Let us begin by noting the respective situations of the Church and religion in a number of western European countries – France, Italy, Spain. And let us also note the rule which says that the more solidly the Church is entrenched in the state, and the more deeply it finds itself engaged in the state-controlled administration of souls, the less it needs religion. Only when it is separate from the state apparatus, as in France, does it have to secure by means of religious life the voluntary consent it would otherwise obtain from the prestige attendant upon direct association with state power. In short, one of the most remarkable effects of the separation of Church and state in France is that (making necessity a virtue) it has cleared a path for religious life, that extra dash of spirit which makes up for the loss of state influence. If we compare the French with the Italian or Spanish Church, we will observe that the involvement of the last two in state authority acts as an influence strong enough to discourage them from promoting a new religious life amongst the faithful. It may, of course, be objected that the ‘religious life’ of the French Church finds its explanation not only in the separation of Church and state, but in other political developments from the Popular Front to the Resistance; and that the French Church has not been able to remain aloof from certain forms of political life that have had a considerable influence on it, affecting its religious life along with the rest. But this argument carries little weight when we consider, for example, the Italian Church, which has barely been affected by politics, and is content to exercise power while giving hardly a thought to religion. As for religious life in the Spanish Church, it takes the direct form of political opposition (for which it serves as a disguise and refuge), not only to the state, but even to the Church itself.
This exordium, too long and too vague, has only one objective: to make it possible to grasp one of the senses in which the renewal of ‘religious life’ has manifested itself in France, where we have experienced it both before and after the last war. Doubtless most of the events we are about to discuss would be unintelligible if considered in isolation from the grand project of the Church, which, so as not to be outstripped by the trade unions, political parties, and youth movements of the Left, took the decision to found Action catholique (around 1930? The exact date has yet to be determined1). This was a revolutionary decision, because, for the first time in its history, the Church was abandoning the kind of religious life that was centred exclusively on the parish in order to replace it with a new form of organization that made allowance for other kinds of groups – those rooted, for example, in ‘milieux’, students, peasants, workers, managers, bosses, etc., i.e., group forms that more or less took the existence of social classes, professional categories, or age groups into account. All the ‘specialized’ movements have their origins here: JEC, JOC, JAC, JP, etc.2 That this was a general decision, not one restricted to France, makes the fact that these Catholic movements developed with incomparable rapidity in France (and Belgium) all the more significant. And the separation of Church and state figures, incontestably, among the features of French life that contributed to this rapid development – as does the fact that the Church had to appeal to religion, or, if one likes, to spontaneous forms, forms of voluntary commitment on the part of its flock. Church members had to leave the passive practices of parish life behind, and actively enrol in these specialized movements, making a personal commitment and experiencing this commitment as a new form of their religious belief. I do not think that anyone acquainted with the young chaplains who threw themselves into these movements heart and soul, or anyone who has experienced the ‘religious life’ of these movements, can deny that they really did involve forms of religious life, and, at the same time, forms of religious and para-religious relationships without precedent in the history of the Church – and, of course, in the history of our country as well. It has here been necessary, doubtless, to trace matters back to this point in order to bring out the contingent necessity that appeared, in France, as a need for an ‘extra dash of religious spirit [un supplément d’âme religieux]’ to compensate the relative decline in the Church’s state role – and to bring out, as well, the profundity and originality of this supplementary ‘life’.
I will consider only one of its particular forms, involving married life. Amongst the main themes of the new ‘religious life’, there emerged an entire neo-theology of marriage that was taught in the youth movements before being assigned an organization of its own, made up of young families and Christian couples. This theology had its theologians, the chaplains of the youth groups, who also served as leaders and confessors. What distinguished the way this neo-theology of marriage was propagated, taught, and sanctioned was the public character of the operation.3 To be sure, the theology of the sacrament of marriage was not invented between 1936 and 1940. But it was given unparalleled weight, prominence, and publicity in those years. It would not be an exaggeration to say that, earlier, the papal encyclicals on love hardly concerned anyone but the clergy, who had to be advised of the rules governing absolution, and, consequently, of the duties of married Christian men and women. These encyclicals were not, however, objects of the same sort of regular, public instruction and commentary as they were later on. The couple’s relations continued to be a private affair; the priest had a role to play only when it came to confession – or the special education he might give one or another child at its parents’ request. Would it be overstating matters to say that one of the reasons for the phenomenal development, in all the youth organizations, of courses or general commentaries on the encyclicals devoted to Christian love, the marriage sacrament,4 etc., was the special circumstance, peculiar to France, of the separation of Church and state – as if the Church had sought, by assigning a profoundly religious meaning to Christian marriage and proposing a Christian way of experiencing marital life, to obtain by the free consent of its members what it could no longer obtain from an administrative authority that had been denied it? Here again I would not hesitate to say that the Church sought in this Christian way of experiencing conjugal relations that extra dash of spirit capable of making up for its loss of power and influence.
In these conditions there developed, beginning with the specialized youth movements and culminating in the organizations for young couples, forms of instruction, commentary, and, later, pre-marital or marital relationships (between young engaged couples in the youth movements; between husbands and wives, and also amongst young married couples in the Christian marriage movements), which were absolutely new, unprecedented, and quite strikingly marked by what might be termed an aggressive exhibitionism. It is not easy to account for this phenomenon, but we need to try to zero in on it. Plainly, in this attitude (adopted not only by the chaplains, but also by young people of both sexes before, while, and after getting to know one another), a defiantly emancipatory reaction to old taboos played a major part. It was as if, on these matters, tabooed for centuries by, precisely, religious morality, the Church militant of the young chaplains and their charges was proving its broad-mindedness and audacity to itself by openly addressing sexual questions: relieved that it could now speak of them as others did, better than others did, it defiantly threw its own public emancipation in their teeth. Yes, the Church had its theology of marriage; yes, the popes had given it encyclicals about married love; yes, it was necessary to speak out frankly and freely about this, calling things by their real names and putting ‘bourgeois’ or even ‘religious’ prudishness to shame (its time was past, but its time had always been past). Indeed, to bourgeois marriage, ashamed of itself – to civil marriage (read: marriage without religious consciousness), which was more or less hypocritical, and in any event [tainted]with hypocrisy by its own (purely legal!) status – to this marriage of interest or reason, which kept women in ignorance and gave men all the advantages of liberty and licence – it was necessary to oppose, unmistakably, religious marriage, which was self-aware, ensured the equality of man and wife, at liberty to administer the sacrament of marriage to one another, and confident of its objectives, which went beyond mere reproduction to the mutual sanctification of the spouses. Thus a lawful lifting of repression (lawful in the religious sense: authorized, sanctioned, and encouraged by religion) dovetailed with an indirect condemnation of non-religious forms of conjugal life; this can be taken as the basis for an explanation of the aggressively exhibitionistic form such propaganda assumed amongst young people.
Soon enough, however, the effects took it upon themselves to reinforce the causes. Something never before seen appeared: ‘Christian couples’ – I mean publicly Christian couples, who professed that that was what they were, and even came together in organizations for mutual assistance and spiritual exchange (on the basis of the Christian theology of the couple). These were couples who professed their convictions and advertised their principles, hiding nothing about them from anybody. They were, at all events, tempted by this ordeal suspended between triumphant witness and discreet martyrdom (which was, however, public too), meant to prove that they had the courage of their principles. But they put more than just their principles on exhibit: they also advertised their results – whether in their own concrete behaviour, or, more commonly, by parading their flocks of children around in public, thus demonstrating in sight of one and all that they made love, by the grace of God, and that, although the ultimate objective of marriage was the mutual sanctification of man and wife, they also could not help sleeping together – under, however, special conditions of human unrestraint, i.e., conscious abandon to the will of Providence. As to taking thought for the morrow, there were the family benefits, and the parable about God providing for the fowls of the air.
It is no exaggeration to say that this whole set of circumstances gave rise to what must be called a new and very particular kind of conjugal behaviour, which, unlike most of the preceding forms (of conjugal behaviour), had as its central, paradoxical feature the fact that it was intimate public behaviour. Not that couples made love out in the open, or confided the details of their lovemaking to all and sundry; but their way of conducting themselves in public served notice of the natural existence of their problems and of their intimate solutions. It was a form of public behaviour (right down to the conscious choice to have large numbers of children) which, far from concealing the existence of their private life and the principles guiding it, conspicuously gave it pride of place. When one adds to this the relations with (public) organizations of young couples, and the relations with the ‘chaplains’ (very different from those that had earlier been maintained with the parish priests), which were also conspicuously ‘frank’ and ‘free’, it will be admitted that this new form of conjugal behaviour could hardly go unnoticed.
The couple, the children, the chaplain, the groups of young husbands and wives, the lectures on theology, the religious ceremonies specially intended for these groups, the retreats, the exchange of ‘spiritual’ experiences – all this lent the new form of conjugal behaviour an incredible indecency and an incredible lack of awareness of this indecency. Here again there can be no doubt that this indecency was not at all consciously experienced as such by these young people. For, in their eyes, what was involved was not indecency or an exhibitionistic display of their private lives (even in the form of these ‘phenomena’). What was involved was ‘spiritual life’. The immediate identity (to put it in Hegelian language) between intimate sexuality and ‘spiritual life’; the fact that emancipation from traditional sexual taboos came about under the aegis of spiritual sanctification; the possibility, which people now had for the first time, of speaking publicly about sex in spiritual terms (which also implied the possibility of speaking of the spiritual in sexual terms); or, in other words, the conjunction of the most purely sexual matters with the most purely spiritual sublimation; all this constituted the unconscious alibi, the legitimation of, and authorization for, a mode of behaviour which, taken out of this subjective context, was constantly in danger of lapsing into the exhibitionism of shamelessness – whether it was an exhibitionism of acts and modes of behaviour, or, quite simply, an exhibitionism of principles.
Moreover, just as Marx (and Bebel) said that the condition of women in their relationships with men permits us to judge the degree of freedom or unfreedom in a given society, so I would say that this unprecedented religious life manifested itself most clearly in the new status and behaviour of women. I mean that it is woman who found herself at the most sensitive point, the focal point of this exhibitionism. The reasons are simple. This neo-theology of marriage brought about a result far more equitable than the articles of the Civil Code: it made woman, religiously speaking, man’s equal. We would have to study the history of this doctrine to determine when it appeared and developed. But it is certain that this sacrament, which man and wife administer to one another as equals in an exchange, had important repercussions on minds shaped by one hundred and fifty years of the Civil Code – by woman’s legal inferiority. Heretofore, if the doctrine of the Church had not been concealed from women, its profound significance, at least, had been – and, in any case, even if it had been taught them, men, their husbands, would have been just deaf enough not to hear it. This time things were different: the chaplains taught everyone, young women, but young men as well, the theoretical truths about their union, and, along with the rest, the young men accepted the religious dogma concerning the equality of the exchange and of the partners in the exchange. The religiously motivated change in woman’s status entered into men’s consciousness, their relations with their wives, and their attitude towards other couples. One might say, in this connection, that the conjunction of this consciousness of equality – not only equality of status, but also equality in the grand spiritual enterprise represented by a life led in common, i.e., in the forging of the couple’s future – the conjunction of the theology of procreation (as an uncontrollable side-effect of spiritual union), bringing in its wake the multiplication of children – the conjunction of the theory of children’s education, considered in all its spiritual-religious profundity, and, generally speaking, the sacralization of the majority of everyday acts, which now overflowed with an excess of spiritual meaning – to say nothing of the more or less consciously assumed role of public witness (itself imbued with religious meaning) – this conjunction had as its overall consequence the paradox that, precisely because she was man’s equal from a religious standpoint, the ‘Christian’ woman, overburdened by her children and the chores that consummated her own sanctification and that of the couple, became a housewife, giving up whatever projects she may have formed with a view to fleeing her limited existence, in particular her professional projects, together with all topics of interest and the social relationships they might have given her access to; she was literally transformed into a mother and homemaker.
But, nota bene, she was transformed into a Christian mother and homemaker, the Christian wife of her Christian husband. This was undoubtedly the circumstance that unconsciously reinforced the feature I earlier called the exhibitionism of shamelessness. I mean that mothers and homemakers are, as everyone can see, mothers and home-makers. But these particular mothers and homemakers had not become what they were either by accident or simply as the result of a sort of vague desire, or, again, of very precise intentions such as the wish to have one child or four children, etc. – the way most women, even traditional Catholics, simply are mothers and homemakers. These mothers and home-makers were such in consequence of a deliberate design that was religious in its essence, that could be set out, defended, and, if necessary, explained (or demonstrated) to anyone. They were mothers and home-makers essentially because they were Christian wives, who, as such, worked towards the spiritual perfection of the couple by having babies and taking them out for strolls, and wiping their bottoms, and bringing them up, as well as by doing the laundry, the cooking, and the washing-up.
I do not say that all of them spent their time making that difference felt; some, thank God, found in this attitude something like a way to preserve their own natural modesty. But I do say that there was a big risk, a very big risk that became a reality for many of them, especially for those who could have done something besides having endless strings of children, who could have had a profession, a real profession, and developed as intelligent beings (and who therefore felt a deep need to make it clear why they had chosen the stupid option of the rabbit hutch and the kitchen sink, a deep need to come up with noble reasons for their obviously foolish mistake, that is, for their sacrifice, which wasn’t one) – there was, I say, a very big risk that many of them would become witnesses in their own defence. In other words, that they would publicly profess their principles so as not to be accused of being fools, and would plunge all the more resolutely into the quagmire, with a resolve that was all the more manifest the more they felt the need to go through this semblance of an ordeal to convince themselves that, far from consigning themselves to perdition, they were securing their salvation. This was obviously a rather sad situation in itself, but it was precisely in this situation that all the latent forms engendered by this general context were gathered together and summed up. The cohabitation of the religious with the banal, or even with the least appealing aspects of daily existence – the cohabitation of the religious and the sexual, of religion and obstetrics, etc. – resulted in a constant back-and-forth from the sacred to the profane, the spiritual to the natural (outsiders could see and feel this, because the intention to demonstrate or defy, or else to bear public witness to something, ran through all these modes of conduct). Ultimately, because people could not always maintain, at the spiritual or religious level, the attitude required to put up with the rest or, if you like, to invest it with meaning, they came to acquire a sort of supplementary shamelessness: they simply gave their attitude out as natural, though nothing in the world could have been less natural – as if ‘nature’ allowed one to dispense with the forms of respect and tact the most essential to social relations – in order to forge an immediate synthesis between what was noblest and what was least so. Thus one met couples (but especially women) who had no other ways and means of dealing with their own embarrassment than to put themselves forward as if they were, so to speak, natural institutions; they saw themselves as people who no longer had any problems to solve, at least as far as their relations with others went, and they paraded their children, and their ‘problems’, and their difficulties through the world, wholly preoccupied with themselves, barely mindful of outsiders, deaf, most of the time (and, it must be said, deafened, deadened, by the cries of their interminable families, whom they substituted for life and the world). They were, in event, confined to a world that was just as public, but they could no longer boast what had originally been their pride: the fact that they had made their world over into a spiritual one worthy of God’s design. Thus they brought a new form of obscenity into the world with the help of the religion the French Church had mobilized to compensate its loss of power.
The designs of Providence are inscrutable. The shamelessness of these couples’ ‘natural behaviour’, and the ‘natural’ character, as they saw it, of their public conduct, ‘naturally’ came to stand in for their religious life and religious intentions. Thus they lived out their married lives in exactly the same manner as certain couples who were forced to live in close proximity in dilapidated or semi-collective modern apartments, whom the constraints imposed by these deplorable living conditions transformed into family units given over to sex, feeding, and child-rearing, in full view of everybody. However, unlike ordinary people, who simply experienced their condition as a fact of life, they made a great show of experiencing it as the supreme spiritual epiphany, a manifestation of God’s grace. They made a show of experiencing as something natural the attribution of a supernatural meaning to ‘nature’, to the point that parading nature about in its nakedness – that is, nature’s public shamelessness – became the very presence of the supernatural, a way of announcing, if not advertising it. If we carefully consider this short-circuiting of ‘nature’ and ‘spirit’, and the public exhibition of their identity as simultaneously ‘natural’ and ‘spiritual’, we will not hesitate to identify it as the very structure of obscenity, if it is true that obscenity consists in the exhibition of a cultural phenomenon as something ‘natural’, the exhibition of the private as the public, the exhibition of forbidden behaviour as permissible or even eminently authorized, and, finally, the exhibition of the ‘supernatural’ as ‘nature’ itself. Obscenity, that is, consists in the ‘natural’ exhibition of the scandalousness of this perpetual confusion of orders.
I do not think anyone can seriously contest the idea that the Church has played an important role in creating these new attitudes and modes of behaviour. For it is the Church which has permitted this short-circuit, which has restructured earlier modes of behaviour by providing a new outlet for impulses that, only recently, were beaten back and repressed. The Church has taken hold of conjugal relations in the categories they were formerly caught up in: secrecy, intimacy, privacy, interdiction, silence, concealment, nature (assuming that these categories were pure) – that is, in the form of repression, generally speaking. And it has transformed these older categories into new ones seemingly in contradiction with them: the categories of the public, the authorized, the spiritual and the supernatural, of witness and manifestation. In other words, it has replaced the categories of repression [refoulement] with new categories which all have the properties associated with the lifting of repression [défoulement], particularly its aggressive triumphalism, its insistence on its rights, its proclamation of its claims to legitimacy, and a conspicuously good conscience rooted in consciousness of God’s complicity.
But it cannot be said that the Church, in making this substitution, has extricated itself from the original situation: it has only ‘inverted’ this situation within the Church itself. The sole solution it has provided consists, in essence, in displaying the marks of its former servitude as so many proofs of its emancipation. But this public display, and all the meanings attached to it, could not have come about if the interdict, or, rather, the form of the interdict placed on certain subjects had not been lifted; it could not have come about, that is, without the official authorization of the Church. This lifting of the form of the interdict has been possible because the power that lifted the interdict is the one that established it: the authority that makes the laws can also unmake them. To be sure, in lifting this interdict, the Church pretended it had not established it, preferring to pillory the world, its materialism, etc., its false piety, hypocritical prudishness, etc. But no-one was fooled by that distinction, because the young couples passed from what was, for them, a false religious consciousness to a true religious consciousness; that is, they remained within the bounds of religion, simply declaring, as they passed from one form of consciousness to the other, that the first, the one they were abandoning, was not religious. However, what they failed to see – but, alas, showed everyone else – was that this authorized, and justified, lifting of repression, which was inwardly balanced by the absolution provided by spirituality, i.e., by the sublimation that sustained the edifice of these passions, had nothing emancipatory or ‘natural’ about it that was not contained in the very categories of authorization and sublimation. What these couples experienced as true emancipation was never anything other than a new form of servitude, but one experienced in new categories that made their private lives, sexual relations, and the conjugal division of labour a form of public witness and religious existence.
This is, without a doubt, one of the most serious forms of mystification of our day. To the earlier forms, which at least showed themselves for what they were, without even taking the trouble to conceal the hypocrisy at their root (the Civil Code in all its legal brutality), the modern forms have added the illusion of emancipation. But this emancipation is merely the authorization to exhibit what one had earlier been obliged to hide; its only effect has been to substitute the release associated with exhibition for the repression of desire, that is, to substitute one form of servitude for another, and, what is worse, a form of servitude that is experienced as true freedom. By thus replacing private repression with public sublimation, the Church has in fact made it more difficult to criticize the condition of the couple; by transforming what had hitherto been experienced in a context of moral asceticism into obvious, self-confident, and manifest ‘nature’, it has cut short criticism of the conjugal situation, and, in particular, of woman’s position in the couple, eliminating the point of attack that the malaise caused by the contradiction of private repression had offered. By transforming malaise and bad conscience into ‘nature’, the Church has not produced the faintest stirrings of freedom; it has, for the most part, produced inanity, when it has not produced outright obscenity. It has terribly complicated the existence of the young people who have committed themselves to its myths, and it has posed the problem of their personal emancipation in terms which are all the more tragic in that these young people have had to break not only with traditional legal categories and obsolete modes of behaviour, but also with new modes of behaviour produced by this ‘religious revolution’ and the consciousness accompanying it. These young people have also had to cope with the surprise and ordeal of their solitude; they have not been able to understand why something ‘natural’ and ‘unproblematic’ in their eyes so often creates problems for others. When they have had the requisite courage, they have had to make an effort to learn to live again – in conditions that were worse than before; when they were not suited for freedom, they have had to go on living in their mythology, i.e., to continue to forget about living.
When, someday, someone draws up the balance sheet of the ‘daring positions’ of the French Church, I hope he will take this case as an object lesson: it demonstrates with perfect clarity that, to free one’s hands, one needs to do more than turn one’s gloves inside out.