Catholic and French Forever. Religious and National Identity in Modern France (review)

Joseph Byrnes argues that Catholicism has played an essential role in French self-identity, even during republican periods when state institutions forcibly erased the nation's religious past. In the ancien régime, religion was the nation's "foundation"; during and after the Revolution it served as "antithesis"; since the Great War it has been a "parallel force." Byrnes pursues his argument by means of seven chapter-long case studies (five previously published) arranged under three chronological headings: the "Divorce" between nation and religion during the revolutionary period; the "Defense" of religion from 1802 to 1914 (i.e., Concordat to wartime "Sacred Union"); and a postwar "Détente" enduring into the present. Each chapter stands on its own and may be read as such. The overall narrative is unified by an extended historical overview preceding each of the three chronological divisions. The combination allows readers to access the material in different ways: it offers unique micro-histories (some based on rare archival sources) allowing voices of the time to speak; and, for those who want or need more, a large narrative arc under which to situate those smaller stories.

In the first section, titled "Divorce," the first (and perhaps strongest) chapter presents first-person testimonies of revolutionary-era priests who signed the constitutional oath, those who later abdicated the priesthood entirely, and those who in the end retracted their oaths and returned to the fold. "In 1772," wrote one abdicator of his ordination, "I was forced to appear before a man who was dressed as a woman" (p. 30). A second chapter, utilizing documents expressing the frustration of authorities, argues that revolutionaries' attempts to transfer Catholic sensibilities of the "sacred" to festivals of "Reason" and "Nature" were "completely thwarted" (p. 55). A third chapter highlights Chateaubriand and Destutt de Tracy as binary prototypes of the conflict between post revolutionary "neo-Christian intellectuals" and rationalist Idéologues. In Chateaubriand's Genius of Christianity (1802) we have the first attempt at making "cultural Catholicism" palatable for a non-believing audience. As with Napoleon himself, although the nation might not practice religion, France could not be divorced from its religious patrimony.

In the second section, titled "Defense," chapter four narrates the mid-century invention of Chartres as a pilgrimage destination. It is striking to see just how political the religious pilgrimage was: a democratized form of travel made possible by trains and leisure, it was viewed as an act of "public and national reparation" in expiation for "public and national crimes" such as the Revolution (p. 96). Chapter five, one of the less successful studies, contrasts the effects of using (or not using) regional languages for catechesis in Alsace (German) and Roussillon (Catalan). As Byrnes acknowledges, the decline in Roussillonnais church practice might have had less to do with linguistic causes than with social and economic ones (pp. 137, 144).

In the third section, a period of "Détente" is inaugurated by the Third Republic's call for a "Sacred Union" (1914) against the German menace. Chapter six follows two bitterly opposed enemies into the trenches: religious priests and laicist teachers. Life in deadly close quarters shows each that they have more in common than they thought. As with the earlier century's pilgrimages, the language of "reparation" for national sins (used by priests to make sense of their own "sacrificial" deaths on behalf of the Republic) is striking (p. 160). A seventh chapter, on art historian Émile Mâle, complements the Chateaubriand chapter ending the "Divorce." Both writers appealed to France's religious artistic past to repair wounds of a preceding bloodbath. Once again, "cultural Catholicism" became palatable to a non-believing national public, allowing it to see religion as an integral part of its national identity.

However, ending the study this way leaves the work on unsure footing. Most of the chapter (twenty-two out of twenty-nine pages) deals with Mâle's works published...