The Crisis of Civilisation and the Sacralisation of Politics in 1930s Europe

Abstract

The perception of being at a turning and critical point in Western European civilisation was a widespread idea among European Catholics in the interwar period.1 In this sense, the FUCI was no exception.2 What was at stake in the eyes of many FUCI intellectuals was the need for a return to a wholly Catholic vision capable of interpreting contemporary reality and, thus, recast and regenerate European culture through the strength of the universality of Christianity. The crisis of civilisation was also depicted as a total crisis that—especially after the economic crisis of 1929—seemed to affect the principal structures and political experiments of the continent, be it the USSR, Nazi Germany, the League of Nations, or the experience of the Popular Front movements. Furthermore, the crisis affected the unity of man, in his spiritual and metaphysical dimensions. The decadence of Western civilisation was presented as all-pervasive, penetrating the life of the spirit, the family, the worlds of education and science, liberty and democracy.3 If the crisis was above all spiritual in nature, then the solution had to be sought at a spiritual level, in the quest for a new and reinvigorated sense of transcendence.4 In this sense, it was significant that both the FUCI and the Movimento Laureati devoted considerable attention to foreign authors, through whose works they analysed the present critical conditions of Western civilisation. One of the most influential was certainly the French Catholic writer Henri Daniel-Rops, whose principal book on the subject was translated by the publisher Morcelliana, which enjoyed very close ties with the FUCI.5 For Daniel-Rops, since the Renaissance there had been a gigantic struggle between a Christian and an anti-Christian conception of man, which had culminated, in his eyes, in the modern idolatry of individualism by making man the centre of the universe: