In his masterful
French Archipelago
(Seuil, 2019), Jérôme Fourquet precedes the description of a
“multiple and divided” France
with a ruthless first chapter, devoted to the
"dislocation of the Catholic matrix"
, with symptoms of the accelerated decline in religious practice and the scarcity of the first name Marie among little girls.
By emphasizing the formerly unifying role of Catholicism in French society, by emphasizing throughout the book that the multiple facets of the current fragmentation are the major factor of contemporary French malaise, Jérôme Fourquet invites reflection on our country. a major conceptual breakthrough, which must be prolonged at all costs to understand what is happening to us.
To read also:
Jacques Julliard: "The crisis of the republican conscience"
However, it seems to me that, in the author's approach, there are one or even two missing links, with the effect of attributing to Catholicism more than it could explain on its own, that is to say that its decline, which began the first half of the 19th century, too
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