Results in, and there may be ambiguity here.

It’s from an 1858 petition written by a Catholic teacher to a Calvinist industrialist, asking for a new Catholic church in Mulhouse, Alsace.

Distraction from news: research thread on why I think this ambiguity was intentional

1/ https://twitter.com/History_Will/status/1258691519277604865">https://twitter.com/History_W...

CONTEXT

At the start of the French Revolution, Alsace had a population of around 710,000:

500,000 Catholics
190,000 Protestants (incl. 18,000 Calvinists)
20,000 Jews

Around 6,000 of the Calvinists were in Mulhouse, an independent city republic in the midst of French Alsace

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Mulhouse’s Calvinist elite voted to join France in 1798 to expand their textile factories.

Catholic workers flooded into the city, reaching parity by mid-1830s and vastly outnumbering Protestants by the 1850s.

Money and power, however, remained with the same old families

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Calvinism and independence remained core to elite identity through the century.

A new sub-prefect posted to Mulhouse in 1857 wrote:

“This town is a vast factory, the owners of which belong, in their hearts, their minds and their language, to a foreign and Protestant race”

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The Calvinist elite families – the Dollfus, Kœchlin, Schlumberger – not only ran the textile factories, but also dominated local government.

They engaged in vast schemes of paternalism and philanthropy for the city’s workers, including constructing schools and crêches.

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The most famous of their paternalism were the cités ouvrières: a housing scheme pioneered by Jean Dollfus from 1853, to transform ‘prolétaire’ into ‘propriétaire’ through healthy houses, gardens, and homeownership.

(Read more @FrenchHistoryUK: https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/crx096">https://doi.org/10.1093/f... https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="😉" title="Winking face" aria-label="Emoji: Winking face">)

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