Catholicism, Christianity, and Vichy

Les Catholiques dans la guerre, 1939–1945: Entre Vichy et la Résistance, by RENÉE BÉDARIDA (Paris, 1998).

War and Religion: Catholics in the Churches of Occupied Paris, by VESNA DRAPAC (Washington, D.C., 1998).

Les Chrétiens français entre crise et libération, 1937–1947, by ETIENNE FOUILLOUX (Paris, 1997).

Politics, Society, and Christianity in Vichy France, by W. D. HALLS (Providence, R.I., 1995).

Nimes at War: Religion, Politics, and Public Opinion in the Gard, 1938–1944, by ROBERT ZARETSKY (University Park, Pa., 1995).

At the conclusion of The Vichy Syndrome Henry Rousso identifies “the culture of traditional Catholicism” as the first of the “structural factors” that might explain both the depth of the French crisis of 1940–44 and the subsequent debates over how the Vichy regime ought to be remembered.¹ Rousso’s choice of Catholicism as a basis for both Vichy and the continuing debate over its meaning is intriguing, but it does not flow from a systematic analysis of the church and its members. Instead, Rousso’s comments on Catholicism are based on his reading of particular events in the post-1944 period, most notably the long judicial battles over Paul Touvier. A Catholic officer from the notorious milice, Touvier was hidden for years by a network of friends, including many clergymen, prior to his arrest in 1989 and his conviction in 1994.² Recent works on French Christianity in the middle years of the twentieth century generally acknowledge the significance of Rousso’s pathbreaking study and in some cases enter into the debate over the Vichy syndrome. But even while they touch on the issue of memory, these authors share a conviction that their empirical research allows them to move the discussion from the realm of memory to one of history. Or perhaps the point should be put a bit differently: they believe (at least implicitly) that empirical historical work, rather than media-fueled debates over dramatic judicial cases, is the appropriate basis for constituting memory.

Rousso chooses culture to describe Catholicism, a term that suggests a set of values manifested through symbol and ritual, without necessarily being located in a particular institution. Historians of Catholicism have generally been more comfortable with the concept of church, but both terms raise problems, for who are the participants in Catholic culture, and who constitutes the church? The Counter-Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the ultramontane campaign of the nineteenth, concentrated both doctrinal and bureaucratic authority in the clergy, organized into a hierarchy that culminated in the pope. Further down in the hierarchy, bishops and curés have claimed leadership roles in articulating Catholic positions and guiding the Catholic community. Consequently, no historian of Catholicism in the twentieth century can ignore the central role played by the institutional church in defining general positions of the faith and its bearing on social and political issues. Of the books under review, Etienne Fouilloux’s Les Chrétiens français entre crise et libération, 1937–1947 gives most weight to the defining role of Vatican leadership, and all devote considerable attention to the clergy, reflecting the balance of power inside Catholicism. But all of these books emphasize as well the importance of the people in the pews. In doing so they reflect a historiographical trend over the last generation in which studies incorporating the laity have broadened and deepened our understanding of how Catholicism has operated in France. In Ruth Harris’s new study of Lourdes, for example, the clergy play a central role in the development of a small town in the Pyrénées into a world-renowned shrine, but they do so only by collaborating with Catholic women who were principal organizers of some of the major rituals conducted at the famous grotto.³

If religious historians agree about the need for incorporating the laity, however, they also show some confusion about exactly how to define Catholic. Renée...