fraternity, and equality meant to members of religious communities. Nuns found freedom in obedience. They found death, at least the symbolic death to the world that accompanied taking religious vows, was a path to eternal life. And they found security in their identities as nuns even at a time when expressing that identity could result in imprisonment. Some women did not embrace the freedom offered by the Revolution and preferred the spiritual freedom offered in the convent. While the revolutionaries espoused a fraternity between all Frenchmen, the women in the convent already had a sisterhood and a spiritual family with which they identified. Mother superiors and individual nuns often advocated for themselves in letters to the National Assembly, both to dissolve and preserve these convents. Furthermore, between 1802 and 1808, the Catholic Church sent a papal legate to adjudicate letters, known as the Caprara letters, written by men and women who hoped to rejoin the church. These letters help explain their actions in the church’s absence. Other primary sources used in this study include diaries, letters, and printed memoirs from nuns during the French Revolution. Perhaps more than any other group in revolutionary France, nuns had to react to changes that affected the aspects of their daily life that defined their identity. They dressed the same, patterned their lives after a highly regimented ritual of prayer and singing, and occupied themselves in a shared mission within their communities. Nuns’ intersectional social, political, religious, and gender identities help us to understand how the Revolution affected individuals. Drawing on concepts from the work of identity theorists, this dissertation makes three arguments. First, nuns’ religious identities were a source of stability in the face of the uncertainty created by the Revolution. Secondly, female religious women had a great deal of agency in choosing which identities to adopt during the Revolution. Lastly, nuns played a role in shaping the return of convents and congregations, and their experiences during the Revolution changed both secular and religious ideas about convents. In the daily practice of new responsibilities, engaging in the world, and taking on new identities, they crystalized the revolutionary changes. My research tells the story of women who lived complicated lives and do not fit into the neat categories we have created for them. In understanding how these women made sense of the Revolution and their place in it, we can better understand how to deal with conflicts between personal religious beliefs and the public performance of various identities

Rethinking Warning: Intelligence, Novel Events, and the COVID-19 Pandemic

17 USC 105 interim-entered record; under temporary embargo.U.S. Government affiliation is unstated in article text

Terrorism's Communicative Dynamic: Leveraging the Terrorist-Audience Relationship to Assess Evolutionary Trajectories

Terrorist groups do not operate in isolation. To survive in the face of counter-pressures from their opponents, the group must establish a beneficial relationship with a targeted audience, a presumed constituency, in order to generate the sympathy and support necessary for maintaining operational viability. Existing studies of terrorism, however, offer few insights into how this might be done. The most common approach revolves around assessments of terrorist messages, yet typically treats those messages as self-serving propaganda or media manipulation. This study takes a different approach, suggesting that terrorists use statements and communiqués in an effort to gain and maintain a supportive audience. Further, the intended audience for the messages infer meaning in terrorist violence, thus augmenting or reducing the impact of persuasive messaging by the terrorist. Understanding this process, in turn, may yield new insights into the dynamic processes of terrorism, offering new opportunities to assess a terrorist group's potential for positive evolutionary growth or greater relative fitness. Using Grunig's situational theory of publics, this study creates and evaluates a new metric, called expected affinity, for examining the terrorist group's effort to establish and strengthen bonds between itself and its targeted and presumptively supportive audience. Expected affinity combines sub-measures addressing problem recognition, expected and desired levels of involvement, and constraint recognition, coupled with an inferred meaning in the symbolism of violent acts in order to evaluate terrorist messages and attacks. The results suggest utility in the expected affinity metric and point to opportunities for making the measure more directly applicable to specific cases through incorporation of detailed case study data

Future of Terrorism: Are We Seeing a Fundamental Shift?.pdf

In 2001, David Rapoport challenged us to think about terrorism differently. Looking at the history and evolution of terrorism, he suggested that modern terrorism could be characterized as a series of cycles in which terrorist goals and activities generally fit a set of dominant features. Each “wave,” in this perspective, has a “different energy” driving actors and actions, with modern terrorism presented as a series of waves beginning with the Anarchist Wave and transitioning over time through the anticolonial, New Left, and finally religious waves. While many characteristics of today’s emerging trends appear to comport with Rapoport’s religious wave, this paper asks whether today’s terrorism might represent the beginnings of a new, fifth, wave of modern terrorism

Assessing Threat Potential Leaderless Resistance.pdf

Recent terrorist attacks highlight the threat of terrorist violence authored not by recognized terrorist groups, but by unaffiliated individuals. In a number of cases, these individuals appear to have been motivated by extremist literature and Internet posts. Attacks in the United States and abroad illustrate the potential for radicalized individuals, acting alone or in small groups, for authoring significant damage. For many, the radicalization process began or was enhanced by appeals for action engendered in calls for leaderless resistance or leaderless jihad. The leaderless resistance literature of the radical right and the leaderless jihad literature of Islamist terrorism are compared to identify common themes in problem recognition, level of involvement, and constraint recognition. While there are similarities, differences remain largely in how problems are presented, constraints on action are characterized, and conceptions of constituencies

Audience and Message: Assessing Terrorist WMD Potential

One of the more frequently debated topics in terrorism is whether and under what conditions terrorists might use a weapon of mass destruction. Given the potential for damage resulting from WMD use by non-state actors, the questions of whether, when, and what likelihood are of critical concern. This paper offers one way these questions might be addressed by considering the mindset and perspective of terrorists, the primary audience they presume to speak to, the message they provide to that audience, and the nature of their relationship with other members of society