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The Catholic Church faced with the French model of secularism
Abstract
The French secular regime established appeared at the turn of late 19 th century and early 20 th century on the founding principle of the separation between state and church. This separation organized by the law of December 9 th 1905 has maintained since then. This article is questioning the reactions of the catholic Church facing this exclusion, that hit it very strongly, from the public sphere. It shows that the Roman institution has, throughout the whole past century, non remained in an unchanged posture. Two periods have followed. During the first length of time, it established a struggling relation with the republican state which lasted until the end of the third republic. Being nostalgic of the catholic state, it entirely rejected the "unfair secular laws". The second period established the church in a more open position : it acknowledged as legitimate the system of separation made by the 1905 law ; however it did not admit the principle of political subjectivity that it is based upon.
This review considers, first, current work on the Napoleonic Empire dealing with Switzerland, the three parts of ‘Germany’ (the Rhineland, the ‘Third Germany’, Prussia), Spain, and the so-called ‘national’ question(s) in these countries and regions. It next focuses on recent work on the three parts of ‘Italy’ (the Kingdom of Italy, the départements réunis, and the Kingdom of Naples). But the main body of the review concentrates on the work of Michael Broers: not only his new and remarkable conceptualization of the Empire as containing ‘inner’, ‘outer’, and ‘intermediate’ zones, but also his creative if controversial application of post-modern colonial theory to an analysis of the French in Italy. The review suggests that Broers, for all his brilliance and mastery, has perhaps pressed his arguments and conclusion beyond his evidence base. The latter, while extensive, is too limited to just French perceptions of Italians before 1815, and does not extensively consider Italian reactions to the French presence; nor does it provide significant evidence to buttress Broers's far-reaching conclusions about nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italy.
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