1948 The French Revolution and the Church, by John McManners (read 13 Oct 1985) This is a 1969 book and is an excellent, excellent study of its subject. In all the reading I've done on the French Revolution. one tends to forget the really frightful persecution which the Church underwent in the 1790's in France. The book is full of insight, e.g.,: "The Revolution had swept away the kings of France with their Gallican traditions and the Enlightened Despots who organized their cardinals to elect weaklings to the Chair of Peter; it had overturned the ecclesiastical princedoms of Germany, the exclusively noble episcopate of France, and the whole proud, vested, aristocratic interest that had battened on the Church; it had broken the claims of secular sovereigns and quasi-independent missionary orders to direct the work of Catholic missions overseas. Catholicism was to reknit its fibres, not along the old traditional patterns of the Erastian national churches, but with the Pope as its centre." ( )