Catholic and French Forever. Religious and National Identity in Modern France (review)

Abstract

Catholic and French Forever. Religious and National Identity in Modern France. By Joseph F. Byrnes. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 2005. Pp. xxiv, 278. $50.00.) Joseph Byrnes argues that has played an essential role in French self-identity even during republican periods when state institutions forcibly erased the nation's religious past. In the ancien regime, religion was the nation's foundation; during and after the Revolution it served as antithesis; since the Great War it has been a parallel force. Byrnes pursues his argument by means of seven chapter-long case studies (five previously published) arranged under three chronological headings: the Divorce between nation and religion during the revolutionary period; the Defense of religion from 1802 to 1914 (i.e., Concordat to wartime Sacred Union); and a postwar Detente enduring into the present. Each chapter stands on its own and may be read as such. The overaE narrative is unified by an extended historical overview preceding each of the three chronological divisions. The combination allows readers to access the material in different ways: it offers unique micro-histories (some based on rare archival sources) allowing voices of the time to speak; and, for those who want or need more, a large narrative are under which to situate those smaller stories. In the first section, titled Divorce, the first (and perhaps strongest) chapter presents first-person testimonies of revolutionary-era priests who signed the constitutional oath, those who later abdicated the priesthood entirely, and those who in the end retracted their oaths and returned to the fold.In 1772, wrote one abdicator of his ordination, I was forced to appear before a man who was dressed as a woman (p. 30). A second chapter, utilizing documents expressing the frustration of authorities, argues that revolutionaries' attempts to transfer Catholic sensibilities of the sacred to festivals of Reason and Nature were completely thwarted (p. 55). A third chapter highlights Chateaubriand and Destutt de Tracy as binary prototypes of the conflict between post revolutionary neo-Christian intellectuals and rationalist Ideologues. In Chateaubriand's Genius of Christianity (1802) we have the first attempt at making cultural Catholicism palatable for a non-believing audience. As with Napoleon himself, although the nation might not practice religion, France could not be divorced from its religious patrimony. In the second section, titled Defense, chapter four narrates the mid-century invention of Chartres as a pilgrimage destination. It is striking to see just how political the religious pilgrimage was: a democratized form of travel made possible by trains and leisure, it was viewed as an act of public and national reparation in expiation for public and national crimes such as the Revolution (p. 96). Chapter five, one of the less successful studies, contrasts the effects of using (or not using) regional languages for catechesis in Alsace (German) and Roussillon (Catalan). …