Overview

In this well-written and imaginatively structured book, Carol E. Harrison brings to life a cohort of nineteenth-century French men and women who argued that a reformed Catholicism could reconcile the divisions in French culture and society that were the legacy of revolution and empire. They include, most prominently, Charles de Montalembert, Pauline Craven, Amelie and Frederic Ozanam, Leopoldine Hugo, Maurice de Guerin, and Victorine Monniot. The men and women whose stories appear in Romantic Catholics were bound together by filial love, friendship, and in some cases marriage. Harrison draws on their diaries, letters, and published works to construct a portrait of a generation linked by a determination to live their faith in a modern world. Rejecting both the atomizing force of revolutionary liberalism and the increasing intransigence of the church hierarchy, the romantic Catholics advocated a middle way, in which a revitalized Catholic faith and liberty formed the basis for modern society. Harrison traces the history of nineteenth-century France and, in parallel, the life course of these individuals as they grow up, learn independence, and take on the responsibilities and disappointments of adulthood. Although the shared goals of the romantic Catholics were never realized in French politics and culture, Harrison's work offers a significant corrective to the traditional understanding of the opposition between religion and the secular republican tradition in France.

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Reviews

Across the book we find elegant writing, exciting narrative, and a colorful (for all their earnest religiosity) cast of characters. -Joseph F. Byrnes, H-France Review (November 2014) Romantic Catholics is an elegant, revisionist reading of nineteenth-century French Catholicism, exemplary for its deft biographical touch and shrewd interweaving of familial and more formally political concerns. It will be of immediate interest to-indeed demand attention from-all interested in the complicated relationship between religion and modernity in the world bequeathed to us by the French Revolution. -John T. McGreevy, I.A. O'Shaughnessy Dean, College of Arts and Letters, University of Notre Dame Romantic Catholics is a terrific book and an extremely significant publication for scholars working in French history, European history, and the history of Catholicism. Carol E. Harrison has uncovered a group of young Catholics who fought to reform the Church from within and to make it compatible with the modern world of the nineteenth century. Harrison's research and argument are impeccable. The engagingly written stories she tells about these largely forgotten men and women also make the book a joy to read. -Denise Z. Davidson, Georgia State University, author of France after Revolution: Urban Life, Gender, and the New Social Order Romantic Catholics is an original, insightful, and sophisticated book on an important topic. Its most significant contribution is to identify and analyze a group of 'Romantic Catholics' who broke from the intransigence of Restoration Catholicism to imagine ways that French Catholicism could be integrated with the modern nation-state. Carol E. Harrison uses individual lives as prisms through which to examine the tensions in the postrevolutionary French church. By including Catholic men in her discussion, she substantially broadens our understanding of gender and religion in the nineteenth century. Her use of literary sources is judicious and grounded in historical context. -Sarah A. Curtis, San Francisco State University, author of Civilizing Habits: Women Missionaries and the Revival of French Empire Historians have usually treated the French Catholic Church in the nineteenth century as a bastion of reaction, seeking to roll back the changes wrought by the Revolution. Carol E. Harrison brings back to life a generation of Catholic women and men who found new spiritual resources in the Catholic tradition, and shows how they, like the early socialists of the period, expressed a longing for community in the face of a world increasingly dominated by individualist values. Clearly and engagingly written, Harrison's work demonstrates the vitality of French Catholicism in the years before Pius IX's Syllabus of Errors clearly identified the Church with opposition to change. Harrison puts her subjects in their historical context, but the issues they grappled with, including the role of women in the Church, remain burning ones today. -Jeremy D. Popkin, T. Marshall Hahn, Jr. Professor of History, University of Kentucky

Historians have usually treated the French Catholic Church in the nineteenth century as a bastion of reaction, seeking to roll back the changes wrought by the Revolution. Carol E. Harrison brings back to life a generation of Catholic women and men who found new spiritual resources in the Catholic tradition, and shows how they, like the early socialists of the period, expressed a longing for community in the face of a world increasingly dominated by individualist values. Clearly and engagingly written, Harrison's work demonstrates the vitality of French Catholicism in the years before Pius IX s Syllabus of Errors clearly identified the Church with opposition to change. Harrison puts her subjects in their historical context, but the issues they grappled with, including the role of women in the Church, remain burning ones today. Jeremy D. Popkin, T. Marshall Hahn, Jr. Professor of History, University of Kentucky

"""Across the book we find elegant writing, exciting narrative, and a colorful (for all their earnest religiosity) cast of characters.""-Joseph F. Byrnes, H-France Review (November 2014) ""By uniting her expertise on the social and, especially, the gender history of the French middle class with a close and sympathetic understanding of post-Revolutionary Catholicism, Harrison has produced a book that allows readers not just to appreciate the interconnection between social and religious questions among early nineteenth-century Catholics but also to imagine the central figures of the period as human beings.""-Robert D. Priest,Journal of Modern History(December 2015) ""Romantic Catholics is an elegant, revisionist reading of nineteenth-century French Catholicism, exemplary for its deft biographical touch and shrewd interweaving of familial and more formally political concerns. It will be of immediate interest to-indeed demand attention from-all interested in the complicated relationship between religion and modernity in the world bequeathed to us by the French Revolution.""-John T. McGreevy, I.A. O'Shaughnessy Dean, College of Arts and Letters, University of Notre Dame ""Romantic Catholics is a terrific book and an extremely significant publication for scholars working in French history, European history, and the history of Catholicism. Carol E. Harrison has uncovered a group of young Catholics who fought to reform the Church from within and to make it compatible with the modern world of the nineteenth century. Harrison's research and argument are impeccable. The engagingly written stories she tells about these largely forgotten men and women also make the book a joy to read.""-Denise Z. Davidson, Georgia State University, author of France after Revolution: Urban Life, Gender, and the New Social Order ""Romantic Catholics is an original, insightful, and sophisticated book on an important topic. Its most significant contribution is to identify and analyze a group of 'Romantic Catholics' who broke from the intransigence of Restoration Catholicism to imagine ways that French Catholicism could be integrated with the modern nation-state. Carol E. Harrison uses individual lives as prisms through which to examine the tensions in the postrevolutionary French church. By including Catholic men in her discussion, she substantially broadens our understanding of gender and religion in the nineteenth century. Her use of literary sources is judicious and grounded in historical context.""-Sarah A. Curtis, San Francisco State University, author of Civilizing Habits: Women Missionaries and the Revival of French Empire ""Historians have usually treated the French Catholic Church in the nineteenth century as a bastion of reaction, seeking to roll back the changes wrought by the Revolution. Carol E. Harrison brings back to life a generation of Catholic women and men who found new spiritual resources in the Catholic tradition, and shows how they, like the early socialists of the period, expressed a longing for community in the face of a world increasingly dominated by individualist values. Clearly and engagingly written, Harrison's work demonstrates the vitality of French Catholicism in the years before Pius IX's Syllabus of Errors clearly identified the Church with opposition to change. Harrison puts her subjects in their historical context, but the issues they grappled with, including the role of women in the Church, remain burning ones today.""-Jeremy D. Popkin, T. Marshall Hahn, Jr. Professor of History, University of Kentucky"

Author Information

Carol E. Harrison is Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. She is the author of The Bourgeois Citizen in Nineteenth-Century France: Gender, Sociability, and the Uses of Emulation and coeditor of National Identity: The Role of Science and Technology.

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