It may seem odd that a review of a volume that describes itself as ‘a history of [French] Catholic political thinking from the French Revolution to the present day’ should find a place in a journal devoted to Anglican studies. This exceptional volume, however, which explores its theme through history, theology and sociology, is an important reminder that Anglicanism has never existed in an Anglophone, Protestant vacuum, but has always been subject to the same religious and secular pressures and currents as other denominations of the Church. Anglicanism (particularly in the context of the Church of England) has a remarkable affinity with that form of French Catholicism known as Gallicanism. Gallicans and Anglicans alike historically have seen Church and State as in a close, symbiotic relationship cemented by a sacral monarchy. They have shared a commitment to diocesan episcopacy against papal incursions and to fidelity to the patristic witness and local expressions of the liturgy as fortresses of the true Catholic tradition against the centralizing uniformity of Tridentine Rome.
Whereas the unity of church and state in modern England was formed in the matrix of a developing parliamentary democracy, the French Church, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, found its relationship with the state defined by monarchical absolutism. In principle, however, the Church insisted on moral and spiritual limits to the royal power which the Church itself conferred in the coronation. With the French Revolution and the abolition of the absolute monarchy, the Church found itself reduced to an instrument of state power. The revolutionary state could not cope with its citizens appealing to any other authority, while the Church understood God to be the only foundation and guarantor of freedom. Perreau-Saussine rightly observes that those who were concerned that the Church had an identity of its own apart from the state believed they had no choice other than to turn to ultramontanism. Napoleon unwittingly encouraged this movement by conferring on the papacy powers over the French Church it had never had before. The ultramontanes exchanged royal for papal absolutism, and their insistence on the independence of the spiritual order lessened the Church's dependence on the laity, the people of God.
The declaration of papal infallibility at the first Vatican Council separated the Church from secular society. It accepted the separation of the temporal from the spiritual. In this respect it upheld the political Gallican tradition, which affirmed the sovereignty of the two powers in their respective domains. Ultramontanes believed that only the papacy could protect the Church from enslavement to a temporal power that had cast itself adrift from the faith, but in so doing they also refused to engage with any and all forms of modernity and with developments in scholarship and science. This alienation from the world was marked by the Church turning inward on itself.
The fight against totalitarianism in the twentieth century enabled the Church to recognize its kinship with liberal democracy and to turn its back on political antiliberalism. At Vatican II, it recovered the old Gallican notion of the political primacy of the laity; Lumen Gentium embraced the consecratio mundi, Christian service in the temporal sphere. How ironic then, that the Church having renounced the ideal of Christendom at the Council, should have found itself in the late twentieth century exercising considerable political influence in Eastern Europe, South America and Southeast Asia.
Perreau-Saussine observes that under the ancien régime ‘the bone marrow of Gallicanism was the identification of Catholics with the life of the nation’ (p. 20). Having remained established, the Church of England was never in a position to reject democracy or intellectual modernity. Establishment Anglicanism in the Church of England is still marked by a culture of commitment to service to the nation. Queen Elizabeth understands her life's dedication to service to flow from the anointing at her coronation, and the parochial ethos of the Church of England is still defined not by the gathered congregation but by service to the whole community. Colonial Anglican churches that were disestablished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries tended to follow the Catholic pattern of turning inward on themselves, away from the wider society. In the present day, when the forces of ideological post-Christian secularism are intent on driving religion more and more into the private realm, it remains to be seen whether the Christian faith will be allowed to offer its service to the wider community without sacrificing some of its own beliefs to the secular faith.
