La Croix and the Swastika: The Ambiguities of Catholic Responses to the Fall of France

Abstract

Studies of identification with authoritarian Vichy regime's professed mission of national renewal have devoted little attention to how so-called Marshal's pious parishioners1 viewed 1940 fall of France.2 Emphasizing political factors above all else, historians have situated defeat as a catalyst that activated French Catholicism's nascent Right-wing tendencies,3 or less typically as beginning of an epreuve that galvanized faithful to resist Nazism (which they had always found abhorrent) through a steadfast presence in form of parish-level solidarity.4 These historiographical approaches forgo a close look at what Etienne Fouilloux has referred to as the history of religious mentalites,5 and in so doing they arguably narrow our appreciation of full import of 1940 collapse. Revisiting fall of France from perspective of religious discourse raises question of how Catholics viewed Nazi victory within framework of a Christian belief in an omnipotent and righteous deity. Theologians refer to questions of justice as theodicy, and historically theodicy has usually centered on reconciling claims of religious belief with agonies of natural evil (e.g., 1755 Lisbon earthquake) or moral evil (e.g., September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks).6 Throughout summer of 1940 discourse on spiritual meanings of defeat reveals itself most prominently in pages of La Croix, a daily newspaper described by W. D. Halls as the semiofficial organ of [French] Catholicism.7 A close reading of La Croix's editorials, articles, reprinted homilies, and pastoral letters illustrates how political helplessness provokes religious questioning. titles of some of these pieces question cataclysmic events in hope of invoking religious assurance:Punishment?... or Sacrifice?Has God Punished France?, and even The Passion of France.8 Quite often their tentative answers blame perceived decadence of prewar years, encapsulated in interlocking themes such as secular education (laicite) and population decline (denatalite). Yet a rejection of democracy does not materialize in La Croix, even as its writers emphasize Marshal Philippe Petain's potential to reconcile finally ideas of liberty and authority and bring about France's rebirth as a Christian nation, hopes already entertained by La Croix's writers while Third Republic still lived. Accordingly La Croix's response to unfolding disaster avoids a mere religious reiteration of what Charles Maurras (no believer he) called divine surprise9 of 1940. Rather, La Croix's pages reflect lamenting of a shattered France, and a newspaper literally following trajectory of defeat, its staff fleeing Paris first for Bordeaux, and then for Limoges in Unoccupied Zone,10 where it would harmonize with chorus of praise for Marshal, at least for a time. Defeat La Croix of 1940 had traveled some historical distance from its notoriously anti-Semitic and anti-Republican stance during fin-de-siecle Dreyfus Affair. Run by Assumptionist order, since December, 1927, paper had as its chief editor Father Leon Merklen, whose appointment had been decreed rather atypically (selon une procedure insolite) by Pope Pius XI himself as a means of underscoring papal condemnation of Action francaise. Merklen's liberal Catholic credentials put him on a sort of Action francaise enemies' list,15 and made for a difficult transition during his first years at helm of a journal previously sympathetic to Maurras. Nevertheless, -while at least one historian writes of ambivalent ralliement of La Croix14 paper had by World War II undergone a fundamental reorientation toward supporting-though not uncritically-French democracy. According to Rene Remond, based on a consistent attempt to follow papal lead after 1927, the influence of La Croix led its readers from Action francaise to Christian Democracy, a Third Republic renversement which would have significant consequences in Fourth. …