Between 1914 and 1918 over 32,000 Catholic priests served in the French army, working as chaplains and nurses but also as combatants, fighting and killing alongside their fellow soldiers. Anita Rasi May addresses the experience of these priests in her new study, paying particular attention to firsthand accounts that provide an intimate look at how these men understood and justified their roles in the Great War. May has identified thirty-three memoirs, diaries, and biographies that she mines for observations on the challenges faced by clergy as they confronted the horrors of trench warfare, but she draws as well on state and church archives, and the extensive publications produced by and for these priests, such as the journal Le Prêtre aux Armées. May's work builds on previous studies by Xavier Boniface, Daniel Moulinet, Nadine-Josette Chaline, and Joseph Byrnes, but in Patriot Priests we hear more distinctly the troubled and poignant voices of these men.

May opens with a chapter that reviews the declining status of the clergy in France during the Third Republic, which was established in France following its defeat in the Franco-Prussian war. Catholic support for a restored Bourbon monarchy cast the clergy as opponents to the new regime and resulted in a series of laws that struck at the Catholic educational system, forced members of religious congregations into exile, and in 1905, separated church and state. Anticlerical legislation also eliminated the exemption of the clergy from military service, setting the stage for their massive participation in World War I.

French Catholics embraced the war as soon as it began, joining republicans in a union sacrée. Members of the clergy called to service shared in this enthusiasm, moved by a conviction that the French cause was just, and willing to defend the nation from a barbarous attack.  Given the history of republican anticlericalism, May acknowledges that “one might have expected more opposition to the mobilization on the part of the bishops or the priests themselves.”(32) But the clergy were impressed by the religious fervor that accompanied the early days of the war, as churches filled and exiled clergy were welcomed back by cheering crowds. With such an enthusiastic reception, priests saw the possibility for recovering a privileged place in French society, and perhaps the beginnings of a revival that would bring the men who had abandoned religious practice back to the Church.

After a chapter on the mobilization of the clergy, May examines the roles of the clergy as missionaries, warriors, and pastors. Only 1,500 clergy were named as official chaplains, a number the regime quickly realized was wholly inadequate. A Bureau of Volunteer Chaplains was established to provide additional clergy, and many clerical conscripts added religious services to their assigned military tasks. This improvised system was confusing and inefficient, but had the advantage of allowing many priests to share the daily burdens of the soldiers. The patriot priests were exhilarated about their new relationships with the soldiers, but also shocked and dismayed by the carnage of war. The Jesuit chaplain Louis Lenoir wrote to his parents in 1914 that ministering to the soldiers was “the happiest period of my life,” but also “the most anguished, the most odious,” as he thought about the “bodies in pieces in the fields . . . villages in flames” (57).

Some of the most gripping material in May's book comes in her chapter on “Patriots and Warriors,” where we see the clergy engaged as combatants, joining in and sometimes leading assaults on the German enemy. Canon law prohibited such behavior, but the Vatican granted a special dispensation for priests who had been conscripted. The French clergy were generally horrified by war, but May found no evidence of pacifist sentiment among them, and in a number of remarkable cases, documents their “enthusiastic reactions to battle.”(74) Teilhard de Chardin, for example, described the sense of exaltation he experienced at the front, “an underlying stream of clarity, energy, and freedom that is hardly to be found anywhere else.”(77) May sees such responses as flowing from rather than conflicting with the Catholic milieu in which these priests were trained, characterized by discipline, obedience, and sacrifice.  By the end of the war clerical hopes that the war would spark a general revival of Catholicism in France had been disappointed. Nonetheless, May concludes that the patriot priests were largely responsible for the warmer relations between church and state of the interwar period.

May has written an intelligent and sensitive portrait of the French clergy at war. She is respectful of her subjects, letting them speak in their own voices while she remains in the background in a sympathetic, non-judgmental posture. Readers curious about how the French patriot priests might look in comparison to chaplains in other wars at other times should consult the collection of essays edited by Doris Bergen, The Sword of the Lord: Military Chaplains from the First to the Twenty-First Century (University of Notre Dame Press, 2004). May's work confirms a tendency of chaplains in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to support the justifications for war offered by the states they served. In their roles as missionaries, pastors, and warriors the patriot priests of France provided moral legitimacy for a war effort, with very few questions asked.  In the aftermath of the war, with its catastrophic losses, did any of the patriot priests join in questioning the “discours catholique” on just war theory, as described by Corinne Bonafou in “Le discours catholique et la guerre juste au XXe siècle,” in, Les Chrétiens, la guerre, et la paix (Xavier Boniface, Bruno Béthouart, eds. [Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2012])? How did those who survived confront the World War II and the civil war in Algeria?  May's fine study does not pursue these questions, which raise the issue of the moral and religious legacy of the patriot priests of World War I.