There was a time when the names of French Catholic writers sprang easily to mind. If pressed, most could identify, say, François Mauriac, Georges Bernanos or Paul Claudel as exemplars of a fiction that held the themes of grace, redemption and suffering at its core.
Dimly recalled nowadays, these writers formed part of an intellectual movement known as the renouveau catholique, or Catholic Revival, that swept across French letters from the late 19th up to the mid 20th century, partly in response to increasing secularisation and partly to the world wars. Not that Mauriac made it any easier, of course, by famously stating: “I am not a Catholic novelist. I am a novelist who happens to be Catholic.”
