About the Relationships between the transformations in the Religious Field and the transformations of Political Space This text is an attempt to describe the mechanism by which the crisis of the religious field gives rise to new forms by which the church makes felt its «presence» in the field of ideological production. The «opening up» of Catholic Culture (here deli-mited and objectified by the study of the inventory of a large religious bookstore) must be related to struggles which are shaking the religious field and which oppose the groups and fractions on the way out, predisposed to efforts of integration, to the rising fractions of the middle classes and of the dominant class who tend to bring to religious question practices and manners in affinnity with their ethos and their life style. Preceeding the evolution of religious tastes of the majority of Catholics (but anticipating a tendency to intellectualize belief and pratices which is related to the overall rise in the level of education and duration of school attendance) by their attempts to in-novate, the intellectual avant-garde of the lower clergy has met the expectations of an elite of the faithful and of active organizers (militants) belonging to the intelligentzia and the new petty bourgeoisie. By renewing and rejuvenating Catholic culture, the attempts of the avant-garde clerics and laymen to reconcile faith with psychoanalysis and, more recently, with Marxism, have had the effect of giving a religious coloring to that ideological mood which can be characterised as fin de siecle, as well as that of leading intellectuals back to a rene wed form of religion. The moving to the left (and to the extreme left) of progressive catholics may contribute to confusion as well as the inversion of the cardinal points of political space, by the shift to the left of ways of thinking and themes more properly the property of groups and mouvements close to the Church, situated until very recently to the right or the extreme right.