Although secular republicanism remains a topcoat for contemporary France, beneath this veneer lie traces of a twisted and troubled relationship between it and Roman Catholicism. In a sharp study of this difficult topic, Joseph Byrnes provides some fascinating vignettes of how this liaison developed, what complications arose between the two interlocutors, and how—despite serious fractures—Catholic belief and practice continued to shape French national identity throughout the modern era. Byrnes argues that the association between the nation's majority religion and its modern republicanism was characterized by three distinct stages between 1789 and 1940: an irreparable divorce during the Revolution; a mutually hostile defense from the Napoleonic regime to the eve of World War I; and a challenging détente that first emerged in 1914 and endured until the occupation and collaboration of World War II.

By no means was the divorce between Catholicism and republicanism a fait accompli when the Revolution began. If anything, national unity was usually expressed in and through Catholic belief and practice, especially since this religion was one of the few amalgams that held France together during the Old Regime. All of that changed, however, with passage of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the subsequent anticlericalism that arose at about the same time as the First Republic. Here Byrnes focuses on the most pro-revolutionary priests, who not only renounced their sacerdotal vows in 1793 and 1794 but also went on to marry. Some of these clerics, however, later retracted their renunciations and returned to their ministries, in part because official attempts to displace Catholicism with republican religious creations in the latter part of the Revolution failed so miserably, as Byrnes makes clear. Both developments nonetheless generated a deep cultural divide among the masses and elite alike in early nineteenth-century France. Using Francois-René de Chateaubriand and Antoine-Louis-Claude Destutt de Tracy as the intellectual exemplars of such divergence, Byrnes explains that despite Napoleonic attempts to iron over Catholic-republican differences, a cultural battle ensued in which education and politics served as a no man's land for the remainder of the century.

This is not to suggest, though, that French nationalism and Catholicism were polar opposites during this time. On the contrary, French Catholics were foremost in expressing nationalistic sentiment, especially through—as deftly shown by Byrnes—pilgrimages to Lourdes, Paray-le-Monial, and Chartres. Catholic educational institutions, moreover, were instrumental in spreading the mother tongue to many parts of the nation, particularly before the advent of compulsory and free primary education during the Third Republic. Even so, Catholic clerics sometimes defended local languages at a time when government officials saw a thoroughly Francophonic patrie as a cornerstone of nation building. Byrnes cites the Second Empire's example of Alsace, where the local clergy sought to maintain the German language through school pedagogy and catechisms, yet he also points to Roussillon, where clerics promoted French in preference to Catalan. When taken together, the two regional examples illustrate the difficulties of making fast conclusions about how nineteenth-century Catholicism thwarted the growth of a national identity, or for that matter encouraged it.

As contentious as educational issues were between Catholics and republicans, the Dreyfus affair, the outlawing of some religious congregations, and the abrogation of the Napoleonic Concordat made their antagonism even worse. Still, Byrnes reminds us that with the German threat looming in 1914, a truce among contentious French politicians—the union sacrée—not only was able to hold throughout the war, but ultimately contributed to the allied victory. Through war memoirs composed by priests, seminarians, and anticlerical public instructors, Byrnes reveals how the union may have looked on the battlefield, specifically in how both religious- and secular-oriented soldiers grew respectful of their cultural adversaries, despite maintaining or even strengthening their own ideologies. Byrnes argues that the peaceful co-existence of Catholics and secular republicans persisted during the inter-war period, thanks to the likes of Emile Mâle, a scholar of medieval art and architecture who, in spite of being a product of France's thoroughly secular public educational system, reinforced national identity through extolling the medieval (and therefore Catholic) glory of French patrimony. Mâle's exaltation of France's Gothic and Romanesque heritage, according to Byrnes, helped construct a national identity upon which both Catholics and the secularized could agree.

For all of its merits—the volume of research and the author's audacity in tackling such a formidable topic are among the most noteworthy—Byrnes's study comes up short in two ways. First, the disconnectedness between the various subjects considered, not to mention the chapters in which they are discussed, impairs the study's overall focus. Readers must make abrupt jumps between collective portraits (abdicataires, the Alsatian clergy, priest-combatants) and individual ones (Chateaubriand, Tracy, Mâle). In the process, the notion of “identity” (a thoroughly amorphous term to begin with) is stretched well beyond its heuristic limits. Second, although Byrnes goes out of his way to depict subtleties of the relationship between Catholicism and modern French republicanism, his characterization of this bond as one of “divorce, defense, and détente” defies the topic's complexity. It overlooks, for example, that in the midst of a revolutionary divorce many clerics (most notably the abbé Grégoire) remained wedded to both Catholic belief and republicanism, just as many secularists in the Third Republic appropriated Catholic figures (Joan of Arc) and themes (martyrdom) in their nationalism while still mounting attacks on a clerical establishment. Furthermore, as much as the union sacrée appeared to be a dramatic ideological shift, Catholic reprisals against leftists under Vichy suggest that what little détente existed from 1914 to 1939 was really an expedient reprieve in a perennial culture war. Arguably that struggle died only after Gaullism, the Second Vatican Council, and a mass exodus of French Catholics from parish churches combined to kill it. Once readers place these conceptual and interpretive problems aside, however, they will discover a study whose value lies as much in provoking meaningful debate as in advancing solid scholarship.