Contenu du sommaire : La révolution Michel Vovelle

During the 1970s and 1980s, Michel Vovelle played a leading role in the emergence and definition of the history of death. His thesis, published in 1973, Piété baroque et déchristianisation en Provence au XVIIIe siècle, based on a serial study of the clauses of wills, revealed the change in collective attitudes towards the afterlife in the century before the French Revolution. His study of the iconography of altarpieces depicting souls in purgatory in Provence (1969) proposed a serial analysis of paintings and sculptures considered as historical sources. He elucidated the sculptures of the « mysterious monument » erected in 1792 by Joseph Sec in Aix-en-Provence, demonstrating that he had wanted to transmit a discourse on the Revolution, and discourses on attitudes towards life. He also undertook a quantitative study of the tombs in Provençal cemeteries. His large synthesis, La Mort et l'Occident de 1300 à nos jours (1983) provoked an interesting debate with Philippe Ariès, and remains one of his principal works.

After a first series of works initiated by the republican school of history from the 1890s to the1920s (Aulard, Mathiez, Dommanget), the dechristianization of the Year Two attracted the attention of researchers once again after the Second World War, echoing Gabriel Le Bras' questions about the historical origins of contemporary dechristianization. In 1963, at the initiative of Marcel Reinhard, Michel Vovelle began an investigation into the abdication of priests in Provence, which he gradually expanded, both spatially and thematically, culminating with the publication in 1988 of a general synthesis, La Révolution contre l'Église. The main result of this long-term study is the constitution of a statistical and cartographic corpus organized around « test » phenomena, a corpus whose use remains essential even today.