Jérôme Grondeux has previously written on French intellectuals and their religion in the Third Republic but in this biography of Georges Goyau, the first since the 1940s, he plots the career of a prominent Catholic intellectual, so making a fresh contribution to the history of Catholicism and the French intelligentsia. Acknowledging insights from the history of ideas, Grondeux consciously puts in the foreground the capital roles of intellectual networks and institutions. His elucidation of Goyau's time at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, in the late 1880s, puts Goyau at the heart of the French intellectual elite. A very promising student of the historian Gabriel Monod, some saw in him a ‘new Mommsen’ (p. vii). However, the philosophical teaching of the Catholic Léon Ollé-Laprune, deftly brought to life by Grondeux, led him towards a keenly felt ‘duty to act’ as an engaged intellectual. A student at the École française de Rome in 1892, the young Catholic from Orléans became a convinced ultramontane who was rapidly introduced into the papal milieu. Thus began a brilliant career as a Catholic publicist, marked in the 1890s by trenchant defence of Pope Leo xiii's Ralliement or policy of détente with the Third Republic. His 1893 book, Le Pape, les catholiques et la question sociale, was a ‘maximalist’, democratic interpretation of the social encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891), a gloss that became the standard reference for French Catholic study circles. The journalism forms the backbone of the book which has in its bibliography a definitive list of Goyau's articles, from the Revue des Deux Mondes to Le Figaro, from 1895 to 1939. Personal papers are cited as well as state and Vatican records. However, bearing in mind Goyau's role as popular historian of the Kulturkampf, more could have been made of Goyau's place in French debates on the German ‘enemy’ before 1914, although his participation in the state-backed French Catholic propaganda of the First World War is covered. Although a republican, Goyau opposed the Dreyfus campaign. He became more conservative during the interwar period when he sat in the Académie Française. Anti-Communism put him on the side of Franco in 1937 (alienating younger Catholics like Mauriac) while in 1939 he helped to facilitate the lifting of the excommunication of Action Française, despite its past injuries to him. Overall, while this book does not have a compelling political narrative, it will be an indispensable reference for those interested in Catholic intellectual life under the Third Republic. The author deserves our thanks.