Action Française was a militant rightist movement in France begun in the late 1890s by Charles Maurras with the goal of replacing the Third Republic with some kind of traditional monarchical regime. It had a powerful appeal to many Catholics because the strongly anticlerical republic had passed laws against Catholic orders and schools. Thousands of schools were closed. Then in December 1905 the Law of Separation assigned control of all church buildings and property to the State. Thus it was not surprising that large numbers of Catholics were attracted to a movement that vigorously attacked the republic for its secular, liberal, and democratic ideas and strove to restore an authoritarian, pro-Catholic regime. His Catholic adherents knew that Maurras himself was agnostic and positivist, but they liked his view that the help of the Roman Church was essential to the restoration of the greatness of the French nation.

In this book, Peter Bernardi studies the works of Maurice Blondel (1861–1949) criticizing Maurras and Action Française and the writings of a Jesuit named Pedro Descoqs (1876–1946) defending them. Blondel was well-known for his 1893 book L'Action in which he offered an interpretation of the relation of the natural and the supernatural different from mainline scholasticism. In 1909 Blondel began defending the Semaines sociales, seminars on social justice conducted by social-minded Catholics inspired by Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum. These seminars had been attacked by Descoqs, an admirer of Maurras, as tainted by a social “modernism,” a serious charge during the anti-modernist campaign of Pius X. The articles of both Blondel and Descoqs deal mainly not with ecclesio-political topics but with quite deep, and at times dense, philosophical and theological issues. Each maintained that the other was not really faithful to basic Catholic thinking on the distinctness of and the relationships between the natural and the supernatural. Each became at times overly severe in criticizing the other. Bernardi aptly characterizes Descoqs' view as “Restorationist,” favoring monarchy as the only way to maintain order in society, and Blondel's as “Transformationist,” meaning Catholics, in a new era, need to appreciate and work with groups and movements interested in the social justice that Christ surely wanted. Bernardi leads us through these essays very patiently and clearly, with abundant and meticulous references to Blondel and Descoqs, and very valuable references to other literature and to background material.

A major crisis for conservative French Catholics occurred in 1926 when the Vatican, after lengthy study of Maurras's writings, issued a condemnation of Action Française. (The condemnation was really written in 1914 but not published because of tensions in that period when World War I was beginning.) Descoqs, quite disturbed, wrote several pieces saying that the Holy See erred in its judgment on Maurras, but he did not publish them. Blondel, vindicated and quite pleased with the Church's statement, wrote several more essays spelling out again his critique of the ideas of Maurras that certainly differed from Catholic philosophy and theology. Bernardi concludes with quite perceptive comments about some contemporary Catholic groups and tendencies that resemble the Left and Right groupings of the early twentieth century. This is a very scholarly book on a significant twentieth-century Catholic controversy.