L’Action catholique à l’ombre de la Grande Guerre. L’exemple de quelques aumôniers de la Jeunesse étudiante chrétienne

Abstract

The historiography has often rightly insisted on the role taken by laypeople in the Catholic church after the creation of the specialised movements of Catholic Action during the inter-war period. This article focuses instead on a group of ten almoners who accompanied the flowering of one of these movements in France - that of the Christian student youth (JEC). Its main question concerns their teaching, which profoundly oriented the movement at its outset, and what it owes to their experience of the First World War. Considered from this angle, the First World War emerges as one of the sources of the specialised Catholic Action in France.