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The Catholic Historical Review 88.1 (2002) 136-137



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Book Review

Catholicism, Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century France


Catholicism, Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century France. Edited by Kay Chadwick. (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Distributed in the U.S. by ISBS, Portland, Oregon. 2000. Pp. xiii, 295. $57.95.)

This carefully constructed collection of essays explores twelve facets of the complex, fascinating development of French Catholicism over the past hundred years. Each essay examines a particular aspect of that development in a self-contained treatment, based on its own well documented research. However, [End Page 136] the twelve essays overlap and interrelate in such a way as to produce an engagingly coherent and comprehensive view of French Catholicism, not in its inner institutional evolution, but rather in its relationship to the society, culture, and state within which the French church functions.

In its own way, each of the essays deals with some aspect of the book's unifying theme, the process of secularization which permeates French Catholic experience in the years 1900-2000, as stressed by Professor Chadwick in her excellent "Introduction." Some of those essays are by well-known senior scholars, such as Émile Poulat and Yves-Marie Hilaire, who examine respectively the development of secularism and the changing religious behavior within French Catholicism over the past century. Their essays, like others in this collection dealing with such topics as education, immigration, and political engagement, provide invaluable distillations of the most recent scholarship in their fields of specialization. Other essays, especially those of Danielle Delmaire on Catholic-Jewish relations and Evelyne Diébolt on Catholic women, break new and nuanced ground on hotly debated issues.

This book is the fruit of extensive academic co-operation by scholars of twentieth-century France on both sides of the English Channel. Each essay is written in the first language of its author. The text is, therefore, roughly half in French and half in English. The "Select Bibliography" includes works in both languages and provides a superb starting point for further research. Specialists and graduate students in French studies as well as historians of contemporary French and church history will find this work extremely rewarding.

 



Francis J. Murphy
Boston College

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