The spiritual conquest of Mexico: Robert Ricard and the first Americanism study of the incipient French Hispanism and their relationship whit the deep crisis of the French Catholic Church on the modernist heterodoxy

Abstract

Robert Ricard’s “The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico”, the first Americanism study of the incipient French Hispanisme, explicitly states in its subtitle that it is " an essay on the apostolate and the evangelizing methods of the mendicant orders”. We are therefore facing a work that, like that of his strict contemporary Marcel Bataillon, its part of the religious history’ studies, a very practiced discipline in the French university of the early twentieth century. This article intends to demonstrate, on the one hand, the relationship between the prominence of religious history and the situation of deep crisis that the French Catholic Church was going through, threatened at the same time by the secularism of the Third Republic and by the modernist heterodoxy. And on the other hand, the impact of that crisis on the birth of French Hispanism, on the choice of topics to research, in brief on the vocation of the hispanists who, on one side or the other, will project on Spain the concerns, crises and the ambitions of their country of origin. The incidence, in short, on the ideological options that determine the attitudes differentiating the Hispanic American Studies of Robert Ricard in “The Spiritual Conquest” and the French Latin Americanism.