Romantic Catholics: France’s Postrevolutionary Generation in Search of a Modern Faith

Carol E. Harrison

Cornell University Press: 2014

344 pages; $49.95

978-0-8014-5245-1

Reviewed by: Stephanie A. Mann

After the French Revolution, and through the restoration and fall of both the empires and the monarchy, both constitutional and absolute, Catholicism in France required restoration and revival. Carol E. Harrison offers an overview of a group of lay and clerical Catholic revivalists who wanted to present Catholicism’s answer to the revolutionary turmoil of their era. As the book’s blurb announces, these Romantic Catholics rejected “both the atomizing force of revolutionary liberalism and the increasing intransigence of the church hierarchy”. They sought to demonstrate that the Church should work with the new world order while remaining true to Catholic doctrine and discipline. In her Introduction, Harrison notes the contrast between these Romantic Catholics and the historian Jules Michelet, who both rejected the liberal exultation of the individual and the Catholic Church, because he saw it in opposition to the French national spirit. Michelet, she notes, feared the influence of devout wives on their republican husbands—religious faith transcended national genius and must be avoided.

The laity and clergy Harrison writes about in nineteenth century France also rejected the Cisalpine tendencies of the Church hierarchy before the Revolution and were thoroughly Ultramontane, but then struggled when successive popes rejected their new model for the Church and society to work in freedom while moving away from monarchy toward republican democracy. Harrison structures her book organically, beginning with issues and images of Catholic childhood, through youth, adulthood, and ending in old age and death, highlighting a few of the Catholic Romantics at various stages of their lives throughout the century.

Starting with childhood, Harrison discusses the celebration of First Holy Communion. In the nineteenth century, First Holy Communion held the place that Confirmation holds now in the United States during a child’s life; it was a step toward adulthood. As Harrison depicts the preparation and celebration of First Holy Communion, she notes the importance of children’s literature, especially the novel Le Journal de Marguerite in modeling Catholic childhood, its piety, morality,  and progress toward holiness. By recounting the First Communions of Leopoldine Hugo, Victor Hugo’s daughter, and two other young girls who died young, Harrison notes that the memory of that day, with all its beauty and innocence, was treasured by the parents who lost their children.

Advancing from First Communion to education, Harrison examines the school experiences of the poet Maurice de Guerin at the College Stanislas in Paris, founded by Abbe Claude Rosalie Liautard. She creates a vivid image of this boy’s boarding school where the students developed strong bonds of fraternity. From the College Stanislaus, Guerin joins Lamennais’ all male community at La Chenaie, briefly continuing his studies after deciding that he does not have a religious vocation. Both he and his sister Eugenie wrote poetry, although both of them died before they could publish—friends edited their works, especially Eugenie’s journals, to show her great love and support of her brother in his literary career, thwarted by his early death at age 29.

Continuing the exploration of Lamennais’ project for the Church to be the ally of modern culture with its emphasis on freedom and social justice, Harrison then writes about Charles de Montalembert and his great friend, Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire, who restored the Dominican order in France in 1850. As the three men wrote and published for L’Avenir they found themselves more and more in conflict with the French hierarchy and then with Pope Gregory XVI. They faced the crucial test of their Ultramontanist views—what do you do when the authority you have sworn obedience to tells you to stop what you think is most important for modern culture and the Church? Montalembert and Lacordaire submitted to the pope’s instructions,  but Lamennais could not.

Perhaps the most fascinating chapter is “Pauline Craven’s Holy Family: Writing the Modern Saint” as Harrison describes how Pauline Craven wrote her family’s story of suffering and holiness, telling how her brother and sisters died in a powerful and popular memoir, Le Recit d’une soeur.  Readers wrote to Pauline telling her how much her memoir moved them, encouraged them to be better Catholics, and led them to pray for the same holy and happy deaths she depicts. Harrison even notes the connection to St. Therese of Lisieux’s L’Histoire d’une ame—the emphasis on holiness in the family, in simple everyday life combined with simplicity of expression and lack of literary pretense.

My favorite chapter, however, was “Frédéric and Amélie Ozanam: Charity, Marriage, and the Catholic Social” with Harrison’s examination of Blessed Frédéric Ozanam’s great charitable project, The Society of St.  Vincent de Paul, the lay organization dedicated to charity and contact with the poor. Harrison shows how Ozanam rejected philanthropy with its emphasis on analyzing and solving social ills and instead gathered young men in associations to visit the poor, to help people directly since part of the purpose of The Society of St. Vincent de Paul was to save the soul of the young men, to increase their love of the poor and thus of Jesus, and grow in humility and faith, as well to serve the poor.

Harrison also describes Ozanam’s great conversion to the virtues of Marriage: he had thought that marriage would call him and other men in the Society away from their work with the poor. When he marries Amélie Soulacroix he realizes that marriage and the family are the true basis of society, that husband and wife can support each other in their efforts to love and serve the poor. Harrison picks up the Lamennain project of establishing a Catholic society with a discussion of how Ozanam opposed the legalization of divorce because of its effects on women, children, and men, creating autonomous individuals and breaking down social bonds. Ozanam dies before he can finish his great work—an answer to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Civilisation au Ve siècle. Amélie Ozanam dedicated the rest of her life to her husband’s cause, making sure his achievements and goals were not forgotten—and she was surely rewarded by Frédéric Ozanam’s beatification by Pope St. John Paul II in Paris at Notre Dame in 1997 during World Youth Day celebrations.

The final chapter is about French Catholic reaction to the crisis of the temporal sovereignty of the papacy in the midst of the Italian Risorgimento. While they supported Italian independence, they feared for the liberty of the Church. Craven and Montalembert struggled with their ultramontane beliefs, even as Papal Infallibility was defined as a doctrine at the First Vatican Council. Once again, with Pope Pius IX, they see their great Romantic Catholic project rejected—and Montalembert even experiences personal rejection after death when Pope Pius IX cancels his scheduled funeral Mass and moves it to another church without any announcement. As the last surviving member of the Romantic generation in Harrison’s study,  Pauline Craven is uncomfortable living in the new Rome of the “prisoner of the Vatican”.

Harrison concludes her study with the examination of two fictions: the sequel to Le Journal de Marguerite and the political interference of Empress Eugenie (who was the object of slurs and attacks as Marie Antoinette had been).  She summarizes her book by asserting the importance of understanding the Romantic Catholic movement:

Restoring romantic Catholics to the story of modern France reminds us that French women and men of the postrevolutionary period saw possibilities other than inflexible church-state conflict. These children of the nineteenth century believed that Catholicism was a model for a society that aspired to be more than an aggregation of atomized individuals. They were eager to demonstrate that Christians tied indissolubly to each other by sacramental bonds constituted a more resilient society than liberal individuals who might occasionally and temporarily enter into contracts with one another. They believed that they could offer this lesson to their fellow French men and women, and their willingness to engage with French society as a whole was the hallmark of Catholic romanticism. Romantic confidence in a dynamic, modern religious faith was not merely a strategy to protect Catholic communities by isolating them from the rest of society and defending them from the rise of secularism.

Although the Catholic romantics Harrison describes were disappointed in the failure of their projects, she notes that they were vindicated by Pope Leo XIII’s pontificate, with his great vision of “a political and social agenda that engaged the church with modern republicanism and the social question”, summarized in Rerum Novarum (1891) . Romantic Catholics is a very important study of Catholics in nineteenth century France—I highly recommend it as well written,  imaginatively structured, and sympathetic to the historical figures and their cause.