Ernest Renan's inaugural lecture as professor of Hebrew at the Collège de France in 1862 was so crowded that many were turned away, and it led to street demonstrations by both admirers and opponents. Napoleon iii's Minister of Education suspended him from his post not only because his implied rejection of the divinity of Jesus was offensive to Catholics, but because the controversies surrounding his teaching were a threat to public order. This was the perfect preparation for the publication the following year of Renan's Vie de Jésus in which he developed his ideas more fully and explicitly. The book was an immediate sensation, selling 168,000 copies in the first eighteen months, inspiring a lively and often acrimonious public debate, and taking only two months to reach the Index. Robert Priest's absorbing book neatly divides into five sections: ‘The Author’, ‘The Book’, ‘The Debate’, ‘The Audience’ and ‘The Legacy’. Renan was born into a modest family in the Breton fishing and cathedral town of Tréguier. He won a scholarship to a Paris seminary where he was trained in languages and biblical criticism, but in 1845, prompted by religious doubts, he left the seminary, and resolved to make his career as a scholar. His passion was philology and he adopted a linguistic determinism, according to which the ‘Semitic’ was fundamentally different from the ‘Indo-European'. The unique role of Jesus was to combine elements of both. Restored to his chair on the fall of the Empire in 1870, he was elected to the Academy and after his death in 1892 received a state funeral. ‘The Book’ aimed to bring Jesus into the ambit of history rather than theology. While it was emphatically a work of science, Renan claimed that his travels in the Holy Land and his status as a once devout Catholic, now sufficiently distanced to be objective, uniquely qualified him for an intuitive understanding of his hero. Miracles were an impossibility, but legends naturally grew up around the great men who did so much to shape history; and Jesus was one of the greatest of these. Renan rejected the view, popular in 1848, that Jesus was a political revolutionary. But according to Renan, he was a revolutionary of a different kind, replacing institutional authority with the authority of the individual conscience. ‘The Debate’ was conducted in the columns of newspapers and periodicals, in sermons, and in numerous polemical pamphlets. The archbishop of Reims simply forbade his clergy and people to read the book, but some Catholics got more personal, comparing Renan to a rat, a fox or a snake. Liberal Catholics drew on the work of German Protestant scholars in attempting a more reasoned critique. At the time, Free-thinkers generally felt bound to defend him, though some like Zola regarded him as ‘an idealist', rather than ‘a scientist'. The high points of the book are the chapters concerning ‘The Audience’ and ‘The Legacy'. Zola had seen Renan's style of scholarship as ‘feminine', but by the 1880s the vogue was for a ‘hard’ and more ‘masculine’ brand of science. However, with the polarisation brought about by the Dreyfus Affair, doubts were cast aside and for those on the Republican side Renan became a symbol of laïcité. His posthumous reputation was symbolised in two monuments erected in Tréguier in 1903: the town-centre statue unveiled by none other than Émile Combes, the arch-anti-clerical prime minister; and the more obscurely located ‘Calvary of Reparation’ built by Catholics with the inscription ‘Truly this man is the Son of God'. In Priest's view, the rival monuments reflected an artificial narrowing of the religious options in the Third Republic. Contesting the familiar picture of ‘Les deux France', Priest argues that there was a wide middle ground. The key evidence is presented in the chapter on ‘The Audience’, which is based on the many letters written to Renan in response to his book or to the volume of memoirs which he later published. Most of these, Priest suggests, were ‘one-off fan letters', but some were abusive, and at least one offered a detailed critical analysis. Those on both sides shared what Priest calls a ‘faith in transformative reading’ (p. 179). Some of the letter-writers said that Renan had destroyed their faith, but others thanked him for leading them to a better form of Christianity. (I was reminded here of the many letters sent to the author of another controversial best-seller, John Robinson's Honest to God.) While rejecting some aspects of Catholic orthodoxy they remained attached to Jesus and to the Bible, and they valued the ambiguities in Renan's thinking, which militant Catholics and Free-thinkers equally disdained. The position of those on this middle ground was easier in Britain or Germany than in France. As in the ‘culture wars’ of the contemporary United States, those French men and women who stood somewhere in the middle could scarcely make their voices heard amid the cacophony of shouts from the ideologues on either side of the divide – but they none the less represented a sizeable sector of public opinion. In present-day America this point can be established through surveys; in Third Republic France it is harder to be sure who these people were. Priest suggests (p. 178) that many of them were women, and this is a suggestion that would be worth exploring in more detail. He has written a persuasive and consistently interesting book, which offers an excellent model for anyone writing the controversial religious best-sellers of other periods – though perhaps few of their authors would fit quite as neatly as Renan into Priest's scheme.