"Au service de l'Eglise, de la Patrie et de la Famille": Femmes catholiques et maternite sous la IIIe Republique (review)

In the late nineteenth century the French Catholic Church had to confront several major challenges. One was the determination of French Republicans tocreate the état laïc, a secular state and a secular society in which religion wasto be relegated to the private rather than the public sphere. The 'Dreyfus Revolution' furnished them with the opportunity to take this project forward through the separation of Church and State, enacted in 1905. A second problem was how to arrest the spread of 'dechristianization,' the decline in religious observance which, though uneven in its geographical spread, was apparent in most parts of the country. The 'social question,' or the plight of the working classes in an increasingly industrialized world, was a third issue of great concern. The social Catholic movement, inspired by Pope Leo XIII's celebrated encyclical of 1891, Rerum novarum, was the Church's attempt at an original response to these diverse, but interconnected, threats.

Anne Cova is not the first to point out that Catholic women played a key role in the ranks of French social Catholicism, but her book-length study, based on extensive research in private archives, fleshes out the story with new detail and new insights. Cova examines a range of feminine associations that, on the one hand, continued to champion the Catholic idea of the nation in the face of the Republican ideal of the idée laïque, and on the other hand engaged in social action that went well beyond private charitable initiatives, contributing ultimately to the emergence of a French 'Etat providence,' or welfare state. The Ligue des femmes françaises, founded in Lyon in 1901 by Jeanne Lestra, the wife of a royalist barrister, was a direct response to the anticlerical Law on Associations of 1901 and described itself as an organization "at the service of the Church, the country and family," a phrase which Cova has borrowed for the title of her book. A rival association, the Ligue patriotique des Françaises, which was linked to the Catholic ralliés of Jacques Piou's Action libérale populaire rather than tothe royalists, developed into the largest women's organization in France (with more than half a million members by 1914) and has already been the object of an excellent study by Odile Sarti published in 1992. Central to the social engagement of Catholic women was a belief in motherhood, the 'mission maternelle,' which was stressed in Rerum novarum and other core texts of social Catholic teaching and carried all the more resonance in France in the context of worrying evidence of dénatalité, or population decline. There could be no rechristianization without procreation, and measures to support children and the family therefore loomed large on the female social Catholic agenda. Anne Cova's monograph on a theme too easily overlooked by both women's history and religious history suggests the value of further studieswhich adopt a gendered approach to the history of religion in modern France.