We warmly congratulate Kilian Harrer on receiving the Historical Journal Early Career Prize for his 2023 article “Mass Pilgrimage and the Usable Empire in a Napoleonic Borderland”.
The article analyzes the largest pilgrimage event of the Napoleonic era and shows how Catholics used imperial opportunities and loopholes to promote religious renewal. In 1810, more than 200,000 pilgrims travelled to Trier to venerate one of Christianity’s most important relics, the Holy Coat.
This pilgrimage was able to take place and reach such immense scale because both clerical elites and laypeople navigated the territorial conditions created by the Napoleonic state with great skill. In the Rhineland border regions, to which Trier belonged, French hegemony enabled the return of the relic to the city, but the pilgrims then took advantage of the malleability of public order, which was likewise characteristic of the Napoleonic Empire. The great pilgrimage of 1810 was neither a mobilization orchestrated exclusively by the Church and controlled by the state from above, nor an act of open, politicized opposition — even though several state officials proved to be distinctly hostile toward sacred mobility and “superstition”. The article therefore argues that in the more peaceful parts of the Napoleonic Empire, pilgrims and pilgrimage organizers accelerated post-revolutionary Catholic renewal by making use of the empire rather than resisting it or collaborating with it.
Kilian Harrer has been a research associate at the IEG since 2023.
