University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2016 Calvary Or Catastrophe? French Catholicism's First World War Arabella Leonie Hobbs University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the European History Commons, Other Languages, Societies, and Cultures Commons, and the Religion Commons Recommended Citation Hobbs, Arabella Leonie, "Calvary Or Catastrophe? French Catholicism's First World War" (2016). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2341. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2341 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2341 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Calvary Or Catastrophe? French Catholicism's First World War Abstract CALVARY OR CATASTROPHE? FRENCH CATHOLICISM’S FIRST WORLD WAR Arabella L. Hobbs Professor Gerald Prince The battlefield crucifixes that lined the Western Front powerfully connected industrialized warfare with the Christian past. This elision of the bloody corporeality of the crucifixion with the bodily suffering wrought by industrial warfare forged a connection between religious belief and modern reality that lies at the heart of my dissertation. Through the poignancy of Christ’s suffering, French Catholics found an explanatory tool for the devastation of the Great War, affirming that the blood of ther F ench dead would soon blossom in rich harvest. This dissertation argues that the story of French Catholicism and the Great War uncovers a complex and often dissonant understanding of the conflict that has become obscured in the uniform narrative of disillusionment and vain sacrifice ot emerge in the last century. Considering the thought to emerge from the French renouveau catholique from 1910 up to 1920, I argue that far from symbolizing the modernist era of nihilism, the war in fact created meaning in a world that had lost touch with its God. At the same time, my reasoning is sensitive to the manner in which the application of Catholic dogma to modern war constituted a form of resistance to the encroaching secularization of French society following the separation of the French state and the Catholic Church in 1905. Through a survey of the major authors associated with the French Catholic revival – Ernest Psichari, Francois Mauriac, L�on Bloy, Paul Claudel and Henri Massis to name but a few – this dissertation aims to recover a different account of the war in the French tradition than the now canonical visions of the conflict inspired by the novels of Barbusse, Cendrars and C�line. In particular, this study aims to question why the major players of the French Catholic revival have fallen so dramatically from the canon given the radical nature of their postulations at the beginning of the twentieth century. More broadly, it seeks to probe the persistence of the vision of the Great War held in the collective imaginary, asking why this myth repeatedly rejects alternative narratives of the conflict. In foregrounding the resurgence of faith, I suggest that French Catholicism allows us to climb out of the trenches to see an altogether different war. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Romance Languages First Advisor Gerald J. Prince Keywords Catholic, Redemption, Sacrifice, orldW War One Subject Categories European History | Other Languages, Societies, and Cultures | Religion This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2341 CALVARY OR CATASTROPHE? FRENCH CATHOLICISM’S FIRST WORLD WAR Arabella L. Hobbs ADISSERTATION in French For the Graduate Group in Romance Languages Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2016 Signature ____________________ Gerald Prince, Professor of Romance Languages Signature____________________ Andrea Goulet, Professor of Romance Languages Dissertation Committee Kevin Brownlee, Professor of Romance Languages Lydie Moudileno, Professor of Romance Languages ii Acknowledgements I have been fortunate to have the encouragement and support of a number of people over the course of this project. I am greatly indebted to my adviser, Professor Gerald Prince for his expert guidance throughout the dissertation process and I am a much more careful and accurate scholar thanks to his comments. His seminar on the early twentieth century novel in France, in particular the session devoted to François Mauriac, was the original inspiration for this dissertation. I am also grateful to my committee members Professors Lydie Moudileno and Kevin Brownlee for their enthusiasm at the proposal stage. Without Lydie’s input in particular, I would never have crossed the Atlantic to study at the University of Pennsylvania. I must also acknowledge a huge debt of gratitude to my mother and sister who have provided constant emotional, intellectual and financial support at every stage of the process. My mother’s novel the Idle Hill of Summer, based on the First World War diaries of our ancestor and Catholic convert Ralph Hamilton, Master of Belhaven & Stenton, became the guiding inspiration during the two solitary years in which I wrote the dissertation itself. Finally, I would like to dedicate this dissertation to my godfather Olivier Ferrer who died tragically earlier this year. Both French and a Catholic, his unswerving championing of my intellectual curiosity from a very young age was one of the reasons I undertook doctoral research in the first place. This accomplishment is as much his as it is mine. AH (June 2016) iii CALVARY OR CATASTROPHE? FRENCH CATHOLICISM’S FIRST WORLD WAR Arabella L. Hobbs Professor Gerald Prince The battlefield crucifixes that lined the Western Front powerfully connected industrialized warfare with the Christian past. This elision of the bloody corporeality of the crucifixion with the bodily suffering wrought by industrial warfare forged a connection between religious belief and modern reality that lies at the heart of my dissertation. Through the poignancy of Christ’s suffering, French Catholics found an explanatory tool for the devastation of the Great War, affirming that the blood of the French dead would soon blossom in rich harvest. This dissertation argues that the story of French Catholicism and the Great War uncovers a complex and often dissonant understanding of the conflict that has become obscured in the uniform narrative of disillusionment and vain sacrifice to emerge in the last century. Considering the thought to emerge from the French renouveau catholique from 1910 up to 1920, I argue that far from symbolizing the modernist era of nihilism, the war in fact created meaning in a world that had lost touch with its God. At the same time, my reasoning is sensitive to the manner in which the application of Catholic dogma to modern war constituted a form of resistance to the encroaching secularization of French society following the separation of the French state and the Catholic Church in 1905. Through a survey of the major authors associated with the French Catholic revival – Ernest Psichari, Francois Mauriac, Léon Bloy, Paul Claudel and Henri Massis to name but a few – this dissertation aims to recover a different account of the war in the French tradition than the now canonical visions of the conflict inspired by the novels of Barbusse, Cendrars and Céline. In particular, this iv study aims to question why the major players of the French Catholic revival have fallen so dramatically from the canon given the radical nature of their postulations at the beginning of the twentieth century. More broadly, it seeks to probe the persistence of the vision of the Great War held in the collective imaginary, asking why this myth repeatedly rejects alternative narratives of the conflict. In foregrounding the resurgence of faith, I suggest that French Catholicism allows us to climb out of the trenches to see an altogether different war. v Contents Acknowledgements………………………………………………….ii Abstract………………………………………………………………iii Introduction………………………………………………………….p.1 Chapter 1…………………………………………………………… p.10 Chapter 2……………………………………………………………..p.49 Chapter 3……………………………………………………………..p.79 Chapter 4……………………………………………………………..p.116 Epilogue………………………………………………………………p.154 Bibliography…………………………………………………………..p.159 1 Introduction Now I rejoice in what I am suffering for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church. Colossians 1:24 The Great War, which killed ten million people and wounded thirty-six million others, was, we are often told, catastrophic. However, faced with this instance of massive bloodletting, those who affirmed a “moral order” fundamentally rooted in a triune God whose presence is proclaimed in and through the Gospel had little difficulty in justifying this hecatomb. Instead of bemoaning the war as evidence of Nietzsche’s famous dictum that God was dead, they saw the war as a real-life Calvary in which God’s presence was writ large. Some years earlier, registering discontent with the seemingly unstoppable juggernaut of positivism, a group of French Catholic intellectuals such as J.K Huysmans and Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly had turned their gaze away from fin-de-siècle decadence towards Catholicism’s rendering of mortality and suffering. Chief amongst their proclamations was the necessity of anguish to fully