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Chateaubriand, Lamennais, and Renan all figured centrally in any chronicle of 19th-century French Catholicism, while Thérèse Martin, the Little Flower, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux kept a marginal position. However, these men, who lived long and wrote much, are for the greater part forgotten, and she, dead at twenty-four, has become one of the most beloved woman in modern times. This chapter illustrates these men under three sorts of temptation, none of which is strictly comparable to those Christ faced in the wilderness but each of which St. Augustine identifies: the rage for feeling, libido sentiendi; for commanding, libido dominandi; for knowing, libido sciendi. As these men did not think, work, write in a vacuum, some brief remarks on the political and spiritual life of their age are provided.

Gregory XVI (pope 1831‐46) pursued a policy in reaction against ’innovators’, meaning political liberalism and the French Revolution and all it stood for, setting the tone for the dislike of the modern world that characterized the papacy throughout the nineteenth century. Paradoxically, however, his assertion of the authoritarian power of the papacy came to be seen by Catholic minorities in Protestant states as the only source of defence of their rights and liberties. Gregory's papacy saw the condemnation of the liberal ideas of Lamennais and his followers in France and the beginnings of the long struggle between French Catholics and anti‐clericals over control of education. In Germany, where the Restoration settlement had created states with large confessional minorities, the papacy was in constant conflict with the Prussian government over the question of mixed marriages and the position of Catholics in the Rhineland. In Switzerland the religious conflict leading to the war of the Sonderbund strengthened the prestige of the papacy among Swiss Catholics. The pope, backed by a reactionary Curia, condemned the first stirrings of Italian nationalism and the compromise between Catholicism and nationalism proposed by the neo‐Guelf movement. Throughout his papacy Gregory was dependent on foreign troops, principally the Austrians, to suppress unrest in the papal states, as a result of which he died ’the most hated of popes’.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and of the question of his (and the Enlightenment’s) connection with and influence upon the French Revolution. After the Revolution Rousseau’s influence upon revolutionary events was seen in strongly negative terms. This chapter explores the interpretation of Rousseau provided by three currents of thought: theocratic reaction (Maistre, Bonald, Lamennais), liberalism (Constant and Guizot), and anarchism (Proudhon). It shows how Rousseau’s influence declined during the nineteenth century and how the radical dimensions of his ideas were now underplayed. It ends, however, by assessing the anti-modernist argument to be found in Rousseau’s writings, especially with regard to the issue of luxury. This theme continued to have a powerful resonance up to the beginning of the twentieth century.

This chapter begins by examining the place of religion in pre-1789 France and the controversy surrounding the Catholic Church during the Revolution itself. Having dismissed the idea that Catholicism in France was unreceptive to advances in science, it explores the hostility to religion evidenced by writers of the French Enlightenment. It then looks at the development of Protestant ideas before, during, and after the Revolution, focusing in particular upon the views of Madame de Staël, Constant, and Guizot. This leads to a discussion of the philosophy of Eclecticism associated with Victor Cousin. The chapter concludes by looking at the response of Catholic writers to the assaults visited upon the Church by republican and secular opinion. The ideas of Chateaubriand, Maistre, Lamennais, and Charles de Montalembert are examined in detail.

This chapter first discusses Tocqueville's debt to Lamennais, notably with respect to the fear of individualism and the means to maintain the social bond. Second, it examines the new meaning that Tocqueville gives to the concept of the religious, and why religion in America can be identified with what he calls the general opinion, that is, the opinion generally shared. This entails an examination of the new “authority” that is constituted by the public, an authority that fulfills the function of persuasion of individuals' minds and, in that way, forms a new ecclesiastical structure. The fourth and last point is that through this structure the “body of the people” possesses a fresh visibility under different and successive shapes.

This chapter focuses on the education of Maurice de Guérin, following him through his years as a boarding pupil at the Catholic Collège Stanislas in Paris. Maurice was sent by his father to the elite Catholic boarding school in the hope of setting him up for a successful clerical career, but abandoned his vocation during his teen years and turned to poetry instead of the priesthood. This chapter provides an overview of Maurice's life at Stanislas and after he left the school, with particular emphasis on his involvement in the scholarly and quasi-monastic community that surrounded Félicité de Lamennais, whose Breton estate at La Chênaie was home to a group of young men who had gathered to create a new “Catholic science.” It shows how Maurice and other Stanislas boys at La Chênaie found a form of Catholic fraternity that they recognized and embraced gratefully.

This chapter explores Félicité de Lamennais's influence on French Catholics as it follows Charles de Montalembert's passage to adulthood. It considers how Montalembert used the platform of L'Avenir, Lamennais's newspaper, to argue that Catholicism should embrace liberty. It also discusses the impact of Pope Gregory XVI's condemnation of Lamennais's teaching on Montalembert's life. It highlights the difficulties of Catholicism for many postrevolutionary men that were evident in Montalembert's efforts to combine the citizen's independent judgment with the Catholic's humble submission to authority. Finally, it analyzes Montalembert's notion of Catholic citizenship as well as his response to the dilemma of autonomy and obedience.

This chapter examines the religious choices of Félicité Lamennais, a key figure in the political and religious debates of the French Restoration. After flirting with the doctrines of Rousseau as an adolescent, Lamennais converted to ultramontane Catholicism, convinced that papal authority was the only reliable basis for social order. State repression of Catholicism in Poland, Belgium, Ireland, and France in 1830 led Lamennais to alter his views and embrace a marriage of “God and Liberty” in which Catholics would support the separation of church and state, and defend political and civil liberties, in particular the freedom of the press. Twice condemned by Pope Gregory XVI, Lamennais abandoned Catholicism and embraced the right of freedom of conscience that he had formerly condemned.

This chapter traces the complicated religious journey of George Sand, from an unorthodox education guided by her free-thinking grandmother to a mystical Catholicism while an adolescent, and finally to a form of social Christianity as an adult. It links Sand’s evolving religious ideas to her tumultuous personal life and her radical positions on social institutions, in particular marriage and the status of women. Although she moved away from Catholicism Sand continued to believe in a benevolent but inscrutable God who oversaw a universe marked by spiritual and material progress. This chapter presents Sand’s life as exemplifying the religion of humanitarianism that emerged in the post-revolutionary era.

In Mediterranean regions between the late eighteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth century, it proved difficult to separate politics from religion—because political communities were also conceptualized as religious communities, so governing them entailed taking a stance on their religious ordering. South European liberalism was not associated with religious toleration: the hope was to bind the national community together around shared beliefs; Ottomans, by contrast, fostered religious pluralism, though also solidarity within religious communities. Those who sought to change the political order along democratic or liberal lines often found some supporters among religious leaders—in southern Europe, especially among would-be church reformers, perhaps in a Jansenist tradition. Such leaders could play an important role in proselytising for new values—though religious—for example, Lamennaisian—visions of democracy did not necessarily align neatly with more political visions. Religious leaders were also often prominent among opponents of reforms and in mobilizing ordinary people behind conservative forms of politics.

The eighteenth-century version of the French moraliste tradition laid great stress on the political and social sources of character formation, and Tocqueville learned much from Montesquieu and especially Rousseau. Rousseau’s Savoyard Vicar seems to be the chief inspiration for many of Tocqueville’s personal religious beliefs, but Tocqueville continually transformed the content of Montesquieu and Rousseau’s ideas to fit his own purposes while borrowing their form, as he did with his seventeenth-century predecessors. Tocqueville also learned much from his Romantic contemporaries, above all from François Guizot, the abbé Lamennais, and especially from Chateaubriand, who like Tocqueville pursued an ideal of aristocratic greatness in a democratic era. Tocqueville’s new moral science, like his new political science, was built on foundations that extended deeply into the past and widely in the present, embracing virtually the whole of the French moralist tradition.