The French church and state which Thérèse Martin knew so well grew out of a complex blend of historical factors. She lived her short life assuming, even taking for granted, a lot of things that never occur to us. There was a huge corpus of political and cultural baggage that made her immediate world what it was. Her writings demonstrate that she knew a great deal about world events, political issues, newspaper editorials, and so forth, both inside and outside of France. But this consciousness of hers completely eludes us today, unless we make an effort to revoke those issues which were never too far from her own mind. If we, a century later, intend to "put on" the mind of Thérèse to really learn from her in the manner that her thoughts developed, and to see things as she saw them, then we must tap into that huge category called "background" or "context." In this article, I propose to do just that.
The records tell us that Thérèse was born in 1873, entered Carmel in '88, and died in '97. These years perfectly span the formation time of the Third French Republic, from the first provisional governments as far as the Dreyfus case. They present a political crucible of the sort of wrangling and very stormy church-state disputes that were just too big to ignore. Thérèse grew up knowing every detail simply by reading the morning paper or talking with someone else who had. And yet that same resilient republic which so many good Catholics hated from its inception would eventually turn out to be rugged enough and adaptable enough to survive until the French defeat by Hitler in 1940.
Thérèse certainly found her own age a very exciting time to be alive. French colonies were being founded in Indochina, Africa and the Pacific. Missions were certainly a part of her thought and her prayer. The popular enthusiasm for discovery and conquest in faraway places was matched in the French church of her own day by a vigorous missionary zeal to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the people of those lands -- a zeal which Thérèse herself shared. She did not become the patroness of the missions by accident. And finally, most of her life also coincides with the reign of Pope Leo XIII, who adapted the Church so successfully to the modern world, and proved that there was genuinely life after Papal States.
So what 1 plan to do is to briefly discuss the political conditions within France, relations between the French state and the church, and the French Third Republic seen in the context of the world.
Thérèse was born in 1873, as were such notables as Enrico Caruso and Sergei Rachmaninoff. Pope Pius IX still had five years to live, but they would not be very happy ones for him. Former Emperor Napoleon III died in exile that same year, settling forever the question of his possible return to power in France. There was a provisional president who was elected, and the beginnings of the Third Republic were finally, agonizingly, set into motion. The weather that year was pleasant. The harvest was good. The German armies were finally leaving France after a very bitter occupation following the Franco-Prussian war. And in the faraway United States, the gunsmiths of the Remington company decided to diversify their manufacturing - they started building typewriters.
It was time for some very hot political debate, and in a great sense, soul-searching, for these people of France, who suddenly found themselves. without a government ... again. They asked: "How should we put it together this time? What will be most acceptable to the majority of French citizens? How should we avoid the mistakes of the past and still preserve the good things which have made France literally the center of Europe for so many centuries?" These were the questions. on the minds of nearly everyone. The biggest problem was a built-in conflict, nearly a century old, between the two blocs of ideas which divided and polarized most French citizens in a way that we find difficult to even imagine. In one bloc, we have a union between religion and royalism. In the opposing bloc, we have the republicans, the revolutionaries, the anticlericals: the people who represented (as far as most practicing Catholics were concerned) atheism, anarchy, disorder, persecution, and everything else they wanted to avoid. But before we can understand the time of Thérèse, we must backpedal just a bit to consider the French Revolution itself.