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A Tiny Pin? His grandparents were peasants, his father was an artillery officer, and Henri Petiot began life as a bright young man with an academic future. He majored simultaneously in law, geography and history at the University of Grenoble, took the equivalent of an M.A. in each, won his agrégation (slightly higher than Ph.D.) at 21. He became a lycée professor in Neuilly, continued teaching until 1945. His first book, a volume of essays called Notre Inquiétude, was published in 1926. He signed it Daniel-Rops—the name he had invented for a character in an un published short story.
Part of the inquiétude he wrote about was disillusion with the church. But ten years later Daniel-Rops had found in Catholicism "a conception of the world . . . a system of thinking . . . a basis for civilization." The church-centered histories, biographies and novels that have poured from him since have contributed much to the new stirrings of religion in anticlerical France, where, he feels, "there is a new kind of Catholic movement afoot. It's not organized, but deep."
"The coming two or three generations are decisive," he says, "because there is real danger ahead. On the one hand is anarchy. Humanity can't survive looking at television screens. On the other there is technocracy, in which man becomes a tiny pin in a gigantic mechanism. How can man be preserved? The answer seems so fragile, so hypothetical, that people understandably mock it. It is simply that we need an act of faith in man—faith in his profound worth and in the divine spark he contains." For faith is the bridge to the future. "This is Rome at the time of the barbarians. It is falling apart. But that doesn't mean the light won't shine eventually."