Michel de Saint Pierre was a widely read realist in the Balzacian tradition. His popular novels over a period of forty years sold millions of copies. At the same time, his vocal opposition to many of the changes wrought in Catholic life and ritual by the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), and his novel on the subject, Les Nouveaux Prêtres (1964; translated as The New Priests, 1966), made him a leading spokesman for the "intégriste" movement within the Church.

Saint Pierre was born on 12 February 1916 into a rural aristocratic family with Norman roots. His parents, Antoinette and Louis de Saint Pierre (his father was a career military man who became a historian after his retirement from active service), sent him off at the age of fourteen to Saint-Jean-de-Bethune, a Catholic boarding school in Versailles. The years spent there were to play an important role in Saint Pierre's...