The historian who would seek to summarize the history of the French church in the eighteenth century must be conscious of an unwieldy legacy. There can be few who have sat in departmental archives who have not encountered the individual in clerical collar or monk's habit, hard at work in the series G, carefully amassing material on his parish, diocese or order at any century since the middle ages, ready to embody the fruits of his labours in the Semaine religieuse de …, the bulletin of his local Société Savante, or in mammoth tome probably entitled Histoire du diocèse de…depuis l'époque gallo-romaine jusqu'à 1789, an individual endowed with those most luxurious of research prerequisites – time and freedom from economic worry. Since the second half of the nineteenth century, the church has provided its own historians, and in our own day – to cite merely three – the Abbé Plongeron, the P. Bertholet du Chesnaye at Rennes and the Abbé Baccrabère at Toulouse must be conscious that they belong to a time-honoured yet living tradition. Admittedly until the 1950s much of the work was stereotyped.