Will France be the battleground for the future of Christian society?

A little over twenty years ago, French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin issued a defiant “non” to his nation’s participation in the Iraq War. Hawkish Americans turned against our old ally, against whom some of my countrymen already needed little excuse to begin with. A North Carolina restaurant renamed America’s favorite side item the aforementioned “Freedom” Fries. Three congressional cafeterias followed suit, and it became a meme. A spokeswoman for the French Embassy reminded her host countrymen that fries actually originated in Belgium, but on s’en fout. Who cares?

More comical expressions of anti-French sentiment proliferated in the early 2000’s, including a WWE tag team of René Duprée and Sylvain Grenier called La Résistence, who had a poodle mascot and took heat as undesirable foreign heels in the vein of the Iron Sheik and Nikolai Volkoff. In one memorable segment on Monday Night Raw, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin drove to the ring in a four-wheeler and gave an all-American comeuppance in front of a roaring crowd to the faux Frenchies, both of whom are actually Canadian.

The French turned out to be right about Iraq, and I say so as someone immensely grateful for the sacrifices our troops made there anyway; but I’ve never countenanced any French ridiculing, even when things were less clear. Part of my family ancestry, including my surname, is French, and I first visited the country in 1994, shortly after my parents divorced and my father was living in Italy. In fact, it was in France that I got my first taste of Catholicism in what I think is the first cathedral I ever visited: Notre-Dame de Reims in Champagne country, followed the next day by the more famous Notre-Dame in the capital.

In 2001, a couple of years before Americans started spitting out their Puligny-Montrachet in a fit of pique, I graduated from college with a degree in French, and I planned to move to France to teach English before I was unexpectedly afforded the opportunity to study in England instead. Nonetheless, I travelled to France several times during this period, came back to the States and taught French at a high school for a few years, and I even proposed to my now-wife in front of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris in July 2005. Sadly, I haven’t been back since then.

Now, not only as a Francophile but as a Catholic, I can’t wait to finally get back to L’Hexagone and try to figure out this place that vexes many of my countrymen. American stereotypes of the French include their rudeness, their loose sexual mores, their obtuse artistic sensibility, and their excessive penchant for striking. Lately, I have even caught wind among members of the intellectual Right in America that the excesses of Liberalism are all France’s fault. If not for that pervert Foucault, there might not be a rainbow flag hanging from the White House!

I’m not so sure.

For my part, I’ve come to think France may instead be the battleground for the future of Christian society in many nations, including my own.

A little historical background may help explain how I arrive here.

Throughout English and Continental literature, there is a recurring motif of “the world upside down,” which may have its richest expression in sixteenth-century France. As the Wars of Religion raged, the most notable authors in French literature – not always altogether exemplary Catholics, by the way – proposed again and again in their works that the struggle for the soul of France was simply unnatural. France was Catholic! The zany, anti-clericalist version of this narrative came from François Rabelais. The beautiful, institutional lament came from Pierre de Ronsard. The epic, apocalyptic vision came from Agrippa d’Aubigné.

France was unique in this era: It was unlike German lands, which ended up permanently divided between Protestants and Catholics; it was unlike England, whose Reformation superimposed Protestantism on top of its old Catholic framework; and it was unlike Spain and Italy, which never had to contend with any serious, direct assault on the Church. For most of the sixteenth century, France had a strong Protestant contingent among the nobility and intellectual classes, and perhaps an even stronger accompanying reform movement within Catholicism, led by the intellectuals in the purview of Marguerite de Navarre, sister of King Francis I. But it did not last.

In the infamous bloodbath in Paris on 24 and 25 August 1572, Huguenot leaders were assassinated and French Protestantism receded. By 1598 things had cooled off a bit, and King Henry IV (himself a former Protestant) issued the Edict of Nantes, granting minority rights to the what was left of the Protestants. But in 1685, King Louis XIV revoked the Edict, declaring Protestantism illegal, thereby driving off the remaining French Huguenots to Britain, Holland, the Colonies, and other more tolerant climes. In any event – and surely for all kinds distasteful reasons I will not explore here – Catholicism had prevailed. To be French meant to belong to the Church, full stop. Neither the philosophes, nor La Terreur, nor Napoleon, nor the Commune would be quite able to pull the relationship apart again.

But here’s where Americans get confused. In the twentieth century, France became officially secular – laïque. But even then, as Pierre Manent argues so brilliantly in his book Beyond Radical Secularism, it was a Catholic secularism. Why? Because “society,” Manent says, “can never be ‘neutral.’” He continues, “French secularity has not neutralized French society as to religion; it has remained a society of a Christian mark, stamped mainly but not exclusively by Catholic Christianity, including also significant Protestant and Jewish elements.” Until very recently, Manent explains, even wildly divergent ideologues “shared the same France, even if they did not see it in the same light.”

To Manent, the crisis for France’s “secular” identity has come from the large influx of Muslim immigrants who have for generations rejected even the pretense of a neutral public square. Michel Houellebecq has explored the implications of this in his 2015 novel Submission, which is one of the most riveting books of the current century.

In his disturbing vision of a French polity suddenly overtaken by Islamists, Houellebecq evokes Manent’s point about the impossibility of a pluralism not rooted in a dominant religious culture. Joseph Ratzinger thought the same thing. In a wonderful little book called Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Christianity, and Islam (Basic Books, 2007), he wrote, “multiculturalism cannot survive without common foundations, without the sense of direction offered by our own values.” If Catholicism fails, something else will succeed.

In America, we’re coming to our senses and rightly freaking out about how the sudden onset of “woke” looks increasingly like a return of the enchantments of Molech and the rest of Yahweh’s old enemies. But the sense I get among many of my fellow Americans is that we see our country as the last bastion of true religion in a once great West, compounding the urgency of our fight against the competing gods. France, of all places, is emblematic of capitulation and decline, and not just because of World War II – an ever-developing punchline, of which the Freedom Fries of two decades ago were just the set-up. They need us, not we them. They’re secular, while we’re still religious.

But France’s struggle is much older than ours, and they have dealt with an upside-down world for centuries. What if France’s vestige of a whole culture centered on the Church – its few living roots buried down somewhere – may actually be a stronger force for evangelism to a deeply humbled Church worldwide than the always and only aspirational Christian ethos of the United States? What if the old cultural Christianity, however beleaguered, turns out to be the place we must turn now in light of our sudden realization that our faith cannot survive as one option among many?

For a place that claims much higher church attendance than France (Quel désastre!), America feels increasingly like a place where our denominational fragmentation has offered thousands of doors left cracked open for the enemies of the Gospel to stick in a big boot and push themselves in.

By contrast, France has an enormous Muslim population. There is the usual array of secular idols. There’s a lot of much-caricatured existential anguish about nothingness. And then there’s the Catholic Church, with very low Mass attendance, yes; but it is also instantiated in the most glorious buildings ever made on earth, placed so firmly at the center of French society of the past that by a miracle of God’s grace, neither the Reformation nor the Revolution, neither the Nazis nor the Nihilists, could destroy it.

And although I am no expert on the state of Church hierarchy in France or anywhere else (more willfully ignorant, actually), how can I be anything other than hopeful when I notice along with every other Catholic commentator that this year’s annual pilgrimage from Paris to Chartres was full beyond capacity, and covered by the national media in France? Gérard Leclerc proposes that the event may be an “antidote to decivilization” and a sign that Pope Benedict XVI’s hoped for “reform of the reform” may be possible (readers of French, don’t miss his whole analysis here).

Likewise, it’s worth noting that the new French Right is making Catholicism an essential part of its political messaging. Eric Zemmour, who is a secular Jew of Algerian background, repeatedly noted in his presidential campaign last year that France and the Catholic Church are still inextricably linked, rising and falling together. As Rod Dreher noticed at the time, even the most public of our usually private or merely performative Christian politicians in America would be unlikely to deliver a Christmas message like this one from Zemmour in 2021.

Finally, how about the recent story of a young Catholic man simply known as Henri, who was traveling around France visiting cathedrals, and suddenly had an opportunity to stop a deranged Syrian asylum seeker from stabbing children at a park in the gorgeous city of Annecy? (This video is disturbing, but tells the story succinctly.) Marion Maréchal, another figure of the French Right, congratulated the providential protector, declaring on Twitter, “Thank you Henri, pilgrim touring the cathedrals of France, who intervened attempting to save these children. Thank you for this courage! We are all very grateful.” (Translation mine.)

Yes, thank you, Henri. And maybe we should all be a little more grateful for France itself, the eldest daughter of the Church, courageously shouldering a heavier load in our civilizational struggle than many of us recognize.

No Freedom Fries for me, merci beaucoup.