(Re)Constructing the European Past: Christianity and the French Religious Memory

Abstract

(Re)Constructing the European Past: Christianity and the French Religious Memory Yelena Mazour‐Matusevich If you forgive anyone his sins, they are forgiven;: if you retain the sins of any, they are retained. (John 20:21‐23) Now, when a united Europe has become a political and economic reality, European nations must politely forget that they used to be hereditary enemies and become good neighbors instead. The European Union was, after all, at its beginnings, not only a project about peace, and economic exchanges, it was also about forgiveness and grace. In a sense, constructing a common Europe is an unprecedented Christian experiment in and of itself for it consists of applying the essentially Christian idea of total forgiveness1 to entire nations, compelling millions of people to put their mutual resentments aside, pardoning each other for all eternity. Alas, a simple trip through Europe easily demonstrates to a naïve tourist that love for geographic neighbors is not on the menu. The pioneering experiment of transforming an essentially personal action of forgiveness into a collective effort has proved to be an enormous challenge. Europe’s long history, like any history, was filled with wars, massacres and prejudices, and collective national memories, with their extensive lists of grievances against the historical other, represent mental barriers for the creation of Europe’s new identity. Indeed, this identity cannot be forged without each country confronting its own national past or rather, the way each nation views and evaluates this past, for, in the context of a historical narrative, “subjectivity is truth and truth is subjectivity.”2 Confronting European historical subjectivities is particularly urgent with regard to the question of Europe’s Christian identity. The recent 2004‐2009 polemics over the inscription of Christian references in the preamble to the European Constitution reveal the significance of the present moment, when each European country must face not only its own collective memory and memories of other Christian nations but also formulate the place of religion in the new Europe.3 The present essay will focus on the case of France and the French religious identity and memory. Western man today is characterized by: An innocent mind and a heavy memory. Emile Poulat I imprudently presented the first draft of this paper at a conference in 1998. Never would I have dared to embark on such a perilous venture again if, after duly scrutinizing the current French media and public Internet forums, I had not happened to notice that the situation in France has not changed substantially in twelve years. It turns out that my initial analysis of France’s major tendencies in dealing with its Christian past is still valid. The tendencies in question are not equally represented in terms of frequency or influence, nor are they completely isolated from each other. The first, the most common trend, is that which journalist and famous essayist Jean‐Claude Guillebaud called “modernité appauvrie,”“an impoverished modernity.”4 People holding this attitude feel estranged from their national past, which they perceive as incomprehensible and, most importantly, no longer theirs. This popular opinion might have an intellectual variation whose proponents consider France’s history too national to be used as a common European foundation and propose to see Europe’s future as constructed from a tabula rasa, from now on. Although lacking even the most basic understanding of what religion is (Jean‐Claude Eslin),5 this dismissive tendency views Christianity as a burden, which, together with the rest of the national memory, is too complicated to take on. In a sense, this outlook is neither anti‐Christian nor anti‐religious per se because it expresses the general and growing alienation of French society from its collective memory, a phenomenon Eslin called “the French without France.”6 Here we will call it the “anti‐history” position (not to be confused with anti‐historical). It does not deny history; rather, it wants none. The second attitude is what Guy Coq, author of Démocratie, religion, éducation (1993) and Secularity and Republic (1995), calls “vulgate républicaine.”7 This ideological position dates from the good old days of the “war of two Frances,” when progressive, secular forces opposed the traditional, Catholic...