ABSTRACT
The Parti Démocrate Populaire (PDP), founded in 1924, can be considered as the first instance of a political party of Christian-based democracy in France, without being directly so called and having no openly denominational reference. As in most other European countries, the party had its origin in a multiplicity of complex traditions, but it had an originality and subtle features of its own, stemming from a combination, to some extent, of Christian democracy in its strict sense, social Catholicism and liberal Catholicism.1 France, however, unlike other countries, and for a range of historical reasons dating back to the Revolution, was alone in that no ‘Catholic’ party was founded there. Although the parties of that tendency, in France and elsewhere, could not be called Christian democrat until 1945, they were referred to, notably in the inter-war years, as ‘Christian-inspired democratic parties’, and all attempts to form ‘Catholic’ parties failed. Development in France was further complicated by the emergence, at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, of another movement that shaped the outlook of a whole generation: the Sillon, founded in 1894 by Marc Sangnier.2
