On the Square Today

Joseph Bottum on anti-Catholicism in French thought :

There remains to this day a snarl in French conservative thought, where all sorts of threads are knotted together: nationalists tangled up with anti-Semites, monarchists, anti-Dreyfusards, Lefebverists, and those aging colonialists who long to reconquer Algeria. They infect one another with their paranoias and they blacken one another with their pasts. And, since often the only thing they actually have in common is Catholicism, they offer a perpetual occasion for anti-Catholicism to feel good about itself.

Can anyone pull free the important threads in modern French thought from all the ugly and extraneous material with which they are entangled?

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