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In 1885 Louis Pasteur successfully treated two boys from different parts of rural France, Joseph Meister and Jean-Baptiste Jupille, with his experimental rabies vaccine. Arguing that the boys played an important role in shaping images of Pasteur and his vaccine in French culture, this article reconstructs their long relationships with the scientist and then traces their evolving cultural representations during the Third Republic up to 1940. Meister, a young child from Alsace who sought salvation in Paris, was particularly assimilable to nationalist narratives that Pasteur himself encouraged. Jupille, in fighting with a rabid dog to save young children from attack, could provide an exemplar of the selfless yet virile male adolescent whom late nineteenth-century authorities sought to produce. Both boys' stories produced associations that reflected favorably on Pasteur and the Pastorians, yet each also held an independent appeal at particular moments in modern French history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article situates Ernest Renan's representation of the historical Jesus in the author's intellectual, personal and political trajectory. It traces the development of Renan's ideas about Jesus across a variety of texts, from his loss of faith at the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice in 1845 until the publication ofLife of Jesusin 1863. It particularly argues that Renan's best-selling book should be rooted in the cultural aftermath of the revolutionary upheavals of 1848 to 1851. The violence of the June Days and the election of Louis-Napoléon bred in Renan a deep disillusionment with democracy and socialism. Where French writers of the 1830s and 1840s had offered a proletarian Christ promising social revolution, Renan therefore depicted a liberal Jesus who offered a non-violent ‘revolution’ of personal morality. This Jesus was an individualist who spurned the temporal realm with ‘transcendent disdain’, preferring instead to pursue a state of inner liberty and perfection. Furthermore, this article argues that this representation of Jesus reflected the self-justification of Second Empire liberals such as Renan, who had retreated from frontline politics into the realm of culture and ideas. Indeed,Life of Jesuswas itself a product of precisely this retreat. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In Jésus et les Évangiles (1878) Jules Soury applied the findings of nineteenth-century psychiatry to Christian history and concluded that Jesus had suffered from paralytic dementia. Although Soury sought to emulate his teacher Ernest Renan’s hugely successful Vie de Jésus (1863), the book failed to generate comparable enthusiasm. Indeed, despite the success of anticlerical psychiatry in the same period, Soury’s appropriation of psychopathology ultimately sabotaged his historical career. This article situates Soury’s work in a broader debate about the institutionalization of the ‘science of religions’ or sciences religieuses. This discipline was central to the Opportunist Republicans’ attempts to secularize the higher education system during the 1880s. I demonstrate how liberal Protestant scholars like Maurice Vernes secured the hegemony of a conception of sciences religieuses that, despite the prevalent scientism of the early Third Republic, represented the rejection of a materialistic interpretation of religious history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]