The Broken Idol: Mounier, the Christian Democrats, and the Crisis Years of the Third Republic, 1934–1939

Abstract

Early in the summer of 1936 Pierre-Henri Simon, a veteran of the Esprit movement, received an urgent summons from Msgr. Chollet, the aged Archbishop of Cambrai.¹ Simon, a professor of French literature at the University of Lille as well as a teacher at the Collège of Roubaix, was received by a visibly upset prelate. Simon himself may well have expected an unpleasant meeting, for although he had long maintained fairly cordial relations with Msgr. Chollet, the Archbishop was a strict Thomist, Maurrasian in his sympathies, and was reputed to have referred to the Cardinal’s hat given his much younger and progressive suffragan, Bishop Liénart of Lille, as a “cocked hat.” When Simon was received by Msgr. Chollet, his host was holding a copy of Simon’s recently published book, Les Catholiques, la politique et l’argent. The book bore ample evidence of having been carefully read; its pages were filled with marginal notations and underlined passages. “You have written,” Simon recollects the good prelate as saying, “an absurd work which offends good sense and tact, which is going to divide Catholics a little more and weaken the position of the Church in our unhappy country.” For the next half hour the Archbishop attempted to substantiate his criticism of Simon’s book and then, finally closing the volume, he told Simon: “This said, having read you line by line, I must say that there is not a word contrary to either dogma or morality in the book and that you limit yourself in it to the order of natural opinion and disputed questions in which a Christian remains free to write nonsense.” Msgr. Chollet concluded the interview by pointing out that no ecclesiastical authority could take action of a doctrinal or disciplinary character against a Catholic layman for exercising his liberty in such matters, whether that Catholic was an intellectual, an academician, or even an army general.

L’idole est brisée, l’idole pour gens tranquilles. Le petit saint. Mounier, “Entretiens VIII, 17 mai 1935.”