On the cover of this book, we read: ‘Histoire de l’Ecole française de Rome’. However, important as that institution was in the life and labours of Georges Goyau, it is only one of the contexts or locations of this once prominent French Catholic writer. He was obviously destined for a brilliant academic career from his lycée years in Orléans where he studied in the company of Charles Péguy and from a very promising career at the Ecole Normale Supérieure under Léon Ollé-Laprune. Although Goyau and Péguy remained in touch, their studies there did not overlap. Thereafter their paths increasingly diverged – Péguy's was the more daring way, skirting abysses, Goyau's the safe and prudent route. Nothing so clearly brings out the contrast than their divergence over the Dreyfus case. Péguy was a passionately partisan Dreyfusard and Goyau discreetly in the opposite camp. Goyau, as Mauriac put it, ‘pousse vers l’Académie française son solide esquif pavoisé de blanc et de jaune’. Despite flying the papal colours so prominently throughout his life, Goyau's national reputation by 1922 made it inevitable that he would find a berth in the haven of ‘Les immortels’. Such laurels for Péguy were out of the question, yet his powerful voice continues to resonate and Goyau's words having, in a sense, served their purposes, quietly repose in the archives of the Institut catholique and the Bibliothèque nationale.
Why did Goyau turn aside from that promising career in the Université? Grondeux believes that this talented young man, visiting and subsequently working in Rome, persona grata in influential Vatican circles, was enthralled by the excitement of ecclesial politics. During the years 1888 to 1894, such manoeuvres came totally to absorb his interest. Indeed, Grondeux goes so far as to claim: ‘Cum grano salis, nous pourrions dire qu’il y a en Goyau un comploteur’. Here, in Rome, at the Ecole française he discovered his métier– to expound ‘catholicisme intégrale’. He would immerse himself in study of the affairs of the Church, using his talent as a scholar and writer, as an apologist for the course upon which Leo XIII and Rampolla, the Secretary of State, had set the Church and particularly the Church in France. In Paris, a Republican and a devout Catholic, Goyau threw himself into the campaign of ‘Ralliement’ and, as a disciple of Henri Lorin, supported emergent Christian Democracy. These ardent young Catholic activists were inspired by Leo XIII's remarkable encyclical, Rerum Novarum. Goyau seized opportunities afforded by this pontificate to promote rapprochement between Church and state in the acutely polarised politics of fin de siècle France. Yet, he and his friends were doomed to frustration. The next pontificate, that of Pius X, was too neurotically defensive. Vatican blunders played into the hands of determined anti-clerical Republicans in France and the result was the radical ‘séparation’ of Church and state in 1905.
One need only turn to Grondeux's excellent bibliography to appreciate the astonishing volume of Goyau's writings. They range from his many books to dozens of articles in Le Revue des Deux Mondes, innumerable articles written for Le Figaro in the 1920s and 1930s. Grondeux devotes twenty-two pages listing all these writings. Nor is this an exhaustive catalogue. The four volumes of his L’Allemagne religieuse, much appreciated by leading French and German Protestants of the day, were remarkable for their objectivity and fair-mindedness. He was indeed a journalist and a polemicist, but a scholarly, intellectual one. He brought to his substantial works a theory of history upon which Grondeux, never one for concision of style, bestows the unwieldy title of ‘Le providentialisme historico-critique’. Goyau believed that, by the ‘force d’histoire’ and governed by divine will, the concept of papal infallibility was carried to its consummation by the decree of July 1870 when authority was at last indisputably ‘incarnated’ in the Pope. Goyau is a latter-day Lamennais, or perhaps more accurately, a latter-day Joseph de Maistre. His ardent ultramontanism survived the operations of the Vatican ‘thought-police’ during the pontificate of Pius X when even he, the safest pair of hands in Catholic Europe, had a brush with the inquisitors. Goyau is a man whom one may justly call ‘Roman’ in every fibre of his being. Even the catastrophically inept Vatican handling of the so-called ‘Modernists’, which he regretted, did not shake the foundations of his ‘romanitas’– all would be ultimately for the best in the divine ordering of history. Even the appalling first world war fulfilled the will of God by humbling nationalism and compelling Catholics to look more directly to Rome for authoritative guidance. Whether he sustained that view with any enthusiasm during the rise of National Socialism in the 1930s, one wonders. He certainly had no time for Nazi ideology and approved the papal condemnation of Maurras's Action Française while preserving amicable relations with the leader who certainly, at times, felt free to mock Goyau. Like many Catholics in the 1930s, but not Mauriac or Bernanos, he supported Franco and failed to protest over the bombing of Guernica.
What then is admirable about Goyau and why commend this detailed survey of his life as a Catholic apologist? His prudence and caution certainly do not make for a compelling dramatic narrative like that of the life of Félicité de Lamennais. Yet, Grondeux's book conducts us with profound erudition through a fascinating and agitated period in the life of the Church in France. This chronicle underlines the prescience of the liberal Catholic Montalembert's appropriation of Cavour's mot when, at Malines in 1863, he daringly appealed for a free church in a free state. That is what Catholic Republicans like Goyau schemed and campaigned for, though, at the same time, for the preservation of the Church at the heart of the nation's culture. However, the rift was too wide for that to be possible. Even after Catholics had demonstrated their patriotism during the 1914–1918 war, there was a recrudescence of anti-clericalism and anti-Catholicism on the part of the Cartel des Gauches. Goyau and his allies saw off that last, not inconsiderable, threat. An uneasy truce with laicité ensued and has endured to this day, so that it appears now to be a settled principle of governance in France.
It is much to Goyau's credit that he insisted that the Church must not evade the challenges and questions of the age. He was a courteous opponent and, although well able to deliver a shrewd polemical blow, never descended to the malicious contestation which so often disfigures polemics. He demonstrated that it is entirely possible to unite a spirit of liberality to zealous ultramontane convictions. Although his ‘high’ papalism was enough to make any papabile candidate decline the office, Goyau's chronic dependence on papal authority might persuade the reader of Grondeux's account to think critically about the risk of placing undue weight on the glib maxim: ‘Roma locuta est; causa finita est.’ He wrote in Le Vatican (1895): ‘Une incarnation perpetuelle de l’absolutisme divin, voilà le seul remède pour que la société ne soit point à la fois la dupe et la victime de ces droits souverains auxquels prétendent les individus. La papauté dans l’histoire, fut cette incarnation…’ Such an authority, ‘le vicariat de Dieu’ he continues, would be opposed to all abuse of power.
Not without justification did Yves Guyot call Goyau: ‘Légat laïque du Pape de France’. Insufficiently critical of papal authority Goyau may be, certainly in his public statements, nevertheless he was a voice for moderation in the French Church as disputatiously and reluctantly she came to terms with the legacy of the French Revolution. Goyau deserves to be remembered and Grondeux's account will ensure that the reputation of this zealous defender of the faith does not quietly repose in the national archives.
