Contestations et Troubles Religieux en France en 1791. La Mise en Exécution de la Constitution Civile du Clergé By Rodney J. Dean. Private publication by the author.  2024.  677 pp. £20.30. ISBN: 979-8327551121

Scholarly self-publication is a double-edged enterprise. On the upside, all limits are self-imposed. There is no publisher, editor or prior peer-reviewer to demand unwelcome cuts or reformulations. The danger or even likelihood of not being noticed or reviewed is on the other side. Rodney Dean deserves better. Over the last 20 years, he has brought out four huge studies in the religious history of the French Revolution, none in his native English, written from a lifetime’s immersion in the French National Archives and Library, the Bibliothèque de Port Royal and the French collections of the British Library. Although never employed in a British university, he completed a Sorbonne doctorate under Jean Tulard, and only began to publish after taking early retirement. More than 700 pages comprised his first great work of 2004 on the Constitutional Church, Napoleon, and the Concordat of 1801. It was dedicated to the memory of Henri Grégoire, who had done so much to sustain the bedraggled remnants of the constitutional church launched in 1790. A second book in 2008 traced Grégoire’s early achievements in this quest throughout the immediate aftermath of the Terror. These studies led Dean back to the origins of the great schism itself—the deepest national divide opened up by the Revolution. Nearly 800 pages on how it came about showed in 2014 that the last word on the subject had not been said by Timothy Tackett in his acclaimed book of 1986 on the oath designed to embed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in the new regime. Now, after ten more years, Dean offers a new analysis of the immediate consequences of the oath down to the end of the Constituent Assembly.