DANIEL BARBU, INTERPRETER OF THE FRENCH CATHOLIC LIBERALS
DANIEL BARBU, INTERPRETER OF THE FRENCH CATHOLIC LIBERALS

Summary/Abstract: This article aims to investigate how Daniel Barbu read the work of nineteenth- century French authors who sought to harmonize liberal political views with religious ones: Alexis de Tocqueville, Henri Lacordaire, and Charles de Montalembert. In his last book entitled Pia libertas. Despre formele politice ale libertății creștine (Pia libertas. On the Political Forms of Christian Liberty), the French Catholic liberal movement is analyzed as a “belief made possible by freedom” (Daniel Barbu), but also in its differences compared to the “old” eighteenth century liberal thought. In the context of the relationship between faith and freedom, the three French thinkers argue that “the advent of democracy” would make the “impénitence libérale” even more necessary in front of the danger of modern despotisms. In the nineteenth century, the Christian advocacy for freedom was carried out in the name of an equal freedom and expressed the belief in a democracy that should not be transformed into an “apotheosis of the sovereign reason of the sovereign people” (Charles de Montalembert). Daniel Barbu is one of the contemporary political thinkers who sheds light on essential issues of liberal Catholic thought.

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