The Ideology of the French Catholic Revival

Extract

This is a period tormented by its sins. Before it, the triumph of science and the Republic; after it, the revival of materialism, and then preparation for war makes it much less easy to see the forms in which individual and collective despair find expression. Yet this despair is of long standing: its cause even more so, and is not specifically French. To anyone seeking a radical cure the idea must present itself forcibly that . .. the decline of Christianity in Europe has a great deal to do with it.

Robert Bessède’s account of late nineteenth-century Catholic culture in France, in his recent study La Crise de la conscience catholique (Paris, 1975), is typical of traditional commentaries on this period. A particular stance—an attitude of despair in the face of history—with its origins in a minority group caught in very specific historical circumstances is transformed by special pleading into a universal phenomenon, to become eventually one more symbolic embodiment of the eternal crucifixion of man. If we look, for instance, into Bessède’s work, which claims to consider objectively the whole movement of ideas at this period, but has its real centre of interest in traditionalism and in the writers of the Catholic Revival, we find that he wholeheartedly adopts the Revival’s own blinkered perspective, refusing even to try to decipher the historical particularity inscribed in their ideology. Ostentatiously dismissing the contribution which the “historian of ideas” can make in such a domain, he prefers to speak of “mysterious” impulses, “feelings”, always and universally the same, which are “the basis and motive force of history”:

The crisis under discussion in this book —more clearly than any other—springs from a nexus of feelings, every one of which is a feeling of lack; it provokes questions whose scope goes beyond the political and social domain.