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  • Mgr René Barbier de la Serre (1880-1969): Un éducateur conservateur et novateur
  • Thomas Kselman
Mgr René Barbier de la Serre (1880-1969): Un éducateur conservateur et novateur. By François Hochepied. (Paris: Editions du Cerf. 2009. Pp. 148. €20,00 paperback. ISBN 978-2-204-08754-4.)

François Hochepied, the author of this biography of Monsignor René Barbier de la Serre, acknowledges at the outset that his subject was a secondary figure in the religious history of France in the twentieth century. In Hochepied's view, Barbier de la Serre nonetheless merits our attention, for his long and varied career led him to participate at the center of a range of educational, intellectual, and social institutions. His biography thus allows us to revisit some of the dramatic events and issues that troubled the Church in the twentieth century, as experienced by a talented and loyal clergyman of the second rank. Hochepied organizes his book into two sections—the first narrating the career of Barbier de la Serre; the second exploring in more detail his ideas about human nature, the Church, politics, and the social question.

Born into an elite Catholic family in Paris, Barbier de la Serre was educated first by the Jesuits and then by the Sulpicians as a seminary student during the Dreyfus affair and the ensuing political crisis, which led to the separation of church and state. This experience left him, as it did so many other clergymen, embittered and alienated from the Republic. More generally, Barbier de la Serre developed a disgust for French politics, which he expressed in frank terms in 1932: "Le terrain politique est stérile et traitre: on y recule toujours" ("The political terrain is sterile and treacherous; one is always recoiling from it," p. 122). After a brief stay in Rome, Barbier de la Serre took up a career in education, serving at the Sulpician seminary, the Collége Sainte-Croix de Neuilly, and the Institut Catholique de Paris; at the latter institution, he worked as prorector with the aging Cardinal Alfred-Henri-Marie Baudrillart from 1927 to 1938. During World War I, he served first as a stretcher-bearer and then as a chaplain for his regiment. But Barbier de la Serre, while devoted to France, did not accept the "union sacrée" that sought to reconcile Church and Republic. Like many other conservative French Catholics, Barbier de la Serre saw the French loss in World War II as a divine chastisement and an opportunity for the Catholic Church to recover its central and essential role in French society. During the Vichy regime he served as chaplain to the French Scouts and the French Catholic student organization. Following the war, he was, for a time, the head of the international Catholic sports federation, before spending his last years as a parish priest in the French countryside. [End Page 843]

Hochepied draws on family archives in telling Barbier de la Serre's story, and his bibliography includes a good list of secondary sources. But there is little that is very surprising in this story, and Hochepied does not generally probe very deeply, beyond placing his subject in the obvious contexts of political strife and educational policy. It would have been interesting, for example, to read more about the motives that pushed Barbier de la Serre to become a major promoter of organized sports, an initiative that seems to have frustrated him because of the tepid response of his colleagues. There seems to be no evidence that Barbier de la Serre himself was an athlete, and his spirituality was conventional in its focus on the other world. How did such a position accord with the advocacy of athletic competition and physical prowess? In his last years Barbier de la Serre was critical of the innovations of the Second Vatican Council, and he remained committed to an ideal of a Christian society based on religious education that Hochepied acknowledges seems out of place in a "post-Christian" France. Although one might accept Hochepied's critique of the current confusion in educational theory and practice, his argument that Barbier de la Serre's career offers a useful vantage point from...

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