The Church as Arbiter: A Divided Right in Interwar France

To document the impact of elites’ choices on political movements, we leverage the condemnation of L’Action Française (AF), a monarchist movement, by Pope Pius XI in 1926. As a consequence of the papal condemnation, French Catholics had to choose between their involvement in AF and accessing Catholic sacraments. Difference-in-differences estimates show that the papal condemnation reshaped AF’s territorial distribution and social basis, weakening its support in religious areas while attracting more secularized followers. Following that shift, AF mutated from being a conservative nationalist movement with strong Catholic connections to an extreme organization entangled with a violent and anti-parliamentarian right. Our examination of the role of elites in the development of political movements allows us to shed new light on the dynamics that resulted in the collapse of democracy in interwar Europe.