Abstract
Reviewed by: Laura O’Brien, University of Sunderland, UK
French Catholicism in the postrevolutionary era is often associated with counter-revolution, conservatism and reaction, diametrically opposed to the secular ideas of republican France. Carol E. Harrison’s engaging book challenges this conception of a monolithic and intransigent Catholicism by showing how a ‘postrevolutionary generation’ of French Catholics – all born around 1810 – sought not just to reform their own church from within, but also to stake out a place for Catholics and Catholic identity within nineteenth-century French politics and society without seeking to turn the clock back and return to the ancien régime.
Romantic Catholics is both biographical and thematic in style and structure. The book’s narrative broadly spans the period between the beginning of the July Monarchy in 1830, and the collapse of the Second Empire and beginning of the Third Republic in 1870. Harrison concentrates her study on the lives of key representatives of this generation of Catholics, including Frédéric Ozanam, founder of the Society of St Vincent de Paul, and his wife Amélie; Charles de Montalembert, leading advocate of French Catholic interests; Pauline Craven, author of a bestselling devotional biography of her own family; and Léopoldine Hugo, daughter of Victor, France’s leading nineteenth-century writer. Harrison rejects the term ‘liberal Catholics’, commonly used to describe this group, preferring instead to refer to them as ‘romantic Catholics’. This, Harrison argues, more accurately reflects the fact that – despite Charles de Montalembert’s description of himself as part of a ‘liberal Catholic opposition’ in the 1860s – most of her subjects ‘utterly rejected the “liberal” label’ (3). The book’s structure, as Harrison explains, follows the broad outline of a ‘Catholic life course’ (20), from Léopoldine Hugo’s first communion to the education of the writer Maurice de Guérin, and from Montalembert’s ‘dilemma of obedience’ as a young man (103) to the intensely Catholic marriage of Frédéric and Amélie Ozanam. The concluding chapter reunites some of the book’s key figures, most notably Montalembert and Craven, in a discussion of the increasing importance of the ‘Roman Question’ in the 1850s and 1860s.
These studies of individuals, families and friendship frame discussions of wider themes within the story of nineteenth-century French and European Catholicism. The story of Léopoldine Hugo’s first communion, told in the first chapter, is a pretext for a much broader discussion of childhood and religious ritual, as well as the devotional aspects of children’s literature. The political campaigns of French Catholics during the July Monarchy and the controversy surrounding the religious ideas of Félicité de Lamennais are central to Harrison’s exploration in Chapter 3 of the ‘crusade’ of Montalembert and his close friend, the Dominican priest Henri Lacordaire. Harrison also uses the relationship between Montalembert and Lacordaire in order to examine ideas of Catholic male friendship, and how it both reflected and rejected elements of revolutionary fraternity. Common to several of Harrison’s case studies is the question of gender, whether in the ‘models of Catholic female virtue’ (186) contained in the writings of Pauline Craven or the considerable impact of Amélie Ozanam on the work and ideas of her husband. Romantic Catholics thus offers a much more nuanced interpretation of the common trope of the ‘feminization of religion’ in the nineteenth century, with its attendant division between the pious devotion of Catholic women, and the abhorrence of ‘rational and autonomous bourgeois men’ (18). Instead, Harrison argues, the experiences of these ‘romantic Catholics’ reveal the deep consideration they gave to the influence of gender on their religious lives, and their belief that faith united, rather than divided, men and women (19).
There are a few aspects of Romantic Catholics that might merit more development. Léopoldine Hugo, the first member of this generation introduced to the reader, seems to disappear entirely from the narrative in the overlapping personal networks that emerge in subsequent chapters, although this might in part be explained by Hugo’s early death in 1843. More could perhaps have been said about Amélie Ozanam’s efforts to maintain and promote the memory of her husband after his untimely death in 1853. Such criticisms, however, are minimal. Romantic Catholics deftly interweaves personal and familial experiences with the wider political, social and religious concerns and crises of both the French and European Catholic Church. Harrison’s book offers a significant re-evaluation of French Catholicism – and of French Catholics – during a crucial period.