Catholics, Republicanism, and the Peace Movement in France, 1821–1921

This paper analyzes the complicated relationship between Catholics and the peace movement in France during the transformative decades before the First World War. Catholics institutionally and individually kept their distance from the peace movement as it developed in France during this period, even though Catholic leaders had expressed sympathy for such pacifist goals as international arbitration and the reduction of armaments. This began to change after 1907, when a Ligue des catholiques français de la paix (LCFP) was established and grew in France and internationally until war broke out in 1914. Why had so few Catholics engaged with the growing peace movement until then, and what changed to bring the LCFP into existence? This paper considers the problem posed by the French peace movement’s pronounced republican ideology at a time when the Catholic Church found itself in conflict with the avowedly laïc and aggressively anticlerical Third Republic. French pacifists invoked the Enlightenment and Revolution as inspiration and ideological source of their principles, an association that made it difficult to attract observant Catholics to the movement. Alfred Vanderpol, founder of the LCFP, presented an alternative genealogy relating the peace movement to the scholastic tradition, thereby endowing pacifist principles with foundations theologically acceptable for devout Catholics. By 1921, with the founding of the Catholic social justice and peace activist Marc Sangnier’s Democratic International for Peace, the wartime union sacrée had altered French Catholics’ relationship with the Third Republic to make a more ecumenical approach to peace activism possible.