In fact, the relationship between Church and state in France even before 1940 was often one of compromise. The Church came to see the advantages of separation and the state's schools did not banish the great Catholic authors of the past from their bookshelves. Church and state fought side by side in the union sacrée of the Great War. Over time — and despite the Church's support for the Vichy regime — republicans came to see that the Church was not quite the intransigent threat to democracy they had taken it to be. The Second Vatican Council, according to Perreau-Saussine, confirmed that this was the case. The Church's new enemy was totalitarianism.

Does this mean that the conflict between Catholicism and democracy has been finally resolved? As an Anglican rather than a Roman Catholic, I am not best placed to judge, but Perreau-Saussine speaks of a "degree of disenchantment". The disquiet and concern of the Church, he contends, is not directed at liberal democracy as such but at the moral consequences of what has become a particular interpretation of individual autonomy. This, as we know, relates largely to issues that concern sexual behaviour. It increasingly bears upon questions of euthanasia and eugenics. More recently, the Church has found itself confronted with an aggressive secularism that seeks to deny the expression of personal religious convictions. Will the Catholic Church be compelled to change its moral teaching in the same way that it has been forced to close adoption agencies because it refuses to place children with homosexual couples?

Here is the nub of problem. If the Church believes that individual freedom cannot be understood outside the context of an objective moral order, it cannot be indifferent to truth. Democracy, however, can be. As even Robespierre acknowledged, the people might be the purest expression of the general good but so too were they capable of committing the most bloodthirsty crimes. The Church, then, claims to bear witness to a reality that transcends the general will. "Religious life", Perreau-Saussine concludes, "can go together with a wisdom to which democratic life does not give rise on its own, a wisdom that consists in recognising limits to human autonomy." All believers could agree.