From the generation of Catholics born around 1810 Harrison selects a number of figures—some well known to those familiar with the period, others rescued from relative obscurity—and uses their lives as a prism to illuminate their attempts to forge a synthesis between faith and modernity. She begins with an examination of Catholic children growing up in the faith to reveal the status of the family in the romantic imagination, moves on to the experience of adolescence to explore the romantic concept of Catholic community, proceeds to adulthood with its tensions between autonomy and obedience to the church and relationship to the wider community, finally to engage old age with its disappointments of earlier hopes during the post 1848 antagonism between church and state. This expansion beyond the theological and political issues that are integral to an understanding of Catholicism during this period is reflected in an expanded cast of characters. In addition to expected names that frame or figure in the narrative—Lamennais, Lacordaire, Montalembert, Ozanam—Harrison introduces Léopoldine Hugo, the novelist Victorine Monniot, the poet Maurice de Gurein, the writer on modern sanctity Pauline Carven, and social Catholic Amélie Ozanam. The latter group enables insight into institutional Catholicism (the social function of first communion, the socialization received in Catholic boarding school), the ideal of sanctity in the modern world, the construction of a counter image of the pious dévote clinging to atavistic faith.

Romantic Catholics examines a generation that sought to embrace elements of the Revolution without abandoning the church, that in consequence was forward looking in hope rather than backward looking in nostalgia, that shared common concern with romanticism in a preoccupation with the relation between the individual and society, between community and autonomy. In doing so it retrieves largely forgotten figures to engage questions of religion and gender, the relation of the political and the familial, to explore networks of friendship and influence—in particular with respect to the laity's role in the church, and contrasts their vision of a modern Catholicism with a romantic anti-Catholicism that portrayed the church in opposition to modernity. The book expands our appreciation of the period it depicts and raises questions of enduring significance.