The French Counter-revolution

From The Catholic Herald:

The last country you’d expect to see a vibrant socially conservative and Catholic movement emerge from would be France, with its reputation for entrenched secularism and libertinism. And yet, this is exactly what La Manif Pour Tous (or Manif, for short), the mass-protest movements against France’s Socialist government’s same-sex marriage bill, managed to spark. Though the bill eventually passed, the movement managed to put more than a million people on the streets, won real concessions from the government, and more importantly created a new sense of a young, eager and growing Catholic social conservative movement in France.

What gives?

The Manif was an utterly unexpected phenomenon. Nobody anticipated that protests against a same-sex marriage bill would draw more than a few tens of thousands. Instead, the largest protests drew more than a million. Over several weeks, with clockwork-like regularity, the Manif drew large amounts of people in every large city of France to protest against the bill. (Read more.)