The article outlines the historical rise of the "Catholic writer" as a new intellectual creature in France after the 1789 revolution, from appearence of Génie du Christianisme by Chateaubriand, though the roles performed by the abbot Félicité de Lammenais, by the journalist Louis Veuillot, or even by the "neo-Christians" of 1880-1890, until the first signs of a "Catholic literary renaissance" during the decade of 1910. This "Catholic" renewal had to cope with literary challenges, so to speak, raised by the dynamics oriented by the rules of art, besides other doctrinal disputes inside a Church whose temporal power was declining, as well as confronted with the lay emancipa-tion. The knowledge of that historical process contributes to a social history of belief in the power of art and also for an understanding about the intellectual founda-tions of belief in the Church as institution.
Sociology of intellectuals; Social history of Catholicism; Literature and Church; France 1800-1914