Romantic Catholics: France’s Postrevolutionary Generation in Search of a Modern Faith by Carol E. Harrison (review)

Abstract

Late Modern EuropeanRomantic Catholics: France's Postrevolutionary Generation in Search of a Modern Faith. By Carol E. Harrison. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2014. Pp. xvi, 328. $49.95. ISBN 978-0-8014-5245-1.)Carole Harrison explores the lives and significance of a small cohort of Catholics in France who belonged to a generation that was born in the first two decades of the nineteenth century and whose religious devotion was shaped by a desire to reconcile faith and modernity after the upheaval of the French Revolution. They include Pauline Craven, Charles de Montalembert, Amelie and Frederic Ozanam, Leopoldine Hugo, Maurice de Guerin, and Victorine Monniot. These enfants du siecle, as Alfred de Musset described the generation who came of age without a firsthand memory of the French Revolution, were progressive and, according to Harrison, romantic in their aspirations. Her overarching goal is to resurrect this group of men and women whom historians have allegedly neglected and who were in many cases linked to one another through kinship, friendship, and marriage, in order to challenge a historiography that she argues oversimplifies the heterogeneous nature of French Catholicism in postrevolutionary France.The book, which is divided into six chapters and an epilogue, charts the coming of age of the principal protagonists, with the opening chapters devoted to how they became part of the Catholic faith as boys and girls through ritual and education. Chapters 3 to 6 examine how they entered adulthood and reacted or adjusted to the tumultuous events around them, which included the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, the Second Empire, as well as to political issues, such as the Roman question. She ultimately concludes that the hopes and aims of this generation of romantic Catholics were frustrated by intransigent anticlericals, conservative Catholics, and a reactionary church hierarchy, which forced them to retreat, even if they were not wholly defeated.Although some of the central figures in this book have long been the subject of scholarly attention, including Felicite de Lamennais and Henri Dominique Lacordaire who were not technically enfants du siecle, as well as Charles de Montalembert and Frederic Ozanam, others have been largely forgotten. The most powerful parts of the book are those that rely on their written work as well as on a rich trove of private papers and correspondence that Harrison has culled from archives that range from the Archives du College Stanislaus, Musee Victor Hugo, the Institut Catholique de Paris, and the Assumptionist Archives in Rome. …