In Their Own Words

In a series of case histories, the author explores the divorce of the revolutionary government from Catholic Christianity, the defense set up by church leaders through the pilgrimage movement and the cultivation of local languages, and, finally, the détente that the trial of war and peaceful scholarship engendered in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Presentations of the quandaries of revolutionary priests and the gripes of revolutionary legislators, the two Frances as seen by Chateaubriand and Destutt de Tracy, pilgrimages to Chartres and local language movement in Alsace and the Roussillon, priests and teachers achieving their own détente in the trenches of World War I, and the reconciliation of secularized universities with the medieval Catholic heritage.