Robert Bessède’s account of late nineteenth-century Catholic culture in France, in his recent study La Crise de la conscience catholique (Paris, 1975), is typical of traditional commentaries on this period. A particular stance—an attitude of despair in the face of history—with its origins in a minority group caught in very specific historical circumstances is transformed by special pleading into a universal phenomenon, to become eventually one more symbolic embodiment of the eternal crucifixion of man. If we look, for instance, into Bessède’s work, which claims to consider objectively the whole movement of ideas at this period, but has its real centre of interest in traditionalism and in the writers of the Catholic Revival, we find that he wholeheartedly adopts the Revival’s own blinkered perspective, refusing even to try to decipher the historical particularity inscribed in their ideology. Ostentatiously dismissing the contribution which the “historian of ideas” can make in such a domain, he prefers to speak of “mysterious” impulses, “feelings”, always and universally the same, which are “the basis and motive force of history”: