The Voyage into Unbelief: Leaving the Catholic Church in France 1870-1940

Today France is effectively a post-Christian nation. The majority of French no longer identifythemselves as Christian. Prior to the modern period, belief in God was largely taken for grantedin French society; the majority of French men and women participated in some form of Christianworship. But these practices have drastically changed over the last two centuries. How might weunderstand the processes through which unbelief took root in modern France even as traditionalforms of worship slowly eroded? In order to understand French religious decline, thisdissertation contextualizes the crisis at the end of the nineteenth century by making acomparative study of former Catholics who became unbelievers during the Third Republic(1870-1940). The work focuses on intellectuals not known outside of specialists in ThirdRepublic France who left testimonies, such as Hyacinthe Loyson, Albert Houtin, Alfred Loisy,André Lorulot, and Clemence Royer. This microhistorical approach studies how unbeliefbecome a part of French intellectual and political culture through the testimonies of reformingCatholics and militant atheists. The decline of religion is related largely to moral and socialshifts that caused the people’s loyalty to Catholicism to evaporate. The decline of religion inFrance was contingent and not a determined process of modernity. Science was important butmostly as a justification after the fact