FRENCH CATHOLIC LITERARY REVIVAL: HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL BACKGROUND

Abstract

The article focuses on the background of French Catholic literary revival of the first half of the XXth century. Among the fundamentals of the analysed phenomenon are distinguished three major ones: historical background, theological preconditions and the influence of purely literary predecessors of the XIXth century. The first one is presented through the research of French peculiarities of republican secularisation, its educational reforms and the social-cultural impact of the Dreyfus affair. The ecclesiastical context is described through the challenge of theological modernism and popes’ encyclicals as an attempt to deal with them. Specific French Catholic identity’s division between Gallicanism and Ultramontanism with its influence on the cultural context is also mentioned. Finally, the return of Christian spirituality and the birth of specific apophatic poetics are observed from symbolism of romanticists Chateaubriand and Lamartine through Baudelaire’s aesthetic of sin to decadent poetization of embodied evil and divided human soul of d’Aurervilly and Huysmans. Special emphasis is made on the tradition of political engagement of Catholic writers from J. de Maistre through Ch. Maurras to L. Bloy. Hence, Catholic literary revival is regarded as complex cultural, historical, theological and literary French phenomenon.