The history of the Catholic Church in France is inseparable from the history of France, and should be analyzed in its peculiar relationship with the State, with which it was progressively confused, confronted, and separated.
Early Christianity
Legend According to long-standing legend, Mary, Martha, Lazarus, and some companions, who were expelled by persecutions from the Holy Land, traversed the Mediterranean in a frail boat with neither rudder nor mast and landed at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer near Arles. Provençal tradition names Lazarus as the first bishop of Marseille, while Martha purportedly went on to tame the a terrible beast in nearby Tarascon. Pilgrims visited their tombs at the abbey of Vézelay in Burgundy. In the Abbey of the Trinity at Vendôme, a phylactery was said to contain a tear shed by Jesus at the tomb of Lazarus. The cathedral of Autun, not far away, is dedicated to Lazarus as Saint Lazaire.
History
The first written records of Christians in France date from the 2nd century when Irenaeus detailed the deaths of ninety-year-old bishop Pothinus of Lugdunum (Lyon) and other martyrs of the 177 persecution in Lyon.
In 496, Remigius baptized Clovis I, who was converted from paganism to Catholicism. Clovis I, considered the founder of France, made himself the ally and protector of the papacy and of his predominantly Catholic subjects.
Foundation of Christendom in France On Christmas Day 800, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, forming the political and religious foundations of Christendom and establishing in earnest the French government's longstanding historical association with the Roman Catholic Church.
The Treaty of Verdun (843) provided for the partition of Charlemagne's empire into 3 independent kingdoms, and one of these was France. A great churchman, Hincmar, Archbishop of Rheims (806-82), was the deviser of the new arrangement. He strongly supported the kingship of Charles the Bald, under whose sceptre he would have placed Lorraine also. To Hincmar, the dream of a united Christendom did not appear under the guise of an empire, however ideal, but under the concrete form of several unitary States, each being a member of one mighty body, the great Republic of Christendom. He would replace the empire with a Europe of which France was one member. Under Charles the Fat (880-88), it looked for a moment as though Charlemagne's empire was about to come to life again; but the illusion was temporary, and in its stead were quickly formed seven kingdoms: France, Navarre, Provence, Burgundy beyond the Jura, Lorraine, Germany, and Italy.
Feudalism was the seething pot, and the imperial edifice was crumbling to dust. Towards the close of the 10th century, in the Frankish kingdom alone, there were twenty-nine provinces or fragments of provinces, under the sway of dukes, counts, or viscounts, constituted veritable sovereignties, and at the end of the 11th century, there were as many as fifty-five of these minor states, of greater or lesser importance. As early as the 10th century, one of the feudal families had begun to take the lead, that of the Dukes of Francia, descendants of Robert the Strong, and lords of all the country between the Seine and the Loire. From 887 to 987, they successfully defended French soil against the invading Northmen: the Eudes, or Odo, Duke of Francia (887-98), Robert, his brother (922-23), and Raoul or Rudolph, Robert's son-in-law (923-36), occupied the throne for a brief interval. The weakness of the later Carolingian kings was evident to all, and in 987, on the death of Louis V, Adalberon, archbishop of Rheims, at a meeting of the chief men held at Senlis, contrasted the incapacity of the Carolingian Charles of Lorraine, the heir to the throne, with the merits of Hugh, Duke of Francia. Gerbert, who afterwards became Pope Sylvester II, adviser and secretary to Adalberon, and Arnulf, bishop of Orléans, also spoke in support of Hugh, with the result that he was proclaimed king.
Thus, the Capetian dynasty had its rise in the person of Hugh Capet. It was the work of the Church, brought to pass by the influence of the See of Reims, renowned throughout France since the episcopate of Hincmar, renowned since the days of Clovis for the privilege of anointing the Frankish kings conferred on its titular, and renowned so opportunely at this time for the learning of its episcopal school presided over by Gerbert himself.
The Church, which had set up the new dynasty, exercised a very salutary influence over French social life. It has been recently proven by the literary efforts of M. Bédier that the origin and growth of the "Chansons de geste", i.e., of early epic literature, are closely bound up with the famous pilgrimage shrines, whither the piety of the people resorted. And military courage and physical heroism were schooled and blessed by the Church, which in the early part of the 11th century transformed chivalry from a lay institution of German origin into a religious one by placing among its liturgical rites the ceremony of knighthood, in which the candidate promised to defend truth, justice, and the oppressed. Founded in 910, the Congregation of Cluny, which made rapid progress in the 11th century, prepared France to play an important part in the reformation of the Church undertaken in the second half of the 11th century by a monk of Cluny, Gregory VII, and gave the Church two other popes after him, Urban II and Pascal II. It was a Frenchman, Urban II, who at the Council of Claremont (1095) initiated the Crusades which spread widely throughout Christendom.
Time of the Crusades
"The reign of Louis VI (1108-37) is of note in the history of the Church, and in that of France; in the one because the solemn adhesion of Louis VI to Innocent II assured the unity of the Church, which at the time was seriously menaced by the Antipope Anacletus II; in the other because for the first time Capetian kings took a stand as champions of law and order against the feudal system and as the protectors of public rights.
A churchman, Suger, abbot of St-Denis, a friend of Louis VI and minister of Louis VII (1137-80), developed and realized this ideal of kingly duty. Louis VI, seconded by Suger and counting on the support of the towns – the "communes" they were called when they had obliged the feudal lords to grant them charters of freedom – fulfilled to the letter the rôle of prince as it was conceived by the theology of the Middle Ages. "Kings have long arms," wrote Suger, "and it is their duty to repress with all their might, and by right of their office, the daring of those who rend the State by endless war, who rejoice in pillage, and who destroy homesteads and churches." Another French churchman, St. Bernard, won Louis VII for the Crusades; and it was not his fault that Palestine, where the First Crusade had set up a Latin kingdom, did not remain a French colony in the service of the Church. The divorce of Louis VII and Eleanor of Aquitaine (1152) marred the ascendancy of French influence by paving the way for the growth of Anglo-Norman pretensions on the soil of France from the Channel to the Pyrenees. Soon, however, by virtue of feudal laws the French king, Philip Augustus (1180–1223), proclaimed himself suzerain over Richard Cœur de Lion and John Lackland, and the victory of Bouvines which he gained over the Emperor Otto IV, backed by a coalition of feudal nobles (1214), was the first ever in French history which called forth a movement of national solidarity around a French king. The war against the Albigensians under Louis VIII (1223–26) brought in its train the establishment of the influence and authority of the French monarchy in the south of France.
St. Louis IX (1226–1270), "ruisselant de piété, et enflammé de charité", as a contemporary describes him, made kings so beloved that from that time dates the royal cult, so to speak, which was one of the moral forces in olden France, and which existed in no other country of Europe to the same degree. Piety had been for the kings of France, set on their thrones by the Church of God, as it were a duty belonging to their charge or office; but in the piety of St. Louis, there was a note all his own, the note of sanctity. With him ended the Crusades, but not their spirit. During the 13th and 14th centuries, project after project attempting to set on foot a crusade was made, showing that the spirit of a militant apostolate continued to ferment in the soul of France. The project of Charles Valois (1308–09), the French expedition under Peter I of Cyprus against Alexandria and the Armenian coasts (1365–67), sung of by the French trouvère, Guillaume Machault, the crusade of John of Nevers, which ended in the bloody battle of Nicopolis (1396) – in all these enterprises, the spirit of St. Louis lived, just as in the heart of the Christians of the East, whom France was thus trying to protect, there has survived a lasting gratitude toward the nation of St. Louis. In the days of St. Louis, the influence of the French epic literature in Europe was supreme. Brunetto Latini, as early as the middle of the 13th century, wrote that, "of all speech [parlures] that of the French was the most charming, and the most in favour with everyone." French held sway in England until the middle of the 14th century; it was fluently spoken at the Court of Constantinople at the time of the Fourth Crusade, and in Greece in the dukedoms, principalities, and baronies founded there by the House of Burgundy and Champagne. And it was in French that Rusticiano of Pisa, about 1300, wrote the record of Marco Polo's travels. The University of Paris was saved from a spirit of exclusiveness by the happy intervention of Alexander IV, who obliged it to open its chairs to the mendicant friars. Among its professors were Duns Scotus, the Italians, St. Thomas and St. Bonaventure; Albert the Great, a German; and Alexander of Hales, an Englishman. Among its pupils it counted Roger Bacon, Dante, Raimundus Lullus, Popes Gregory IX, Urban IV, Clement IV, and Boniface VIII.
Advent of Gothic art and the Hundred Years' War France was the birthplace of Gothic art, which was carried by French architects into Germany. The method employed in the building of many Gothic cathedrals – i.e., by the actual assistance of the faithful – bears witness to the fact that at this period the lives of the French people were deeply penetrated with faith. An architectural wonder such as the cathedral of Chartres was in reality the work of popular art born of the faith of the people who worshipped there.
"Divine right" and the weakening of the influence of the papacy in Christendom