Henri Daniel-Rops
| Henri Daniel-Rops | |
|---|---|
| Born | Henri Jules Charles Petiot 19 January 1901 Épinal, Vosges |
| Died | 27 July 1965 (aged 64) Aix-les-Bains, Savoie |
| Pen name | Daniel-Rops, Henri Daniel-Rops |
| Occupation | Author |
| Nationality | French |
| Genre | Catholic religion |
| Literary movement | Ordre Nouveau |
| Notable works | Jesus, His Life and Times |
| Notable awards | Académie française 1955 |
| Spouse | Madeleine Bouvier |
| Children | Francis Petiot |
Henri Daniel-Rops (Épinal, 19 January 1901 – Aix-les-Bains, 27 July 1965) was a French Roman Catholic writer and historian whose real name was Henri Petiot.
Daniel-Rops was the son of a military officer. He was a student at the Faculties of Law and Literature in Grenoble, receiving his Agrégation in History in 1922 at the age of 21, the youngest in France. He was a professor of history in Chambéry, then in Amiens and finally in Paris. In the late 1920s he began his literary career with an essay, Notre inquiétude (Our Anxiety, 1926), a novel, L'âme obscure (The Dark Soul, 1929), and several articles in journals such as Correspondent, Notre Temps and La Revue des vivants.
Daniel-Rops, who had been brought up a Roman Catholic, had by the 1920s become an agnostic. In Notre inquiétude his theme was humanity's loss of meaning and direction in an increasingly industrialized and mechanized world. When he considered the misery and social injustice around him, and the apparent indifference of Christians to those they called their brothers, he questioned whether Christianity was any longer a living force in the world.
The alternatives, however, did not seem any better. Marxism, for instance, claimed to concern itself with people's material well-being, but quite ignored their non-material needs, which for Daniel-Rops was unacceptable. In the 1930s he returned to the Catholic Church, having come to feel that, in spite of the shortcomings of Christians, it was only through Christianity that the technological age could be reconciled with humanity's inner needs.
Starting in 1931 he wrote mostly about Catholicism, advised by Gabriel Marcel with whom he shared membership of the Ordre Nouveau. He helped disseminate its ideas in books in which it is often difficult to distinguish his personal reflections from the doctrines of the movement he had attached himself to, and which make him a leading representative of the intellectual ferment among non-conformists in the 1930s: Le Monde sans âme (The World without a Soul), Les annés tournantes, Eléments de notre destin.
After 1935, his ties with Ordre Nouveau loosened somewhat. He collaborated with the Catholic weeklies Sept and Temps présent. By 1940 he had published several novels, biographies and essays. For Plon he directed the collection Présences, in which he published the book La France et son armée (France and Its Army) by General de Gaulle, who became his friend.
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