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LATE MODERN EUROPEAN Monseigneur Darboy (1813-1871): Archevêque de Paris entre Pie IX et Napoléon III. By Jacques-Olivier Boudon. (Paris: Cerf. 2011. Pp. 192. euro19,00 paperback. ISBN 978-2-204-09200-5.)
Being the archbishop of Paris was a dangerous job in the nineteenth century. Monseigneur Georges Darboy, the subject of Jacques-Olivier Boudon's excellent brief biography, was executed as a hostage by forces representing the Paris Commune in May 1871; two of his predecessors, Monseigneurs Affre and Sibour, also died violently-Affre on the barricades of June 1848, Sibour at the hands of a crazed priest in 1857. Boudon's biography clarifies the details leading up to Darboy7s tragic death, but it also provides an overview of his entire career and thereby brings into focus some of the most important developments in the history of the Church in modern France.
Darboy7s career followed a typical pattern for the nineteenth-century French episcopacy. He was born into a modest family in the Haute-Marne, east of Paris. His intelligence and ambition opened doors to high positions in the Church that would have been a rarity for a nonaristocrat, if not unthinkable, in...