French Catholic Research Articles

Jones, Linda Carol. The Shattered Cross. French Catholic Missionaries on the Mississippi River. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 2020, 296 p.

Jones, Linda Carol. The Shattered Cross. French Catholic Missionaries on the Mississippi River. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 2020, 296 p.

The power of love: The spiritual foundations of chaplaincy in Catholic universities – A framework for discussion

This article delineates the foundational theological principles upon which a Catholic Higher Education chaplaincy devoted to the spiritual development of staff and students might rest. We claim that this is a key dimension of chaplaincy work. In a (post)modern culture where staff and students exhibit a range of beliefs or none, we offer a broad definition of spirituality not necessarily tied to religion and construct a framework which might appeal to a wide cross section of people attending Catholic Universities. It examines how the insights and guidance of two French Catholic writers, the 16th century priest St. Francis de Sales and the contemporary philosopher Jean-Luc Marion, offer a basis for understanding what constitutes a spiritual approach to life. We suggest that their emphases on the power of love, the heart, God’s glory, imago Dei and gift constitute a ground of hope and stable base from which spiritual progress might take place. We also outline how this template challenges the emphasis on autonomous agency at the centre of much educational discourse at the present time.

The Belgian Fate of Dostoevsky’s Works: Les Confessions d’un assassin by Eugène Hins

The role of Belgium in the reception of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s works in the West is far less known than that of France. Eugène Hins (1839–1923), a philologist, freethinker, freemason, secretary of the Belgian section of the First International, and anarchist close to Мikhail Bakunin, was a major literary translator from Russian into French in Belgium in the second half of the nineteenth century. Hins, whose ideas of Russia and its culture were close to those of the French Catholic viscount Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé (1848–1910), wrote a novel entitled Les Confessions d’un assassin (Confessions of a Murderer) (1884–1885). After the Literary Awards Committee in Brussels suspected him of having plagiarised Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, the reasons which led Hins to “adapt” Dostoevsky’s novel for the Belgian cultural milieu suddenly emerged. This article focuses on Les Confessions d’un assassin in light of an unpublished document – a preface that Hins wrote in order to justify his enterprise. Just like his Parisian counterpart É. Halpérine-Kaminsky (1858–1936), translator of The Brothers Karamazov and admirer of E.-M. De Vogüé, Hins was convinced that Belgian readers were not able to understand Dostoevsky’s work. For that reason, it was necessary, according to Hins, to “recreate” Dostoevsky’s novels in a Belgian (Western European) context. However, Hins was not only the author of a “bourgeois” version of Crime and Punishment, but also one of the significant promoters of anarchism in Western Europe in the late nineteenth century. His anarchist views greatly influenced his “transfer” of Dostoevsky’s ideas to the West. In addition, this article highlights different forms of the reception and transformation of Dostoevsky’s works in France and Belgium.

Faith in Drugs: The Material and Immaterial Effects of Medication in the Early Modern French Catholic World

Abstract This article explores a set of medications, called les remèdes des pauvres, that were distributed from the late seventeenth century onward to the sick poor of rural France and to French missions abroad. Although it was eventually absorbed into the French state as a form of royally sponsored poor relief, this drug distribution network began in 1670 as a distinctly ecclesiastical endeavour, aimed at allowing parish priests, missionaries, and charitable laywomen to imitate the healing ministry of Christ and his apostles. While critics saw them as peddling a dangerous chemical drug in poor villages, their promoters argued that the active charity involved in distributing the remedies, and even the faith placed in their effectiveness by the sick, played an important role in effecting their cures. As such they offer a useful perspective on the shifting boundaries between medical charity and medical commerce, as well as between natural and supernatural healing.

The Christian Anti-Torture Movement and the Politics of Conscience in France

Abstract This article investigates how the concept of ‘conscience’ emerged as a battleground within the French Catholic Church and as a politicized concept with implications for ideas about human rights. State-sponsored torture during the Algerian War (1954–62) prompted dissident Christians to pioneer the use of ‘individual conscience’ as a tool of resistance. The Christians of the anti-torture movement embraced the theologically informed language of conscience alongside a French, secular tradition of rights drawn from the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The way that Catholic dissidents thought about rights transcended the secular–religious divide; while recognizing a liberal concept of rights coming out of the French Revolution, these Catholics also insisted upon the spiritual function of individual conscience as a check upon the state. Intra-Catholic debates about conscience thus reveal the political and theological diversity within mid-twentieth-century Christianity, long assumed to have been dominated by actors on the political right, as well as the multiplicity of coexisting ways of speaking about and interpreting human rights.

Katherine Davies, Toby Garfitt (eds), God’s Mirror. Renewal and Engagement in French Catholic Intellectual Culture in the Mid-Twentieth Century

Katherine Davies, Toby Garfitt (eds), God’s Mirror. Renewal and Engagement in French Catholic Intellectual Culture in the Mid-Twentieth Century

The United States at the Center of the Action

The United States at the Center of the Action

Louis Cardinal Billot, S.J. (1846–1931): Thomist, Anti-Modernist, Integralist

Abstract Largely forgotten today, the French Jesuit Louis Billot was “the most important Thomistic speculative theologian of the late nineteenth century.” He taught generations of students at the Pontifical Gregorian University during the pontificates of Leo xiii and Pius x. His neo-Scholastic manuals remained influential until the Second Vatican Council. Having made a major contribution to the church’s anti-Modernist campaign, Billot was made a cardinal in 1910. He served on various Vatican congregations, including the Holy Office, during three pontificates. In the 1920s, Billot ran afoul of Pius xi for refusing to retract his support for the neo-monarchist, nationalist movement Action Française, led by the agnostic Charles Maurras, that had sought an alliance with French Catholics to defeat the anti-clerical Third Republic. Compelled to resign his cardinatial dignity, the only prelate in the twentieth century to incur this humiliation, Billot lived his last years in quiet retirement outside of Rome.

Unsteady Is the Cross: Catholic Missionaries, Marriage, and Fang Communities in the Gabon Estuary, ca. 1914–1945

Between 1914 and 1945, French Catholic missionaries and Gabonese priests tried to impose their faith and ideals of family life on Fang communities in the rural Estuary region of the French colony of Gabon. Catholic evangelists offered benefits such as education as well as threats of spiritual punishment to convert Fang people. However, Fang men and women often rejected these demands. While Fang men tried to maintain polygamy as a sign of successful manhood, women often rejected their spouses. At the same time, missionaries relied on Catholic lay Fang catechists in their work. Male catechists often violated the marital ideals of the missionaries, but they also successfully promoted Catholic conversions. Ultimately, rural Estuary communities selectively appropriated aspects of Catholicism, even if relatively few followed Catholic teachings on marriage.

African Catholic: Decolonization and the Transformation of the Church

African Catholic is, at once, a historical, religious, political, and social treatise on French Catholic evangelization of Africa within the crucible of the obnoxious colonial project. This is a fantastic book, and so captivating that putting it down is difficult. It is a thoroughly well-researched, integrated bricolage of competing religious and social forces, woven beautifully together with the dexterity of an author possessing a mastery of navigating both the African and European terrains, as well as the ecclesiastical and sociopolitical climate of the day.Set at the height of French colonization of West and Central African countries between the 1940s and 1960s, this important book describes French activities in the colonies, with Catholic missionaries as its fulcrum. Positioned against this is the agitation of African Catholic intellectuals (laity and priests), with the support of liberal French clerics, to decolonize the Church, thereby exerting enormous influence on and making an invaluable contribution to Vatican II.What the author describes as the “Franco-African Catholic World” (6) at mid-century was characterized by competing powers and ideologies (colonization versus decolonization, imperialism versus independence, assimilation versus Africanization, racism versus negritude) and the pivotal role of religion, Catholicism to be precise, in the thick of it all. The question that loomed large on the minds of those at the center of the Church (the Vatican) was, how could the Church extricate itself from the trappings of colonialism under whose patronage it evangelized the world? This question was particularly important during the said period of increasing African rejection of European political and cultural control, impelled by the wave of independence sweeping across the African continent.French Catholic missionary activity in West Africa, as espoused by the book, was perceived as an arm of the colonial project. By means of its education to eradicate Africa’s “backward culture,” the Church would be said to be that instrument of change, par excellence. Consequently, some missionaries would paint a negative picture of Africa to promote the image of a dark continent in order to garner financial support from France in aid of missionary work upon which the so-called French civilizing mission depended. Perhaps some comparative analysis, in the book, with missionary activity in the neighboring British colonies in which members of the same missionary societies worked, albeit of different nationalities, would have substantiated the author’s argument even further regarding the agency of French missionaries in pursuing that goal.The ensuing tensions between the French state and the Vatican were inevitable. While the former sought to assimilate people in its colonial territories, profiting from the agency of missionaries to execute this task, the latter endeavored to insert such missionary territories into the one Catholic (universal) Church. This contestation would feed into Vatican II. Notable architects of French mission activities and cultural colonization, like Monsignor Marcel Lefebvre, “the most powerful French prelate in Africa for most of the postwar period” (7), would see Vatican II “as a betrayal and self-destruction of the church” (264). Whereas African Catholic intellectuals, such as Alioune Diop, saw in the Council a unique opportunity to infuse “African culture, values, and spirituality” (71) into the Church as a means to redeem both Africa and Europe. The quest of the latter group, and later Vatican II, was to see Christianity “incarnate itself in the cultures and civilizations of all peoples if it was going to be true to itself” (83). Herein lies what these Africans professed to be their “duty”: “to be the conscience of the church and confront its colonial hypocrisy, along with colonialism itself” (88).The reader gets the impression that the scramble for Africa was not the one-time episode of a well-executed partition in Berlin in 1884/85, but rather an incessant process sequestering the continent, with missionaries entrenching the political weal of Western powers. This is exemplified in the struggle between French Catholic missionaries and American Protestants that rendered Africa a playground of the West. The complex relations between Catholicism and Islam also receive a prominent place in the discussion, whether to build bridges or foment animosity between them.Noteworthy is the progress achieved through this struggle to the point of Vatican II emphasizing the recognition of the dignity of all peoples. Amidst the dwindling numbers in the Church in France, a touted reverse mission involving African migrants and clergy contributing to its vitality pays lip service to a total inclusion of Africans in the Church. The paternalism and blatant racism exhibited at both the mission and metropole are far from over.

French Catholic Men at War 1939–1940: A Study of Faith and Masculinity in the Field

ABSTRACTThis article contributes to the burgeoning scholarship on the intersection of gender and religious faith and practice and engages with new interpretations of the feminisation thesis. Specifically, it sheds light on French Catholic masculinities through a unique body of sources, letters written by soldiers, lay and religious, to the Carmel of Lisieux from the mobilisation in September 1939 to the defeat in June 1940. The correspondents were devotees of the most loved saint of the modern era, Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–97). The letters reveal the deep resonance of Theresian teaching and the ways in which men in the field consciously aimed to model a female saint known as the Little Flower. The material under review points to the limitations of strictly binary gendered interpretations of expressions of belief. Ordinary Catholic men embraced popular devotional practices that have been labelled as ‘feminised’. The evidence suggests, further, that there was a fluidity between masculine and feminine Catholic identities and that there were multiple non‐binary possibilities for the articulation of Catholic manhood at this time.

Historical Study and Conservation Strategies of “Tianzihao” Colony (Nanjing, China)—Architectural Heritage of the French Catholic Missions in the Late 19th Century

The “Tianzihao” colony was built by the French Jesuits in the 1890s. As one of the earliest examples of the French Catholic Church’s mission in China, as well as the only case in Nanjing, it shows the historical scenes of Western missionaries in Nanjing 120 years ago. It is a demonstration of cultural exchanges between China and the West after China opened to the Western world in the late 19th century. In architectural style, the “Tianzihao” colony is Western-style townhouses, but a large number of traditional Chinese architectural technologies were used for it, and therefore it is characterized by Western space and Chinese technology. The “Tianzihao” colony was badly damaged during these decades, with a lot of decayed building materials and structures on the verge of collapse. Based on the historical research and technical analysis of the “Tianzihao” colony, this article explores the conservation strategies and methods of reusing the architectural heritage. In addition, this article is to study the characteristics of the times before introduction of Western architectural technology in Nanjing based on an analysis on the building technology used for the “Tianzihao” colony. The authors participated in the conservation and restoration project of the “Tianzihao” colony, and the objective of this study was achieved through some qualitative methods, including collection and analysis of archival data, analysis of old maps and photos, architectural mapping and a large amount of historical information found in the conservation process.

A sacred social: Christian relationalism and the re‐enchantment of the world

AbstractThis article intervenes in an ongoing debate as to whether or not Christianity introduces individualism into the lives of its converts. Drawing on an ethnographic account of Emmanuel, a French Catholic Charismatic community, it demonstrates that, counter to the argument that in social cases where Christianity is central, individualism emerges as a prominent value, in some cases it is relationalism that shapes Christian ethical aspirations. I argue that differences observed across contexts in expressions of value and configuration of personhood may be the result of the varied manners in which divine presence is experienced and understood to inhabit the world across Christian communities. Bringing God into the centre of ethnographic analysis in accounting for these differences broadens the debate's comparative reach, while underscoring the manner in which divine agency shapes the ethical aspirations of religious persons and their orientations to social others. Considering the ethical and political implications that one's orientation to the social can have, further investigation is called for into the manner in which the divine is experienced and invoked in social and ritual life.

The American and the Clan

The Henry James novel The American (1877) is analyzed on the basis of a conflict between the twoforms of liberty, which Isaiah Berlin in the end of the 1950s designated as negative and positive. Theconcept of negative freedom is in this interpretation of the novel connected to a contrast between thestate and the clan. With starting point in Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order (2011),and Mark S Weiner in The Rule of the Clan (2013), modern rule of law is in the analysis of the novelregarded as something radically different from clan society.Based on an understanding of the modern state as a guarantee for individual autonomy and liberty, inBerlin’s negative meaning, James depicts in The American, the problems of maintaining liberty, in thenegative sense, in a community organised around the clan.In the novel, the American protagonist Christopher Newman with his lack of prejudices represent forhis French fiancée Claire de Cintréa possible way to freedom. What Newman does, is to offer Claire theopportunity to move from the French aristocracy to the economically strong Americanbourgeoisie—from a kind of feudalism to capitalism. The proposed move coincides with thedevelopmental curve of the novel, which with respect to Claire runs from clan to state.In striking contrast to Newman’s optimized sort of freedom, where neither any internalized norms norany economic limitations prohibit the protagonist from acting in the way that he desires, Claire is thedaughter of a family that represents the old world, with all its limitations and restrictions on negativeliberty. In a highly concrete manner she is prohibited from acting as she wants. This is emphasized inthe question of who to marry.The analysis connects Claire’s family to the ultramontanists and legitimists circles of 19th centuryParisian aristocracy. The terms refer to the ultra-conservative and fiercely anti-liberal movements that,after the French revolution, turned against the modern state power that allegedly forced on the French Catholics secular values.Legitimism and ultramontanism are in the novel intimately connected to maintaining an organisationaround the clan. In contrast to the clan, rule of law, democracy and individual freedom is seen asconsequences of the framework of the modern, liberal state.

Henri Pourrat and “Le Trésor des Contes.” ed. by Royall Tyler

Reviewed by: Henri Pourrat and “Le Trésor des Contes.” ed. by Royall Tyler Anne E. Duggan (bio) Henri Pourrat and “Le Trésor des Contes.” Edited and translated by Royall Tyler, Blue-Tong Books, 2020, 387 pp. Although his tale collections appeal to a broad readership in France, Henri Pourrat has been a somewhat marginal figure within fairy-tale and folktale studies. In this critical edition of a selection of Pourrat’s tales, Royall Tyler seeks to resituate and validate the work of Pourrat within the field. Tyler translated an earlier collection of Pourrat’s tales into English, French Folktales (1989), organized in sections titled “Fairy Enchantments,” “The Devil,” “Bandits,” “Around the Village,” “The Mad and The Wise,” “Bestiary,” and “Love and Marriage,” following editions of Pourrat’s work in France and Pourrat’s own apparent wishes. Some thirty years later, Tyler returns to Pourrat, producing an interesting anthology that provides biographical, historical, and methodological contexts to better understand Pourrat’s work, as well as tales not included in the 1989 collection. Part 1 includes a biography of Pourrat and the social and historical contexts in which Pourrat produced his collections of tales. Part 2 brings together Pourrat’s field sources with the published form Pourrat gave them, which allows the reader to understand his method of adaptation. Part 3 follows a similar scheme as French Folktales with sections titled “Loves,” “The Devil and His Devilry,” “The Mad and the Wise,” “Animals,” “Fairies,” “Robbers,” and “Around the Village.” Together they give Anglophone [End Page 380] readers a sense of the ideological motivations, the sociohistorical context, and the methodology of Pourrat’s important collections of French, and specifically Auvergnat, folktales. Pourrat concentrated his attention in the Auvergne region of France. A bourgeois from the town of Ambert, Pourrat first began collecting tales in 1908 and continued through the 1950s, his most productive years being the 1910s and 1920s. Tyler situates the Trésor within the context of Pourrat’s other important publications, the most notable being Gaspard des Montagnes (1921–31), which Pourrat characterized as “a sort of epic novel of Auvergne a hundred years ago” (19). Like nineteenth-century folklorists, Pourrat sought to preserve the memory of the rural folk at a time when “[r]ural society was under threat” (23), and he clung to French Catholic and preindustrial values, which led him, initially, to embrace Pétainism during World War II, with its values of “travail, famille, patrie” (“work, family, country”). Tyler then goes on to place the Trésor within, on the one hand, the history of the European tale in the tradition of Noël du Fail, Giovanni Francesco Straparola, Giambattista Basile, Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, Charles Perrault, and Marie-Jeanne Lhéritier; and, on the other, the tradition of French regionalist folklorists such as François-Marie Luzel (Brittany), Jean-François Bladé (Gascony), Emmanuel Cosquin (Lorraine), and Paul Sébillot (Brittany). Interestingly, Tyler maintains that Pourrat “explicitly recognized the possibility, even the likelihood, of written-to-oral transmission,” which is evidenced in the second section of the anthology (38). In Part 2 of Henri Pourrat and “Le Trésor des Contes,” Tyler juxtaposes Pourrat’s source texts from the field with the versions he eventually published in the Trésor. Already touching on some of Pourrat’s adaptation techniques in the introduction, including the economical use of patois and the use of literary language from canonical writers like François Rabelais to both send the reader back in time yet make the texts accessible, Tyler gives specific examples of Pourrat’s transformation of oral tales into Trésor tales. The first tale discussed, “Finon-Finette,” was collected from Marie Claustre, a domestic servant and lacemaker. The two-page field version clearly is a folklorized version of Lhéritier’s “Finette, ou l’adroite princesse” (“Finette, or the Clever Princess”); Pourrat develops these two pages into a ten-page tale incorporating an important detail taken directly from Lhériter’s literary tale: Claustre does not specify where the father goes when he leaves his daughters on their own; Pourrat pulls the detail of the father going to the Holy Land from Lhéritier’s “Finette...

The Shattered Cross: French Catholic Missionaries on the Mississippi River, 1698-1725 by Linda Carol Jones

Reviewed by: The Shattered Cross: French Catholic Missionaries on the Mississippi River, 1698-1725 by Linda Carol Jones Kenneth C. Carstens Linda Carol Jones. The Shattered Cross: French Catholic Missionaries on the Mississippi River, 1698-1725. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2020. Pp. 297. Figures. Index. Maps. Notes. Cloth: $50.00. I have been fascinated by early (colonial) New World Catholic missionaries since 1959, when my parents first took me to Fort Michilimackinac at the tip of Michigan's Lower Peninsula, then farther north to St. Ignace and Sault Ste. Marie, both in the Upper Peninsula. There, I learned firsthand about the work of the early Jesuit fathers, and their attempts (some successful, some not) to bring Native Americans to Christianity. By the mid-1960s, I had read Vernon Kinietz's book Indian Life in the Upper Great Lakes, 1615-1760 (1965), which further fostered my interest about the assimilation and acculturation process behind culture change. As a budding anthropologist, I read Reuben Thwaites's seventy-three-volume work Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, 1610-1791 (1853-1915) through my college years at Central Michigan University. Now, added to these noted works, is a new book written by Linda Carol Jones. Jones, an associate professor of language area studies at the University of Arkansas, has further documented the influence of Jesuits from the Great Lakes area into the middle and lower Mississippi River valley. After reading Jones's work, I am confident her book will be considered of equal importance to the writings of Kinietz and Thwaites whenever studies about early colonial Jesuit history of the pays d'en haut are mentioned. Jones details the extraordinary, often reciprocal, and dynamic interactions (both good and bad) among different Native and European groups along the Mississippi River during the colonial (contact period) era. These dynamic cultural interactions might be Natives (various Illini groups and groups located further south along the Mississippi, like the Tamarois, Quapaw, Chickasaw, Natchez, or others) with other Natives; Natives and Europeans—the world of European traders (both French and English), coureurs de bois, and metis—and Europeans with other Europeans (e.g., Jesuits with various political leaders such as Cadillac, Iberville, or Bienville), explorers (e.g., LaSalle and Tonti), religious leaders (whether back in Montreal with the Petit Séminaire de Québec, in Paris, or with the Holy See at the Vatican), or different missionary sects also vying for Native converts to baptize. Indeed, Jones's book details the significant, and extremely complex, ideological and political considerations Jesuit fathers needed to "stay alive" (although martyrdom was not a bad thing if done for the right reasons), and how best to convert Natives to Christianity: force-feeding Christianity and European values to Native Americans in what Jones calls "Frenchification" (that is, forcefully [End Page 151] making Natives French men and women), or finding ways (linguistically or culturally) that Native Americans themselves selected to adopt; that is, letting the choice of acceptance or rejection be a Native one, whether for what the idea was, or a modification of the idea as it would best fit a Native cultural need or understanding. Indeed, when Frenchification was forced on Natives, the results ended in a "shattered cross." Although I considered my background in Jesuit history in North America better than average, I learned so much more about Colonial Jesuit history that I did not know previously, especially regarding the political climate between Jesuits and church leadership (that is, "Jesuits in the field" versus church leadership in Montreal, Paris, or the Vatican). Nor was I aware that the idea to begin missionary work among Native Americans along the Mississippi River had its origin in seventeenth-century Jesuit fathers in China. And although church philosophy in the late 1600s and early 1700s was to force "Frenchification" on the Natives, Jesuits who were the most successful as Christian missionaries were those who practiced love, allowing Natives to accept or reject on their own terms what part of French culture and Catholicism best served their needs. Colonialism, including intentional forms of assimilation, acculturation, and—yes—genocide, is not to be condoned in today's world. But it did happen. Ignoring that it happened presents an incomplete...

Mais de quel roi parlez-vous, et de quel prince? Sovereign Power, Freedom, and La Boétie's La Servitude volontaire in the 1580s

Drawing on mostly unfamiliar material, often from anonymous political pamphlets, this article examines the use made of La Boétie's treatise La Servitude volontaire among pro- and anti-monarchical French Catholic writers in the 1580s. The purpose of the treatise was the defence and critique of sovereign power. The article demonstrates how pro-monarchical writers used the Homeric quotation which opens La Servitude in order to defend kingship, then how ligueur writers developed alternative views of sovereignty, freedom, and the nature of the constitution. La Boétie's work occurred in both camps in the form of references, allusions, and, more ambitiously, dense verbal quotations.

Père Merklen’s War: Editing France’s Catholic Newspaper During the Dark Years

Examining how the daily newspaper La Croix and its editor-in-chief, Father Léon Merklen, negotiated the Dark Years of the Occupation, this article addresses common categories of resistance and collaboration as they pertain to the French Catholic Church during World War II. Resistance and collaboration are both necessary but problematic terms. We need to account for the complexity and fluidity of the experiences of the majority of Catholics, including clergy, who do not fall easily into one of these categories. Merklen’s story introduces us to an ineliminable grey area at the heart of Catholic responses to Vichy, Nazism, and the Holocaust.

The Shattered Cross: French Catholic Missionaries on the Mississippi River, 1698–1725 by Linda Carol Jones

The Shattered Cross: French Catholic Missionaries on the Mississippi River, 1698–1725 by Linda Carol Jones

Republican Socialism and Gendered Portrayals of Catholic Masculinity in Nineteenth-Century France

The popularity of Ultramontanism and the political energy provided by Sacred Heart piety gave French Catholicism of the post-Commune era a militant posture, one that republican socialists saw as antagonistic to their political objectives. This article shows that socialists responded by emasculating their Catholic opponents. Drawing on the materialist tradition that emerged from the Enlightenment and Revolution, and highlighting the resignation and emotive nature of radical Catholic piety, republican socialists maintained that religious belief was evidence of inadequate virility. Speaking to the anxieties of the period, which included concerns about racial degeneration and the adequacy of France on the world stage, this gendering of epistemological convictions allowed socialists to argue for the exclusion of religion and the religious male from French politics.