Catholic Internationalists, Building Peace, and the French Connection, 1920–38: The “Democratic International” and the Legacy of the First World War.

The war service of French Catholic lay activist Marc Sangnier (1873-1950) was a hinge point in a public life that had placed him at the heart of Social Catholic networks in Europe even before 1914. From 1920 though, through his collaboration with Christian Democrats but also with non-Catholics, Sangnier helped to create a self-styled Democratic International for Peace whose primary mission was European peace and reconciliation. The resultant eye-catching series of International Democratic Peace Congresses, held across Europe from 1921-32, were more than just the work of a charismatic facilitator. Rather, through them, Sangnier and interlocutors such as German Catholic priests Magnus Jocham and Max Josef Metzger, founders of the Friedensbund Deutscher Katholiken [German Catholic Peace League], bore witness to the recent war and debated how its wounds might be bound up. Over time, Christian women and later still idealistic adolescents claimed space in these gatherings oriented towards ‘peace through youth’. A Catholic sensibility was an integral but not exclusivist element of the movement –the Catholic Mass formed part of its sacred drama. Concrete measures of recompense for the war’s wrongs – such as the staged secular Sacrifice of Reconciliation at Freiburg in 1923- showed participants’ alertness to the practical issues of reconstruction in France even at a time of economic crisis in Germany.

Between Sangnier and his interlocutors, though, rhetorical tensions and political arguments persisted. Anti-Bolshevik visions of Christendom – and adamant treaty revisionism on German participants’ part – jostled with Sangnier’s universalist French republican faith in the League of Nations. Within France, his Catholic internationalism was at odds with the Catholic chauvinism of the right-wing Action Française. Previously part of the popular enthusiasm in France in the late 1920s for Briandism and détente with Germany, Sangnier’s movement was effecting an anguished shift from pacifism to anti-fascism by 1938.