What Happened to the Catholic Novel?

The idea of a specifically Catholic novel arose during the nineteeth century. The often anti-Catholic agenda of the philosophes and the libertine novel had been counterbalanced by writers such as Rousseau and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, who sought to reveal God through the wonders of the natural world. But it was Chateaubriand’s Atala (1801) that inaugurated the new genre of the Catholic novel as a riposte to the dechristianization associated with the Revolution. Chateaubriand was more partial to the epic, however, and in this he was followed by Bonald, who appreciated the scope that the epic afforded for the depiction of ‘le merveilleux chrétien’, including angels.¹ An interesting twentieth-century representative of this tradition is Patrice de La Tour du Pin, whose three-volume Somme de poésie (1946–63) charts the progression from lyrical poetry in a neo-Romantic vein, through a process of kenosis or self-emptying (which involves a shift towards prose in the second volume), to the creation of a new théopoésie.² Epic poetry continued to offer a means of exploring religious and scientific ideas throughout the nineteenth century (Quinet, Hugo, Bouilhet), but there was already a backlash by the 1820s, and, as the novel rapidly established itself as the major literary genre, a number of Catholic sub-genres developed. The ‘Avant-propos’ to Balzac’s Comédie humaine expresses nostalgia for the alliance of throne and altar, but only a handful of the novels — Le Curé de village (1839), for example — promote a Catholic sensibility.

The new emphasis on the inner life encouraged by the violent upheavals of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, and in literature by Chateaubriand, Constant, and the early Romantics, prepared the way for novelistic explorations of struggles with faith and conscience in the manner of Sainte-Beuve’s Volupté (1834); but for much of the century the growing confidence of the Church and the spread of literacy were reflected in the huge production of anodyne ‘improving’ literature. The Catholic publishing house of Mame pioneered the ‘roman évangélique’ with such works as Les Deux Lignes parallèles, ou Frère et sœur, roman intime (1833) by Balzac’s friend and interpreter Félix Davin, and others by women writers such as the comtesse de Bassanville (Anaïs Lebrun). Zénaïde Fleuriot was to become particularly prolific, with eighty-three books to her name (François Mauriac was later to remember both her and ‘Raoul de Navary’ (Eugénie-Caroline Saffray) as favourite authors of his childhood). Another was the even more prolific Paul Féval, although his most famous novels, such as Le Bossu, preceded his conversion in 1876. Alongside this bien-pensant current, the violent fantasies of Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly — L’Ensorcelée (1854), Un prêtre marié (1865) — provoked controversy and did not immediately attract imitators. A few writers eventually emerged in the last quarter of the century who grappled with the prima facie contradiction between the dominant doctrine of realism and the spiritual claims of Christianity. Notable among them were the former naturalist Joris-Karl Huysmans and Léon Bloy, both of whom emphasized the redeeming power of suffering.

The best study of the relationship between the Catholic novel and the realist tradition remains Malcolm Scott’s The Struggle for the Soul of the French Novel (1989).³ Scott devotes five chapters (the bulk of his work) to the nineteenth century: scepticism about religion, Barbey, the later Zola, Huysmans, and Bloy, before moving into the twentieth century. He is particularly keen to scotch the myth of Barbey as a reactionary and moralizing writer: for Scott, Barbey’s bridging of the space between fantasy and religion, his creation of character (notably that of the country priest), his balanced articulation of moral conflicts, and his complex narrative technique, all make him a worthy precursor of the twentieth-century Catholic novelist. His significance is only now beginning to be recognized, however, and for Mauriac he was more important as a correspondent of Maurice de Guérin than as a novelist. In any case, the SUDOC database contains no item relating...