Religions and Society in Modern Europe by René Rémond (review)

BOOK REVIEWS343 tively minor complaints, compared with the overall contribution the study makes. David Genulcore School ofAdvanced Study, University ofLondon Late Modern European Religions and Society in Modern Europe. By René Rémond. Translated by Antonia Nevill. [The Making of Europe.] (Maiden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers. 1999. Pp. viii, 237. $27.95 paperback.) This book is a volume in "The Making of Europe" series, a collaborative effort of five European publishers exploring both the exceptional creativity of their continent's past and the difficulties that this past bequeaths to the nascent European community. The author chosen to examine what religion has contributed to this legacy is René Rémond, one of France's most distinguished historians . His qualifications for the task are unrivaled. Elected in 1998 to fill the chair of François Furet at theAcadémiefrançaise, René Rémond has written or edited over twenty works on, among other subjects, the history of contemporary Europe, the political history of modern France, and the often deeply troubled engagement between the Catholic Church and the democratic and secularizing forces unleashed by the Revolution of 1789. The author's ambitions match his accomplishments. Rémond proposes "to measure" the place "the great organized faiths" have occupied in "people's minds, institutions, laws, customs, collective behaviour, and exchanges of ideas" (pp. 2, 54-55). The starting point of his study is the French Revolution, its terminus contemporary Europe. Adopting the perspective of the longue durée, Rémond seeks "to discern a general direction" in which the relationship between religion and society is headed in all European societies (pp. 10, 128). Rémond insists that his subject is not a study of the variety of juridical regimes that may govern the relationship between church and state.Yet much of the text is devoted to these regimes. In the opening chapters, the author sketches the essential features of the confessional state of the old regime. Subsequent chapters follow the transformation of the confessional state in the aftermath of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. The nineteenth century was the period of what Rémond calls the first era of secularization. The abrogation of confessional discrimination under the auspices of a tolerant liberalism yielded, above all in France, to an intolerant campaign of "laicization" aimed at eliminating religious expression from all aspects of public life (p. 144). The second era of secularization took shape in the twentieth century. The great organized faiths, above all Roman Catholicism, responded to the threat of totalitarianism by shedding their opposition to liberalism and reinventing themselves as Tocquevillian intermediary bodies in a fundamentally pluralistic civil society (pp. 70, 170). 344book reviews Rémond's typology of secularization is a useful tool of analysis. Likewise his insistence on the important role religion may play in a vital civil society is welcome . Nevertheless, these contributions are compromised by a variety of flaws. Thus for all that Rémond announces a balanced history of the whole of Europe, he must concede in his conclusion that the "lion's share of the discussion has focused on France" (pp. 216-217). And indeed the comparative dimension of this text often amounts to little more than so many confirmations of a French model. Rémond's treatment of the varieties of European religious experience is equally unbalanced. As Europe's religious "traditional regime" and as Europe's largest religious denomination, Roman Catholicism deserves extensive treatment . This Rémond provides, but to the admitted neglect of the complexity of other religious traditions. Rémond's treatment of both Orthodoxy and Protestantism is at best perfunctory. ForJudaism, the emphasis that Rémond places on civil emancipation needs to be balanced by a far more searching examination of both the rise of political anti-Semitism in late nineteenth-century Europe and the Holocaust. To his credit Rémond does devote a section to Islam in contemporary Europe.Yet in discussing the difficulty that arises between Islam and secularity he overlooks the obvious reference to Islamic Turkey's secular state. Conceptually, too, Rémond dissatisfies. He tends to collapse "society" into "political society." Certainly the more urban, the more consumerist...