How could Mrs May make positive use of such a working knowledge of German history in her dealings with Berlin, Paris and Brussels? I have no idea. But as it happens, this is the year of the Dutch, French, British and German elections. The sheer ugliness of what Europe is becoming has just been on display again in France, which is worth briefly comparing to Germany. For months the candidates traded insults and smears, conspiracy theories and guilt by association — anything rather than offer the voters what they were crying out for: a certain idea of France, as De Gaulle put it. The General dismissed those like Emmanuel Macron who use Europe as a political slogan: “It amounts to nothing and it signifies nothing.” But he also despised nationalists like Marine Le Pen, who tried and failed to imitate his authentic patriotism. De Gaulle believed in both the Republic and the Catholic Church, the twin pillars of French identity. Neither Macron nor Le Pen appears to appreciate that the Republic cannot flourish without the Church, just as the Church must embrace the whole Republic.

De Gaulle was not the last great Frenchman. The late Cardinal Archbishop of Paris, Aaron Jean-Marie Lustiger, was born a Jew and survived the Holocaust only thanks to the kindness of Catholics. He chose to convert but always considered Christianity to be the fulfillment of Judaism and himself no less a Jew than a Christian: “For me, the vocation of Israel is bringing light to the goyim. That is my hope and I believe that Christianity is the means for achieving it.” He rebuked Marine Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie, for his anti-Semitism and racism: “The Christian faith says that all men are equal in dignity because they are all created in the image of God.” His epitaph in Notre Dame reads: “Having become Christian by faith and by Baptism, I have remained Jewish as did the Apostles.” By forcing France to confront the Jewish origins of the Christian faith, Lustiger did more to banish anti-Semitism from respectable discourse than all the intellectuals of the Left Bank put together. That anti-Semitism has returned with a vengeance since Lustiger’s death in 2007 and the French Jews are emigrating in ever larger numbers is a terrible indictment of the French political class.

Lustiger was a living symbol of what France at its best could still achieve, just as his friend Joseph Ratzinger, whom he helped to elect as Pope Benedict in 2005, remains a symbol of what is best in Germany. In his debate with the leading philosopher Jürgen Habermas, the Pope Emeritus (as he now is) invoked faith, “that which holds the world together”, as the moral foundation of freedom and the necessary counterpart to reason in what both thinkers concurred in describing as a “post-secular” world. The Ratzinger catchphrase, “the dictatorship of relativism” also implies that relativism leads to dictatorship. Germany, like France, has suffered a catastrophic fall in religious practice; neither the strict separation of church and state (as in France) nor the funding of established churches by taxpayers (as in Germany) has made much difference to this decline. 

The forthcoming German election in September has so far proved almost as unedifying as the French one: the candidate of the social democrats, Martin Schulz, has threatened the British with “the hardest Brexit possible”, while the upstart Alternative for Germany has lurched so far to the Right that its best known (and British-educated) politician Frauke Petry was replaced as leader for urging moderation towards Muslims.  As in the Weimar Republic, but unlike the postwar Federal Republic, there now seems to be little or no spiritual dimension to prevent German politics spinning out of control. As the daughter of a Lutheran pastor and theologian, Angela Merkel belongs to the Evangelical Church, though she is careful not to wear her faith on her sleeve. On occasion she has been heard to say that Germany suffers not from “too much Islam” but “too little Christianity”. German Catholics now outnumber Protestants; together they still wield considerable influence, which manifests itself in the fact that Germany tends to be more liberal in political than in moral issues: it has not so far followed the rest of Europe in legalising same-sex marriage, for example.