Preferred Citation: Luria, Keith P. Berkeley: University of California Press, c When Bishop Le Camus arrived in Grenoble in , he saw not religious vitality but religious decay. He came from a world quite different from that of the people whose spiritual life he was now to direct.
Le Camus was born into a Parisian family of the noblesse de robe in When he was ordained as a priest twenty-six years later, he obtained an almoner's post at the court. To the austerity he learned from the abbot of La Trappe, Le Camus added an intellectual discipline gained from his association with the Oratory and a severity and rigor adopted from his close friends at Port-Royal.
But he was not prepared for what he was to face in the diocese of Grenoble. The problems the Church faced in Grenoble were similar to those it faced elsewhere in France, but the diocese presented its particular difficulties. It was divided by geography, language, and even by national borders.
But a large portion of the diocese belonged to the Duchy of Savoy and was ruled from Turin, not Versailles. Villagers, whose rights in these areas of Roman law were fixed by written reconnaissances negotiated with their seigneurs once a century, participated in strong communal governments that sharpened their political skills and cultural ambitions.
In the north, reconnaissances did not exist, seigneurs were thicker on the ground, and communal institutions were weaker. The two regions also had different means of taxation, which led to different levels of social conflict. The carnival in Romans and the peasant rebellion it accompanied revealed the extent to which the taille personnelle in the north exacerbated tension between villagers and tax-exempt nobles or city dwellers who bought land in rural communities.
