Romantic Catholics: France's Postrevolutionary Generation in Search of a Modern Faith

Introduction

1 Introduction Romantic Catholics and the Two Frances France’s romantic Catholics were members of a generation that the writer Alfred de Musset (born 1810) characterized as enfants du siècle in his 1836 autobiographical novel. The children of the nineteenth century,Musset wrote,came of age without firsthand memories of the Revolution;they were “an ardent,pale,and fretful generation . . . [c]onceived between battles [and] reared amid the noises of war” who reached adolescence in the midst of a “world in ruins.” Ill at ease in this world, Musset’s contemporaries suffered, he claimed, because they could see no path from the revolutionary past to the future they desired. Their present—defined by what Musset famously described as mal de siècle—was “vague and floating, a troubled sea filled with wreckage . . . where one cannot know whether at each step, one treads on living matter or dead refuse.”1 The women and men who became romantic Catholics shared the generational identity and the anxieties of Musset’s enfants du siècle. They were dismayed by the legacy of their parents’ revolution, although some—like Stendhal’s Julien Sorel, hero of The Red and the Black—were equally discontented that they had been born too late to participate in the world-historical event of their era. The romantic Catholics were, like Musset, born around 1. Alfred de Musset,Confession of Child of a Century (NewYork,1977),2,4,7,with my modifications to the translation. 2 INTRODUCTION 2. Alan Spitzer, The French Generation of 1820 (Princeton, 1987) focuses on a slightly older group of subjects, mostly born around the turn of the century, and I am indebted to his discussion of generations in history. 3. On women writers in the republican tradition, see Whitney Walton, Eve’s Proud Descendants: Four Women Writers and Republican Politics in Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford, 2000). On the neglect of Catholic writers, see Maria LaMonaca, Masked Atheism: Catholicism and the Secular Victorian Home (Columbus, OH, 2008), 26–27, 207–12. 1810. Some belonged to families that had benefited from the upheaval of the 1790s,with fathers who had served in revolutionary armies. Others were born to counterrevolutionary families and émigré fathers who remembered the Revolution as a catastrophe. Accordingly, some inherited their Catholicism as an important family tradition while others adopted their faith of their own volition. In both instances, however, the romantic Catholicism of these children of the century was self-consciously different from the religion of their elders.2 Many children of the nineteenth century turned to Catholicism to resolve the dilemma that Musset identified: separating the “wreckage” of the Old Regime and the Revolution from the “living matter” out of which they might construct their own lives. Feeling detached from their surroundings, alienated from their parents’ ambitions, and chafing at the uncertainty and caution that characterized their postrevolutionary surroundings,some young romantics looked to Catholicism in an effort to make a world of their own. They determined to set aside the battles of their parents’ generation with philosophes, de-Christianizers, and revolutionaries on one side and Jesuits, Jansenists, and royal censors on the other. Their goal was to find a Catholicism that would be expansive, dynamic, and glorious instead of the nostalgic, bitter, and fearful faith that was the stereotype of the Restoration years. The Catholic men and women of this book shared with Musset a generational sensibility that they directed to the project of reimagining their religious faith. The men—Maurice de Guérin, Charles de Montalembert (both born in 1810), and Frédéric Ozanam (1813)—were public figures whose names are known,at least in passing,to those familiar with nineteenthcentury history or literary studies. Two of the women—Pauline Craven,née de la Ferronnays (born 1808) and Victorine Monniot (born 1824)—were best-selling authors of the second half of the nineteenth century whose names have all but disappeared today. Even more than most popular female authors, Catholic women writers disappeared from the literary canon, and, unlike their republican counterparts such as George Sand,they have not been recuperated as part of a process of feminist canon revision.3 The archival traces of the experiences of Léopoldine Hugo (born in 1824) and Amélie INTRODUCTION 3 4. See the classic Georges Weill, Histoire du catholicisme libéral en France, 1828–1908 (Paris, 1909), and, more recently, Lucien Jaume, L’Individu éffacé ou le paradoxe...