The war that between 1926 and 1929 — and on a smaller scale between 1934 and 1938 — pitted thousands of peasants against a government that was assumed to be the product of the triumphant Mexican Revolution was for decades under the mantle of taboo. The social composition of those who fought it, the Jacobin mood – barely repressed – of some revolutionary generals, the hostility between the new Mexican State and the Vatican made that long and bloody episode of our history little studied, almost sneaking, until in the early 1970s The Cristiada was published, book master by its method, its depth and its empathy with the vanquished. For seven years, Jean Meyer poked in archives, conducted surveys and recorded conversations with many survivors of this fratricidal shock: the result of that dedication is the book that today, forty years after its first edition, publishes Siglo XXI Editores.

In this political and diplomatic history Mexico, Washington and Rome occupy the foreground, with the Mexican Church confronted with the national state and the Vatican, in a conflict in which oil is not far from the holy water and in which agrarian reform and the vanguard ideas of the government resonate. Meyer’s work is woven of narrative and analysis, of military, economic and sociological history, and is at the same time an ambitious attempt at interpretation, a discourse on other discourses: that of Calles – which is not that of Obregón – that of the Holy See – which is not that of the National League Defending Religious Freedom or that of the Archbishop of Mexico – that of the Americans.

This first volume addresses the war of the christs from the word of the actors themselves: the Catholics standing, the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the fighters of both sides, the generals—both the mythical Enrique Gorostieta and Obregón and Calles—, present in this living and painful account of the confrontation. The author is careful to show that the christens were not people of the Church, nor Catholics doing politics, nor lackeys of the bishops, nor instruments of the League. Jean Meyer is right: “The Cristiad can be read as the Iliad.” Whoever looks at these pages “will not fail to try a deep emotion when reading each of the episodes of that epic that belongs to the heritage of humanity.