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In 1980, during his first apostolic journey to France, John Paul II addressed the crowd gathered at Bourget: “France, eldest daughter of the Church, are you faithful to the promises of your baptism?” This famous exhortation speaks to a relationship and an expectation between the papacy and France that existed at least until the early 20th century, while also indicating a loss of influence, if not prestige, of France in the Catholic world and especially with the Holy See, observable during the 20th century.
These few lines of reflection, which do not pretend to exhaust the subject, consider this ambiguous relationship, focusing on the period from the mid-19th century (the beginnings of what has been called the “Roman Question”) to the end of the 20th century: a century and a half sometimes neglected, but whose threads must be untangled in order to better understand where we stand on the eve of Pope Leo XIV’s visit to France.
In this period, two main phases can be identified. First, between the springtime of peoples in 1848 and the break in diplomatic relations with France in 1904, the papacy and France maintained a singular relationship, fundamentally shaped by the inheritance of 1789. Second, between the Separation of 1905 and World War II, the relations between the popes and France were marked by a gradual reconciliation as well as by the consequences of a slow decline in France’s influence within Catholicism. Some concluding remarks finally address the second half of the 20th century, in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, during which the Church’s centripetal pull toward the old European powers accelerated.
It should be noted that these questions have generated extensive historiography, notably linked to the gradual opening of the Holy See archives (from 1884, Leo XIII opened part of the Vatican archives, dating before 1814). From the pontificate of Pius XI, the practice of opening papal archives from pontificate to pontificate began, culminating with Pope Francis’s 2020 release of the archives of the Pius XII pontificate. Work has been carried out, in particular, at the École française de Rome in the last decades: many publications focus on the history of the papacy and its global stakes, not limited to relations with France.
1848-1904 : a singular relation, in the shadow of 1789
In the middle of the 19th century, the papacy’s relation to France inherits decades of upheaval following the French Revolution. Beyond, of course, the persecution of clergy that marked the Revolution’s most violent period, what preoccupies the popes is not primarily the change of political regime. In the 19th century, the popes spoke little on this subject, and rarely yielded to the temptation of an eschatological explanation of the fall of monarchy, as Burke or Maistre did (the latter, by contrast, reserving in his counter-revolutionary system a preeminent place for the pope).
What primarily occupied the popes during the revolutionary period and the years that followed was the preservation of the papal primacy and its authority over bishops. This is the whole stake of the conflict opened by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which can be read as much as a rupture arising from the Revolution as a continuation of a form of Gallicanism with deeper roots. Fiercely negotiated, the 1801 Concordat, even though it carried the Organic Articles that limit papal prerogatives, and despite an aborted reform attempt under the Restoration (1817), turns out to be a compromise that traverses the entire century and its various regimes, up to 1905.
However, one should not think that Rome possesses a legal appreciation of the Revolution’s consequences. The first decades of the 19th century provide the opportunity for the papacy to begin the elaboration of a doctrinal corpus on the relations between the Church and modernity, between the Church and liberalism—which, at least philosophically and politically, tends to be assimilated to the Enlightenment heritage and the French Revolution. This is how one can understand, in particular, the first condemnation of “liberal Catholicism” by Gregory XVI’s encyclical Mirari vos in 1832.
It is often assumed that 19th-century French Catholicism was a theater of opposition between liberal Catholicism and intransigence. Yet this is a misperception. It concerns rather two periods of Catholicism, which correspond to two chính tendencies. The July Monarchy and the short Second Republic are the great moment of liberal Catholicism, with a strong intellectual charge (Lamennais, Montalembert, Lacordaire, Ozanam around the journal L’Avenir).
Liberal Catholicism is not progressivism. It is resolutely ultramontane—which makes the condemnation all the more painful—and while it pleads for a strict separation of political and religious spheres, and even for the abandonment of the Concordat, this is mainly to guarantee the freedom of the Church. After Gregory XVI’s condemnation of liberalism in all its forms and of the separation of Church and State, the leaders of liberal Catholicism nevertheless continued to dominate French Catholic intelligentsia; they directed themselves toward defending several causes, the most famous of which is the defense of Catholic education.
The emergence in 1846 of Pius IX, perceived as liberal because he was elected against the candidate supported by Austria, a great Catholic conservative power in Europe’s Vienna Congress, followed by the 1848 Revolution, which was anticlerical, raised great hopes among liberal Catholics. Early 1848, as the so-called “spring of nations” began in the Kingdom of Naples and spread to the Italian peninsula, Pius IX announced the drafting of a constitution for the Papal States. But the refusal to endorse the uprising against Austrian domination led by the King of Piedmont in Northern Italy caused the pope to shift position, and to pull the King of Naples into a repressive logic that soon spread across the peninsula.
For more than twenty years, the France of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, elected President in 1848 and who became Napoleon III in 1852, acted as guarantor of the survival of a Papal State increasingly threatened by Italian unification. The intensity of military support by the Second Empire for the papacy varied with the political currents Napoleon III sought to win over in domestic politics, and with the ambiguities of his Italian policy: for in reality, the Emperor was sensitive to the cause of Italian unity, and he saw it mainly as a way to challenge Austrian preeminence and the European order stemming from the Congress of Vienna. In 1849, the dispatch of an expeditionary corps to reinstate Pius IX in Rome, who had been expelled by Giuseppe Mazzini’s “Roman Republic,” sealed the alliance between Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte and the conservatives. In 1859, while Napoleon III attempted to steer his power toward a “liberal empire,” he allied with Cavour and fought a war in Northern Italy against Austria which he abruptly halted, but which allowed Cavour, through a wave of uprisings in the peninsula, to gain numerous annexations to the Kingdom of Piedmont by plebiscite. Finely strategic, Cavour knew how to agitate Napoleon III with the Garibaldi’s Thousand expedition’s threat to the pope in May 1860 to obtain from the Emperor an agreement for a preventive occupation of the Papal States by Piedmont, and their annexation with the exception of Latium.
The Second Empire, however, continued to defend this papal State reduced to a mere shell against the Garibaldians for ten years, until the regime fell in the 1870 war: the repatriation of the French garrison to Rome allowed the Piedmontese to enter through the Porta Pia breach (a few steps from the current French Embassy to the Holy See), and the establishment in Rome of the capital of a fully unified Italy. Pius IX ordered Rome to be delivered without a battle and withdrew into the Vatican Palace, refusing to make the pope dependent on the “Laws of Guarantees” that the Italian government enacted in 1871. This marks the beginning of the “Roman Question” proper, which lasts for almost sixty years.
The 1860s, during which Pius IX appeared particularly threatened, mark the beginning of an increasingly close relationship between French Catholics and the pope. This is embodied in the deployment of Papal Zouaves to serve the pope. After the Battle of Castelfidardo, the papal army’s great defeat by the Piedmontese in 1860, the pope’s army, commanded by General de Lamoricière, from a Nantes-based monarchist family, benefited from an unprecedented international confessional mobilization that enabled the organization of a battalion and then a regiment of Papal Zouaves. Between 1860 and the regiment’s disbandment in 1870, 10,000 volunteers joined the Papal Zouaves, from twenty-five nationalities, predominantly Dutch, French, and Belgian. In France, all departments participated, but Brittany, particularly the Diocese of Nantes, was the major supplier of the Zouaves (ahead of Northern France). The Battle of Mentana in 1867 was the great victory of the Zouaves against the Garibaldians (and indeed the only one, as the Zouaves spent most of their time waiting for the opportunity to fight…).
Behind the Papal Zouaves’ military engagement, there is a multifarious commitment of French Catholics behind the pope and his temporal power, a spiritual commitment, but also a financial one (with the 1859 revival of the Peter’s Pence). It is truly around Pius IX’s figure (including in a very concrete way, with the dissemination of his image and messages, made possible by modern technologies) that the construction of a papacy revered and omnipresent in the Catholic world becomes evident, which Philippe Boutry called the “movement toward Rome.”
In France, this is the moment when a synthesis forms between a counter-revolutionary heritage, ultramontanism, opposition to liberalism and secularization, which comes to be called “intransigence” or “intransigent Catholicism” (the term defined by Émile Poulat), which progressively becomes dominant in French Catholicism in the second half of the 19th century. The perception of the pope as a sovereign on a threatened throne is fundamental. Figures like Louis Veuillot, editor of the newspaper L’Univers, who did not possess the intellectual heft of the great leaders of “liberal Catholicism,” emerge from the shadow and become the voices for defending the “Pope-King.” In return, Pius IX frequently spoke about France and explicitly approved many of Louis Veuillot’s positions.
With Pius IX, one also finds this strong conviction that the papacy is besieged by a monarchy, Piedmont, liberal and anti-clerical (this is the coloring Cavour wanted to give it in the 1850s to secure the collaboration of the Northern Italian bourgeoisie in the unification around Piedmont); Piedmont embodies modernity in all its condemnable aspects, and essentially the legacy of 1789. The confrontation between the Holy See and liberal Italy is a fundamental explanation for the intransigent dimension that the papacy assumed from the second half of the 19th century, and at least until the early 20th century. And the France’s third position, both in Napoléon III’s official power, who played hot and cold with the Papal States, and in French Catholicism which evolved toward an increasingly marked ultramontanism, also had a major influence on shaping the pope’s political thought.
Thus the publication of the famous Syllabus as an appendix to the encyclical Quanta cura in December 1864 (which lists several dozen propositions condemning modernity, liberalism and the Revolution’s heritage, already published in earlier papal documents) must be understood in part within the context of the “Roman Question.” Although prepared over a decade, the publication of the Syllabus is a direct reaction to the conclusion, three months earlier, of a Franco-Italian agreement foreseeing (without consulting Pius IX) a gradual withdrawal of French troops who still protected what remained of the Papal State. Moreover, Napoleon III forbids the public reading of the text, which is seen as an attack on his regime and policy. The Syllabus, furthermore, appears to intransigent Catholics as a confirmation of their commitments and, due to the rift its reception creates in French Catholicism, is often described as the true birth certificate of Catholic intransigence, in opposition to liberal positions condemned once again.
The Syllabus, which becomes a true charter of Catholic intransigence in France by the late 19th century, does not function solely as a deterrent freezing Catholic positions into a unilateral rejection of modernity. It also triggers, under the Third Republic, a dynamic of intellectual, political, and social innovations through which Catholicism seeks its own response to the “errors of modernity.” This is especially the case with “Catholic social teaching,” a response rooted in intransigence, often legitimist, to social changes stemming from the industrial revolution but also a response to the fear of revolution sparked by the Paris Commune (1871). The experiences and reflections of “social Catholics” from Belgium, Switzerland, Germany and especially France, are the origin of the encyclical Rerum novarum (1891), a foundational stone of what is today called the Church’s social doctrine.
The distinction we often make, for the period we are interested in, between popes who are diplomats or realists and popes who are intransigent, must be nuanced. Intransigence is then, in Rome as well, a doctrinal undercurrent in relation to liberal modernity. What changes is the question of whether it should be attacked directly (as Pius IX, or to some extent Pius X, in 1906-1907) or indirectly, through a bottom-up reconquest of society via charitable works (the strategy favored by Leo XIII or Pius XI). And here again the relationship with France is a fundamental indicator. Leo XIII is far from a liberal pope. He restates the posture developed by Pius IX of the ‘prisoner in the Vatican.’ The “movement toward Rome” is confirmed under his pontificate; the multiplication of pilgrimages, facilitated by the expansion of railways, is also a way for pilgrims to show their attachment to the pope, to occupy the Rome stripped by the Kingdom of Italy and to remind its role as the capital of Catholicism.
However, while he shows inflexibility toward the Kingdom of Italy, Leo XIII adopts a pragmatic stance toward France. Well informed, he receives many visitors from France, whether “social Catholics” marked by legitimacy or Catholic intellectuals with liberal convictions (Étienne Lamy, Ferdinand Brunetière). Since 1879, the Republicans had taken power in France, after nearly a decade of monarchist rule that failed to restore the monarchy. The death of the principal claimant, the Count of Chambord, in 1883, followed by repeated electoral victories of the Republican camp, permanently removed the possibility of restoration. For nearly forty years, the right was kept out of power. The Republicans accomplished in the 1880s a substantial program that included the secularization of society and, first of all, education.
Throughout the Third Republic, anticlericalism (which, moreover, in the 1880s mainly took the form of anti-congregationalism) appears as the cement of a Republican bloc whose options, for the rest, were increasingly diverse. In the 1890s, the development of political currents with more ambitious social aims—the Radicals and even the Socialists—splits the Republican camp, some moderates being pushed toward the center.
Symmetrically, some Catholics, still very much a minority, consider that unconditional opposition to the regime is sterile and that integration into political life, through alliances with moderates, is necessary in the face of social danger. This evolution that Leo XIII seeks to promote by encouraging the “reconciliation” of Catholics with the Republic, notably through the encyclical Au milieu des sollicitudes (1892), faithful to the thinking of his predecessors who never showed a preference for the monarchic regime but were concerned to give Catholics a capacity for political action. Yet the call for “reconciliation” was poorly received by the majority of Catholics engaged in politics, who preferred to withdraw from the parliamentary arena rather than disobey the pope, some engaging in social action instead.
What to take from this second half of the 19th century? First, a strong bond, for better or worse, between France and the popes, without an equivalent elsewhere in the contemporary era. The pope plays an important role in French policy. He becomes increasingly present in French Catholicism as ultramontanism, nourished among other things by the image of a martyred sovereign, triumphed. In return, France is present in papal audiences and in the popes’ thinking, and this is a major factor in understanding the development of the papal position toward modernity, which, paradoxically, in a sense leads to the Church’s social doctrine.
1905-1945 : From Separation to Reconciliation, an Eroding Influence
The first half of the 20th century, opening with the separation of Church and State, is marked instead by a distancing from France and a loss of influence in the Catholic world. The Dreyfus Affair definitively closes the era of the “reconciliation” mood of the 1890s. It triggers a new strong polarization between the left-wing republican and the nationalist right. As a consequence, among other things, due to the loud anti-Dreyfusism (and of course often anti-Semitic) by certain Catholic voices and press organs (notably those of the Augustinians of the Assumption), anticlericalism becomes a fundamental element of the left-wing coalitions that have governed France since 1899.
We witness a renewed virulence in policy, again primarily aimed at congregations. This is the case with the 1901 law, which provides for freedom for all associations, except religious congregations, which must obtain government authorization—refused in the vast majority of cases. The arrival to power in 1902 of a radical majority (the Bloc des Gauches), led by Prime Minister Émile Combes, results in a very strict interpretation of the law, the closing of many schools and the departure of many congregations into exile.
Émile Combes reuses the theme of the separation of Church and State, dear to the radical majority, which harkens back to the French Revolution and the Paris Commune. Initially, however, it is mainly a mobilizing theme and a means to pressure the pope. What Combes sought in 1902-1903, instead of separation, was to use the Concordat as a more effective means of controlling the Church, and in particular episcopal appointments. He aimed to forcibly abolish the traditional arrangements for government-Vatican conciliation that had existed since the early 19th century, what is called the “prior entente” for the appointment of bishops, and to impose a more radical version of the government’s right of nomination as interpreted by the Organic Articles, with the pope in this interpretation only granting canonical investiture.
Combes engages in a showdown with Pius X from 1902, unilaterally appointing or moving bishops; the pope refuses to yield and to confer investitures. Relations with the Holy See deteriorate until 1904. Combes deliberately triggers a diplomatic incident by allowing the visit to Rome of the French President Émile Loubet (as part of a policy of alliances orchestrated by Foreign Minister Théophile Delcassé aimed at isolating Germany): it was the first time since 1870 that a Catholic head of state visited the King of Italy in Rome, without a visit to the pope. That same year, Pius X summoned to Rome two French bishops, one of whom was openly a republican, so they could defend themselves in matters of morals or administration: Émile Combes demanded the withdrawal of the summons, which he deemed contrary to the concordat, the Holy See refused, the government announced the rupture of diplomatic relations, the French embassy to the Holy See was closed and the apostolic nuncio left Paris. Combes kept pressing, hoping to force Pius X to yield, the threat of separation, even after his departure from power in January 1905. In this sense, the separation of Church and State became a reality, carried by its own momentum.
The 1905 law is now regarded as a monument of the French legal system, recognizing major principles. First, in its Article 1, it guarantees freedom of worship. It is essential to recall that it begins thus: it is by virtue of this principle that the government is compelled to do everything to allow the organization of Catholic worship even though, at first, the Church refuses the law. And then Article 2 of the law states the absence of recognition and funding of worship by public authorities. The 1905 law does not create laicism (indeed the word is absent from the text, and only becomes common usage between the wars); it completes a process of progressive secularization begun twenty-five years earlier.
It is essential not to forget that the 1905 law has always been the subject of divergent interpretations, between the maximalist reading at debates by some on the left and far left, who want to use the law as a tool to weaken or even dissolve the Catholic Church, and a liberal interpretation that emphasizes freedom of worship and seeks, as far as possible, to make the law acceptable to the Church. It is this second interpretation, through Aristide Briand, the rapporteur of the text, that prevails in the law’s wording. As for the spirit of the text, however, the two interpretations have continued to oppose each other in various ways, navigating sometimes unexpectedly between political sensibilities, up to the present day. This is why it is prudent not to claim to possess a single, unambiguous definition of what we now call “laïcité”: what a historian can offer is precisely an historicization of this complex concept, highlighting the diversity of its interpretations and evolutions in history.
The reason Pius X firmly rejects the text is not primarily the unilateral rupture of the Concordat it represents (which opponents present as a “divorce”). It is indeed the heart of the text and the establishment of the “cult associations,” which are the core of the text, that the pope refuses. In addition to the abolition of the worship budget, the main objective of the 1905 law is to shift the legal organization of worship from public law (under the regime of “establishments of worship,” in force since the Concordat) to the law of associations, the “establishments of worship” being replaced by special associations, called “cultual,” which would succeed them. The question of maintaining episcopal authority over these associations, which would be composed of lay people, is at the heart of the 1905 debates.
In the encyclical Vehementer Nos, published in February 1906, Pius X condemns these associations, stating that the rights of hierarchical authority are then not guaranteed at all. The year 1906 unfolds in heated debates; most bishops and Catholic intelligentsia, acknowledging Pius X’s principled condemnation, nonetheless favored a practical accommodation given the risk of losing most of the Church’s goods in the absence of cultual associations to receive them. In May 1906, at Pius X’s demand, the first plenary assembly of the French episcopate (such meetings were excluded under the Concordat) took place and it spoke in favor of attempting canonically legal associations, i.e., cultual associations that would guarantee episcopal authority and conform to canon law. But Pius X preferred to condemn any such conciliation in a second encyclical, Gravissimo officii, in August 1906. The Catholic Church enters nearly twenty years in a kind of legal vacuum, and it loses a large portion of its goods in the process.
Pius X was particularly influenced by French intransigence, which exerted a strong influence on him. The pope was an avid reader of Mgr. Pie, the late bishop of Poitiers, a great defender of papal infallibility and a figure of intransigence; he sometimes quotes his writings verbatim in his homilies. The period 1904-1907 also marks the pivot of the Modernist Crisis: the encyclical Pascendi, condemning the use of historical-critical methods for biblical study, dates from 1907. All of this is connected in the mind of Pius X and his intransigent interlocutors: in his view, France around 1900 is once again sinking, and even more radically than under Pius IX, into secularism, naturalism, scientism, and it is essential to preserve the Church from it.
We enter at least a decade of intellectual hardening of the Magisterium, characterized by the anti-modernist struggle. The so‑called “Integrist” current that forms during this period (studied by Émile Poulat) has roots in radical intransigence and is not without political ties to Action Française. It should be recalled that Action Française played a significant mobilizing role in the demonstrations against the inventories of church property in early 1906 in Paris, which convinced the pope to publish Vehementer Nos. These networks intersect, notably within the French circle around Pius X. The intransigence demonstrated by the Magisterium gives rise, during this decade, to divisions within the clergy and among Catholic intellectuals in France, between those who support it and those who lament it.
World War I, even though Benedict XV’s peace appeals, often viewed as pro-German, were poorly received even among Catholics, was a period of national reconciliation forged in the crucible of war, sealing the integration of Catholics into the Republic. The religious quarrel does not regain the central place it had during the previous period (the anticlerical politics of the Cartel des Gauches in 1924, marked by attempts to apply separation to Alsace-Moselle and to break diplomatic relations with the Holy See again, stands as an exception but faced strong opposition from conservative Catholics, grouped in the National Catholic Federation of General de Castelnau).
Indeed, the 1919 election of a center-right majority (the National Bloc) enables a policy of religious pacification marked by tolerance for the return of congregations, and above all by the restoration of diplomatic relations between France and the Holy See in 1920-1921. This revival leads in 1924 to an agreement on the legal status of the Church in France, based on the creation of “diocesan associations” (which could have been possible, and had been envisaged, within the 1906 framework of “canonico-legales”), and on the Pope granting a so‑called “prior notification” procedure replacing the “preliminary entente” in the appointment of bishops.
Under Pius XI, the atmosphere appears to be one of reconciliation with the Republic, what some historians have called the “second reconciliation,” notably marked by the condemnation of Action Française in 1926 – a painful event, but often accepted in obedience by the Catholics concerned. Pius XI’s pontificate corresponds to a long period of concord with France regarding official relations, especially around the theme of peace, particularly when Aristide Briand serves as Foreign Minister (nearly irremovable in the 1920s). Briand pursued a resolute policy of religious appeasement and Franco-German reconciliation, making him a particularly valued interlocutor of apostolic nuncios, Bonaventura Cerretti and Luigi Maglione.
Yet Pius XI remained a pope marked by intransigence. His pontificate was structured around a broad political theology under the figure of Christ the King. The goal was to secure a Christian reconquest of society, but from the bottom up, through works, especially through the development of Catholic Action, which became a major axis of the pontificate. Pius XI advocated for a strict autonomy of the religious sphere from the political sphere, in the context of an ever-stronger assertion of the papal power and its autonomy from the States. Under Pius XI, the Holy See knew how to leverage both the loss of temporal power and the reconfiguration of the post-World War I international order and the rise of multilateralism to assert itself as a moral and diplomatic power without equal, capable of negotiating on equal terms with states. Cardinal Gasparri, secretary of state under Benedict XV and then Pius XI, made extensive use of the new Code of Canon Law (1917) as a common law binding on states and guaranteeing papal prerogatives, which now underpins the many concordats signed with states.
This evolution of the Holy See at the start of the 20th century, which eluded French diplomacy, gave rise to a misunderstanding when relations were resumed. The Quai d’Orsay in the 1920s remained dependent on a concordat mentality that pushed it to hope that, with diplomatic relations, it would be possible to have the Holy See ratify a number of decisions, and thus a form of control over the Catholic hierarchy. These hopes were most often disappointed. Moreover, for interwar diplomatic relations, many of the most important issues concerned colonial and missionary spaces in general—and it is by considering these spaces that one can grasp France’s position’s weakening.
Indeed, from the end of the 19th century, talking about France means more than Paris and the metropolis; for the Holy See this is fundamental: there is the colonial space proper, whose structure under the Third Republic favors missionary settlement; beyond the colonial space itself, there are the cohorts of missionaries, men and women: one Catholic missionary in two in the world was French in 1900. Finally, there is the “Catholic protectorate” of France, whose origins are obscure and increasingly contested by other powers (notably Italy), under which France claims to ensure “consular protection” for Catholics of all rites, in the Ottoman Empire and in the Far East. The Third Republic, despite secular legislation, and even after the 1905 law, continued to rely on this formidable tool of influence that overseas missionary presence and the “Catholic protectorate” provide.
But this ambiguous attitude meets two obstacles in the first half of the 20th century: first, the rapid decline in the proportion of French missionaries, the primary cause being the closure of training houses prompted by the 1901 law, and also the carnage of the Great War. The second obstacle: the evolution of the Holy See’s own attitude, which seeks to centralize missionary organization under its authority (as indeed the entire Church does, on the foundation of the Code of Canon Law). It becomes increasingly critical of the convergence between mission and colonization that emerged at the turn of the century (the historian Claude Prudhomme speaks of a “nationalization of missions”). It is already the subject of the apostolic letter Maximum illud (1919) denouncing the nationalism of French missionaries.
The centralization in Rome of French missionary works (including the Work for the Propagation of the Faith, the main fundraising body for missions on a global scale) within a new ad hoc structure, the Pontifical Missionary Works (1922), was received with great resistance by the French government and stands as clear testimony to France’s loss of influence in the missionary world, and to the new freedom acquired by the Holy See. But was such a decision contestable? Since the war, donations collected in France no longer represented the majority within the Works’ funds, with Americans becoming the majority. More generally, from the interwar period to the present, American Catholic influence on the Holy See has progressively consolidated, notably through financial mobilization via powerful organizations like the Knights of Columbus.
In the final analysis, the first half of the 20th century marks a turning point in the relations between France and the papacy. While for Catholics the “movement toward Rome” ends, in a context of unprecedented centralization of the Church around the pope, institutionally France’s position weakens, secular legislation permanently preventing it from maintaining a place in the Catholic world that, paradoxically, the Quai d’Orsay would have liked to preserve.
Since 1945: a preoccupation that has become a concern
A few quick words, which will serve as a conclusion, about the period that follows World War II, which is perhaps better known. Two ideas: since the war, France remains the object of the popes’ concern, but this concern is also a worry.
The theme of a “Christian vocation” of France, already present under Leo XIII, becomes more and more present in the popes’ discourse as France’s secularization deepens and seems to render this “vocation” less obvious. Pius XII speaks of it willingly, and this even before his pontificate. If he did not visit France as pope, Cardinal Pacelli, then Secretary of State, was sent twice on official visits as papal nuncio, in 1935 to Lourdes, and in 1937 to Lisieux and Paris, during which the cardinal delivered a memorable sermon at Notre-Dame on France’s vocation.
John Paul II, who ascended to the papal throne while France was plunged into the “Catholic crisis” (Denis Pelletier) characterized by a lasting decline in practice (as the historian Guillaume Cuchet has recently shown) and an acceleration of secularization, repeatedly returned to this theme of France’s vocation during his seven apostolic visits on French soil, including the term “elder daughter of the Church.” It is also notable that this famous expression is not without political connotations: a contemporary transposition of the title of “eldest son of the Church,” which had spread in modern times to refer to the King of France, the expression “elder daughter” circulated in Catholic discourse to designate France, at the moment of the secular policy of the early Third Republic.
The relationship between French Catholicism and the popes is also intellectual, especially with John XXIII (who was deeply embedded in intellectual circles when he was a nuncio in Paris after the war) and even more so with Paul VI, personally linked to many figures of the “new theology” or the milieu of the “Sources chrétiennes” (Congar, Bouyer, but also Guitton, Gilson and Maritain, who, as ambassador to the Holy See in 1945, notably with the founding of the Centre Saint-Louis, embodied this intellectual and cultural dimension of France–Holy See relations).
In 1964, between two sessions of the council, Paul VI, visiting Saint-Louis-des-Francais, declared that “France is the forge where the intellectual bread of Christendom is baked.” In reality, all the popes mentioned here have a form of cultural, intellectual and even linguistic proximity to France, which Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI), elected as an associate member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in 1992, still embodies prominently. But it must be acknowledged that the situation is no longer the same today.
After the war, France was also a subject of concern for the pope, while secularization made him a figure viewed with more distance or even hostility, including among some Catholics. The 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s were times of polarization that French Catholicism embodied particularly well, including as regards the papal relationship: from the condemnation of worker-priests (1954) to the formation of a Catholic liberalism within trade unions and Catholic Action (notably during the Algerian War), up to the reactions to Vatican II, including the foundation of the Society of Saint Pius X (1970), the pope’s figure was venerated or rejected (or both, in a way, by the Lefebvrite movement).
But starting with the encyclical Humanae Vitae (1968) which condemns contraception, which was very poorly received by many Catholics, including members of the clergy, it is bioethics that became the source of fundamental disagreement: from civil unions to “marriage for all,” which caused a mini-diplomatic crisis during President Hollande’s term and Pope Francis’s pontificate; from abortion to assisted suicide, to which Leo XIV might allude.
The split represented by these questions is visible in the relations between France and the Holy See, but more broadly in the relationship between the Church and French society, which, like most Western societies, becomes more and more distant from the moral reference points advocated by the papacy and the hierarchical Church in its majority. But in the smaller remainder of French Catholicism, within which the sensitivity that Yann Raison du Cleuziou called the “observants” tends to be perceived as dominant, the importance of the pope’s figure and the ambition to remain faithful to his teaching, particularly in moral matters, remain markers.
Since 2013, as popes who are not from Europe take the chair, and as the globalization of the Church—already germinating mid‑20th century—accelerates, the papacy seems to decentralize its attention away from old Catholic powers, including France. It is hard to imagine that the France–Holy See relationship will regain the centrality it once had in the pontifical magisterium a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago. While the Holy See and France generally avoid official expressions of their disagreements, they highlight a number of geopolitical convergences, on ecology, on peace (especially in the Middle East, where France’s influence, though waning, still plays a role), and on defending international law under threat from American presidential policy. In this context, it will be interesting to watch, in the speeches Leo XIV will deliver, the two faces of the France–Holy See relationship: perhaps its elder daughter, but certainly not the most faithful, as Pope Francis’s ironic remark suggests.