'Jesus the sans-culotte': Marxism and religion during the French fin-de-siecle

Most historians have assumed a fundamental antagonism between Marxism and t heism. In practice, the relationship between the two world-views has been f ar more complex than simple hostility - a complexity admirably illustrated by the experience of the Marxist Parti Ouvrier Francais (POF) between 1882 and 1905. While the Marxists of the POF developed a vicious socialist anti- clericalism that made its own original contribution to France's long tradit ion of anti-religious polemic, they none the less experimented with a rudim entary Christian socialism designed to attract the proletarian faithful, an d also developed an agnostic programme of religious indifference which soug ht to insert the circuit-breaker of class conflict into the highly charged link between militant secularism and Catholic clericalism. This article exa mines the intricate and, in the end, incoherent, pattern of engagement betw een Marxist socialism and French religion during the fin de siecle, and sug gests that this incoherence contributed to the eventual frustration of the Parti Ouvrier's revolutionary purpose.