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doi: 10.1017/S0009640709000729 Catholic and French Forever: Religious and National Identity in Modern France. By Joseph F. Byrnes. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005. xxiii + 280 pp. $55.00 cloth.
Although secular republicanism remains a topcoat for contemporary France, beneath this veneer lie traces of a twisted and troubled relationship between it and Roman Catholicism. In a sharp study of this difficult topic, Joseph Byrnes provides some fascinating vignettes of how this liaison developed, what complications arose between the two interlocutors, and how - despite serious fractures - Catholic belief and practice continued to shape French national identity throughout the modern era. Byrnes argues mat the association between the nation's majority religion and its modem republicanism was characterized by three distinct stages between 1789 and 1940: an irreparable divorce during the Revolution; a mutually hostile defense from the Napoleonic regime to the eve of World War 1; and a challenging détente that first emerged in 1914 and endured until the occupation and collaboration of World War II.
By no means was the divorce between Catholicism and republicanism a. fait accompli when the Revolution began. If anything, national unity was usually expressed in and through Catholic belief and practice, especially since this religion was one of the few amalgams that held France together during the Old Regime. All of that changed, however, with passage of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the subsequent anticlericalism that arose at about the same time as the First Republic. Here Byrnes focuses on the most pro-revolutionary priests, who not only renounced...