Local Catholicism as Transnational War Experience: Everyday Religious Practice in Occupied Northern...

Local Catholicism as Transnational War

Experience: Everyday Religious Practice in

Occupied Northern France, 1914–1918

Patrick J. Houlihan

THE Great War is not a historical episode that easily lends itself to studyingthe subtleties of religious belief systems. Believers on opposite sidesclaimed that they were engaged in a just war of defense against aggression.

They argued that God was on their side, and they prayed for victory of theirnation—even if that meant the destruction of their fellow believers who werenow considered the enemy. Despite Catholic claims to internationalism and uni-versalism, the overwhelming majority of Catholic bishops and prominent clericsin the public sphere devoted themselves to national causes.1 Clerical nationalismseemed to overwhelm Christian fellowship, and the clerical nationalist paradigmoften served as scholarly shorthand for the experience of religion during the war,especially for long-term studies of Christianity and war.2 The implacable hostility

I gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the Fulbright Program as well as the Universityof Chicago; both of these sources made the research for this article. I also want to thank severalcolleagues who read and commented on the article; I especially appreciate the detailed critiques ofRoger Chickering, Thomas Kselman, Richard Rosengarten, and Benjamin Ziemann, as well astwo anonymous reviewers for Central European History.

1A pointed literary exchange of national stereotypes and accusatory polemics between French andGerman clergy began with the French publication of Alfred Baudrillart, ed., La guerre allemande et lecatholicisme (Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1915). This work was published by the “Catholic Committee ofFrench Propaganda Abroad” (Comité Catholique de Propagande Française à l’Étranger) with the joint spon-sorship of Cardinal Léon-Adolphe Amette of Paris and Cardinal Louis Luçon of Reims. In 1935,Baudrillart would be named a cardinal by Pope Pius XI. The main German response emerged in1915 as Georg Pfeilschifter, ed., Deutsche Kultur, Katholizismus und Weltkrieg. Eine Abwehr desBuches, La guerre allemande et le catholicisme (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1915). The volumewas pub-lished with the indirect support of many German bishops, though it did not have the official approvalof the Fulda Bishops’Conference.Most notably, thework reflected the particular influence ofMichaelvon Faulhaber, the Bishop of Speyer and later Cardinal of Munich, who wrote one of the essays,entitled “Our Religious Culture.”

2For a recent overview, see Andreas Holzem, ed., Krieg und Christentum. Religiöse Gewalttheorien inder Kriegserfahrung des Westens (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2009). See also Andreas Holzem and ChristophHolzapfel, “Kriegserfahrung als Forschungsproblem. Der Erste Weltkrieg in der religiösen Erfahrungvon Katholiken,” Theologische Quartalsschrift 182, no. 4 (2002): 279–97.

Central European History 45 (2012), 233–267.© Conference Group for Central European History of the American

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between French and German Catholic bishops became a convenient symbol ofEuropean national enmity in an age of total war.3

In studying the Great War as a cultural event, however, the tendency tosubsume every religious impulse under the common heading of clerical nation-alism obscures important analytical differences of religious groups. Catholicism inparticular, as a religion whose universalistic liturgy and theology readily promotetransnational conceptualization, offers alternative dimensions to a story where theparadigm of the nation dominates thinking on religion and war. Seen from a his-toriographic perspective, World War I has begun a new generation of transna-tional writing, and this essay contributes perspectives toward that approach.4

There is much work to be done. Focused on modes of irony and meaningless-ness, modernist literary representations of the conflict tended to reduce religiousbelief to a superfluous relic, an archaic vestige of the old order that was no longerrelevant in an age of industrialized slaughter.5 Although Jay Winter’s classic com-parative work demonstrated the persistence of classical, romantic, and religioustropes as necessary avenues for grieving people trying to cope with the war’sdevastating losses, for a long time the majority of cultural histories of the wartended to focus on the avant garde culture of major cities.6

3For France, see Annette Becker, War and Faith: The Religious Imagination in France, 1914–1930,trans. Helen McPhail (Oxford: Berg, 1998); Gérard Cholvy and Yves-Marie Hilaire, eds., Religionet société en France 1914–1945 (Toulouse: Éditions privat, 2002). Older foundational works includeJean-Jacques Becker, The Great War and the French People, trans. Arnold Pomerans (New York:St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 178–96; Jacques Fontana, Les catholiques français pendant la Grande Guerre(Paris: Cerf, 1990); Jean-Marie Mayeur, “Le catholicisme français et la Première Guerre mondiale,”Francia 2 (1977): 377–97. For Germany, see Erwin Gatz, Die Katholische Kirche in Deutschland im 20.Jahrhundert (Freiburg: Herder, 2009), 55–66. Older foundational works include Karl Hammer,Deutsche Kriegstheologie, 1870–1918 (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1974); HeinzHürten, “Die katholische Kirche im Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Der erste Weltkrieg. Wirkung,Wahrnehmung, Analyse, ed. Wolfgang Michalka (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1994), 725–35; HeinrichMissalla, “Gott mit uns.” Die deutsche katholische Kriegspredigt, 1914–1918 (Munich: Kösel Verlag,1968); Richard van Dülmen, “Der deutsche Katholizismus und der Erste Weltkrieg,” Francia 2(1974): 347–76.

4Jay Winter, “Approaching the History of the Great War,” in The Legacy of the Great War: NinetyYears on, ed. Jay Winter (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2009), 1–17, esp. 6–7. For acommanding historiographical overview, see Jay Winter and Antoine Prost, The Great War inHistory: Debates and Controversies, 1914 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

5For a classic work in this vein, see Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1975). More recently, see Theodore Ziolkowski,Modes of Faith: Secular Surrogates forLost Religious Belief (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). In his provocative revisionist history,Niall Ferguson argues that “The persistence of the idea that thewar was ‘a bad thing’ owes much to thegenre known as ‘war poetry’ (usually meaning ‘anti-war’).” As Ferguson elaborates, an often selectivefocus on the disillusioning experience of some ex-soldiers made for dramatic literature but created adominant interpretation of thewar as “a dirty trick which had been played onme and my generation,”in the pithy phrase of Siegfried Sassoon. See Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (London: Penguin Press,1998), xxvi–xxxii; quotes from xxvi, xxx.

6Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). The latest nationally comparative research in the reli-gious practices of major metropolitan areas in Paris, London, and Berlin, however, concludes that these

PATRICK J. HOULIHAN234

Religious histories have done little to widen this narrow perspective. AlthoughCatholic histories of thewar have shown some attempts to overcome the previousfocus on institutional history, they remain largely focused on the peacemakingefforts of the papacy.7 Recent religious histories freely admit that the everydayexperience of Catholics during the Great War remains a neglected historicalepisode.8 Overall, as Michael Snape has argued in the recent Cambridge Historyof Christianity, “Despite its magnitude as a global event, the First World Warhas not been well-served by historians of Catholic and Protestant Christianity.Although numerous studies have been published on the churches’ involvementin the war, they have tended to adopt a relatively narrow national or denomina-tional focus, a tendency which has hampered the identification of connectingthemes and which has served to obscure the wider impact of the war onWestern Christianity as a whole.”9

After the cultural turn in World War I studies, histories of religion during thewar have stressed the autonomous power of religion to shape identities, albeitlargely in national frameworks.10 The recent work on religion as part of a “warculture” has helped to focus attention on the everyday motivations of ordinarycitizens for whom religious faith was a key part of their identity.11 When theseworks are read collectively, however, nationally oriented religious scholarshipand the “war culture” approach often unintentionally reduce religion to instru-mental terms of mobilization (i.e., the crusading effort to win hearts and mindsdevoted to victory). Thus religion can still be read as a form of propaganda: didit further victory or defeat? Particularly for the defeated, this narrative conve-nience quickly transforms frustrated collective spiritual energy into a tale of

preeminent sites of modernist culture also saw an amazing continued vitality and adaptability of reli-gious traditions. See Adrian Gregory and Annette Becker, “Religious Sites and Practices,” in CapitalCities at War: Paris, London, Berlin: vol. 2, A Cultural History, ed. Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 383–427.

7Notwithstanding scholarly focus on papal diplomacy during the war, Pope Benedict XV remains,in the words of his biographer, an “unknown pope.” John F. Pollard, The Unknown Pope: Benedict XV(1914–1922) and the Pursuit of Peace (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1999). Cf. Letterio Mauro, ed.,Benedetto XV: Profeta di pace in un mondo in crisi (Bologna: Minerva, 2008).

8Nicholas Atkin and Frank Tallett, Priests, Prelates, and People: A History of European Catholicism since1750 (London: IB Tauridge, 2003), 195–203, 354.

9Michael Snape, “The Great War,” in World Christianities, c. 1914-c. 2000, vol. 9, CambridgeHistory of Christianity, ed. Hugh McLeod (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006),131–50; here, 131.

10Four superb works are A. Becker,War and Faith; Jonathan H. Ebel, Faith in the Fight: Religion andthe American Soldier in the Great War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Michael Snape,God and the British Soldier: Religion and the British Army in the First and Second World Wars (London:Routledge, 2005); Benjamin Ziemann, War Experiences in Rural Germany, 1914–1923, trans. AlexSkinner (Oxford: Berg, 2007).

11Annette Becker, “Faith, Ideologies, and the ‘Cultures of War,’” in A Companion to World War I,ed. John Horne (Malden, MA:Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 234–47. See also Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeauand Annette Becker, 14–18: Understanding the Great War, trans. Catherine Temerson (New York: Hilland Wang, 2002).

CATHOLICISM AS TRANSNATIONAL WAR EXPERIENCE 235

political religions and new authoritarian messiahs who promised revenge andredemption.12

By going beyond the rhetoric, stereotypes, and narrative conventions andinstead focusing on Catholic belief as what Charles Taylor has termed “lived con-ditions,” this essay sheds new light on not only the history of the Great War butalso its place within a Catholic twentieth-century Europe dominated by themeta-narrative of Franco-German hostility.13 Viewed through archival evidenceof German Catholic chaplains, as well as personal published accounts from Frenchcitizens under occupation, this essay reveals a shared public religiosity that defiesnational stereotypes. The communal French-German Catholicism was based onan asymmetrical power relationship fundamental to the dynamics of occupationin which German military power was sovereign—an attitude that strongly filteredsurviving documentation from both sides. For French civilians who enduredoccupation, keeping a diary was a testimonial form of resistance. For German chap-lains, pastoral reports and diaries were part of their official record-keeping duties,as reported back to their superiors both in military and church administration.14

12Hans Maier, “Political Religion: A Concept and its Limitations,” Totalitarian Movements andPolitical Religions 8, no. 1 (2007): 5–16. For an entertaining and polemical work, see MichaelBurleigh, Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics from the Great War to the War on Terror(New York: HarperCollins, 2007).

13Charles Taylor,A Secular Age (Cambridge,MA: Belknap Press of HarvardUniversity Press, 2007),8. The experience of Belgians during the war had vast symbolic importance for all the war’s partici-pants, and the practical reality of Catholic religious life in occupied Belgium has received some atten-tion. Frédéric Dauphin, “Le clerge paroissial en Belgique: La perception de l’occupation allemande,”Revue du Nord 80, no. 325 (1998): 367–82; Sophie De Schaepdrijver, La Belgique et la Première Guerremondiale, trans. Claudine Spitaels and Vincent Marnix (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2004). For reasons oflimited space, however, this article bypasses many issues associated with Belgium in order to focuson events in northern France and thus more effectively engage the meta-narrative of French-German conflict over the course of the twentieth century.

14To complement the archival source base of German Catholic chaplaincy, this article has made useof the diaries of several chaplains that exist as extended reflections over the course of the entire war.These long-term narratives complement more fragmentary and isolated reports about occupationfound in the German archives. Additionally, materials from French published primary sources aswell as the Vatican Archives provide a more balanced assessment of the occupation narratives. Thechaplains’ reports cover the spectrum between official public duty and personal private rumination,and this article has made use of reports from across the spectrum. To approach a localized, personalizedreligiosity beyond the chaplains’ official line, however, this article has emphasized chaplains’ semi-private communications such as letters and diaries. The official reports, termed “pastoral reports”(Pastoralberichte) or “activity reports” (Tätigkeitsberichte), were issued by chaplains as part of their dutyas military officers responsible for the religious worship opportunities offered to soldiers and civilianswhere the chaplains were stationed. These reports were issued by chaplains through military channelsat least quarterly, though some assiduous chaplains wrote more often. Eventually these reports woundup at the central offices of the Catholic chaplaincies for the various federal states of the GermanEmpire, for which Bishop Heinrich Joeppen of Prussia assumed overall supervision of the GermanCatholic chaplaincy. These reports survive at both the Germany Military Archives (Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, Freiburg imBreisgau) as well as church archives. Many chaplains alsowrote quasi-officialletters and reports to their religious superiors on the home front and to leading church figures, the mostvisible of whomwas probablyMichael von Faulhaber, Bishop of Speyer, later Cardinal ofMunich, andthe official head of Bavarian Catholic chaplaincy. These documents are found in Faulhaber’s personal


Nevertheless, both types of sources reveal a synthetic, impromptu Catholicworship under duress that provides a more nuanced portrait of occupationduring the GreatWar. As Annette Becker, the leading historian of the French reli-gious experience of the Great War has recently observed, empirical evidence ofintangible concepts is always a problem for historians of religion.15 Thoughthey served in the administrative apparatus of a brutal occupying power, therecords of German Catholic chaplains in the occupied territories help toprovide details of daily religious life, thus recapturing more autonomousexpressions of public religiosity that otherwise would not have been historicallyrecorded.The social position of Catholic chaplains highlights avenues in which Catholic

tradition adapted to the circumstances of war and occupation. The Catholic mili-tary chaplain serves as an analytical lens to examine how national sentimentscompete with supranational and subnational identities. Long dismissed as an epi-phenomenal superfluity or an unreflective defender of the old order, the militarychaplain is, in fact, a key figure for examining issues of church and state in times ofwar.16 As state-sponsored clergy responsible for ministering to soldiers and civil-ians under military control, the military chaplain is a frame of analysis for notonly the dissemination of top-down military-religious decrees but also popularreligiosity and more autonomous religious agency filtered back to military andreligious authorities.17 Located in the experiences of everyday events inadapted, improvised circumstances, the military chaplain offers avenues for dis-cussing how religious believers strive to imbue with transcendent meaning

papers at the Archdiocesan Archives ofMunich-Freising. Chaplains also mademore personal notationsand diaries, which have been preserved at disparate church archives. Some of these personal notes anddiaries show various degrees of preparation for possible public audiences, sometimes being typewrittencopies revised from original handwritten manuscripts in Sutterlin script or Gabelsburg shorthand, forinstance.

15“Traditional religious services and spiritualism, prayers and amulets, the suffering of Christ and theintercession of the saints, ordinary piety and extraordinary revelations all contributed to the religion ofwartime. Yet it is hard to reconstitute prayers, fears, and suffering when they leave few archival traces.”A. Becker, “Faith, Ideologies, and the ‘Cultures of War,’” 241.

16For a comparative imperial perspective on the position of central European Catholic chaplains, seePatrick J. Houlihan, “Clergy in the Trenches: Catholic Military Chaplains of Germany and Austria-Hungary during the First World War” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2011).

17For an excellent comparative overview of chaplaincy throughout the ages, see Doris L. Bergen,ed., The Sword of the Lord: Military Chaplains from the First to the Twenty-First Century (South Bend,IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004). For German Catholic chaplains during World War I,see Frank Betker and Almut Kriele, eds., Pro fide et patria! Die Kriegstagebücher von Ludwig Berg1914/18. Katholischer Feldgeistlicher im Grossen Hauptquartier Kaiser Wilhelms II (Cologne: Böhlau,1998); Arnold Vogt, Religion im Militär. Seelsorge zwischen Kriegsverherrlichung und Humanität. Einemilitär-geschichtliche Studie (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1984); Hans-Josef Wollasch, ed.,Militärseelsorge im Ersten Weltkrieg. Das Kriegstagebuch des katholischen Feldgeistlichen Benedict Kreutz(Mainz: Matthias Grünewelt Verlag, 1987); Benjamin Ziemann, “Katholische Religiosität und dieBewältigung des Krieges. Soldaten und Militärseelsorger in der deutschen Armee, 1914–1918,” inVolksreligiosität und Kriegserleben, ed. Friedhelm Boll (Münster: Lit, 1997), 116–36.


their earthly struggles during a time of war. The wartime religiosity recorded bychaplains reveals Catholic believers simply persisting in their daily religious lifeunder extreme circumstances that at first glance would seem to generate chaos,meaninglessness, and the ultimate futility of sacrifice so fundamental to the reli-gious imagination.18 The religious faith of those in extreme conditions,however, was much more complex than Manichean alternatives of either blindfaith or disillusioned “realism.”

German Catholic chaplains serving in the occupied territories in the GreatWarwere micro-level examples of the challenges that Catholic traditionalism faced inadapting to the circumstances of modern war. Unlike their French clericalcounterparts who were subject to conscription as part of the nation-in-arms,German chaplains were ordained priests designated as noncombatants, a separateliminal caste. Attached at the division level as members of disparate federal armycontingents in the German Empire, Catholic chaplains were subject to a variety ofchurch-state accords negotiated by the Vatican with each German state on theissues of military chaplaincy. Theoretically, German Catholic chaplaincy duringwartime fell under the centralizing authority of the Prussian Feldpropst,Heinrich Joeppen.

During the Great War, however, centrifugal tendencies became exacerbated.Institutional chaos reigned regarding German chaplains’ identities, rights, andduties. Even such a basic task as organizing a common Catholic field manualproved troublesome. Only in summer 1918 did Catholic authorities issue afield manual for Prussian Catholic chaplains, which was largely based on theexperiences of one Eastern Front chaplain, Franz Albert of the 10th Army inVilnius, and which did not have time to find widespread usage in the Germanarmy as a whole.19 Further underscoring the fragmentation of the GermanCatholic war effort, the Prussian War Ministry disparaged even this late attemptat a common pastoral aid as something that would hold “no special interest forBavarian military chaplains” because the handbook was designed for “Prussianchaplains.”20 Similarly, Vatican attempts to coordinate religious duties inwartime proved of limited value, as the decrees of the Holy See had to be filteredthrough imperial, national, and federal contexts.21

18For a classic examination about the fundamental cultural patterns of religious believers copingwith the threshold of chaos that threatens the perceived general order of transcendence, see CliffordGeertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books,1973), 89–125, esp. 93–104.

19Franz Albert, Handbuch für die katholischen Feldgeistlichen des Preußischen Heeres (Vilnius: Verlag der10. Armee, 1918).

20Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv (hereafter BHStA), Abt. IV (Kriegsarchiv), MKr. 13852, 184:Nr. 246457a, KBKM, Ausschnitt aus dem preußischen Armee-Verordnungsblatt Nr. 45 vom31.8.1918, 502. Emphasis in original.

21Archivio Segreto Vaticano (hereafter ASV), Seg. di Stato, Guerra 1914–1918, Fasc. 474, 11r–12v:“Facultates et declarationes pro sacerdotibus durante bello,” ex June 24, 1915.


Such structural confusion helped to reinforce the nature of chaplaincy asworked out at a local level, based on shifting needs. Confusion and uncertaintyreigned, leading to much improvisation and individual adaptation, as senior com-manders recognized. For instance, the commanding general of the staging area ofthe German 6th Army Oberkommando wrote in January 1918 that military chap-lains “are subordinate to, on the one hand, their military, and on the otherhand, their church laws. The double subordination places high demands on thediscretion of the clergy, since it is in many cases difficult to separate sharplythe boundaries between military and pure church activities [rein kirchlichenAngelegenheiten].”22

Coupled with the lack of French clergy due to mobilization, this created a situ-ation of transnational cooperation to copewith the available manpower resources.German chaplains were mostly stationed in German military accommodationsalongside German troops, but chaplains also were billeted in French homes andreligious institutions.23 Together with the remaining French clergy, theGerman chaplains coordinated Catholic services for both the French civiliansand German soldiers. German and French Catholics adapted to the situation asbest they could because priests were in such shortage. For such a sacramental reli-gion as Catholicism, where priests performed the sacred rites, the importance ofthis point should be underscored.German military and religious authorities recognized this at the time, and their

shifting reactions hint at the localized nature of chaplaincy in practice. Late at theend of the war in 1918, facing a grim strategic situation that was unraveling moreeach day and threatening to break out into full-scale social revolution, theGerman High Command became much more nervous about the morale of itstroops and their possible ideological contamination by enemy priests. Over pro-tests from the head of the German Catholic chaplaincy, Heinrich Joeppen, theHigh Command suddenly reversed its earlier position about international reli-gious services, instead taking a much more hard-line approach that wouldforbid “soldiers to participate in the Masses of enemy clergy and above all toreceive absolution” from French priests.24 Soon thereafter, at another chaplains’conference in occupied Brussels, Joeppen and his colleagues collectively affirmedthat they would vigorously protest this decision, saying that such a move would“restrict the freedom of conscience [Gewissensfreiheit] of soldiers in an

22BHStA, Abt. IV (Kriegsarchiv), Bd. 13850, 299: Jan. 31, 1918, Etappen-Inspektion 6. Armee, IId.Nr. 142 pers. an das Armee-Oberkommando 6.

23Erzbischöfliches Archiv Freiburg (hereafter EAF), Na. 44 (Jakob Ebner Tagebuch), 497, entry ofMay 23, 1916. On that day, Chaplain Ebner noted that he had monitored the French catechism lessonfor the ten-year-old son of his French host (Quartierwirt) in the village of Sugny.

24Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv (hereafter BA-MA), PH 32, Bd. 391: Protokoll über die Konferenzdes Hochw. Herrn Feldpropstes der Armee, Dr. Joeppen mit den Oberpfarrern und Feldgeistlichender 1., 3., u. 7. Armee am 18. Sept. [1918] in Charleville, 6.


impermissible way.”25 While there was too little time left in the war for more of abureaucratic battle to take place, Joeppen went on the record advising hischaplains to work out with their military commanders “verbal agreements . . .from case to case” that would allow for the skirting of the High Command’sabsolute prohibition on the grounds of practical necessity.26

At a level of individual conscience observed in their letters and diaries, GermanCatholic chaplains were not troubled by the ancient dilemma of religious believ-ers serving two masters.27 In their official theoretical implementation of militaryadministrative policies, German chaplains were often servants of Caesar. Germanchaplains reasoned that Germany was fighting a just war of defense against aggres-sion. German chaplains did not take orders from French clergy, even their eccle-siastical superiors, and any French cleric who proved stubborn would incur thewrath of the German military state. Due to the manpower crisis, however,German chaplains wound up taking time away from Catholics in the Germanarmy to minister to the needs of the French civilian population. Conversely,German Catholic troops found themselves begging to receive sacraments fromFrench clergy, and thus found themselves imploring theoretically enemy civiliansfor religious worship. In such cases, German Catholic soldiers participated incommunal religious life with their enemy more than they did with fellowGerman soldiers who were Protestant or Jewish. Particularly in contrast to theirrelations with French clerics, German Catholic soldiers’ religious interactionwith German Protestant and Jewish clergy was much more limited and inmany cases, nonexistent.

Thus, German military chaplains were intermediary authority figures of littledirect agency, more effective as both observers as well as conduits of top-downand bottom-up religiosity. Nevertheless, as numerous historical studies sincethe cultural turn have shown, it is precisely by studying previously marginalizedfigures that historians have been better able to understand the dominant socialrepresentations that inform perceptions of “normality.” While scholars shouldbe wary of enthusiastic assertions of peaceful coexistence found in the chaplains’reports presented solely from the German point of view, the German chaplains’evidence hints at narratives that do not neatly fit generic verdicts of the histori-ography of the Great War.

The demonstration of mentalities is a notoriously difficult subject, but manyCatholic believers especially from rural regions across Europe have found

25BA-MA, PH 32, Bd. 391: Bericht 24. Sept. 1918: Konferenz in Brüssel, 2.26BA-MA, PH 32, Bd. 391: Protokoll über die Konferenz des Hochw. Herrn Feldpropstes der

Armee, Dr. Joeppen mit den Oberpfarrern und Feldgeistlichen der 1., 3. u. 7. Armee am 18. Sept.[1918] in Charleville, 6.

27John Eppstein, The Catholic Tradition of the Law of Nations (Washington, D.C.: CarnegieEndowment for International Peace, published by the Catholic Association for International Peace,1935), 29–62.


themselves as voiceless historical subjects in a conflict where the reigning trope isdisillusioned futility.28 Documents that demonstrate the continued persistence ofreligious life must be balanced against the collective disenchanted judgments ofnihilism given by urbane elites, whose own subjective perspectives on religionduring the GreatWar have not received a comparative amount of critical distance.Only through evaluating a plurality of participants can scholars achieve a morebalanced assessment of religiosity during the era of total war.This essay proceeds to sketch the historiography of occupied France during the

Great War and the Catholic nature of the occupation. The following sectionselaborate, in an admittedly pointillist fashion, religious themes of the cradle-to-grave Catholic caritas network that persisted during the occupation from1914–1918; the methodological pointillism reflects both the fragmentarynature of the source base and an approach to the study of religion that does notfavor quantifiable systematic analysis.29 Next, a brief section continues the chro-nology after 1918 to emphasize continuities after the war’s conventional narrativeendpoint. Finally, a concluding section offers reflections on the wider relevanceof a more personalized religious history of the war beyond national frameworksand standard cultural narratives.Instead of national paradigms, it is more advantageous to look at the German

occupation of northern France during World War I as an “entangled history.”30

By reassessing occupation dynamics, the study of military chaplains contributesnew empirical evidence to a study of daily life of occupied France during theGreat War. The story of the occupation of northern France during the GreatWar allows researchers to examine the Catholic experience of the war as a supra-national and local religious experience. While national armies violently clashedover no-man’s-land and bishops wrote their screeds from the safety of thehome front, the occupied territories were a shared space of transnationalCatholic cooperation under the burdens of military administration.

The Historiography of Occupation

The old dichotomy of awar in which the battlefront was separated from the homefront has increasingly given way to portrayals of the war that emphasized theoverlap of these previously exclusive domains. The civilians’ war cannot be

28For a reconsideration of the grand narrative of modernization, see Michael Saler, “Modernity andEnchantment: A Historiographic Review,” American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (2006): 692–716.

29Even with the best of sources and modern data assessment techniques, systematized assessment ofreligious collectives, let alone the recovery of individual religious subjectivity, is an unreachable limit.The methodology of this essay, therefore, is deliberately pointillist in the hope that the alternative pat-terns of religious behavior described here may be subjected to further scrutiny. In the meanwhile,scholars must avoid the extremes of categorical generalizations of religious group identity based onnational stereotypes.

30Jürgen Kocka, “Comparison and Beyond,” History & Theory 42, no. 1 (2003): 39–44.


easily divorced from the soldiers’ war.31 For all these recent developments,however, the daily life of occupied civilians during World War I still has notreceived the attention it deserves, especially in contrast to the material writtenabout occupation during World War II.32

The French story of occupation does not easily fit with French heroic mem-ories of victory and consequently remains a neglected narrative. In a recent theo-retically and empirically sophisticated piece of collaborative scholarship, twoleading historians of World War I from French and German scholarly traditions,Jean-Jacques Becker and Gerd Krumeich, have jointly written a monographentitled La grande guerre: Une historie franco-allemande, in which they declare that“a scientific history of this regime of occupation has to this day only partiallybeen written.”33 In her path-breaking work on the occupation, AnnetteBecker writes that the occupied French citizens (as well as French prisoners ofwar) were vociferously discussed and indeed instrumentalized as objects of propa-ganda during the war. Ironically, it was precisely the French victory that causedprisoners of war and occupied civilians to become forgotten after the war, com-pared to the portrayals of heroic combat. Dishonor and shameful humiliation ofthese groups of French citizens did not accord with the narrative of final victory.34

Those French and Belgian citizens who became intimately associated with theoccupying German forces during World War I represent one of the most schol-arly neglected social groups of the entire conflict. Even less studied, except inthe morally charged terms of collaboration, are daily relationships of more enthu-siastic cohabitation, despite the fact that individual personal loyalties were farmore complicated than national frameworks allow.35

Annette Becker’s influential work on the religious imagination in Franceduring World War I helped to inaugurate a cultural history of religion duringthe war, and she has also written and directed research on the occupied regions

31For an overview, see Winter and Prost, The Great War in History.32Nicholas Atkin, ed., Daily Lives of Civilians in Wartime Twentieth-Century Europe (Westport, CT:

Greenwood Press, 2008); Lieve Gevers and Jan Bank, eds., Religion under Siege, 2 vols., vol. I: TheRoman Catholic Church in Occupied Europe (1939–1950) (Leuven: Peeters, 2007).

33Jean-Jacques Becker and Gerd Krumeich, La grande guerre: Une histoire franco-allemande (Paris:Tallandier, 2008), 177. See also Philippe Nivet, “Départements envahis,” in Dictionnaire de laGrande Guerre 1914–1918, ed. François Cochet and Rémy Porte (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2008),321–24. Despite Belgium’s important symbolic role in Allied rationale for the war, the Belgian experi-ence of occupation has only recently received scholarly attention. See De Schaepdrijver, La Belgique etla Première Guerre mondiale.

34Annette Becker,Oubliés de la GrandeGuerre: Humanitaire et culture de guerre, 1914–1918: Populationsoccupées, déportés civils, prisonniers de guerre (Paris: Noêsis, 1998), 14–15.

35Emerging scholarship has begun to hint at the complicated loyalties of individuals who donot neatly fit into national frameworks. See Sophie De Schaepdrijver, ed., “We Who Are SoCosmopolitan”: The War Diary of Constance Graeffe, 1914–1915, 2nd ed. (Brussels: Archives généralesdu Royaume, 2008). For the Belgian example of collaboration, see De Schaepdrijver, La Belgique etla Première Guerre mondiale, 251–85.


of northern France.36 Approaching the work from the perspective of an increas-ingly brutalizing “war culture” from 1914–1945, she concludes that the occu-pation experience was a decisive step “toward the system of Nazi deathcamps.”37 Larry Zuckerman’s study of occupied Belgium rests on exactly thesame premise.38

Becker’s most recent work on occupation expands her frame of reference toinclude both Belgium and northern France in a monograph that augments herprevious studies. Offering new conceptual refinements as well as empiricalsupport, she reinforces her earlier work, drawing on Ashvali Margolit’s notionof witnessing. Tomake analytical points about the period of 1914–45 as one con-tinuum of brutalized warfare, this passionate revisionist desire to give voice to sup-pressed victims tends toward moral advocacy. Indeed, to bolster her case that thebarbarization, terror, and extermination during World War I occupation set thepath toward genocide, Becker invokes no less a moral-juridical authority thanRaphael Lemkin, citing his views on occupied northern France.39

Instead of rushing to the story of Nazism as the ultimate moral-political parableof the twentieth century (though one certainly can see it in those terms),however, more historical contextualization on the issue of military occupationis necessary. As Jan T. Gross has written, scholars should strive to represent occu-pations as at least partially endogenous social systems with peculiar dynamics oftime, place, identity, and agency.40 Although Gross refers explicitly to World

36A. Becker, War and Faith. More recently see Annette Becker, “Die Religionsgeschichte desKrieges 1914–1918. Eine Bilanz,” in Alliierte im Himmel. Populare Religiosität und Kriegserfahrung, ed.Gottfried Korff (Tübingen: Tübinger Vereinigung für Volkskunde, e.V., 2006), 33–45. Becker’s fun-damental work on occupation not only brought to light a marginalized episode in French historicalremembrance but also revised an uncritical history that relied on idealized literature and memoirs torepresent moments of peace and fraternization between occupier and occupied. See A. Becker,Oubliés de la Grande Guerre, 17. Becker’s criticism refers primarily to the only serious English-languagework on the occupation until that date, namely Richard Cobb, French and Germans, Germans andFrench: A Personal Interpretation of France under Two Occupations, 1914–1918/1940–1944 (Hanover,NH: University Press of New England, 1983). Cobb relied heavily on Louis Barthas, Les carnets deguerre de Louis Barthas, tonnelier: 1914–1918, ed. Rémy Cazals (Paris: La Découverte, 1997 [1978]);Jean Norton Cru, Témoins: Essai d’analyse et critique des souvenirs de combattants édités en français de1915 à 1928 (Paris: Les Étincelles, 1929).

37A. Becker, Oubliés de la Grande Guerre, 377. See also Leonard V. Smith, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, and Annette Becker, France and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2003), 45–52. For more on the notion of the “war culture,” see Audoin-Rouzeau and A. Becker, 14–18: Understanding the Great War.

38Larry Zuckerman, The Rape of Belgium: The Untold Story of World War I (New York: New YorkUniversity Press, 2004), 2. “Occupied Belgium was a forerunner of Nazi Europe.”

39Annette Becker, Les cicatrices rouges, 14–18: France et Belgique occupées (Paris: Fayard, 2010), esp.295–313. Philippe Nivet’s recent work also indicates that the occupation of northern France is attract-ing more scholarly interest, though here, too, the temptation is to view the episode as part of the1914–45 continuum. See Philippe Nivet, La France occupée: 1914–1918 (Paris: Armand Colin, 2011).

40Jan T. Gross, “Themes for a Social History ofWar Experience andCollaboration,” inThe Politics ofRetribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath, ed. István Deák, Jan T. Gross, and Tony Judt(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 15–35, esp. 15.


War II and its aftermath, his observations need to be applied to World War I aswell. The conceptual history of the term “collaboration” itself underscores thecomparative neglect of the phenomenon during World War I.41 For the occu-pation regimes during the Great War, as Philippe Nivet has recently indicated,relations between occupier and occupied took on varied forms, ranging from hos-tility and direct resistance to indifference and sometimes acceptance.42 Therefore,the need remains to write a critical history of occupation that acknowledges theimportance of the extremes of both brutality and fraternization. The occupiedterritories were a moral gray zone: historians need to search for a plurality oftruths in between the moral extremes.

The theme of religious life in occupied France, however, lends itself to eithermarginalization or one-sided heroic moralizing. Despite recent empirical researchby Becker and others into the brutal administrative details of the occupation, thestory of religiosity during the occupation often resembles a clear-cut morality taleinstead of a work of critical social science.43 Only a handful of secondary accountscalls attention to religious aspects of the occupation, which are largely subsumedunder the heading of heroic collective endurance, and thus resembles and echoesthe published firsthand accounts of religious life under the occupation.44 The actof writing a diary was expressly forbidden by German occupation authorities, andthus the mere act of record-keeping was in a profound sense a form of resistance.As an empirical matter, however, this predisposes the surviving written evidencefrom French citizens toward a collective interpretation of defiance. Thus, the

41Gross’s own edited volume on the issue of occupation calls attention to the lexicographical factthat the term “collaboration” dates from a statement of Marshal Pétain from October 24, 1940, andhas an explicitly narrow meaning in several European languages: namely, the association with Nazioccupations during World War II. Ibid., 24.

42Nivet, “Départements envahis,” 323. Cf. A. Becker, Les cicatrices rouges, 249–70.43The most prominent English-language work by Helen McPhail, who also translated important

French scholarship on the Great War into English, pointedly discloses her sympathy for the Frenchpeople and French culture in a work that proposes to speak about “the Long Silence” and yet isitself practically silent about the religious life of French citizens under occupation. See HelenMcPhail, The Long Silence: Civilian Life under the German Occupation of Northern France, 1914–1918(New York: I. B. Tauris, 1999). Cf. Marc Blancpain and Marcel Carnoy, La vie quotidienne dans laFrance du Nord sous les occupations (1814–1944) (Paris: Hachette littérature générale, 1983), 199–314.

44Marc Blancpain, Quand Guillaume II gouvernait “de la Somme aux Vosges” (Paris: Fayard, 1980);Carine Cnudde-Lecointre, “Monseigneur Charost, évêque de Lille durant la Grande Guerre,”Revue du Nord 80, no. 325 (1998): 355–66; Dauphin, “Le clerge paroissial en Belgique,” 367–82;Fontana, Les catholiques français pendant la Grande Guerre, 309–26; Georges Gromaire, L’occupation alle-mande en France (1914–1918) (Paris: Payot, 1925); Mayeur, “Le catholicisme français et la PremièreGuerre mondiale,” 377–97. More recently, see Cholvy and Hilaire, eds., Religion et société en France1914–1945. See, for example, Charles Calippe, La Somme sous l’occupation allemande (27 août1914–19 mars 1917) (Woignarue: La Vague verte, 2003 [Paris: Téqui, 1918]); Fañch Postic, ed.,Moi Louis-Joseph Le Port: Curé dans la France occupée: 1914–1918 (Rennes: Apogée, 1998). For a collec-tion of journals and an editorial overview, see Annette Becker, ed., Journaux de combattants et de civils dela France du Nord dans la Grande Guerre (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 1998).


extant French sources also need to be read against the grain for evidence of formsof coexistence that do not neatly fall into dichotomies of resistance orcollaboration.The seductive narrative simplifications of national histories, however, remain

powerful.45

The Character of the Occupation

The German occupation on the Western Front involved all of Belgium’s soleArchdiocese of Mechelen-Brussels plus eleven Catholic dioceses in northernFrance. Of the French dioceses, Cambrai, Lille (with the exception ofDunkirk), and Reims were totally occupied for almost the entire duration ofthe war. In contrast, Arras, Amiens, Beauvais, Châlons, Soissons, Nancy, Saint-Dié, and Verdun found themselves under partial occupation either geographicallyor chronologically (see maps 1 and 2).46 The legal situation of the occupied ter-ritories was ostensibly clear-cut, insofar as the invading power had assumedresponsibility for the religious care of the occupied civilian population.47

Article 43 of the Hague Convention of 1907 declared that “The authority ofthe legitimate power having in fact passed into the hands of the occupant, thelatter shall take all the measures in his power to restore, and ensure, as far as pos-sible, public order and safety, while respecting, unless absolutely prevented, thelaws in force in the country.” Regarding religious matters, Article 46 stated,“Family honor and rights, the lives of persons, and private property, as well as reli-gious convictions and practice, must be respected.”48 A diplomatic complicationarose, however, because France was not directly represented in the Vatican,having severed relations with the Holy See in 1904, even before the laïcité law

45Despite ever-increasing international research collaboration on World War I, especially throughthe influences of the Historial de la Grande Guerre at Peronne near the Verdun-Somme battlefields, JayWinter and Antoine Prost have recently reminded scholars that the historical remembrances of the warremain fragmented according to different national trajectories in the course of the twentieth century.SeeWinter and Prost, The Great War in History. Thus,WorldWar I for Britain remains ultimately futileas a waste that led to appeasement and eventually World War II, “their finest hour” where Britainfinally and decisively stopped German expansionism. In complete contrast, the Great War inFrench memory retains an aura of almost holy enthusiasm most famously demonstrated through theunion sacrée: in the French conceptualization, a successful defense of the nation that occludes the hum-bling defeat and embarrassing complicity ofWorldWar II. One could also mention disparate interpre-tations for Russia and the United States, among other participants.

46Fontana, Les catholiques français pendant la Grande Guerre, 309.47For all the declared antimodernism of Pope Pius X, on the issue of occupied northern France,

ironically Canon Law in 1914 administratively agreed with the latest precepts of international law, for-mulated in the Hague Convention of 1907. See Eppstein, The Catholic Tradition of the Law of Nations;Edward N. Peters, ed., The 1917 or Pio-Benedictine Code of Canon Law: In English Translation withExtensive Scholarly Apparatus (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2001).

48Hague IV, Sect. III, Art. 42–56: Yale University’s “Avalon Project” http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hague04.asp#art42 (accessed March 14, 2012).


of the following year.49 Bishop Thomas Heylen of the Archdiocese of Namur,Belgium, exercised ecclesiastical jurisdiction for the territories of occupied north-ern France with special powers delegated by the Holy See.50 Given the symbolicimportance of Belgian innocence, Cardinal Désiré Mercier of Belgium becamean outspoken leader of opposition to the German occupation regime, which

Map 1. Source: Jean Boutier, Olivier Guyotjeannin,Grand Atlas de l’histoire de France, 225. © EditionsAutrement, 2011.

49James F. McMillan, “French Catholics: Rumeurs Infâmes and the Union Sacrée,” in Authority,Identity, and the Social History of the Great War, ed. Frans Coetzee and Marilyn Shevin-Coetzee(Providence, RI: Berghahn, 1995), 117.

50Calippe, La Somme sous l’occupation allemande, 88–90. Cf. Acta Apostolicae Sedis: CommentariumOfficiale (Rome: Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, 1909-present), vol. 7, 526.


placed him under house arrest. The Germans considered taking more direct puni-tive action against him but ultimately refrained from doing so.51

Besieged by advocates seeking to advance national causes, the Holy Seemanaged to remain fairly neutral. The Great War represented the decisivemoment in which the Vatican abandoned its hostility to modernity, at least interms of international relations. Precisely because of its loss of the Papal Statesduring the 1870 unification of Italy, the Catholic Church became a more

Map 2. Source: Jean Boutier, Olivier Guyotjeannin, Gillies Pécout,Grand Atlas de l’histoire de France,258. © Editions Autrement, 2011.

51Roger Aubert, Les deux premiers grands conflits du Cardinal Mercier avec les autorités allemandes d’occupa-tion (Louvain: Peeters, 1998). See also Désiré Mercier, Cardinal Mercier: Pastorals, Letters, Allocutions,1914–1917 (New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1917).


believable supranational actor during the Great War, a diplomatic player advocat-ing humanitarian concerns. Benedict XV condemned the horrors of the unfold-ing war, which he deemed “useless slaughter,” a “tragedy of human madness,”and the “suicide of civilized Europe.” A reactionary pope could have easilylapsed into apathetic and unmoving Schadenfreude directed against industrialsociety. Instead, the pope devoted massive amounts of energy and resources inthe pursuit of vigorous humanitarian initiatives, especially caring for prisonersof war and displaced persons. In the long term, such measures helped to acclimateforeign powers to the idea that the Holy See was a more impartial advocate ofhumanitarian interests, as opposed to advancing its own political agenda as it un-abashedly had done throughout the centuries. In the short term during the GreatWar, however, both the Central Powers and the Triple Entente held the beliefthat the Holy See was partial to the interests of the other side, which ironicallyhelped to reaffirm the papacy’s neutrality. The status of the occupied territoriesbecame a key point of dispute for the appeals of both sides to the Holy See.Despite desperate pleas from Catholics seeking to advance their national cause,the pope managed to remain relatively impartial.52

Having to the serve the needs of both Catholics in the German army as well asministering to the needs of the French civilian population, the German armyfaced a fundamental clerical manpower crisis in the occupied territories.Relying on nineteenth-century administrative structures that often failed toadjust to the age of mass mobilization, German Catholic chaplains, officiallyattached to German army units at the division level, were part of a federally frag-mented army bureaucracy that often failed to provide a unified conception ofmilitary-religious requirements.53 As the size of the armies swelled, the numberof chaplains failed to keep pace. In extreme cases in some Prussian divisions,for instance, the one official Catholic chaplain, if not supplemented by moread hoc measures, was theoretically responsible for the pastoral care for everyCatholic solider in a division of around 17,000 men if the unit were at fullstrength.54

In the occupied territories, French priests were in extremely short supplybecause the 1905 laïcité law did not exempt them from conscription. Due to

52Pollard, The Unknown Pope. For a beautifully illustrated plea signed by a group of French childrenwho had just made their First Communion and appealed to the pope for a “durable peace, based onjustice and law,” see ASV, Segretario di Stato, Spoglio, Benedetto XV, Nr. 1 (unindexed): April 13,1916, letter signed by L. Poulin, curé de la Sainte-Trinité.

53Houlihan, “Clergy in the Trenches.” Vogt, Religion im Militär, 455–648.54Benjamin Ziemann has calculated that during 1915–1917, the Bavarian Army, which was around

seventy percent nominally Catholic, rose from 380,000 to 530,000 soldiers, while the number ofCatholic chaplains increased from only 170 to 189 chaplains. Furthermore, this meant that aBavarian Catholic chaplain was responsible for ministering to around 1,600 Catholic soldiers in con-trast to 665 peacetime parishioners. See Ziemann, “Katholische Religiosität und die Bewältigung desKrieges,” 119–20.


France’s mobilization requirements in the war’s early phase, the occupied popu-lation consisted heavily of women and children as well as men who were too oldto be mobilized. The few able-bodied French men who remained in the occu-pied territories were often sent back to Germany as forced laborers. This exacer-bated prewar tendencies toward the feminization of lay piety in the nineteenthcentury, a fact that German Catholic chaplains often noticed. In mid-1916, forinstance, Chaplain Jakob Ebner held Mass and preached in French to townspeo-ple in Sugny, noting in his diary, “Sad! Poor France! . . . The church was filled tocapacity, but the men are missing.”55

The precise numbers of French priests in the occupied territories are difficult toascertain due to the war’s administrative confusion as well as destruction duringtwoworld wars.56 For the foreseeable future, it will remain unlikely to distinguishbetween generic categories of clerics such as those who were mobilized quickly,those who fled, and those who remained during the occupation. Nevertheless, ageneral idea can be extrapolated from mobilization figures of the dioceses notunder occupation. For example, the diocese of Lyon held the largest numberof clergy and religious: 2,249 of which 1,150 were mobilized (in echelonthroughout all years of the war). Of the thirty-five dioceses not under occupationat any time (with the partial exception of Besançon) represented in Fr. FrédéricRouvier’s postwar survey, most dioceses were considerably smaller, averagingaround 700 clerics each. Of these dioceses, mobilization rates of the totalnumber of clerics ranged from around thirty to fifty percent.57 Furthermore, apostwar assessment of casualties and mobilization gives some idea of the magni-tude of both French clerical sacrifice as well as the lack of clergy in the occupiedterritories: 3,101 priests and seminarians, as well as 1,517 members of religiousorders died in the conflict; this represented fourteen percent of all Frenchpriests and religious mobilized. Of the almost 79,000 clergy who were mobilizedworldwide, France alone provided nearly 45,000.58 Thus, on a purely quantitat-ive scale, French clergy remaining in the occupied territories were comparativelyfew. Coupled with the escalating size of the German army, the Catholic Churchin the occupied territories of the Western Front faced a severe manpower crisis ofclerical resources.Regarding the historical character of the occupation, there is now a well-

documented scholarly consensus: the German military administration of

55EAF, Na. 44 (Jakob Ebner Tagebuch), 513, 519, entries of June 25 and July 21, 1916.56For the dioceses under occupation and the impact of destruction on the administrative records, see

volume 2 of Fernand Boulard, ed.,Matériaux pour l’histoire religieuse du peuple français: XIXe-XXe siècles, 3vols. (Paris: Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1982–95).

57Fontana, Les catholiques français pendant la Grande Guerre, 278–83. Fontana contextualized the orig-inal figures drawn from Frédéric Rouvier, En ligne: l’Église de France pendant la Grande Guerre(1914–1918) (Paris: Perrin, 1919).

58Cholvy and Hilaire, eds., Religion et société en France 1914–1945, 35. Adrien Dansette, ReligiousHistory of Modern France, trans. John Dingle, 2 vols. (NewYork: Herder and Herder, 1961), vol. 2, 331.


Belgium and northern France was brutal and coercive in its design and appli-cation.59 John Horne and Alan Kramer have recently given systematic empiricalfoundation to the widespread reports of German wartime atrocities. In the war’sopening phases, largely deluded by the specter of franc-tireurs partisans from theFranco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, the German army committed atrocitiesagainst civilians in Belgium and northern France by shooting around 6,500 inno-cent civilians as collective reprisals against imagined snipers.60 After the initialconfusion of thewar’s opening weeks, the oppressive occupation regime enforceda code of conduct in which ordinary French citizens lived their daily lives undermartial law subject to the basic requirements of the German army and theGerman state. During the stalemate on the Western Front, the German occu-pation of northern France was an attempt to exploit the material resources ofone of France’s most vital industrial centers, directly depriving the French wareffort and strengthening the German war machine.

Although the mass killings of the invasion’s initial phase were not repeated,anything that interfered with industrial exploitation incurred the full wrath ofthe German military state. The German authorities often suspected Frenchpriests of fomenting trouble and shot French clerics by firing squad on vaguepretenses of espionage.61 French citizens underwent severe rationing, oftenleading to malnourishment. French citizens were under constant suspicion bythe occupying powers, and the Germans denied them freedom of movement,forcing them to display identity cards and travel permits to any German soldierwho demanded to see them. Furthermore, the Germans forcibly deportedFrench and Belgian workers to industrial sites in Germany, and Germanmilitary authorities routinely commandeered French citizens to build militaryfortifications for German troops, a cause of no little consternation to the occu-pied people who were indirectly helping to kill their countrymen.62 Finally,when the German high command initiated a strategic retreat to the defensivepositions of the Hindenburg Line in 1917, the Germans conducted a brutalscorched-earth policy, poisoning wells, booby-trapping houses, and generally

59A. Becker, Les cicatrices rouges, 101–30.60John Horne and Alan Kramer,German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (NewHaven, CT: Yale

University Press, 2001), 419–31. The Germans summarily executed the civilians in the period fromAugust-October 1914, charging them with sniping at German troops. In fact, as Horne andKramer have shown, in the confusion of the advance, the Germans, fearing the actual franc-tireurs of1870–71, mistook gunfire from German units as representing sniper fire from imagined partisans.

61For instance, three priests (Mathieu, Buëcher, and Lahache) were shot in Besançon on November29, 1914; seven were shot in Cambrai in September of the same year; and one year into the war, byAugust 1915, eleven priests had been executed in Nancy. For the three shot in Besançon, see La Croix,October 1, 1914, 1, cited in Fontana, Les catholiques français pendant la Grande Guerre, 311. For the sevenkilled in Cambrai and the eleven executed in Nancy, see La Croix, Sept. 23, 1914, 2–3, and La Croix,Aug. 24, 1914, 3; both cited in Fontana, Les catholiques français pendant la Grande Guerre, 312.

62A. Becker, Les cicatrices rouges, 13–14.


destroying anything of value that was left in the swathe of recovered Frenchterritory.63

This article represents not a root-and-branch revisionist history of these pre-vious accounts, but rather an alternative dimension with symbolic importancefor the Catholic narrative of Europe over the course of the twentieth century.It is important to focus on the asymmetrical power relationship betweenGerman Catholic chaplains and their French Catholic temporary parishioners.Ultimately, German military power was sovereign, and religious life in northernFrance was subject to the German state’s control. The surviving written docu-mentation from French Catholics was understandably colored by the constantthreat of force.64

Within these severe constraints, however, the persistence of a cradle-to-gravecaritas network of the Catholic Church continued under occupation, forminga hazy middle ground in which the ostensibly clear legal ideals of internationaland canon law were translated into localized practices under improvised and con-fusing circumstances.Were it not so neglected in the historiography, it would be abanality to state that French Catholics under occupation continued to be born,live their lives, and die as Catholic believers and members of a universal church.For some of the most devout French Catholics, the German invasion was seen

as a justly deserved divine punishment for waning faith, especially the laïcité lawof 1905, but some even thought as far back as the anticlericalism of the FrenchRevolution and the growth of secular forces in the public sphere over thecourse of the nineteenth century.65 Chaplain Jakob Ebner, serving with the 1stBadisches Leibgrenadier Regiment, noted in his diary that he was greeted withtears by an old French couple in Manhoué, who offered him food and shelter.The couple proceeded to show Ebner a room full of saints’ devotional portraits,declaring, “We are good Catholics. The French government earned what’scoming now. They plundered the cloisters and persecuted the monks andnuns. They abandoned God, who now abandons and punishes them.”66

Conversing with Ebner in French and Latin, a French priest complained to thechaplain about the “robbing of the churches by the French government andthe alliance with the barbaric Russians,” claiming that these events “were respon-sible for the terrible war.”67 After offering the chaplain a bottle of the “finest

63Michael Geyer, “Rückzug und Zerstörung 1917,” inDie Deutschen an der Somme 1914–1918, ed.Gerhard Hirschfeld, Gerd Krumeich, and Irina Renz (Essen: Klartext, 2006), 163–79.

64For example, Calippe, La Somme sous l’occupation allemande, 80.65The literature on the secularization question is immense. As general guides with comparative anal-

yses, see Hugh McLeod, Religion and the People of Western Europe, 1789–1989, 2nd ed. (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1997); Hugh McLeod, Secularisation in Western Europe, 1848–1914(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000); Hugh McLeod and Werner Ustorf, eds., The Decline ofChristendom in Western Europe, 1750–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

66EAF, Na. 44 (Jakob Ebner Tagebuch), 40, entry of September 5, 1914.67Ibid., 71, entry of September 26, 1914 (sic, ca. September 28–29, 1914).


Burgundy wine,” another French priest near the town of Tincry told Ebner suc-cinctly, “Our Lord God cannot bless hands that have broken churches. God chastensthe French government through the German fist.”68 Whether they wished forFrench chastisement or complete defeat, such utterances came dangerously closeto confirming the “infamous rumors” (rumeurs infâmes) that French anticlericals sus-pected of their Catholic conationals. Especially at the outset of the war, such Frenchsentiments were no doubt attempts towin the hearts of the invading German forces.Many such sentiments no doubt disappeared as the invasion became an oppressiveoccupation. In any event, such utterances help to reveal the persistence of socialdivisions in French society, thus modifying portrayals of the union sacrée.69

From many of their own written accounts, German chaplains generally gotalong quite well with French Catholics—at least in the initial phases of thewar, but often continuing deep into the war as the chaplains were the church’sonly recourse for providing pastoral care to the citizens of occupied France. Ofcourse, as the German occupation wore on and daily hardships became moreoppressive and seemingly endless, there are indications that such overt displaysof sympathy with the invaders became more muted, sometimes turning into hos-tility. Yet, the supranational mission of the Catholic Church created bonds of soli-darity that provided means for transcending exclusivist national superiority. Deepinto the war, Louis Joseph Le Port, a French priest in the occupied territories whocritically judged the German depredation, would reflect on these Catholic bonds.Le Port referred to a helpful German Jesuit chaplain as “always fraternally oblig-ing” in the chaplain’s attempts to intervene on Le Port’s behalf with theGerman military. As late as September 1918, Le Port described his GermanJesuit colleague as possessing the “true heart of an apostle.” By 1917 Le Port’sCatholic background enabled him to work more closely with the unnamed mili-tary commander of the local unit, who presided over judicial proceedings againstcivilians. Le Port described the commander as “the son of a president of a Catholiccenter” and a “very great Catholic, who is a great and fine man.”70

For French citizens under occupation, their Catholic faith provided an outletfor culture, a semi-protected space that they could use to endure the daily indig-nities and humiliations of occupation, expressing their values under duress—evenwhen those values had distinctly national ascriptions such as the cult of the SacredHeart or the devotion to Our Lady of Lourdes. One should underscore the extentto which religion provided a coping mechanism for French Catholics at a timewhen the opportunity for cultural expression was severely curtailed by theoccupation authorities.

68Ibid., 85, entry of September 29, 1914.69McMillan, “French Catholics,” 129. Further micro-studies of French religious life should prob-

lematize the disparate French responses to the German invasion.70Postic, ed., Moi Louis-Joseph Le Port, 118–19, 190.


In keeping with the universalizing mission of the Catholic Church and therequirements of international law, German chaplains were the primary officialclergy in occupied northern France, but they formed part of a larger Catholicassociational network of caritas. The church tried to coordinate humanitariancare that crossed figurative and literal national boundaries, such as when theApostolic Nunciatur of Belgium invoked the authority of the Holy See to senda French priest, Joseph Hégo, a diocesan missionary from Cambrai, on a specialmission into German-held territory to minister to French prisoners of war.71

The ambiguous existence of German Catholic chaplains’ presence and theirministry can be demonstrated by the cradle-to-grave caritas network that thechurch claimed to offer. Although German military authority theoreticallyretained ultimate political sovereignty, in practice, French clergy and civilians ata local level exercised disparate, relational, and circumstantial degrees of agencyin fulfilling the requirements of their Catholic faith.

Cradle

The caritas network of Catholicism began as German chaplains initiated Frenchnewborns into the rites of the Catholic Church. For instance, on November 8,1914, chaplain Jakob Ebner of the 1st Badisches Leibgrenadierregiment baptizedtwo French children into the faith. One of these children, Henri Pierre Jacques,the son of Jean Léon Chrochart, a soldier, and Therése Elisabeth Billon, a localwoman in Villers, had been born on September 12 but had not yet been baptizedin the confusion of the war’s initial phase. The other child, Auguste Pauline,daughter of Jules Charaden, also currently serving in the French army, andJosefine Serrurier, his wife in Villers, had been born the previous evening. Inthe latter case, August Pauline Charaden’s godparents were the German regimen-tal medical officer, Dr. Vieser, and his wife, in absentia, in Germany.72

As the German occupying troops became more of a permanent presence,Catholic chaplains also began to baptize the children of liaisons betweenGerman troops and French civilians. Of course German military regulationsforbade such fraternization with enemy noncombatants, but military chaplainsgenerally blessed the children of such unions into the Catholic faith.73 In onesuch instance on July 12, 1916, Jakob Ebner baptized a child, MargareteCharlotte Mary, born on May 17, 1916, to Germaine Mary of the town of

71ASV, Segretario di Stato, Guerra 1914–1918, 244.D.7, Fasc. 106, 163: Nov. 30, 1914, NunziatureApostolica del Belgio.

72EAF, Na. 44 (Jakob Ebner Tagebuch), 128–30, entry of November 8, 1914.73The Germanmilitary, as did the militaries of other nations, established a network of official broth-

els to provide outlets for the sexual needs of the troops. See Lutz Sauerteig, “Militär, Medizin undMoral. Sexualität im Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Die Medizin und der Erste Weltkrieg, ed. Wolfgang U.Eckart and Christoph Gradmann (Pfaffenweiler: Centarius, 1996), 197–226. The brothels became amajor point of contention between Catholic and military authorities.


Loisy. Ebner noted in his diary that Germainewas “unmarried” and the father wasa Sergeant Weber of the 50th platoon (presumably of the 1st BadischesLeibgrenadierregiment), who “was three months in the house” of GermaineMary, living there until September 27, 1915.74

Infant baptism could be dealt with eventually if not immediately, even by thestrained and ad hoc German chaplaincy. Schooling of children, as well as religiousinstruction, however, presented much more of a problem. Unlike the prewar era,a regular, sustained catechism class and instruction in the sacraments was impos-sible for many French children under occupation who were outside of thepurview of the remaining French clergy in the occupied territories. Religiousinstruction was sometimes improvised by chaplains but often devolved to thechildren’s parents. For their part, German chaplains tried to make provisionsfor the religious education of the young, but because the religious needs ofGerman soldiers often took precedence, this happened only when the chaplainswere so inclined to spend their time with the occupied population.

On one such occasion, the mother of the town priest in Villers, who himselfhad gone off to war, intervened to ask the German chaplain to conduct animpromptu catechism class, in French, for the children of the village. Thechaplain did so, and eventually made it a habit to pass out chocolates andmedallions to the children who came to the class and progressed well withtheir lessons, a measure that, of course, helped to increase attendance and par-ticipation.75 After offering Mass for the children of the village of Sugny in theChampagne region, Jakob Ebner gave religious instruction to the children ofthe village, inviting them afterward to confession and communion. Threegirls named Helene, Lucia, and Elisabeth took him up on his offer, and henoted that “They made a good impression.” But such instruction was notalways pleasant. In fact, it sometimes testified to prewar French society’sneglect of religion and the war’s disruption, as Ebner noted in a counterexam-ple that three boys, ages eight, nine, and eleven, could not even pray the “OurFather,” no doubt, he surmised, because the eldest was the son of an “unbe-liever.” Ebner could only comment that the situation was “Depressing.Depressing.”76

Chaplains, however, did their best to provide religious care for the Frenchyouth. As part of the nineteenth-century culture wars, the French Republichad striven to keep clerics out of the classroom. Hence, during the Great War,some French priests, even those who strongly resisted the German occupationfrom the outset, found satisfaction in noting that it was the German enemy

74EAF, Na. 44 (Jakob Ebner Tagebuch), 517–18, entry of July 12, 1916.75Ibid., 221, entries of February 8–9, 1915.76Ibid., 505–6, entry of June 17, 1916.


who allowed French Catholic believers a measure of religious freedom by rein-troducing religious instruction and prayer in the schools.77

Daily Life in the Middle

The caritas network continued to provide pastoral ministry for the daily require-ments of most French Catholics. This often depended on the acquiescence oflocal German military commanders as well as the initiative of individual chaplains,thus creating an ad hoc quality of pastoral care, which was in keeping with theimprovised nature of military chaplaincy. When conditions allowed, Germanchaplains said Mass, heard confessions, performed marriages, and provided coun-seling for the occupied civilians.In carrying out these functions, many German chaplains reported excellent

relationships with the remaining French clergy in the occupied territories.Jakob Ebner, for instance, reported working at hospitals with French nuns who“gladly gave everything to me whenever I asked for it” and reported discussingwith the parish priest of Senones “only religious questions about the religiousrelationships in the archdiocese of Freiburg.” Although they may have avoidedbroaching the war too directly, evidently the two priests maintained an amicablyconversational form of sociability, as Ebner would describe his companion as “avery worthy, smart, dear cleric.”78

On another occasion, chaplain Ebner established a rapport with the parishpriest in the town of Tincry. When the priest became ill and unable toperform Mass, Ebner substituted for him. On one such instance on October11, 1914, Ebner, along with a Landwehr infantryman from Karlsruhe, headedto a small village church in the parish’s jurisdiction to say Mass. The Landwehrman served as ministrant for the chaplain, who noted in his diary that “Peoplecame in numbers when it became known in the little village that a German mili-tary chaplain was holding church services that day.” Ebner noted that the congre-gation of French parishioners “communally sang the Latin Mass beautifully andworthily, but in French pronunciation.” After concluding services in thevillage church, Ebner headed back to his post to say a field Mass for theGerman troops.79

Similarly, other German chaplains testified to the cooperative arrangementsthey made with French clerics to minister to the civilians. In the diocese of

77One French cleric, Louis-Joseph Le Port, would comment on the Germans’ reintroduction ofCatholic prayer in the schools, “What a kick to the French government!” Postic, ed., Moi Louis-Joseph Le Port, 9. The conflicts over religious education can be approached through ChristopherClark and Wolfram Kaiser, eds., Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

78EAF, Na. 44 (Jakob Ebner Tagebuch), 63–4, entries of September 20 and 23, 1914. Cf. Calippe,La Somme sous l’occupation allemande, 80–87.

79EAF, Na. 44 (Jakob Ebner Tagebuch), 92–3, entry of October 11, 1914.


Nancy in October 1915, the Catholic chaplain of the 1st Bavarian LandwehrDivision, Freiherr Theophil von Hansen, equally divided the pastoral care forthe civilian population in the area between himself, his chaplains stationed in afield hospital (Feldlazarettgeistliche), and the French priest Jules Jacquot.Together they shared responsibility for the towns of Fuvrecourt, Réchicourt lapetite, Caincourt, Hures, Vancourt, Housse, Remoncourt, Avricourt, andAmenoncourt.80

Contrary to many home front depictions of Catholics being deprived of theopportunity to worship, some French Catholics proudly testified to the resiliencewith which frequent Mass attendance demonstrated active piety. EugèneDelahaye-Théry of occupied Lille kept daily notes during the war, which herson used to publish a memoir in the interwar period. In that memoir, contraryto the depictions of empty churches and no services, Delahaye-Théry wrotethat in May 1915, “The church was packed,” especially on occasions when thePatriotic League organized Masses to benefit French soldiers and evacuees.81

French Catholic believers such as Delahaye-Théry used their writings as docu-mentation of endured suffering. Their testimony to their continuity of belief inthe face of hopelessness and brutal occupation became a form of resistance tothe German occupiers and a reaffirmation of their own faith.82 Yet when exam-ined against the grain of national-religious stereotypes, even the strongly defiantattitudes of someone such as Eugène Delahaye-Théry hint at nuanced relations ofreligious life in the occupied territories. Delahaye-Théry, for instance, profuselydenounced the “horror” of French Catholic churches being requisitioned specifi-cally for German Protestant services in 1915. She was silent on the issue ofGerman Catholic requisitioning, however, indicating that German Catholic pres-ence in the French churches was less of an outrage.83 Though it is doubtful thatshe participated in combined French-German services later in the war, herdescription of a Christmas Mass early in 1914 indicated a more tolerant attitudetoward German Catholics. In mild tones that contrasted with the normal under-currents of outrage that she felt toward the occupiers, she noted that severalGerman Catholic soldiers participated in the international service and “prayedrespectably.”84

80BHStA, Abt. IV (Kriegsarchiv), 1st Bay. Landw. Div, Bd. 62, Akt 4, “Übersicht über die Seelsorgein francös. (sic) Gemeinden im Bereiche der I. Bay. Landw. Division.”

81Eugène Delahaye-Théry, Les Cahiers Noirs. Notes quotidiennes écrites d’Octobre 1914 à Novembre1918 par une Lilloise sous l’occupation allemande (Rennes: Éditions de la Province, 1934), 72, 77.

82Throughout the war, one of the most persistently recurring refrains in Eugène Delahaye-Théry’sjournal was, “Sacred Heart of Jesus, I have confidence in You.”

83Delahaye-Théry, Les Cahiers Noirs, 77, 130.84Ibid., 10. For the service at the Church of St. Étienne the next day, shewrote that the preacher was

a German military chaplain, a Bavarian Capuchin monk who wore the robe of his order, which“unfortunately” had been prohibited for ten years to French Capuchins.


Similarly interactions would continue throughout the war. After he was trans-ferred in 1915, for instance, Jakob Ebner continued to reach out to the occupiedpopulations of northern France. Serving in the Champagne region near Sugnyand Mars-sous-Bourcq, Ebner noted in his diary that “As before, the Frenchpopulation was given the opportunity to come to Holy Mass and receive theBlessed Sacrament.”85

International Services

Since Mass attendance was such a keystone of the Catholic faith, international ser-vices between French civilians and German Catholic soldiers form some of themost poignant scenes of communal Catholicism in the face of adversity. Early inthe war, the General Governor of Belgium,Moritz von Bissing, outlined theoreti-cal general rules of religious interaction for German Catholics with their enemycoreligionists. German military chaplains were responsible for ministering to theentire German army, but in cases of needing to meet religious obligations, aGerman soldier could make a “private visit of civilian religious services held byBelgian clergy” who could also hear the soldier’s confessions and distribute com-munion to him. Although German clergy were obliged to minister to Belgianwounded in hospitals, von Bissing allowed Belgian patients to request thatBelgian clergy minister to them. Belgians interned by the German governmentwould receive religious ministry from both German military chaplains and cap-tured Belgian clergy.86 German commanders sometimes enforced strict separationby reserving time for military religion in which soldiers were kept apart fromFrench civilians and clergy, whowere consequently denied use of their churches.87

In practice, however, interaction between German, French, and Belgian Catholicswas of a much more fluid, impromptu nature that blurred national boundaries.On one of these occasions later in the war, Polykarp Schmoll was a Minorite

Friar from Munich who served as a military chaplain in the BavarianReserve Division. For the Easter services of April 25–26, 1916, Schmoll wrotethat French civilians and German artillerists celebrated Mass together inThumeréville, further noting in his diary that “All the church services of HolyWeek were well attended; opportunity to receive the Easter sacraments wasvery eagerly used.”88 Later that year, Schmoll helped to lead the CorpusChristi processions in numerous towns in his section of occupied France, includ-ing Thumeréville, Olley, St. Jean, Gussainville, Boinville, Baumont, and Villers.

85EAF, Na. 44 (Jakob Ebner Tagebuch), 476, entry of February 29, 1916.86ASV, Segretario di Stato, Guerra 1914–1918, 244.D.7, Fasc. 106, 117: June 8, 1915, Brussels,

General-Gouvernement in Belgien, Sekt. IV d2, Nr. 1198/15.87For example, onMay 22, 1915, Eugène Delahaye-Théry noted that the Church of St. Maurice in

Lillewas reserved for the Germans from 9:00–10:00 in themorning, with no French citizens permittedto enter the church. Delahaye-Théry, Les Cahiers Noirs, 71–2.

88Archiv der Bayerischen Franziskaner (hereafter ABF), PA I, 991 (3) (Polykarp Schmoll Tagebuch), 15.


Although he noted that the services were primarily for the towns’ inhabitants, it islikely that German Catholic soldiers participated, too. In any event, this wasanother case of a German Catholic priest spending his time and energy for thelocal population, even as German Catholic chaplaincy was suffering a severeshortage of manpower.89 Similarly, even late into the war, the chaplain OskarKrafft sent the Bavarian military chaplaincy a picture postcard that documentedthe combined participation of French civilians and German soldiers for theCorpus Christi processions of 1917.90

The most poignant examples of a wartime transnational Catholicism duringoccupation were the High Masses for Christmas and Easter. In Lille, in thewar’s opening year, Eugène Delahaye-Théry described in her diary a ChristmasMass where “the church was packed” with French citizens and German troops,and the diarist noted that “the Germans prayed there respectfully.”91 By Easter1916, however, the situation in Lille was particularly depressing given theshortages of food and the forced deportation of French women and children.92

As the occupation became more oppressive, French civilian enthusiasm for inter-national services slackened considerably.

One of the war’s most nostalgic episodes, the “Christmas truce” offers apoignant but teleological impression of religiosity between the nations in micro-cosm: a nostalgic return to peace and nineteenth-century sensibility thatgave way to the iron logic of industrial slaughter throughout the remainder ofthe war.93 In fact, developments were far from linear. The first Christmas ser-vices under occupation also showed some of the limits of transnationalCatholicism during wartime: in the end, it was the German authorities whowere setting the limits. Chaplain Fridolin Mayer, serving with the 28thInfantry Division noted that the 1914 Christmas Eve service showed a contrastof friendly national music styles offered to the mixed Franco-German congre-gation, as the German soldiers sang German hymns with full men’s chorus incontrast to the vespers that evening that had been sung by solo Frenchwomen’s voices. Most likely, the sermon that evening to the mixed congrega-tion focused on the peace and unity of the Christmas message. In contrast, theChristmas Day services were given separately to the soldiers and civilians, withsoldiers having use of the village church first; overall the style of the Mass was

89Ibid., 22.90Erzbischöfliches Archiv München-Freising (hereafter EAM), NL Faulhaber 6779/1: Picture-

Postcard, July 6, 1917, from P. Oskar Krafft, Feldgeistlicher, B. Feldlazarett 30, D. Feldpost 865 toFaulhaber.

91Delahaye-Théry, Les Cahiers Noirs, 10.92A. Becker, ed., Journaux de combattants et de civils de la France du Nord dans la Grande Guerre, 197–8.93Malcolm Brown and Shirley Seaton, Christmas Truce: The Western Front, December 1914, rev. and

expanded ed. (Basingstoke: Papermac, 1994); Michael Jürgs, Der kleine Frieden im Großen Krieg.Westfront 1914: Als Deutsche, Franzosen und Briten gemeinsam Weihnachten feierten (Munich: C.Bertelsmann, 2003).


much more nationalistic and chauvinistic when the populations were kept sep-arate. Mayer noted that the sermon for the soldiers on Christmas Day wasentitled “Come, let us go to Bethlehem with our German flag black-white-red” and concluded with a reading of the military order of the day, whichclosed with the slogan, “Our body for the fatherland until the last breath, oursouls for God for all time.”94

While revealing elements of national chauvinism, Mayer’s diary also offers aglimpse of a transnational Catholicism that sometimes privileged internationalrelations at the expense of inter-confessional bonds. For instance, Mayer notedthat French priests “were more receptive to interaction with me (friendlier treat-ment, prior discussions [of courses of action]),” which he contrasted with the“drill-sergeant tone of my chief,” a Protestant pastor who was the commandingchaplain of Mayer’s division.95 In this regard, the case of Fridolin Mayer’sChristmas services, and their transnational and confessional implications, is alsoinstructive. It should be remembered that French civilians and the GermanCatholic soldiers in Mayer’s unit at least shared a Christmas Eve service in1914. Regarding this episode, Mayer notes that the Catholic and Protestant sol-diers of his unit held totally separate services that year. Furthermore, when aProtestant officer approached Mayer the next year about the possibility ofholding a communal Christmas service for German Catholic and Protestant sol-diers, Mayer dismissed the officer’s suggestion with a single word: “No.”96

Indeed, German Catholic chaplains sometimes fought strenuously to preserve aseparate Catholic religious identity within army life. Such confessional disputeseven became evident to French observers, such as the priest Charles Calippe ofAmiens who noted that, protesting orders from their commander, GermanBavarian Catholic chaplains complained to the Cardinal of Munich aboutbeing forced to hold a single, communal religious army service with theirProtestant counterparts. Even in the presence of French clergy, Calippenoticed that one Bavarian chaplain “was not always successful in hiding hisdisdain for Prussia and even for the Kaiser.”97 Religion and nationhood con-tained entangled loyalties, and nationalism did not always win out in the end.98

94EAF, Na. 16/1 (Kriegstagebuch 1914–1918 von Fridolin Mayer), 80–83, entries of December24–25, 1914. Cf. Calippe, La Somme sous l’occupation allemande, 85.

95EAF, Na. 16/1 (Kriegstagebuch 1914–1918 von Fridolin Mayer), 79–80, entry of December 24,1914.

96Ibid., 79–80.97Calippe, La Somme sous l’occupation allemande, 80–82.98Cf. Günther Baadte, “Katholischer Universalismus und nationale Katholizismen im Ersten

Weltkrieg,” in Katholizismus, nationaler Gedanke und Europa seit 1800, ed. Albrecht Langner(Paderborn: Schöningh, 1985), 89–109; Barbara Stambolis, “Nationalisierung trotzUltramontanisierung oder: ‘Alles für Deutschland. Deutschland aber für Christus.’Mentalitätsleitende Wertorientierung deutscher Katholiken im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert,” HistorischeZeitschrift 269 (1999): 57–97.


Thus, in terms of communal religious life, many Catholic believers in the Germanarmy participated in services more with enemy civilians than with German com-rades-in-arms who happened to be Protestant or Jewish.

Many of the regular French diocesan priests were no longer available, eitherhaving fled the advancing German army or having been called to active dutyto fight it. French parishioners in occupied areas had no other recourse than toturn to German military chaplains to fulfill religious requirements. Sinceautumn 1914, Jakob Ebner was responsible for the religious ministry in Villers.The departing French priest, called to serve in the army, had issued instructionsto his congregation that they should confess to “whomever they wanted.”After three French children bravely came to the chaplain one morning to offertheir confessions, the rest of the town began to follow suit. Eventually, the towns-people began attending Sunday military services to receive the Sacrament along-side members of the German army. Ebner noted in his diary that German songswere sung duringMass.99 Due to Ebner’s influence, Villers was fairly well accom-modated with opportunities for religious participation for both German soldiersand French civilians. Ebner reported that of the 403 French Catholics in the town,“nearly all of them” attended his 1915 Easter services and took communion fromhim.100

The corporate attitudes of French clergy who remained in the occupied terri-tories largely became solidified under the heading of collective heroic resistance,in many cases regaining the civic stature that they had lost in previous decades.101

It was precisely due to their positions of cultural authority that the remainingFrench priests in the rural areas of northern France roused enormous suspicionamong German military leaders as possibly dangerous influences on theGerman troops. The largely dominant Prussian military in particular lookedaskance at the influence of enemy Catholic noncombatants. On April 20,1915, at a conference in Laon of military chaplains of the German 7th Army,chaplains revealed that after the initial hesitancy from the High Command,most junior officers were finally allowing French priests to minister to Germantroops. Wherever possible, the officers insisted that the language of service beGerman. One captain, however, refused to let his troops hear Mass from aFrench priest on the grounds that church services with an enemy priest wouldlead “to a falsely understood friendship [zu einer falsch verstandenenFreundschaft].”102 As in much religious life during the Great War, however, con-ditions were improvised on the ground according to necessity.

99EAF, Na. 44 (Jakob Ebner Tagebuch), 128–30, 140–6, entries of November 8 and 13, 1914.100Ibid., 403–4, entry of September 30, 1915.101Cnudde-Lecointre, “Monseigneur Charost, évêque de Lille durant la Grande Guerre,” 355–66 ;

Dauphin, “Le clerge paroissial en Belgique,” 367–82.102BA-MA, PH 32, Bd. 390: Militär-Pfarrer-Konferenz (7. Armee) in Laon, April 20, 1915.


Because of the shortage of chaplains, German army officials were forced toacknowledge the need to allow French priests to minister to German troops.Abbé Charles Calippe of Amiens wrote of his ministry to combined congrega-tions of German troops and French civilians. At one service, soldiers filled thegrand nave of the church while the officers sat near the pulpit and French civilianssat in the small nave on the left. The soldiers sang the Mass parts of the Kyrie,Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei, after which Calippe declared inFrench translation the pope’s prayer for international peace. Calippe noted thatthe German commander ordered him to pray for the souls of the dead soldiersas well as deliver a sermon that explicated the Gospel readings. The Frenchpriest responded by extolling the virtues of the Sacred Heart and of Our Ladyof Lourdes. Far from inciting national religious hatred in the pews, Calippe’ssermon instead led to a friendly disputation between him and the German sol-diers, with the Catholic soldiers claiming that they prayed just as devotedly tothe Sacred Heart in Munich as in Montmartre, but Calippe forced them toadmit that they did not have Our Lady of Lourdes.103 In these services,German chaplains occasionally even served in subsidiary roles as the deputies ofFrench priests in the case of Abbé Lacorne, the parish priest of Mesnil-en-Arrouaise, who also took on extra pastoral duties in Manancourt andEtricourt.104 In ways scarcely imaginable to high-ranking ecclesiastics in jingoisticnational mindsets, German and French lower clergy in the occupied areas workedtogether to minister to civilians and soldiers, sometimes together as one commongroup.

Grave

Churches in the occupied areas often became hospitals, makeshift gathering areasfor the sick and wounded.105 French and German clergy consoled the woundedand dying at religious sites and hospitals, but clergy also made more improvisedvisits to individual destinations as circumstances allowed. The sacrament ofExtreme Unction could only be given by an ordained priest, and Catholic believ-ers were vitally dependent on whatever priestly manpower resources were avail-able in local areas. In its efforts to offer believers the opportunity of eternalsalvation, the Catholic caritas network continued to provide pastoral care includ-ing death and burial rites. Some of these took place in especially grim circum-stances, such as executions of French citizens for espionage. Mostly, however,German chaplains continued to offer sacramental rites to French believers in

103Calippe, La Somme sous l’occupation allemande, 73–74.104Ibid., 75–76. Fontana, drawing on Calippe, claims that German chaplains did not often fulfill

subsidiary roles serving under French priests. See Fontana, Les catholiques français pendant la GrandeGuerre, 317.

105Fontana, Les catholiques français pendant la Grande Guerre, 317.


circumstances that attempted to restore a sense of normality to religious life thatwould complete the life cycle of the believer.

German Catholic chaplains in occupied France such as Polykarp Schmoll tooktheir interpretation of duty to include the entire life cycle of their flock. Histime was often quite evenly divided between civilian and military needs, as onJune 12, 1916, when Schmoll’s main activity for the day consisted of twoburials. The morning was spent officiating at the burial of a seventy-six-year-oldFrenchwoman, Marie Payon, in St. Jean, while the afternoon saw Schmoll presid-ing over the funeral of a German infantryman named Vilus of the 28th Regiment,10th Company, who drowned while bathing in the Orne.106

For the reader of priests’ accounts, the most poignant moments of transnationalCatholicism are often the likely romanticized and stylized death scenes, whichsound naïve and credulous to the modern reader. Some German chaplainsreported that the very last words of French civilians before they died were“Thank you, Father” spoken in French and sometimes both French andGerman.107 Nevertheless, one should keep in mind that to the Catholic believer,a Catholic priest was the essential figure authorized to perform sacramental ritesthat would assure the eternal salvation of the believer. Archival records indicatethe German Catholic authorities empowered German chaplains with tools forenabling final reconciliation, such as a sheet of French translations for the sacra-ment of penance.108

Even in death, however, national reconciliation could not always be achieved.Many Catholic burials in the occupied territories were separate services in whichFrench or German priests administered the final rites to Catholics of their ownnation.109 Especially in smaller villages and rural areas, however, French civiliansand German soldiers had to cope with whatever priestly resources were available.For Catholic believers in the occupied territories, the threat of dying without atone-ment for mortal sins was a more serious matter than national stereotypes. To fulfillthe spiritual requirements of their faith, Catholic German troops and French civiliansappealed to Catholic priests of whatever nationality to conduct the final rites of thefaith, even if that meant supplicating oneself to a theoretical enemy.

Exultation at the End

Despite the transnational Catholic experiences that they had shared under theoccupation, there was little doubt that the overwhelming majority of French

106ABF, PA I, 991 (3) (Polykarp Schmoll Tagebuch), 23.107EAF, Na. 44 (Jakob Ebner Tagebuch), 151, 161, entries of November 22 and December 1, 1914.108EAM, NL Faulhaber, 6779/2: Supplement to the booklet, “Einige praktische Bemerkungen für

die hochw. Patres anläßlich des Krieges.”109Eugène Delahaye-Théry noted that after the massive artillery damage to the Church of

St. Maurice in January 1916, even the combined German and French victims of the attack wereburied in separate services. See Delahaye-Théry, Les Cahiers Noirs, 145.


Catholics were overjoyed at the German departure. After Lille was finally liber-ated, a huge Mass of thanksgiving was held in the church of St. Maurice onOctober 20, 1918, and the event became a cathartic outpouring of intertwinedreligious patriotic fervor. After the blessing of the Holy Sacrament, the organplayed la Marseillaise, la Brabançonne, and various English hymns. In this atmo-sphere of “delirium,” in which she was so excited that she could not rememberthe contents of the sermon, Eugène Delahaye-Théry wrote, “An hour like thatwhich I’ve passed is worth years of suffering. Thank you, my God!”110

As fitting as it might be for occupation narratives, the story of transnationalCatholicism did not end with the departure of German troops, however, for asthe war came to a close, the cleanup and restoration process began. In additionto the physical damage done to religious sites, many French dioceses hadwitnessed looting and destruction of church property. Valuable items such aschalices, monstrances, and vestments were either lost or stolen during theconfusion of the occupation. Even during the war itself, the Catholic Churchacted as an intermediary for repatriation of peoples and property between thecombatants.111 Based on the pressure exerted by German Catholics, by 1917the issue became a directive of the Quartermaster General of the Prussianarmy, who spoke directly to German Catholic chaplains:

I request German chaplains to make it their duty in their conduct with theirlocal commanders to take care that religious paraphernalia and vestments ofchurches that have fallen prey to destruction should be quickly salvaged andgiven, with a receipt, either to a French civilian chaplain in a large staging-area locale or else delivered to the staging-area inspection so that the objectscan be removed from desecration through improper usage, etc., and can bereturned to their owners after the war.112

After the war, French dioceses advanced claims to the German state forcompensation for the items they had lost. As their coreligionists, GermanCatholics who had been in occupied France, including many military chaplains,intervened to lobby the German state on behalf of the French dioceses. In March1919, for instance, the Archdiocese of Bamberg forwarded to the Bavarian WarMinistry a request on behalf of the cities of Guise and St. Quentin for the return of“religious vestments and paraphernalia” or their monetary replacement in theamount of 2,130 marks. The items had gone missing as German troops were

110Ibid., 348.111Two captured French military chaplains, Zimmermann and Scorssery, attempted to get back

their field chapels that were captured at Verdun. They had written to the Bishop of Paderborn, andthe accusation was funneled through the military chaplaincy of the 25th Infantry Division, EtappenInspektion AOK 5. See BHStA, Abt. IV (Kriegsarchiv), M.Kr. 10851, Nr. 156: PreussischesKriesgsministerium Nr. 1104 from Jan. 16, 1917, to the Königlich Bayerisches Kriegsministerium.

112BA-MA, PH 32, Bd. 17, Generalquartiermeister IIc Nr. 19420 general order from June 10,1917.


leaving the occupied areas in November 1918, and the Bamberg Archdioceseunderscored that “We are of the opinion that the religious paraphernaliashould be given back at once to the rightful owners.” If this was impossible,then Bamberg argued that the German government should cover the replacementcosts.113 Due to the devastated economic circumstances of the immediate postwarsituation, however, it is unlikely that many of these requests for compensationwere fulfilled by either the German government or the governments of thevarious German federal states.114

Other legacies of German occupation on Catholics in occupied France andBelgium remain underexplored. Most histories of religious sentiment focus onthe importance of the martyr motif of national suffering and Catholic resurgencein the interwar period.115 On a local level, however, this becomes much moreproblematic regarding the issue of collaboration. The boundaries of official/unof-ficial persecutions remain unclear regarding French and Belgian Catholic believ-ers who tried to fulfill their religious obligations through overenthusiasticinteraction with German Catholic chaplains.116

Nevertheless, after the guns of the Western Front fell silent, the CatholicChurch provided a transnational way of reconciliation in ways unimaginable tothe embittered national chauvinists, especially those from defeated ProtestantPrussia.117 During the postwar period, the influential German Jesuit journalStimmen der Zeit accorded prominent space to the essays written by PaulDoncoeur, a French Jesuit who had served as a French army chaplain in thewar and who had been severely wounded at the Somme. Doncoeur claimedthat a visit to Lourdes had miraculously healed his wounds, allowing him torejoin his regiment and participate in the final push to victory in 1918. His

113BHStA, Abt. IV (Kriegsarchiv), M.Kr. 10851, Nr. 205, “Das Erzbischöfliche OrdinariatBamberg an das Generalkommando des II. BAK Würzburg,” March 21, 1919.

114For an account of the chaotic political economy of Bavaria, see Martin H. Geyer, Verkehrte Welt.Revolution, Inflation, undModerne: München 1914–1924 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &Ruprecht, 1998).

115A. Becker, War and Faith; Dauphin, “Le clerge paroissial en Belgique,” 367–82.116Most recently, see A. Becker, Les cicatrices rouges, 249–70, 295–313. See also Renee Martinage,

“Les collaborateurs devant la cour d’assises du Nord après la très Grande Guerre,” Revue du Nord77, no. 309 (1995): 95–115. French prosecutions of collaborators remained focused on the eventsofWorldWar II. Unlike the social stigmatization afterWorldWar II, French womenwho cohabitatedwith German soldiers after World War I did not have their heads shaved. See Jean-Yves LeNaour,“Femmes tondues et repression des ‘femmes à boches’ en 1918,” Revue d’Histoire Moderne &Contemporaine 47, no. 1 (2000): 148–58.

117Some German Catholics, however, certainly did feel an embittered sense of defeat and betrayal,perhaps most notably Bishop (later Cardinal) Michael von Faulhaber of Munich, who had beenheavily involved in the leadership of Bavarian chaplaincy during the Great War. Nevertheless, themost comprehensive study of the “stab-in-the-back” legend emphasizes the decisive influence ofthe Protestant social-moral milieu in advancing a sense of religiously charged nationalist disappoint-ment. See Boris Barth, Dolchstoßlegenden und politische Desintegration. Das Trauma der deutschenNiederlage im Ersten Weltkrieg (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2003), 150–71, 340–59, 555. For an argumentabout the specifically Catholic linkages to Nazism, see Derek Hastings, Catholicism and the Roots ofNazism: Religious Identity and National Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).


Catholic sensibility was not exultant in service of the winning power; he struck achord in the German Jesuits of the losing side. In the conclusion to one of hisarticles published in 1922, Doncoeur emotionally wrote of the necessity ofCatholicism as a force for reconciliation in a fallen world:

Despite everything that can temporarily separate us here below [on Earth], itis nevertheless a wonderful thought that there are millions of souls all overthe world who strive to give honor to the same Heavenly Father. Webecome aware that we are brothers, born of the same blood that flowedout of the same heart at one and the same Calvary. May this feeling ofthe unity of all sons of the church triumph over all the obstacles thatbattle against love and unification. It was for them [i.e., all sons of thechurch] that our Savior prayed in high priestly prayer: may they be one.118

Conclusion

In a recent article, Brad S. Gregory has perceptively written that a culturalhistory of religion must seek to interrogate its historical actors with the question,“What did it mean to them?”119 This accords well with the recent ecclesiologywritten by the Catholic scholar Richard P. McBrien, who notes that theCatholic Church is, in the minds of believers, “not simply a religious community,institution, or movement (although it is all of these and more),” but it is also a“mystery, or sacrament . . . the corporate communal presence of the triuneGod in the world.”120 Seen through these perspectives, there is much work tobe done on the story of religious believers during the Great War. Historians ofCatholicism have offered suggestive avenues for transnational histories ofCatholicism that end in 1914 and continue the story after 1945, but during the

118Paul Doncoeur, S.J., “Die Gegenwartshoffnungen der Katholiken Frankreichs auf religiösemGebiete,” Stimmen der Zeit 103 (1922): 200. “Trotz all dem, was uns hier unten einen Augenblickauseinanderreißen kann, ist es doch ein herrlicher Gedanke, daß auf der ganzen Welt die Seelennach Millionen zählen, die alle für die Ehre desselben himmlischen Vaters sich mühen. Da erwachtin uns das Bewußtsein, daß wir Brüder sind, geboren aus demselben Blute, das aus demselbenHerzen floß auf ein und demselben Kalvarienberg. Möge dieses Gefühl der Zusammengehörigkeitaller Söhne der Kirche triumphieren über all die Hindernisse, die sich der Liebe und derVereinigung entgegenwerfen, für die unser Heiland betete im hohenpriesterlichen Gebet: Ut sintunum.” The phrase “high-priestly prayer” refers to the last discourse of Christ recounted in John17: 1–26.

119Brad S. Gregory, “The Other Confessional History: On Secular Bias in the Study of Religion,”History and Theory 45, no. 4 (2006): 132–49. Gregory has cautioned against the formation of a “secularconfessional history” based on “theologically atheistic, metaphysically materialist, and culturally rela-tivist” assumptions that “overtly or tacitly explain religion by reducing it to something else.” Gregoryargues that such a way of thinking is itself a form of belief in which the postulates of the natural sciencesare applied to religion.

120Richard P. McBrien, The Church: The Evolution of Catholicism (New York: HarperOne, 2008),354.


period of the world wars, the category of the nation remains the touchstone ofreligious histories.121

Contrary to the stereotypes of disillusioned modernism, the interwar periodsaw a resurgence of an activist Catholicism, expressed politically as well as liturgi-cally.122 Even at the level of party politics, Catholics in interwar Europe engagedin convoluted courses of action. Some Catholics eagerly embraced reactionaryauthoritarian nationalist politics.123 Others pursued what John W. Boyer hastermed a politics of “corporate modernity” that drew on the sociopolitical cri-tique articulated by Pope Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum, avoiding the alternativesof both individualist and collectivist utopias.124 In terms of everyday beliefs andpractices, many Catholics from rural regions did not magically transform intoavant-garde nihilists once bullets started flying in 1914. Rather, Catholic believersstrove to understand and live the Great War in terms of their traditional world-views, adapted to local particularities of place. Only after the social upheavalsof World War II, not World War I, did many European Catholics adapt to pat-terns of religious observance more in line with trends associated with the disputedsecularization thesis.125

This article has focused on many developments in occupied France to offernew perspectives on the French-German meta-narrative of the twentiethcentury. The implacable national opposition of France and Germany duringthe wars from 1870–1945, and the countries’ subsequent reconciliation that pro-vided the support for European unification, forms a key element in a story ofsupranational transcendence that informs many grand narratives of Europe inthe twentieth century.126 This meta-narrative of European unification after1945 needs to account for the disparate Catholic narratives that complicate thestories of political development in twentieth-century Europe.127 For French,Belgian, and German Catholics in occupied territories during the Great War,

121For a stimulating conceptualization of a globalized and transnational Catholic history, see VincentViaene, “International History, Religious History, Catholic History: Perspectives for Cross-Fertilization (1830–1914),” European History Quarterly 38, no. 4 (2008): 578–607.

122Martin Conway, Catholic Politics in Europe, 1918–1945 (London: Routledge, 1997).123See, for example, Burleigh, Sacred Causes.124John W. Boyer, “Catholics, Christians, and the Challenges of Democracy: The Heritage of the

Nineteenth Century,” in Christdemokratie in Europa in 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Michael Gehler, WolframKaiser, and Helmut Wohnaut (Vienna: Böhlau, 2001), 23–59.

125Friedrich Wilhelm Graf and Klaus Grosse Kracht, eds., Religion und Gesellschaft. Europa im 20.Jahrhundert (Cologne: Böhlau, 2007); McLeod, ed., World Christianities.

126John Gillingham, Design for a New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006);Andrew Moravcsik, The Choice for Europe: Social Purpose and State Power from Messina to Maastricht(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).

127Wolfram Kaiser, Christian Democracy and the Origins of European Union (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2007); Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Rise of Christian Democracy in Europe (Ithaca, NY:Cornell University Press, 1996).


the story was more complicated than standard national histories allow. Therewereaxes of loyalty that did not always privilege the category of the nation.This essay has shown that reconciliation, accommodation, and persistence of

belief occurred amid the harsh pressures of occupation during the Great War.German military chaplains and French clerics who remained behind enemy linesstruggled to copewith their pastoral responsibilities as best they could in impromptucircumstances that depended on local conditions. Often, priestly resources weresimply inadequate to the task, but lay believers were desperate for any availablepriests. Because of the sacramental importance of the Catholic priest, French civil-ians and German soldiers in occupied northern France often sought out thereligious pastoral care of their theoretical enemy. Bonds of Catholic solidarityhelped French and German believers worship with each other more than withtheir own conationals who happened to be of a different religion, particularlyProtestants and Jews.128 This was not simply making a virtue of necessity. If nationalhatred were the overwhelming ideological motivating factor, these Catholic believ-ers in the occupied territories could simply have declined any aid from enemyclerics. Many Catholic believers, however, did not choose to do this.Beyond simply enduring terrible circumstances, Catholic French civilians and

German soldiers exercised a degree of voluntarism, supplicating themselves to theenemy in disparate ways that formed a moral gray zone between the Manicheanextremes of nationalist ideologies. At the high point of clerical nationalism in anage of total war, religion and nation did not map out into neat categories. UsingCatholicism as a frame of liturgical reference, a comparison of entangled local his-tories during the Great War demonstrates that shared public religiosity took avariety of forms that often went above and below the level of the nation-state.The Catholic historical legacies of World War I will continue to unfold as

scholarly work attempts to go beyond the polarizing war jingoism of the nationalepiscopates. Rooted in subnational and supranational stories that complicate thestandard national histories of the Great War, the local everyday Catholic religios-ity during occupation remains a story whose relevance necessitates furtherexploration. Born of necessity under the duress of military administration inthe Great War, the experience of the occupied territories shows that evenduring dark times, the theory of a supranational Catholic Church had a localbasis in reality.

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

128Wolfgang Altgeld, Katholizismus, Protestantismus, Judentum. Über religiösbegründete Gegensätze undnationalreligiöse Ideen in der Geschichte des deutschen Nationalismus (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag,1992); Helmut Walser Smith, ed., Protestants, Catholics, and Jews in Germany, 1800–1914 (New York:Berg, 2001).


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