Liberty of conscience and liberty of the press were ‘execrable’ ideas, declared the encyclical Mirari vos, of 15 August 1832, dismissing brutally those who claimed that religion could gain anything from either idea. In the wake of Mirari vos, sovereign pontiffs thundered forth condemnations of the French Revolution and of the ‘modern world’. Only truth (that is Catholic truth) had rights: there could not be a freedom not to be Catholic since recognition of such a freedom would entail a culpable indifference to revelation. In the course of the last centuries, the Catholic Church has been confronted with liberal democracy, a political regime whose triumph it had not foreseen, and with which, for this very reason, it was ill prepared to cope. With Dignitatis humanae (1965), the Catholic Church seemed to change its teaching in a fundamental way: the ‘Vatican Council declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom’. Since then, there has been no serious attempt to return to the church's previous anti-liberalism. Catholics acknowledge the supremacy of the Catholic Church over the state, but regard themselves as powerless to implement Catholic rules and ideals at a national level except through the ballot box. This chapter sketches the reasons for this shift from a radical anti-liberalism to a certain type of liberalism. I focus in particular on the intellectual history of the Gallican Church since the internal debates of French Catholicism in this period have often turned out to be the debates about Catholicism as such.