What’s happened to French Catholic

literature?
Arabella Byrne
12 December, 2019

There was a time when the names of French Catholic writers sprang easily to mind. If pressed,
most could identify, say, François Mauriac, Georges Bernanos or Paul Claudel as exemplars of a
fiction that held the themes of grace, redemption and suffering at its core.

Dimly recalled nowadays, these writers formed part of an intellectual movement known as the
renouveau catholique, or Catholic Revival, that swept across French letters from the late 19th up
to the mid 20th century, partly in response to increasing secularisation and partly to the world
wars. Not that Mauriac made it any easier, of course, by famously stating: “I am not a Catholic
novelist. I am a novelist who happens to be Catholic.”

Unlike their Anglophone counterparts, for whom Catholicism practically underwrote their appeal
in the 1930s, French Catholic novelists publicised themselves as incidental Catholics. Not for the
French, Waugh, Burgess or even Spark’s explicit labelling of themselves as Catholics as a means
to boost their literary appeal. Novels such as Mauriac’s masterful The Viper’s Knot (1932)
pursued the novel’s demands for realism and irony first, Catholicism second.

If the middle decades of the 20th century proved infertile ground for French Catholic writing,
then what kind of engagement with Christianity is reflected in the work of contemporary French
writers such as Michel Houellebecq and Leïla Slimani?

Certainly, by the end of the 20th century, struggles with conservative Catholicism, the clerical
scandals of the 1990s and other cultural forces had brought France to its status as a “post-
Catholic” nation, a fate generally accepted in much contemporary writing. Self-conscious
Catholic literature is thin on the ground in the 21st century but not entirely extinct.

Perhaps what distinguishes French Catholic literature these days is the belief that literature and
theology have something to say to each other; the idea that prayer book and paperback novel,
Good Book and comic book, can be brought into conversation with each other.

But has the peculiar literary-religious climate that produced the French Catholic revival
disappeared altogether like a waft of incense? Is it faintly absurd to talk about a French Catholic
novelist in this day and age? As early as 1949, Mauriac announced that Catholic literature was if
not dead, then fundamentally “broken”. André Malraux prophetically declared in the mid 20th
century that literature would either be religious or not religious at all, admitting no reconciliation
between literature and Christianity. And perhaps he was right. Very few late 20th-century French
writers seem willing to label themselves as Catholics, though they use the spiritual as a means of
appealing to a broader audience. Of this number, Sylvie Germain stands out, her spiritual
meditations Les échos du silence (1996) and biography of Auschwitz inmate Etty Hillesum
(1999) providing a kind of mystical literature for a nation wary of explicit religious writing.

Who better to turn to, then, than François Taillandier? He is a laureate of the Association des
Ecrivains Catholiques de langue française and author of L’écriture du monde, a historical trilogy
set in the 6th century AD. He has written countless novels, including Anielka (1999), which won
the Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française. He is a self-confessed Catholic and member
of the aforementioned académie.

Rather than use his writing to create a bulwark against modernity, Taillandier allows the
oppositions that have plagued modern Catholic writing to sit alongside each other, however
uncomfortably.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in his most recent offering, François, roman (2019), an
autobiographical portrait of his young self in the Catholic heartlands of the Auvergne in the
1950s and 60s. He was jolted into self-examination by a photograph of his boyish self: “This
boy, it’s definitely me; but perhaps foremost it’s him, the boy from whom time has estranged
me.” Taillandier embarks upon an anecdotal journey through his past in which the doctrinal
pressures of Catholicism jostle with the seismic shocks of May ’68, Vatican II and beyond.

Like Bernanos before him in Journal d’un curé de campagne (1937) and Grands Cimetières sous
la lune (1938), Taillandier sees his childhood as an inscription of Catholicism onto the landscape
of France itself, his cradle Catholicism indistinct from the contours of the Auvergne, stretching
back to “la Gaule Romaine” itself.

In interviews, Taillandier, softly spoken in middle age, comes across as a thoroughly modern
Catholic, prepared to admit the gaps in his catechism, even going so far as to call himself un
mauvais chrétien (a bad Christian). In 2007 he affirmed his re-engagement with the Catholicism
of his youth, in Le Figaro, in response to what he described as stifling technocratic and capitalist
horizons. His devout and subtle reading of the Gospels, Jesus (2016), teases out a self-portrait of
a writer whom the modern world has ironically pushed closer to, rather than further from, God.

Quietly admitting to a preference for Matthew, Mark and Luke over John, in whose insistence
upon Jesus’s word he finds little room for self-interrogation, Taillandier brings his novelist’s eye
to the Gospels, admiring the dramatic expanse of the texts.

As for the Church’s doctrinal teachings on sex and marriage, he makes no apology for finding
them hard, inflexible even, a stumbling block amply illustrated in the accounts of his youth in
François, roman. His judgments informed by what he sees as the spiritual poverty of the modern
world, Taillandier asks both himself and his readers what a modern, imperfect form of
Catholicism could look like. Taking Jesus’s words to Satan in the desert – “man cannot live on
bread alone” – the novelist declares them universal, timeless truths in which we glimpse the
fragility of the human condition and the need for a stronger connection between spirituality and
community.
Like any good scholar (see his biographies of Balzac and Rostand), Taillandier is interested in
beginnings, both his own and others. And yet it is surely his preoccupation with his own life and
faith that endows his fictional and biographical writing with its enduring appeal for a modern,
Catholic audience. If the future of the Catholic literary imagination is, as Paul Elie put it,
“somewhere between a dead language and a hangover”, then Taillandier asks us to look for it in
different places, to redefine what we might mean by Catholic writing by gesturing towards the
contradictions of his own faith. Perhaps in France, as elsewhere, this amounts to less absolutism
and more ambiguity, less focus on Catholicism as organised religion and more emphasis upon
the individual’s experience of faith as it confronts modernity.

So, think again. French literature hasn’t lost its faith. It’s there in plain sight, like the pyramid in
front of the Louvre, even if it does look different.

Dr Arabella Byrne is a freelance writer