freuds-cokedealer:

Replicating Marx’s own distaste for Christian workers’ movements, terrified by this “refloating of a Christian socialism which has been sunk for so many years,” the Parti ouvrier [Workers’ Party] threw itself with crusading zeal into the struggle against Christian socialists (a term French Marxists understandably detested but nonetheless used indiscriminately in relation to both Social Catholics and Christian Democrats). How could the Parti ouvrier not hate a movement that officially adopted the slogan “Religion, Family, Property” -the three institutional evils Guesdists [term for members of the Parti ouvrier) detested most in bourgeois society? Worse yet, Christian socialists quite unashamedly placed their movement under (in their own deferential terms) the “patronage of the superior classes.” [Pope] Leo, after all, had mandated Christian Democrats to defend the rights of property and respect the “class distinctions” that founded every properly constituted state.’ No wonder Christian Democracy’s advocates, no less than its enemies, envisaged the movement as a “rampart against socialism.” Abbe Garnier’s Union nationale -the most widespread and deeply implanted of France’s many Christian Democratic organizations-typically dedicated itself to stopping “the disastrous progress of a socialism that aims to overthrow all the bases of society at once.“Conferences contradictoires, those archetypal fin de siecle arenas of popular political culture, regularly pitted Marxists against Social Catholics such as Garnier, offering their fascinated spectators oratorical contests in which class-collaborationist Christian socialists battled mightily against Guesdist class warriors.

 Guesdists challenged the credentials of their interlocutors on such occasions, dismissing their religious message as delusion and self-delusion, denouncing their pretensions to democracy and to Christian socialism as thin camouflage for reaction, attacking their proposals for social brotherhood as a plot to subordinate gullible. workers to scheming capitalists. At the very least, Guesdists mockingly contrasted the Christian Democrats’ pious goal of transforming the dog-eat-dog world of French capitalism into a harmonious Christian commonwealth with their meager achievements in, at the best, mandating seats for tired shop assistants. The Parti ouvrier expected “socialist acts and not just socialist words” from those who identified themselves as Christian socialists.

“A ‘De Profundis’ for Christian Socialism”: French Marxists and the Critique of Political Catholicism by Robert Stuart