Tommaso
GIORDANI

 

The project explores previously neglected interaction between two traditions of social reform in late 19^th century France: republican solidarisme and French social Catholicism. Historiographical treatment of these traditions runs in parallel, neglecting the question of their interactions. Integrating the traditional tools of intellectual history with the study of networks, institutions, and individual biographical trajectories, however, reveals a much more entangled reality. The project interrogates archival bases in Lyon and Paris in order to understand the flow of ideas between the two discourses, and reveals the extent to which the field of social reform constituted a space of collaboration between secular republicanism and Catholicism in the France of the time.