French ‘Left-Catholics’ and Communism in the Nineteen-thirties

Abstract

Not long before he died, Lenin told a French Catholic visitor that “only Communism and Catholicism offered two diverse, complete andinconfusibleconceptions of human life.” Lenin's belief that Communism and Catholicism were incon fusible was probably shared by most Communists, and most Catholics, in France in the nineteen-thirties. When the French Communists offered an “outstretched hand” to Catholic workers in 1936 in an effort to achieve a tactical alliance to head off fascism in France and Europe and to promote social progress—ignoring the incompatibilities of world view as much as possible—a number of French Catholics sought to grasp it. But these Catholics were not, for the most part, the “Catholic workers, clerks, artisans, peasants” to whom Maurice Thorez had addressed his appeal, but rather Catholic philosophers, “social priests,” journalists, and cardinals. They grasped, or considered grasping, the outstretched hand with a variety of motivations, hopes, and intentions which were quite often different from the intentions of the Communists who proffered it.