La Revue «La Vie intellectuelle»: Marc Sangnier, le thomisme et le personnalisme (review)

This concise study examines one of interwar France's most influential Catholic periodicals—a journal of ideas first published monthly and, after 1931, bimonthly—which dedicated itself to reinvigorating Catholic thought in the wake of the successive controversies of modernism; the Sillon, a lay movement; and Action Française, the integral nationalist movement.

Founded in 1928 by the Dominican fathers who established the Éditions du Cerf publishing house, La Vie intellectuelle began its nearly thirty-five-year life (1928-40, 1945-56) in the aftermath of Pope Pius XI's 1926 condemnation of Action Française.

Père Marie-Vincent Bernadot (1883-1941), who directed the revue during its early years, had joined lay Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain and four other clerics in drafting Pourquoi Rome a parlé (Paris, 1927), a defense of the papal ban on French Catholics joining the agnostic Charles Maurras's movement or reading its popular newspaper. Bernadot himself had once sympathized with Action Française, but now supported wholeheartedly a doctrinal clarification and political reorientation on the part of the Holy See. Tensions with Father Thomas Pègues, an eminent Thomist and Maurrasian who served as regent of studies at the Dominican house at Saint-Maximin, led to papal intervention to secure the transfer of Bernadot and his colleague, Père Étienne Lajeunie, from the Dominican province of Toulouse to that of France (Paris). From the new couvent of Juvisy, Bernadot relied on the contributions of younger Dominicans such as Marie-Dominique Chenu and Yves Congar, associated today with the nouvelle théologie that helped shape the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.

La Vie intellectuelle embraced a catholicity that went beyond the Thomistic renewal envisaged by Maritain, an early supporter of the journal. It presented to its educated readership less a unified point of view than a carrefours, or intersection, of several approaches to the question of how French Catholics could best renew their engagement with the secular Third Republic and pluralistic modernity. The Social Catholicism associated with the legacy of Marc Sangnier and his movement, the Sillon, which was suppressed by Pope Pius X in 1910, presented one approach; and, for Delbreil, the question of Sangier's influence on both La Vie intellectuelle between the wars and, by extension, the Christian Democratic movement after 1945 remains in the foreground throughout this study. The Thomism of Maritain, Étienne Gilson, and others—freed from both a narrow, static conception of the relationship between nature and grace on the one hand and from authoritarian politics on the other—provides another approach. Finally, the idea of personalism found a prominent place in the journal, its ni droite, ni gauche answer to the "established disorder" of the 1930s expressed through an ecumenical, revolutionary "mystique" by Emmanuel Mounier (a periodic contributor best known for founding the journal Esprit) and a more specifically Christian and avowedly democratic expression by Paul Archambault.

Delbreil addresses differing scholarly interpretations of the revue directed by Bernadot and by Father Jean-Augustin Maydieu after Bernadot began devoting more of his attention to the new weekly Sept in the mid-1930s. These include Yves Tranvouez's portrayal of the journal's editors as exemplifying "Catholic intransigence" toward modernity and Philippe Chenaux's recent depiction of La Vie intellectuelle as playing a positive role in the formation of a new generation of post-Maurrasian Catholic intellectuals, with Delbreil showing more sympathy for the latter thesis. He also offers a nuanced interpretation of the revue's philosophical and theological heterogeneity, including the contribution of philosopher of action Maurice Blondel, his reputation again ascendant after the Action Française condemnation. Delbreil is less successful in demonstrating the abiding influence of Sangnier, however, despite offering portraits of rising young Christian Democrats who contributed to the revue and later played a role in both the Resistance and postwar politics: Étienne Borne, Jacques Madaule, and Maurice...