Yves Simon and the Road to Vichy

On the Importance of the Parallels between Then and Now

In my most recent posts, I discussed the two opposing socio-political orientations of French Catholics in the early twentieth century, with an eye toward the contemporary relevance of their example. The first and majority orientation supported the proto-fascist Action Française (AF) movement, under the intellectual direction of the agnostic Charles Maurras, which sought the restoration of the integralist union between “throne and altar” so the Church could employ the coercive power of the state to defend the moral order. I discussed how this stance enjoyed the support of two of the leading Catholic intellectuals of the day, the Suarezian scholastic Pedro Descoqs, SJ (1877-1946) and the Thomist Louis Cardinal Billot, SJ (1846-1931). The latter was one of the most powerful men in the Vatican, was a strong anti-liberal, and was a primary intellectual force behind the two 1907 anti-modernist documents of Pius X, which were enforced by a network of censors.

The second socio-political orientation in France was that of the social Catholics who participated in the political process of the Third French Republic to better realize the demands of justice, inspired by the first modern social encyclical, Rerum novarum: On Capital and Labor. Although Pope Pius XI condemned AF in 1926, this did not result in a decisive victory for the social Catholics for different reasons. These included the fact that there was little Catholic intellectual or political support for constitutional democracy, that communism was considered the primary threat, and that fascism seemed to be the primary alternative to communism. The leading Catholic intellectuals, moreover, were strongly inclined toward the proto-fascism of AF, with Louis Billot, SJ resigning from the cardinalate rather than renouncing his support for AF as Pope Pius XI had insisted.

In this post, which is somewhat longer than the previous ones, I will expand upon my previous reference to the French philosopher Yves Simon, who was the initial Catholic scholar working to reconcile Catholicism with constitutional democracy. Following the 1926 condemnation of AF, he was also increasingly, but gradually as his scholarship progressed, joined in these efforts by his teacher and friend Jacques Maritain.

In my opinion, the anti-liberalism, postliberalism and integralism advanced by influential contemporary American Catholics—in rough alignment with today’s increasingly anti-democratic and at least quasi-fascist Republican party—reflects sufficient parallels with the situation of interwar France to merit our careful consideration, if not alarm.

[Yves Simon, Courtesy of University of Notre Dame]

Besides the integralist tendencies to undermine democracy and support authoritarianism that I discussed in my previous posts on Maurice Blondel and Billot, contemporary Catholics should give careful consideration to the grave consequences that followed from such behavior. We should similarly recognize that the subsequent Social Doctrine of the Church clearly follows the socio-political orientation of the social Catholics, including Ketteler, Varela, Ryan, Blondel, Simon and the later Maritain. On the other hand, it eschews that of the integralists, who tend toward political alignment with fascism.

Yves Simon’s “The Road to Vichy: 1918-1938”

Simon’s 1942 The Road to Vichy: 1918-1938 offers a first-hand and extensive account of the role of French Catholics in the fall of the Third French Republic to Nazi Germany, and of the subsequent establishment of the collaborationist Vichy regime under the endorsement of Charles Maurras.

The most important points from The Road to Vichy can be draw from a 1988 essay “The Road to Vichy: Yves R. Simon’s Lonely Fight Against Fascism,” published online at Crisis Magazine by John Hellman, a longtime scholar of European intellectual and modern French history at McGill University, who also edited a later edition of the book. Hellman’s essay, drawn from the introduction to his edition, was published at a time of increasing consensus for constitutional democracy in the late 1980s. It served, therefore, as a perhaps necessary reminder to readers—who were living during an apparent end—in the sense of telos—of history in liberal democracy. This warning concerned the dangers of fascism, which seemed to be relegated to history. In 2024, however, we need not just reminders about fascism, but the deep understanding that historical study can help us to achieve.

Hellman’s essay elucidates Simon’s stinging rebuke of French Catholics who were deeply involved in the Vichy government that ultimately helped the Nazi’s ship over 70, 000 French Jews to their deaths in the concentration camps.

[Marshall Petain with Adolph Hitler in 1940 after the Fall of France. Wikipedia]

In the interest of fostering societal reconciliation, postwar historiography, politics and religion strove to downplay the widespread antidemocratic and authoritarian sympathies among the large majority of prewar French Catholics. Hellman’s article, on the other hand, considers Simon’s harsh but contemporaneous judgment in The Road to Vichy to a valuable contribution to the scholarship (para. 36). Such studies have shown, moreover, that antidemocratic and fascist tendencies among interwar Catholics were widespread across Europe and the Americas.

In upcoming posts, I will draw upon some of this literature to illustrate further examples of Catholics supporting fascism and authoritarianism, even by those who consider themselves to be living devout Catholic lives.¹

I will do so, not because I disagree with today’s advocates of what I call “postliberal, ressourcement Thomism,” that we need attractive and compelling presentations of the truth and beauty of Catholicism. I will do so precisely because failing to give due attention to these key moments from our history, to the analogous signs of our times, and to the authentic Social Doctrine of the Church, not only disfigures that doctrine but—in failing to apply it faithfully in light of that history and those signs—thereby presents grave threats to the Church, to the entire human family, and to the planet.

Social Catholicism as a School of Democratic Participation

Following his birth in 1903, Simon’s later support for democratic collaboration with those of good will followed naturally from his two years of participation—after World War I—in French social Catholicism through the Jeune Republique (para. 22) or Young Republic League, which had evolved from earlier Christian social movements that had been suppressed as part of the antimodernist interventions of Pope Pius X under the influence of men like Cardinal Louis Billot, SJ.

Simon’s participation in the Young Republic League included the experience of coming together with groups of young French and German Catholics to foster dialogue and solidarity when the two nations were deeply scarred by the recent memory of “the Great War.” Consistent with the broader tradition of social Catholicism since especially the example of Bishop von Ketteler in the mid-1800s, Simon was convinced of the compatibility between democracy and Catholicism (para. 22), and of the importance of broad collaboration within civil society to address pressing social challenges and to foster the common good. As we have seen in previous posts, this collaboration and dialogue in the tradition of social Catholicism included apparent political opponents such as anticlerical republicans and socialists. From this we might note the radical distinction between an authentically Christian and Catholic mode of socio-political engagement—marked by dialogue, respect for human dignity, solidarity, collaboration, participation and social friendship—and contemporary tribalism and polarization. What, then, were the deepest roots of this social Catholicism?

A Catholicism More Inspired by the Gospels

The answer is found precisely where it should be for Catholics, namely in the Gospel. Simon—and increasingly, after 1926, Jacques Maritain—saw themselves as speaking for a Catholicism “more consciously inspired by the Gospels” (para. 12), and ordered to living out Christian charity in the world, which followed from a deepening appreciation of an integral humanism rooted in a respect for human dignity and human rights.

This recognition of the need to live an authentic Christian life rooted in the Gospel is precisely what the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council would emphasize in their concise directives for the renewal of moral theology in the conciliar “Decree on Priestly Formation.” In the context of the increasing acceptance of constitutional democracy after the Second World War, the Council Fathers emphasized that morality should be more fully nourished by the Scriptures to point Catholics to their “most high calling in Christ” and to their “obligation to bear the fruit of Charity for the life of the world.”²

I would argue that this conciliar call for a renewal of moral theology aligned precisely with social Catholicism. It was therefore contrary to the primary alternative that combined an integralist and clericalist alliance between the Church and coercive state power to enforce conformity to a moral order. This order was determined, moreover, by speculative and metaphysical thinkers like Louis Billot with little regard for historical or practical questions of justice, or for the common good as the contemporary Church understands it.

Given the clarity of conviction that followed from Simon’s authentic Christian faith—which we also saw in Maurice Blondel—he bore witness to the radical inconsistency between the true faith that works through love (Gal 5:6 ) and the proto-fascism of Action Française. Simon provocatively described the integralists as “‘true atheists even when they went to Mass,’ for whoever in his view ‘mocks these divine names, liberty, justice, mercy cannot be a worshiper of the true God’” (para. 25). Although this judgment is severe, it would seem to be proportionate to the horrors that followed from what Hellman describes as “the role of the Right, particularly the Catholic Right, in softening up the country for fascism” (para. 34).

Simon’s Exile to the United States

By 1938, Simon was so troubled by French Catholic sympathy for Hitler and opposition to democracy that he accepted the offer of a visiting professorship in the United States at the University of Notre Dame (para. 5). Considering, for example, the pro-Nazi remarks of Austrian Cardinal Innitzer following the annexation of his country by Hitler, and given the Catholic alliance with Franco in Spain, Simon saw the European Catholic hierarchy as morally degenerate (para. 7). He experienced difficulty, moreover, in finding Catholic venues that were even willing to publish arguments against fascism (para. 7, 8, 10). Following the outrages of the left-leaning Republicans in Spain against Catholics, their sympathies were increasingly anti-communist, which normally meant support for fascism, which meant little support among Catholics for democracy.

Several other points articulated by Hellman are noteworthy for my exploration of an analogy between the interwar situation and our contemporary one. In what follows, I summarize some of these key points in four steps: one concerning the lack of venues for publication, one regarding the Thomist Renaissance, one regarding Pope Pius XII, and one regarding practical politics.

Lack of Venues for Defending the Constitutional Republic

A major problem faced by Simon and others fostering a social ethic of participation in democratic processes for the common good was that right-wing opponents engaged in aggressive censorship. This might help to explain why there was an almost total lack of Catholic voices supporting democracy in France and elsewhere, combined with institutional opposition to expressing anti-fascist views in Catholic venues. For example, one French publication called Sept was initially receptive to such argumentation and was subsequently shut down after funding was withdrawn (para. 8, ). Continuing in the tradition of the anti-modernist censors discussed in my post on Billot, there was also active intervention to censor democratic voices from another periodical called Temps Present in which Simon and Maritain had hoped to argue that Catholics need not simply support the Franco regime in Spain but could have more nuanced positions.

Those active in censorship included “influential French priests such as Father Lallement” and “the leading Dominican Thomist theologian Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange.” They prevented, for example, the publication of “anti-Franco positions” in Temps Present (para. 10), and presumably in other venues over which they had influence. Simon and Maritain saw similar tendencies in the American Catholic press, with some reflecting “a pernicious antisemitic tone,” and others opportunistically capitulating—in their opinion—to the fascist “spirit of the age” by advancing pacifism. Yet others, such as Fr. Charles Coughlin’s influential Social Justice adopted a more explicitly pro-Nazi line (para. 16). Prominent members of the Catholic intelligentsia, moreover, were publishing in support the illiberal right of the day. This could be seen, for example, in an argument that Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia was justified in the interest of “Western Civilization” (para. 4, 29).

Besides Yves Simon, the primary Catholic voice of the 1930s who was willing to speak out clearly and publish against the evil of fascism was the American Dorothy Day in her The Catholic Worker. In the very first point of her December 1, 1936 letter “For the New Reader,” Day emphasized that The Catholic Worker was “strongly antifascist.”³ Simon and Maritain ultimately had to collaborate with a Canadian venue to publish a series of tracts that were dropped behind Nazi lines into France to encourage the Free-French resistance. 

As central figures in the Thomistic renaissance, Simon and Maritain were particularly troubled that many French Thomists, led by Dominican Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange “‘never even tried’ to come to grips with democracy” and instead fought “valiantly” for Vichy (para. 19). As a Thomist myself, with sufficient appreciation for Garrigou’s work to have offered an elective for seminarians on his spiritual theology, I was disappointed to read that he went even further in declaring that support for the Free-French under General De Gaulle was “a mortal sin” (para. 19). As a result of Garrigou’s prominence in support of the Vichy collaborationist regime, Simon confessed to Maritain the temptation to hate Garrigou more than Petain, Mussolini or Hitler. He affirmed, moreover, that he “‘would rather have a daughter in a whorehouse’ than have a son grow up to be a pro-fascist priest” (19). More soberly, Simon “concluded that the Thomism to which he and Maritain had dedicated their lives had not been ‘up to the circumstances’ when faced with the wave of authoritarian and antidemocratic regimes of the 1930s” (para. 18).

Given the burgeoning Thomistic revival of our day and the corresponding threats to American democracy, I regret to say that it is not at all clear that the Thomism of our day is up to the circumstances. By this, I mean that while there is much interest in metaphysics and speculative theology at a time when discussion of integralism is front and center, there is surprisingly little scholarship in support of democracy or the authentic Social Doctrine of the Church among the new generation of Thomists. There are, however, promising exceptions.⁴

The Stance of Pope Pius XII

Regarding Pope Pius XII, Jacques Maritain saw the pontiff’s 1939 “rehabilitation of Action Française as meaning that France, too, would have a form of ‘Hispano-Italian Catholicism’ which, allied with a rigid dogmatic traditionalism, would seek to impose a ‘law of violence’ on the country” (para. 12).  Here “hispano” referred to the situation of the Church under the Franco regime in Spain, wheras Italian referred to the situation under Mussolini in Italy. Simon saw France as “a country lost in clericalism and where, evidently, clericalism serves as the vehicle for anti-civic ideas” (para. 17). Simon feared Pius XII was enacting “a total reversal of the anti-fascist policies” that his predecessor Pius XI had adopted late in his Pontificate (para. 11). More recent scholarship shows, for example, that the then Cardinal Pacelli apparently slowed Pius XI’s efforts at the end of his life to publish the so-called lost encyclical Humani generis unitas.⁵ This text had been drafted by the American Jesuit John Lafarge and would have explicitly condemned Nazism but was put aside and has only become available in recent years. Other recent scholarship shows, however, that Pius XII actively opposed Nazism with a surprising degree of initiative, but through strictly clandestine means.⁶

Perhaps we could say that Pius XII not only saw the dangers of fascism and shrewdly opposed them when necessary and possible, but also pragmatically lived with them when he judged that prudent.

Practical Politics

Regarding practical politics, I will include just a few remarks. As previously noted, Maritain initially supported, but later regretted, belief in a “parallelism of action”—a collaboration in the political sphere—between the “right”  of his day and Catholics of “the Thomist renaissance.” Simon was consistent in speaking against fascism and for the constitutional republic, and he did so with passion, partially because of the passion of the extremist right, which was rooted in their militancy which engaged the irascible passions. Their zeal thereby far exceeded that of the supporters of liberal democracy who lacked “driving enthusiasm” (para. 26) and thus failed to gain a wide following. Simon spoke against French Catholics contributing to a “‘domestic treason party” which would undermine his country in case of war” (para. 7). He spoke of them as “imbeciles,” with “hopelessly naïve views” of the fascists with whom they were collaborating, which he rightly judged was leading to a situation in which “criminals [will] have a free rein” (para. 13). Much could be said regarding an analogy to our times but that will be obvious for those with ears to hear.

Given the lack of support in Europe for the anti-fascist and increasingly democratic priorities of Simon followed by Maritain, it is striking how what were minority views during the interwar years and into the war achieved almost universal acceptance as Catholic doctrine in the decades following the war. In a future post I will introduce an essay by Drew Christiansen, SJ entitled “The Gospel and Human Dignity: Catholicism and Liberalism in Dialogue,” which discusses how the postwar Church emerged from the anti-modernism and anti-liberalism of earlier decades—and the alignment of many Catholics with fascism—to embrace key tenets of the liberal tradition.

1. Charles R. Gallagher, Nazis of Copley Square: The Forgotten Story of the Christian Front (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2021). James Q. Whitman, Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).

2. Optatam totius no. 16. “the obligation that is theirs of bearing fruit in charity for the life of the world” (eorumque obligationem in caritate pro mundi vita fructum ferendi). https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decree_19651028_optatam-totius_en.html.

3. See Dorothy Day, “For the New Reader,” December 1, 1936.  “THE CATHOLIC WORKER is strongly anti-Fascist because Fascism denies that man has a higher obligation than his obligation to the State, because Fascism believes that man is made for the State and denies that the State is made for man, because, although it believes and acts on these principles, as is apparent in Italy and Germany, it pretends to recognize religious, political, and economic rights, and is therefore more dangerous in many ways than the open enmity of Communism.” https://catholicworker.org/310-html/.

4. For example, Fr. James Dominic Rooney, OP of Hong Kong Baptist University, published a strong argument in the 2023 volume of Nova et Vetera that integralism is unjust. See also his coedited collection on Beyond Classical Liberalism: Freedom and the Good.

5. Peter Eisner, The Pope’s Last Crusade: How and American Jesuit Helped Pope Pius XI’s Campaign to Stop Hitler (New York: Morrow, 2013).

6. Mark Riebling, Church of Spies: The Pope's Secret War Against Hitler (New York: Random House, 2015).