Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-kw2vx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-22T11:52:45.395Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

14 - Catholic Christianity in France from the Restoration to the separation of church and state, 1815–1905

from PART II - THE CHURCHES AND NATIONAL IDENTITIES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
James Mcmillan
Edited by
Sheridan Gilley  and
Brian Stanley
Sheridan Gilley
Affiliation:
University of Durham
Brian Stanley
Affiliation:
Henry Martyn Centre, Cambridge
Get access

Summary

Introduction

The relationship between church, state and nation in nineteenth-century France was shaped in large measure by the legacy of the preceding revolutionary era. The French Revolution had begun with the blessing of the church but it ended in a seismic rupture. Whereas the clergé patriote of 1789 had looked to religion to bind the nation together, within a few years religion had developed into the single greatest source of national discord. The Jacobins proclaimed the Republic one and indivisible, but their onslaught on Catholic Christianity in effect turned France into not one nation, but two.

On one side of the fault-line lay those who continued to identify with the revolutionary idea of the sovereignty of the people, to be realised in the construction of a new kind of polity, the liberal or democratic nation-state. On the other were those who refused to embrace a social order which did not rest on religious foundations and who still thought of France as the Christian nation par excellence, the eldest daughter of the church, the creation of a Christian monarchy best exemplified by St Louis. The Revolution thus bequeathed to the nineteenth century a mythic vision of a culture war’ between les deux France which would last throughout the nineteenth century, and even beyond, though only after 1879 would it once again involve hostile action on the part of a republican state against the forces of organised religion.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Christianity , pp. 215 - 232
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Acomb, E. M., The French Laic Laws (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941).Google Scholar
Anderson, R. D., Education in France 1848–1870 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).Google Scholar
Aston, Nigel, Christianity and Revolutionary Europe, c.1750–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).Google Scholar
Boutry, P. and Cinquin, M., Deux pèlerinages au XIXe siècle: Ars et Paray-le-Monial (Paris: Beauchesne, 1980).Google Scholar
Bowman, E. P., Le Christ romantique (Geneva: Droz, 1973).Google Scholar
Brown, Marvin L., Louis Veuillot: French Ultramontane Catholic journalist and layman 1813–1883 (Durham, NC: Moore, 1977).Google Scholar
Bush, J. W, ‘Education and social status: the Jesuit College in the early Third Republic’, French Historical Studies 9 (Spring 1975).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Capéran, L., L’anticléricalisme et l’affaire Dreyfus, 1897–1899 (Toulouse: Imprimerie Regionale, 1948).Google Scholar
Caron, J., Le Sillon et la démocratie chrétienne, 1894–1910 (Paris: Plon, 1967).Google Scholar
Chevallier, P., La séparation de l’église et de l’école: Jules Ferry et Léon XIII (Paris, 1981).Google Scholar
Cholvy, Gérard and Hilaire, Yves-Marie, Histoire religieuse de la France contemporaine, 3 vols. (Toulouse: Privat, 1985–1988).Google Scholar
Christophe, Paul, Les choix du clergé dans les Révolutions de 1789, 1830 et1848, 2 vols. (Lille: privately published, 1976).Google Scholar
Cubitt, Geoff, The Jesuit myth: conspiracy theory and politics in nineteenth-century France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Curtis, Sarah, Educating the faithful: religion, schooling and society in nineteenth- century France (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000).Google Scholar
de Falloux, A., Le parti catholique: ce qu’il a été, ce qu’il est devenu (Paris: A. Bray, 1856).Google Scholar
de Montalembert, C., Les intérêts catholiques au dix-neuvième siècle (Paris: J. Lecoffre, 1852).Google Scholar
Ford, Caroline, Creating the nation in provincial France: religion and political identity in Brittany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).Google Scholar
Gibson, Ralph, ‘Missions paroissiales et réchristianisation en Dordogne au XIXe siècle’, Annales du Midi 98 (1986).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gibson, Ralph, A social history of French Catholicism 1789–1914 (London: Routledge, 1989).Google Scholar
Gough, Austin, Paris and Rome: the Gallican Church and the Ultramontane campaign 1848–1853 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).Google Scholar
Harris, Ruth, Lourdes: body and spirit in the secular age (London: Allen Lane, 1999).Google Scholar
Hazareesingh, S. and Wright, V., Francs-macons sous le Second Empire: les loges provinciales du Grand-Orient a la veille de la Troisième République (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2001).Google Scholar
Hazareesingh, S., Intellectual founders of the Republic: five studies in nineteenth-century political thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jonas, Raymond, France and the cult of the Sacred Heart: an epic tale for modern times (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2000).Google Scholar
Kselman, T., ‘The dechristianisation of death in modern France’, in McLeod, Hugh and Ustorf, Werner (eds.), The decline of Christendom in Western Europe 1750–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).Google Scholar
Kselman, T., Miracles andprophecies in nineteenth-century France (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983).Google Scholar
Lafon, J., Les prêtres, les fidèles et l’état: le ménage à trois du XIXe siècle (Paris: Beauchesne, 1970).Google Scholar
Lagrée, M. in Delumeau, J. (ed.), Le diocèse de Rennes. Histoire des diocèses de France vol. x (Paris: Beauchesne, 1979).Google Scholar
Lalouette, J., La libre pens´e en France 1848–1940 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1997).Google Scholar
Langlois, C., Le catholicisme aufeminin: les congrégations à supérieure générale au XIXe siecle (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1984).Google Scholar
Larkin, Maurice, Church and state after the Dreyfus affair: the separation issue in France (London: Macmillan, 1974).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lebrun, J., Lamennais, ou l’inquiétude de la liberté (Paris: Fayard-Mame, 1981).Google Scholar
LeGuillou, L., L’évolution de la pensée religieuse de Felicité Lamennais (Paris: A. Colin, 1966).Google Scholar
Maurain, J., La politique ecclésiastique du Second Empire de 1852 à 1869 (Paris: F Alcan, 1930).Google Scholar
Mayeur, J.M., Un prêtre démocrate, l’abbé Lemire (1833–1928) (Paris: Casterman, 1968).Google Scholar
McManners, John, Church and state in France 1870–1914 (London: SPCK, 1972).Google Scholar
McMillan, James F., ‘“Priest hits girl”: on the front line of the war of the two Frances’, in Clark, C., and Kaiser, W. (eds.), Culture wars: secular–Catholic conflict in nineteenth-century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).Google Scholar
McMillan, James F., ‘Rediscovering Louis Veuillot: the politics of religious identity in nineteenth-century France’, in Harkness, Nigel et al. (eds.), Visions/revisions: essays on nineteenth-century French culture (Oxford and Berne: Peter Lang, 2004).Google Scholar
McMillan, James F., ‘Religion and politics in nineteenth-century France: further reflections on why Catholics and Republicans couldn’t stand each other’, in Ivereigh, Austen (ed.), The politics of religion in an age of revival (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 2000).Google Scholar
Montclos, X., Lavigerie, le Saint-Siège et l’église (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1965).Google Scholar
Montuclard, M., Conscience religieuse et démocratie chrétienne: la deuxième démocratie chrétienne en France, 1891–1902 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1965).Google Scholar
Moody, J. N., The Church as enemy: anticlericalism in nineteenth-century French literature (Washington, DC: Corpus Books, 1965).Google Scholar
Partin, Malcolm O., Waldeck-Rousseau, Combes and the Church: the politics of anticlericalism, 1899–1903 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1969).Google Scholar
Phayer, J. M., ‘The cult of the Cross in France 1815–1840’, Journal of Social History 11 (Spring 1978).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Phillips, C. S., The Church in France 1789–1848 (London: SPCK, 1936).Google Scholar
Pierrard, P., Louis Veuillot (Paris: Beauchesne, 1998).Google Scholar
Poulat, E., Eglise contre bourgeoisie: introduction au devoir du catholicisme actuel (Tournai: Casterman, 1977).Google Scholar
Scott, I., The Roman question and the Powers, 1848–1965 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sedgwick, A., The Ralliement in French politics 1890–8 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965).Google Scholar
Sevrin, E., Les missions religieuses en France sous la Restauration (Saint-Mandé: Procure des Prêtres de la Miséricorde, 1948).Google Scholar
Sorlin, Pierre, ‘La Croix’ et les Juifs (1880–1899) (Paris: B. Grasset, 1967).Google Scholar
Sorlin, Pierre, Waldeck-Rousseau (Paris: A.Colin, 1966).Google Scholar
Thureau-Dangin, P., L’église et l’état sous la monarchie de juillet (Paris: Plon, 1880).Google Scholar
Weill, G., Histoire de l’idée laïque en France au XIXi`me siècle (Paris: F. Alcan, 1929).Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×