Who is to be believed? The French philosopher Henri Bergson, in one of his last major works at the beginning of the 1930s, composed an emphatic eulogy on mechanisation, at the very time when the spread of Taylorism and the industrial depression were leading many intellectuals to call it into question. He made no hesitation in concluding that ‘Spiritualism leads to mechanisation.’ He meant by this that technical progress, by liberating humanity for the first time in its history, from the obsessive ‘fear of not feeding its hunger’, allowed it, by escaping from a constrained and inevitable asceticism, to reach finally genuine spiritual experience. Conversely, throughout France in the 1950s, the chaplains of the rural Catholic ‘Action Group’ were raising the alarm as agricultural mechanisation reached the French countryside. They may have read Bergson during their studies at the seminary, but their view was totally the opposite. In their opinion the ‘technical mentality’ went towards accelerating the breakdown of traditional parish civilisation.

Comparing the fields of religion and technology inevitably leads to the following type of contradiction: some hope to find in technical progress a starting-point for a new type of evangelisation, while on the contrary others see in it a fearful dissolution of ancient Christian civilisation. The issue is too vast for an overview to be easily taken. We shall start from a precise point in time and space: France during the century which runs from 1850 to 1950.