Introduction
The religious situation was different on both sides of the Channel, contrasting an essentially Protestant country on the one hand, whose sovereign was also the head of the Anglican Church and on the other hand a country with a Catholic majority and whose religious leadership supported the Second Empire, just as long as it upheld the Church’s social role and the Papacy in the Italian Peninsula. In the United Kingdom, the recent opening of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge to non-Anglicans, the conversion of members of the Anglican elites to Catholicism and the development of so-called dissenting churches promoted plurality in theological policies and apologetic strategies. In France religious practice was never higher than in the late 1850s but the Catholic Church felt threatened by the dissemination of new ideas and its leadership supported Pope Pius IX[1]’s publication in 1864 of the Syllabus of Errors, a catalogue of modernity’s errors. Six years later the dogma of “papal infallibility” over matters of faith and lifestyle was proclaimed during the First Vatican Council; it reinforced the pope’s authority on all doctrinal matters. The proclamation of the 3rd Republic, the anti-clericalism that characterised the constitution of the transient Commune of Paris and the failure of the attempt to restore the Monarchy changed the political deal for the Catholic Church in France.
