 The Third Republic was reft by conflicts between the secular Left and the Catholic Right, with many individuals on both sides espousing distinctly radical positions (see, for example, the article on the famous Dreyfus affair).Thus it has been said that "Lefebvre was... a man formed by the bitter hatreds that defined the battle lines in French society and culture from the French Revolution to the Vichy regime".Lefebvre's first biographer, the English traditionalist writer Michael Davies, wrote in the first volume of his "Apologia Pro Marcel Lefebvre"