The Paraplegics of Virtue: Mounier as a Critic of Christian Democracy, 1932–1934

Abstract

Shortly after Emmanuel Mounier’s death, a controversy took place in the pages of Témoignage Chrétien, the progressive Catholic weekly founded during the Resistance. It was triggered by Henri Marrou who had paid heartfelt tribute to Mounier as a témoin.¹ Mounier’s influence, Marrou contended, was so profound that its true nature and extent could be discerned only with the aid of historical perspective. In the first decade of the century, Marrou explained, French Catholicism consisted largely of “little chapels” in which a Léon Bloy or a Charles Péguy prophesized in solitude, a few discouraged or suspect “liberal milieux,” and, most important, “the ghetto of the bien-pensants.” Contaminated by money, the bourgeois spirit, and the neo-paganism of Action Française, French Catholics looked upon Taine, Barrès, Maurras, and even Drumont as great thinkers. They were excluded from contemporary life, from political life, and from the main movements of art and science. All of this had to be recalled, Marrou stated, in order to appreciate fully the great historic revival which put an end to the tendency of French Catholicism to immigrate to its own interior and which destroyed the walls of the ghetto: “in this movement, Emmanuel Mounier was one of the most powerful influences and Esprit a center of ralliement.”

Mardi soir, conférence aux Sillonistes. Pauvres pâles généreux débris épuisés de douceur...

Mounier, “Entretiens VIII, 8 juin 1934.”