This is the first of two books on nineteenth-century French Catholicism by Roger Price recently published by Palgrave: the second, Religious renewal in France, 1789–1870, was published in 2018. This first volume concentrates on the nature of the Church-State relationship in France from the French Revolution to the collapse of the Second Empire in 1870. In particular, Price examines how the French Catholic Church responded to the multiple revolutions and regime changes that marked this turbulent period, from the impact of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, introduced in 1790, through to the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, and Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte's coup d’état in 1851. As Price shows, the difficult relationship between Church and State in post-revolutionary France reveals the internal conflicts within the Church itself: above all, between Gallicanism and ultramontanism. Central to Price's narrative are the European revolutions of 1848 and their consequences. In France, 1848 all too briefly raised the possibility of a greater accommodation between the Catholic Church and the new French republic. In Rome, however, the experience of 1848 and the Roman Republic turned Pius ix towards a reactionary course against modern ideas. In France Price argues that the Church instead used the establishment of universal manhood suffrage in 1848 as ‘a means of reinforcing the political potential of religion’ (p. 274). Price demonstrates that, despite some resistance, the French Catholic Church in the century after the revolution of 1789 came to recognise that ‘Collaboration with … the State … offered powerful means of affirming the Church's place in the world and reinforcing moral and political order’ (pp. 273–4). The book tends to be focused on the perspectives of the church hierarchy, as well as the official structures of the state – this may be a consequence of the range of archival sources consulted and available for this period. It is striking that there are no perspectives from the social or cultural history of nineteenth-century French Catholicism in this volume, given both the academic interest in these fields over the past two decades and Price's own reputation as a social historian of the period, though some chapters in Price's Religious renewal in France, published shortly after the volume under review, explicitly address the religious practices of the faithful. The Church and the State in France combines archival research with a very useful synthesis of the considerable secondary literature in this field. As such, the work offers a solid overview of Church-State relations after 1789, though the narrative ends rather abruptly with the proclamation of the Third Republic in 1870.