La sanctification du dimanche : un combat par l’image

Setting against the church and the factory, the sanctification of the Sunday and the impious work, a picture of catechism published in the eighties of the nineteenth century by the Maison de la Bonne Presse gives a symbolic view of the struggle on the Day of the Lord. Shaped on a carrefully designed rhetoric of oppositions, this plate offers at first sight a manichean vision of the society tuned in to the struggles of the present. Considering it with other contemporary pictures of catechisms makes more clear the nature of the discourse that is been used and the links to the social doctrine the Church was developing. But if this militant plate is put back in the long-lasting network of pictures, it meets also mystical readings and former iconographical sources which attest to the importance of this theme. To respect the Sunday as a day of rest is not only a commandment, it is also the sign of the christian hold over the society and a choice of life which involves salvation. The requirements of such a commitment put up, in the claims, with the new values of rest.