Henri Daniel-Rops

Henri Daniel-Rops
Photograph of Daniel-Rops by Studio Harcourt (1950)
Born	Henri Jules Charles Petiot (1901-01-19)19 January 1901 Épinal, France
Died	27 July 1965(1965-07-27) (aged 64) Tresserve, France
Spouse	Madeleine Bouvier
Children	Francis Petiot
Writing career
Pen name	Daniel-Rops, Henri Daniel-Rops
Notable works	Nôtre Inquiétude (Our Anxiety, an essay from 1926) L'âme obscure (The Dark Soul, 1929) Jesus and His Times (1945) Daily Life in Palestine at the Time of Christ (1961)

Henri Jules Charles Petiot (19 January 1901 – 27 July 1965), known by the pen name Henri Daniel-Rops, was a French Catholic writer and historian. At the time of his death, he was considered to be, internationally, "one of Roman Catholicism's outstanding writers."

Biography

Daniel-Rops was the son of a military officer. He was a student at the Faculties of Law and Literature in Grenoble, receiving his Agrégation in History in 1922 at the age of 21, the youngest in France. He was a professor of history in Chambéry, then in Amiens and finally in Paris. In the late 1920s he began his literary career with an essay, Notre inquiétude (Our Anxiety, 1926), a novel, L'âme obscure (The Dark Soul, 1929), and several articles in journals such as Correspondent, Notre Temps and La Revue des vivants.

Daniel-Rops, who had been brought up a Roman Catholic, had by the 1920s become an agnostic. In Notre inquiétude his theme was humanity's loss of meaning and direction in an increasingly industrialized and mechanized world. When he considered the misery and social injustice around him, and the apparent indifference of Christians to those they called their brothers, he questioned whether Christianity was any longer a living force in the world.

The alternatives, however, did not seem any better. Marxism, for instance, claimed to concern itself with people's material well-being, but quite ignored their non-material needs, which for Daniel-Rops was unacceptable. In the 1930s he returned to the Catholic Church, having come to feel that, in spite of the shortcomings of Christians, it was only through Christianity that the technological age could be reconciled with humanity's inner needs.

Literary career

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Starting in 1931 he wrote mostly about Catholicism, advised by Gabriel Marcel with whom he shared membership of the Ordre Nouveau. He helped disseminate its ideas in books in which it is often difficult to distinguish his personal reflections from the doctrines of the movement he had attached himself to, and which make him a leading representative of the intellectual ferment among non-conformists in the 1930s: Le Monde sans âme (The World without a Soul), Les annés tournantes, Eléments de notre destin.

After 1935, his ties with Ordre Nouveau loosened somewhat. He collaborated with the Catholic weeklies Sept and Temps présent. By 1940 he had published several novels, biographies and essays. For Plon he directed the collection Présences, in which he published the book La France et son armée (France and Its Army) by General de Gaulle, who became his friend.

From 1941 to 1944, he wrote Le peuple de la Bible (Sacred History), the first of a series of works of religious history that would culminate in the monumental Histoire de l'Eglise du Christ (History of the Church of Christ) (1948–1965). Since it appeared during the German occupation of France, Sacred History was quickly confiscated. The book later became a great success; the English version appeared in 1949. The English version of Jésus et son temps (Jesus and His Times) was released in 1954.

After the liberation of France in 1944, he abandoned teaching to devote himself to his work as a Christian historian and writer, directing the magazine Ecclésia and editing Je sais, je crois (I know, I believe), published in dozens of volumes in English as The Twentieth Century Encyclopedia of Catholicism. His 1952 book Missa Est included a combination of photographs regarding the mass and commentaries on individual parts of the ceremony.

From 1957 to 1963 he was one of the fifty governors of the European Foundation of Culture founded by Denis de Rougemont. In 1955, he was elected to the Académie française.

Criticism

Dominican priest Gervase Mathew noted in a 1959 review that Henri-Rops's style had its flaws: factual inaccuracies, odd omissions, and imaginative "flights of pure fancy" were common in the French writer's publications. Nonetheless, the author's undeniable literary skill, brilliant French rhetoric, and "unflagging verve" make his work a valuable contribution.

Bibliography

References

External links

• Media related to Daniel Rops at Wikimedia Commons
• Daniel-Rops autobio
• News and biographical works on the site of the Académie française (in French)
• Works by Daniel-Rops on 2nd-hand booksite Antiqbook