Volume 48, Number 12 · July 19, 2001
The Last French Saint
By Patrice Higonnet
Simone Weil
Francine du Plessix Gray
Lipper/Viking, 246 pp., $19.95
For Tocqueville, politics was the religion of the nineteenth century; religion, that is, of the left (revolutionary socialism); of the center (anticlerical republicanism); and of the right, which in France meant Catholicism. One of the most striking aspects of the long religious wars between 1789 and World War II was that those who believed in salvation through political works did not much believe in salvation through religious faith (or vice versa). One contemporary definition of modern saintliness can be found in the defiant position of those who have passionately and unreasonably yearned to combine these goals.
Review, 4330 words
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