Franz Stock. Source: H. Briand and Les Amis de Franz Stock; used with permission. Franz Stock died alone in a Parisian hospital in February , not yet forty-four years old. He was an ardent Catholic and a devout Francophile. His story, in particular his contributions to Franco-German rapprochement after , remains relatively separate from mainstream historiography, with only one recently-published account in English. Who exactly was this priest, then?
Hanley conducted interviews with individuals who had known Stock personally, or did extensive research on him; his book is the culmination of several decades of work.
Stock was the oldest of nine children born to a working-class couple, and he knew by the time he was twelve years old that he wanted to become a priest. He attended the seminary at Paderborn and joined the Quickborn Catholic youth movement, with which he was first able to visit France during the summer of , for an international peace conference held at Bierville. He was deeply influenced by the example of Marc Sangnier, a militant French Catholic pacifist who was in favor of progressive reform for the Church, who had organized the conference.
As a result of this love affair with France, Stock applied to spend three semesters at the Institut Catholique in Paris; he was the first German to be admitted since the Middle Ages. It was during this impressionable stage of his life, Hanley writes, that Stock became determined to dedicate his life Franco-German reconciliation, a devotion all the more extraordinary for the reality Stock faced when he gave himself over to it: this was arguably the most intensely hostile period of the two countries in their centuries-long history of rivalry, enmity, and bloodshed.
His arrival back in Germany upon the outbreak of the Second World War was only temporary; he applied for and received permission to return to Paris in June Eventually he procured from the German ambassador to Vichy France a pass allowing him to visit imprisoned Frenchmen and women, to give them pastoral care.
