MARIO TESINI 

Echi del "mito americano": i cattolici liberali francesi dell'Ottocento

N. 162

Summary — The controversial historical definition of the concept of liberal catholicism (mostly a French phenomenon) is revealed in the judgement on America in the mid XIX century.

The North-American experience showed that the freedom and separation of the Church from the civil power was possible.

Lamennais’ newspaper, L’Avenir, to which also Montalembert and Lacordaire contributed, had suggested this same perspective since 1830 as the result of the religious crisis triggered by the Revolution.

But attention was not only focussed on religious questions: the liberal catholics, readers and interpreters of Tocqueville’s work, often expressed original standpoints as the judgement on America evolved in France between the Restoration and the Second empire.

The themes of civil equality and of social opportunities as well as those related to freedom of religion and thought are echoed in the works of Montalembert (among the first to grasp the ambivalence of Tocqueville’s judgement on America) - of Lacordaire as well as of the most eminent student of slavery in the United States on the eve of the civil war, Augustin Cochin.