I THE SETTING IN 1814–1815
The Revolution antagonised the Catholic Church, although reform-minded members of the French clergy had initially welcomed it. The ensuing conflict degenerated into a genocidal franco-French war in which exponents of the new secular creed tried to exterminate determined adherents of the old. When revolutionary and Napoleonic armies and administrators exported blasphemy and sacrilege, the result was the fusion, whether in Spain, Germany or Russia, of counter-revolution, nationalism and religion, although to use these concepts is neatly to divide what was probably perceived as a whole. Whatever the subtle realities of Napoleon’s attempts to use the Concordat Church to perpetuate both his dynasty and his regime, the perception grew that the arrival of French troops, under the command of the Corsican Anti-Christ, meant the draining of communion wine, the host snaffled by horses, soldiers larking about in clerical garb, their whores writhing on altars, pipes lit from holy lights, and the raucous chorus of revolutionary song where more lofty tones had prevailed. General count Hugo, as he had become under Napoleon, was responsible for perpetuating some of the grisly scenes in Spain depicted by Goya in his Disasters of War engravings, and was especially proud of his display of severed ‘bandit’ heads, which he sometimes arranged above the portals of churches. This was difficult to reconcile with his son’s claim that ‘That Army [Napoleon’s army in Spain] carried the Encyclopédie in its knapsack.’ Reading that work evidently made scant impact on a father who shot up the tomb of El Cid, tried to blow up Burgos cathedral, and looted every Goya, Murillo and Velásquez he could lay his grubby hands on when it was time for the French to retreat.1
Across Europe statues of saints allegedly averted their gaze, bled, wept and threatened to depart, to avoid the impieties that so offended humble folk that tens of thousands of them were prepared to take up arms and fight the French. In Spain, patriots drew upon centuries of Christian resistance to the Moors, literally exchanging the latter’s robes and turbans for the Jacobins’ blue coats and red caps, as happened during an 1808 procession in Cadiz that celebrated the feast day of St James. True Christians and Spaniards became synonymous. Icons and incense were similarly heavily present whenever the Russian tsar’s armies went into battle with Napoleon’s polyglot legions. Napoleon’s aide de camp watched before Borodino how icons were paraded before the Russian host: ‘This solemn spectacle, the exhortations of the officers, the benedictions of the priests, finally aroused the courage of the spectators to a fanatical heat. Down to the simplest soldier, they believed themselves consecrated by God to the defence of Heaven and the sacred soil of Russia.’2
Events seemed to gust with the violence of solar storms. Writing to a friend in 1819, the philosopher Hegel confessed: ‘I am just fifty years old, and have lived most of my life in these eternally restless times of fear and hope, and I have hoped that sometime these fears and hopes might cease. But now I must see that they will go on for ever, indeed in moments of depression I think they will grow worse.’ As a young man he had sympathised with the Revolution, writing ‘Vive la liberté’ in his private album, and had regarded Napoleon as ‘the world soul on horseback’, despite having his meagre possessions pillaged by French troops as they swept through Frankfurt. Aptly enough, a philosopher who was adept in the eddies and currents of world history, philosophy and religion also had a nose for which way the wind blew in accordance with his self-interest. After publishing an essay that poured cold water on the desirability of constitutions, in 1817 Hegel was appointed to a professorship of philosophy in Berlin, virtually becoming Prussia’s official state philosopher, although his style was so opaque that, as his soi-disant pupil Ludwig Feuerbach (and Karl Marx) proved, Hegel’s thought could run in many directions.3
In the circles that regained power in 1814–15, the political ideals of the Enlightenment were discredited by a Revolution whose possibilities had narrowed to either anarchy and terror or continental military dictatorship, notwithstanding the brief parenthesis of the Directory. Statesmen, of whom the greatest was the Austrian foreign minister and chancellor Metternich, might privately have held enlightened views, but felt it inexpedient to espouse them publicly. In England and Wales, where senior clerics were not usually given to either lurid imaginings or political pronouncements, Anglican bishops followed the abbé Barruel in regarding the Revolution as a conspiracy and the rise of Napoleon as the advent of the reign of Anti-Christ. They joined the Tory John Wesley in offering to raise militias to combat domestic radicals and foreign invasion.4
Across Europe where there had been hope there was disillusionment, as the biographies of innumerable Romantic artists, musicians, poets, thinkers and writers witness. The British poets Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth were among those who progressed from a naive enthusiasm for the French Revolution to more conservative opinions, putting away, as Coleridge had it, his ‘squeaking baby trumpet of sedition’ after French forces invaded his beloved Switzerland.5 The future poet laureate Southey took longer to outgrow the political equivalent of juvenile acne, but the implacability of his mature views, when juxtaposed with his youthful enthusiasms for the Jacobins or the medieval peasant leader Wat Tyler, ensured the enmity of the genius Byron and the professionally snide Hazlitt.6 The ideal of individual cultivation, coupled with political conservatism, took the place of a youthful fixation with liberty as these erstwhile romantics turned greyly prudent.7 Many prominent continental thinkers, such as Clemens Brentano, Chateaubriand and Joseph Görres, discovered harmony, hierarchy, history and order in what one might call cultural Roman Catholicism, appreciating the faith for its aesthetic qualities rather than for its spiritual truth. A Breton nobleman, once memorably described as looking like ‘a hunchback without the hump’, Chateaubriand had lost his brother in the Terror. The death of his pious mother triggered the exile’s religious crisis–‘I confess that I did not undergo any great supernatural illumination. My conviction came from my heart. I wept and believed’–which he resolved in his Le Génie du Christianisme. This was an extended and nostalgic paean to Christianity as the supreme cultural value on the part of a man who did not hesitate to bring his mistress when he was appointed secretary to the French embassy to the Holy See.8 Not a few Protestant thinkers, such as Adam Müller in 1805 or Friedrich Schlegel in 1808, converted to Rome, although the general trend was otherwise, in their search for certainty and order in a chaotic world. The politics of creative artists too did not move in an entirely synchronised manner from left to right, for in France Victor Hugo and Alphonse de Lamartine would transfer their sympathies from throne-and-altar conservatism to enthusiasm for the liberal 1830 July Revolution.
Throughout Europe monarchs adopted local versions of ‘God Save the King’ and flags based on the Union flag’s crosses rather than threatening bands of three colours. Everywhere religion restored seemed a compelling alternative to reason rampant, since the logic of the latter seemed to have culminated in the Terror and genocide in the Vendée. Men developed a new respect for infinity, perhaps best reflected in the diminutive and solitary figures wandering, their backs invariably turned towards us, amid the fog, forests, waters and wastes of Caspar David Friedrich’s numinous landscapes.9 They also rediscovered the imagined harmonies of organic rural communities and hierarchy stretching from earth to heaven. A Romantic enthusiasm for the Middle Ages, imagined as an ‘Age of Faith’, in which peace prevailed in Christendom while war was externalised against Arab and Turk, or a kind of epic narcissism based on the cult of the original genius, supplanted the austerities of neoclassicism and the fluent whimsicality of the rococo. The (Protestant) poet Novalis, the pen name of Friedrich von Hardenberg, gave eloquent expression to this Romantic longing for unity in an essay called Christendom or Europe written at the height of the French Revolutionary Wars. He exalted the Middle Ages and condemned the Reformation for dividing the indivisible Church and confining religion within political frontiers. Although the French Revolution was the distant progeny of the Reformation, Novalis nonetheless regarded it as the purifying moment at which Europe could renew its fundamental Christian spiritual unity with Jerusalem as the capital of the world.10
The view was widespread that any assault on religion led logically to the subversion of governmental authority, and with it morality, it making little odds if that authority was not even Christian. Just to demonstrate how pervasive this view was, let’s briefly visit the outer edges of Christendom. In 1798 the Greek Orthodox patriarch Anthimos warned against ‘the fiend [who] tries us with newly appearing types of constitution and government, allegedly more desirable and more beneficial…resolutely give your obedience to the civil government, which grants you that which alone is necessary to the present life, and what is more valuable than anything, does not present any obstacle or damage to your spiritual salvation’. He meant, of course, the Muslim Ottoman authorities, to whom he guaranteed the loyalty of the Orthodox population, in return, it should be noted, for more religious toleration than existed in much of Christian Europe.11
That view was as common in Anglican Britain, which included Ireland, as it was among continental Roman Catholics and Protestants. It was a theme that could unite the bishops of the Protestant Church of Ireland and the Irish Catholic prelates. Despite being one of the few Whig bishops and, initially, a supporter of the Revolution, bishop Richard Watson of Llandaff wrote: ‘when religion shall have lost its hold on men’s consciences, government will lose its authority over their persons, and a state of barbarous anarchy will ensue’.12 Religion was a guarantor of political freedom: its rejection the gateway to anarchy and tyranny. That is why a self-consciously and sometimes aggressively Protestant England provided state as well as Church support between 1792 and 1820 to exiled French Catholic clergy.
In his 1831 ‘Catechism on Revolution’ pope Gregory XVI asked: ‘Does the Holy Law of God permit rebellion against the legitimate temporal sovereign?’ He answered: ‘No, never, because the temporal power comes from God.’13 The following year he issued the encyclical Mirari vos that said:
We have learned that certain teachings are being spread among the common people in writings which attack the trust and submission due to princes; the torches of treason are being lit everywhere…both divine and human laws cry out against those who strive by treason and sedition to drive the people from confidence in their princes and from their government.
A French bishop, monsignor Le Groing de la Romagére, was prepared to take that even further when he called upon his flock ‘to continue to obey in the civil order whoever derives sovereign power from above, however evil his morals, whatever his religious beliefs, whatever the abuses, apparent or real, of his government, and however impious and tyrannical the laws he enacts in order to pervert you’.14
Throne and altar in alliance was to be the foundation of legitimate authority. The revolutionary notion that the state rested upon a contract with the nation was rejected in favour of the restoration of princely dynasties ruling sovereign states, many of which were empires consisting of multiple ethnicities speaking several non-standardised languages. The necessity for a Genoese–Italian dictionary in 1851 highlights the problem, even if many more Italians understood the high version of the language than either spoke or wrote it.15 It was also regarded as natural that, say, the king of England ruled German Hanover too, or that Habsburg princes and viceroys held power in northern Italian Lombardy and the Veneto. Metternich notoriously denied the existence of such a thing as ‘Italy’ (as opposed to seven sovereign states) except as a ‘geographical expression’ and he dismissed the desire for ‘Germany’ (as distinct from thirty-nine states and sovereign cities) as a daydream ‘incapable of realization by any operation of human ingenuity’.16
What was Restoration Europe like and was it more than a brief conservative parenthesis between two ages of revolution? French remained the language of diplomacy and high politics, but its distinguishing idiom was the languid aristocratic drawl of statesmen, many of who combined hard-headedness and exquisite sensuality, rather than the vehement bawling about virtue and morality by aroused fishwives and radicalised lawyers in marketplaces and revolutionary tribunals. Some returning émigrés had spent so long abroad that they sounded like foreigners. After seven years’ exile in England, Chateaubriand counted in English and expressed spontaneous emotion too in that language, for some while after he returned to France in 1800 to serve Napoleon. The duc de Richelieu, who in 1815 became Louis XVIII’s chief minister, and who had spent so long governing southern Russia from Odessa (where he installed the famous steps) that he spoke French with a Slavic accent, was known to wits as ‘The Frenchman with the best knowledge of the Crimea’. The ubiquitous Talleyrand still slithered through the corridors of power: ‘his unprepossessing figure, clad in an old-fashioned coat of the Directory, stooping, heavily advancing on crooked legs…An enormous mouth filled with rotten teeth above a high collar, small deep-set grey eyes without any expression in them, a face striking in its insignificance, cold and calm, incapable of blushing or revealing any emotions…a real Mephistopheles’.17
The aims of the Great Powers, Austria, Britain, Russia and Prussia, had been given limited definition by the 1814 Treaty of Chaumont, although the desire to defeat Napoleon bulked larger than any plans for a peacetime ‘new order’, a notion they were mercifully ignorant of except in the most mystical formulations. This relatively simple objective was complicated by the need simultaneously to restore and restrain a monarchical France, in order to prevent ‘a Calmuk prince’, that is the Russian tsar, exploiting the threat of further revolution as a pretext for becoming the ultimate arbiter of Europe.18 The other powers wanted the Cossacks to disappear back into the steppes. France was restrained by bringing Russia further into Poland, while Prussia filched part of Saxony, Westphalia and the left bank of the Rhine. Austria took Lombardy–Venetia, the Netherlands acquired Belgium, and the kingdom of Piedmont–Sardinia was extended to include Genoa. What the people thought was irrelevant to all concerned.
This inner alliance dominated the Congress of Vienna, which convened from the autumn of 1814 onwards, an interlocking series of informal meetings between sovereigns and their principals; specialist committees to discuss specific problems; and sessions where smaller powers were presented with the decisions of the major players. The victors treated Bourbon France with moderation, allowing Talleyrand into their midst better to restrain Russia, but their mood hardened after the hundred-day interlude when Napoleon escaped Elba. The French king taxed the patience of allies whose armies had restored him to his throne. At a dinner in the Tuileries Palace, attended by the king of Prussia and the Russian tsar, Louis XVIII went in first, and then exploded ‘To me first, to me first!’ when a valet served the exquisitely polite Alexander first.19 The big four powers concluded a Quadruple Alliance and agreed to meet periodically in concert to ensure maintenance of agreements that they regarded as the best bet for equilibrium and peace in Europe. France was subjected to occupation and reparations. At Aix-la-Chapelle Bourbon France was admitted to a Quintuple Alliance ‘consecrated to protect the arts of peace, to increase the internal prosperity of the various states, and to awaken those sentiments of religion and morality which the misfortunes of the time had weakened’.
The Congress System was designed to crush any recrudescence of the spirit of 1789 and to resolve differences between the Great Powers through diplomacy. That these congresses fell somewhat short of a permanent ‘system’ to impose order was largely due to British suspicions of unlimited obligations towards reactionary continental monarchies seeking to repress liberal or nationalist reforms and revolutions which captured the imagination of political romantics across Europe. However, with or without Britain, the other Great Powers successfully crushed revolutions at either end of the Italian peninsula and in Portugal and Spain in 1820–1, with only the 1821–31 Orthodox Greek revolt against the Muslim Ottoman Turks complicating the matter of their sympathies.20
II DINNER FOR FOUR?
In 1815 Metternich arrived for a supper with tsar Alexander I. He found four places laid at table. This perplexed him. Apart from himself and the tsar, the only other guest present was a Baltic German woman whose mind seemed unfocused. When Metternich inquired as to the identity of the absent fourth guest, the tsar explained that the place was set for Jesus.21 The Restoration saw fitful attempts to reconstitute the divine basis of political authority. Mystical fervour, hard to recapture even in our era of White House prayer breakfasts and magic crystals in Downing Street, was evident in the most explicit attempt to bolster monarchical government through religion. Tsar Alexander had a fervent interest in mysticism due to the influence of two friends–‘brothers in Christ’–prince Alexander Golitsyn and Rodion Koshlev. The former was the procurator of the Holy Synod, which made him head of the Orthodox Church, while Koshlev kept Alexander au courant with every new mystical publication in Europe. Over a decade, Golitsyn dined with Alexander 3,635 times, or virtually every day. There was also the lady we have already encountered.
Baroness Juliane von Krüdener had left her Russian diplomat husband to take up with a younger French officer in Paris. Reconciled to her husband, the baroness went to Riga in 1804 where she was ‘converted’ to her millenarian faith by a Moravian cobbler. Clearly receptive to the prophetic enthusiasms of the lower classes, in Prussia she was persuaded by a peasant that a man would emerge ‘from the north…from the rising of the sun’ to destroy the Corsican Anti-Christ. In mid-1815 she secured a lengthy interview with Alexander as he passed the summer in the quiet backwater of Heilbrunn, away from the balls and receptions that this tortured soul had ceased to enjoy. At precisely the moment when Alexander was thinking of seeking her out, the baroness appeared at the Rauch’sche Palais.
The baroness was already a known quantity to the tsar. Inspired by a presence she dubbed ‘the Voice’, she (habitually dressed in a religious habit) preached at the weeping tsar for three hours: ‘Be filled with divine creation! Let the life of Christ permeate morally your spiritual body.’ Alexander declared he had found inner peace, although this was premature since he would subsequently seek out all manner of religious counsel. On 11 September 1815 the baroness played a prominent role in a military parade on the Plain of Vertus held to celebrate the feast of the tsar’s patron saint Alexander Nevsky. The baroness and the tsar processed past seven altars symbolising the mystic number of the Apocalypse.22
Though the tsar would disentangle himself from the clutches of this ageing religious maniac, a rupture that was final when she besought his blessing for the Greek Revolution, Alexander wanted to make religion the cornerstone of international order. He provocatively issued a ‘Declaration of the Rights of God’ as part of the Holy Alliance which was signed by Francis I of Austria, Frederick William III of Prussia and the tsar himself on 26 September 1815. There was little ‘traditional’ about this project since Europe’s monarchies, whether Catholic or Protestant, had spent the previous five hundred years defying such universal pretensions.23 The Holy Alliance licensed the suppression of liberal and nationalist revolutionaries, and sanctioned open-ended breaches of state sovereignty. It was a reactionary anticipation of what many liberal human rights moralists (and their neo-Jacobin conservative analogues) seek to impose on a world sceptical of their faiths today.
British statesmen refused to sign up to what Castlereagh famously dismissed as ‘sublime mysticism and nonsense’, while the German conservative thinker Friedrich von Gentz dismissed it as ‘a monument to human and princely eccentricity’. Pope Pius VII excused himself from a compact with schismatic Orthodox Russians and heretical Protestant Prussians, which to him smacked of ‘indifferentism’ and ‘syncretism’. He added: ‘from time immemorial the papacy has been in possession of Christian truth and needed no new interpretation of it’. As Muslims, the Ottoman Turks were excluded. Metternich, who identified Protestantism with anarchy, but who, as a rational aristocratic Catholic, also despised the fervour of theocrats, confided to his diary: ‘Abstract ideas count for very little. We take things as they are, and look for those factors that may save us from becoming prisoners of illusions about the real world.’24
At a time when even conservatives say that ‘true’ conservatism has become an American phenomenon, it is useful to remember ‘old’ Europe’s (and especially France’s) contribution to a tradition that involves more than rich garagistes seeking to pay no taxes and a tendency to throw one’s weight around internationally in the name of ‘world order’. Several thinkers attempted to supply a more comprehensive justification for the restoration of monarchy and religion in an alliance of throne and altar, the apex of a hierarchy resting upon strong aristocratic intermediary authorities, religion and the patriarchal family. This was hypocritical since it had been the absolutist monarchs of ancien régime Europe whose enlightened reforms had cleared away the dense entanglements of localised rights, while reforming and subordinating the Church, thereby not only performing much of the work of the Revolution for it but creating an appetite for further reform. It was also ironic that Europe’s absolute monarchs had been compelled to mobilise precisely those nationally conscious elements to fight Napoleon that after 1815 they were so concerned to suppress once they had performed this limited objective. They had unleashed forces that they would never be able fully to control, although it would take the rest of the century for that aspect of democracy to become evident.25
III A PECULIARLY DIFFERENT ENGLAND
Many continental ideologists of the Restoration were heavily indebted to the genius of the Irish Whig Edmund Burke. The nub of Burke’s political philosophy was to favour experience, history, prejudice and tradition, with changes happening by increment, and each living generation conscious of what it owed to the dead as well as the unborn. Burke was also an admirer of dogma, meaning the beliefs, values and state of mind into which one is born. Religion underpinned domestic social hierarchy and in the form of international law provided the ‘great ligament of mankind’.
We know, and, what is better, we feel inwardly, that religion is the basis of civil society, and the source of all good, and of all comfort. In England we are so convinced of this, that there is no rust of superstition, with which the accumulated absurdity of the human mind might have crusted it over in the course of ages, that ninety-nine in a hundred of the people of England would not prefer to impiety.
Burke detested the idea of separating Church and state, regarding disestablishment as almost as pernicious as the French Revolution’s ‘Atheism by Establishment’. He was also hostile to the very notion of ‘alliance’ between throne and altar–commonplace in most Restoration conservative thinking–for ‘an alliance is between two things that are in their nature distinct and independent such as between two sovereign states. But in a Christian commonwealth the Church and State are one and the same thing, being different integral parts of the same whole.’26 The political function of religion was not simply to keep the lower orders quiescent, as has been tiresomely argued by generations of Marxists, but also to impress upon those who had power that they were here today and gone tomorrow, and responsible to those below and Him above: ‘All persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with an idea that they act in trust, and that they are to account for their conduct in that trust to the one great Master, Author, and Founder of society.’
By the time these doctrines were enunciated, both English society and English religion were undergoing great transformations. By the mid-eighteenth century the Anglican Church, whatever its problems, seemed to have seen off any rivals. It was ensconced in the post-Reformation remnants of a medieval Catholic Church that since the Venerable Bede had helped define the essence of Englishness. It benefited from its identification with the English state, and a sense of Protestant providential purpose that steered a moderate path between popish fanaticism and Puritan zealousness. Its competitors were in poor shape. Old Dissent had lost many of its higher-ranking adherents, who were reabsorbed into Anglicanism, which in turn diminished its purchase on the lower classes. New Dissent was merely an Evangelical minority tendency within the Church of England. The defection of upper-class Catholics, chafing at their legalised marginality, similarly halved the number of English Catholics in the fifty years before 1740, before their ranks were increased by Irish immigration.
Yet the ground was shifting beneath the Anglican Church’s ramparts, its monopolistic position being challenged in an era of profound social and economic upheaval, which has reminded some of the ways in which the Roman Catholic Church establishment is being eclipsed nowadays by Pentecostalism in the teeming cities of Latin America. Religious voluntarism, which the Anglican Church partially encouraged, might either revivify the Church or develop, as Methodism eventually did, into a powerful secessionist competitor, captivating and capturing classes that Anglicanism failed to greet. Large-scale Irish migration would give an enormous fillip to Catholicism, again partly because of an ethnic and social coincidence between priest and people. By contrast, in the 1830s the Anglican Church was in danger of becoming a minority establishment. Because it lacked internal machinery for reform, between 1717 and 1852 its Convocations were prorogued, and the state set about reforming it, thereby giving further impetus to the secularisation of the originally indivisible establishment. How had things reached this pass?
It would be relatively easy to paint a picture of eighteenth-or early-nineteenth-century clergy whose sermons contained more Cicero than Christ, or who regarded practice of their religion as a bothersome distraction from chasing foxes. They were hardly unique in that, because in 1819 the bishop of Kildare and Leighlin in Ireland forbade his Roman Catholic clergy to deal in land or to hunt, they being more familiar with ‘ejaculating “Tally Ho!” than Dominus Vobiscum’, as the bishop pithily had it.27 In a nutshell, the Anglican Church was like any old-fashioned corporate monopoly faced with energetic competition from rivals who had a more flexible and imaginative understanding of existing or potential markets within a wider context characterised by tentative religious toleration.
Anglican assurance about the stability of the alliance not only between throne and altar, but between parson and squire (so interlinked as to be known as the ‘squarson’) mistook conditions in the arable heartlands of lowland England for Britain as a whole, where parish structure, settlement patterns, tenurial arrangements and new ways of making a livelihood all militated against the dependence and deference that ensue from settlement. In the century 1741 to 1841 the population of England and Wales rose by 165 per cent from six to nearly sixteen millions. The population of classical agricultural counties doubled, while that of those where industry or commerce predominated tripled or quadrupled. This latter growth was in regions where the parochial net was broad rather than fine, and where the inhabitants neither lived in compact villages nor were constrained by a resident squirarchy, whose presence or absence was as important as that of clerics.
Methodism, and successive Nonconformist denominations, reached out to those whom John Wesley dubbed ‘low, insignificant people’, providing them with an associational, communal and recreational focus, as well as a theology and moral code that complemented and reinforced their own social and economic aspirations. It was never simply a creed designed to discipline an industrial workforce, a charge routinely made by modern British academic apologists for a political religion that preferred to discipline workers by means of Arctic concentration camps, but it did separate large numbers of ambitious artisans and the like from the more hedonistic culture of the popular classes in previous centuries, a sort of extended parenthesis before they sank back into a more debased version of it in the late twentieth century. Methodism sought people out wherever they were, whereas, as the bishop of Lichfield explained to a curate in 1837: ‘If the inhabitants will not take the trouble to come…to hear your sermons, and much more to hear the beautiful prayers of our Liturgy, which are superior to any sermons that were ever written, I am sure they do not deserve to have them brought to their doors.’ Moreover, as the Anglican establishment became more and more enmeshed in the preservation of an unreformed political order, so people turned to evangelical Nonconformity partly to register their newfound independence of a social order that had little relevance to them. That was implicit in the duchess of Buckingham’s condemnation of Methodist doctrines as ‘strongly tinctured with impertinence and disrespect…towards superiors, in perpetually endeavouring to level all ranks, and do away with all distinctions’. The duchess was appalled to ‘be told that you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl on the earth’, a powerful challenge to a society hitherto based on hierarchy and inherited landed wealth but gradually being exposed to other values.28
IV PAPERING OVER THE CRACKS
Since French experience of the Revolution was most sustained and visceral, it is unsurprising that thinkers with knowledge of France were the most intransigent exponents of what might be called the palaeo-conservative position during the Restoration. Maistre and Bonald sought to bury the optimistic assumptions of the Enlightenment about man and society and to restore the Church to the position from whence the Revolution had expelled it. Paradoxically they used a highly sophisticated application of reason to advocate the irrational, and, though intellectuals themselves, despised those whose intellectual conceit lacked grounding in reality. Both of them came to the rather odd conclusion that it would be better if fewer books and ideas were in general circulation, not the first instance where their thought battered every assumption of modernity including claims that more knowledge is better. What is one to make of Maistre’s observation: ‘I dare say that what we ought not to know is more important than what we ought to know’? These men wanted to restore the power of throne and altar; they were neither ‘freaks’ as one member of the British Marxist academic Establishment has claimed, nor part of the long genealogy of Fascism, a quirky charge once levelled by Isaiah Berlin, which has been dismissed by Robert Paxton, a leading American historian of Fascism who has spent a lifetime studying the actuality of that phenomenon.29
Joseph de Maistre was an ennobled Savoyard lawyer. Savoy was a province of Piedmont–Sardinia, whose king ruled from across the Alps in Turin. Maistre was both a devout Catholic and an enthusiastic freemason. Masonry was fashionable and philanthropic, which could no longer be said of the old-style lay religious confraternities. An admirer of the British constitution, Maistre also approved of the American Revolution, writing, ‘Liberty, insulted in Europe, has taken flight to another hemisphere,’ and he regarded the initial stages of the French Revolution with equanimity. He was an advocate of the separation of powers, with the judiciary advising monarchy, and religion holding society together like cement. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and a reading in September 1791 of Burke’s Reflections, whose author’s intelligent rage articulated the Savoyard’s own, represented a turning point, as did the behaviour of his fellow countrymen after Savoy had been annexed by revolutionary France. Bitter experience affected the tone of his writing, which in fluent radicality went far to the right of Burke.
Accompanied by his expectant wife and two small children Maistre fled to Aosta, returning only briefly to Chambéry to establish how awful rule by revolutionaries could be. Years later he recalled: ‘Savoy…was invaded in the midst of the great paroxysm; one had to see churches closed, priests chased out, the king’s portrait paraded in public and stabbed; one had to listen to the Marseillaise sung at the elevation (I heard it); my heart was not strong enough to put up with all that.’30 In 1793 Maistre moved to Lausanne, where he combined counter-revolutionary pamphleteering with running a Savoyard intelligence network whose findings he reported back to the government in Turin. Clearly feeling undervalued by his own monarch, he would complain that ‘I was the knight errant of a power that wanted nothing to do with me.’31
In 1797 Maistre published Considerations on France, his providential reading of the multiple shortcomings of the ancien régime and the divine punishment represented by the Revolution. He intended to enhance royalist fortunes in the French elections in March that year as well as to reassure people (in a France he visited for the first time in 1817) that counter-revolution would not entail punitive confiscation of lands stolen from their rightful owners or a vengeful bloodbath. Despite this moderate mission, his relative Lamartine described it as ‘thought out by an exterminating mind and written in blood’.
Thereafter Maistre’s hopes of preferment as a major ideologue of counter-revolution were dashed as the storms of revolution gusted into each city and state he sought refuge in. It was like being stalked by a typhoon. Dragging his family of young children across Europe, Maistre was reduced to selling the silver. During bouts of enforced leisure he read intelligently and voraciously, for he was a great lover of books. In July 1799 he was appointed regent in Sardinia, an unhappy posting for Maistre was bored with both law and public administration, and he clashed badly with the soldier viceroy.
In 1803 he was designated Sardinian ambassador to St Petersburg, for after Bonaparte’s annexation of Piedmont in 1800 the island was all that was left of Victor Emmanuel I’s north Italian kingdom. The man who confidently and wrongly predicted that no capital could ever be built on the swamps of the Potomac found himself posted to Peter the Great’s northerly pastiche of Venice. Through sheer presence Maistre gained influence at the Russian Court, for he was the representative of an impoverished kingdom that had been reduced to an island outpost, and the exiled monarch in Rome was dependent upon subsidies from Maistre’s present Russian hosts and the British.
A contemporary described him in St Petersburg:
I believe I can still see before me that noble old man, walking with his head high, crowned by hair whitened by both nature and the caprice of fashion. His large forehead, his pale face stamped with features as striking as his thoughts, marked too by the misfortunes of his life, his blue eyes half dimmed by deep and laborious studies; and finally the accomplished elegance of his costume, the urbanity of his language and manners–all that forms in my mind a certain original and suave whole.
His jokes were also good, in a characteristically dark sort of way. In a letter from St Petersburg to a young relative he told the story of a mass baptism around a hole in the ice of the River Neva. When the presiding Orthodox archbishop accidentally let slip an infant who disappeared into the dark waters below, he remarked ‘davai drugoi’ (give me another one) and continued as if nothing had happened.32
Apart from his official duties, Maistre acted as an adviser to Louis XVIII and to Alexander I, whom he thought slightly mad. He read deeply and took copious notes from great tomes in English, German, Italian and, of course, French, Latin and ancient Greek. He had a special admiration for the English, and knew people like Edward Gibbon whom he had met in Switzerland. Maistre would have been content to live out his days in Russia, but the ever closer identification of Russian patriotism with Orthodoxy (though he denied it the name) ensured that this articulate, proselytising Catholic became persona non grata. The atmosphere became positively hostile once the tsar expelled the Jesuits in 1816, perhaps because their exclusive allegiance to the pope clashed with the role of saviour of Europe that he derived from the Holy Alliance. In February 1816 Maistre had a rather intimidating interview with Alexander: ‘The emperor advances with twenty-six million men in his pockets (one sees them clearly), he presses you at close quarters, and even, since his hearing is poor, brings his head close to yours. His eye interrogates, his eyebrows are suspicious, and power comes out of his pores.’ Maistre left Russia in the spring of 1817, spending six weeks in Paris where he met Louis XVIII, who perversely avoided any mention of the writings of one of the major apologists of the Bourbon cause. On his return to Sardinia, Maistre was appointed a minister of state until his death a few years later. Having alienated the Sardinian royal house by appearing too francophile, he had managed to antagonise the restored Bourbons by describing their politique 1814 constitutional Charter as ‘a soapbubble’.33
In the course of the Considerations, Maistre confessed, ‘I am a perfect stranger to France, which I have never seen, and I expect nothing from her King, whom I shall never know.’ The Considerations opens with a rejection of Rousseau’s dictum that ‘man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains’. Maistre countered: ‘We are all attached to the throne of the Supreme Being by a supple chain that restrains us without enslaving us.’ He viewed the Revolution as ‘a whirlwind carrying along like light straw everything that human force has opposed to it; no one has hindered its course with impunity’. The leaders, whom he dismissed as ‘criminals’, ‘mediocrities’, ‘monsters’ and ‘rascals’, were in reality merely the led. Politics had no autonomy from the divine drama and anyone who thought they were willing events to happen was utterly self-deluded since everything was in God’s hands. Using concepts, like purification, that paradoxically enough were permeated by Jacobin concerns, Maistre saw Providence at work in even the Revolution’s most bloody phases:
The great purification must be accomplished and eyes must be opened; the metal of France, freed from its sour and impure dross, must emerge cleaner and more malleable into the hands of a future king. Doubtless, Providence does not have to punish in this life in order to be justified, but in our epoch, coming down to our level, Providence punishes like a human tribunal. (c. 14)
For each blow and setback was part of a providential scheme, in which terrible punishments were accompanied by quasi-miracles on the battlefields of Europe that expanded French power. Under a different dispensation, this power might be used to good effect, namely a Frenchled ‘moral revolution’ in Europe. His mode of argument could be typified by the claim that even the exile in Protestant England of large numbers of Catholic clerics had contributed to a greater spirit of tolerance on the part of the Church of England, for God works in such mysterious ways. Mere events were of secondary significance, as when Maistre dismissed 9 Thermidor as being the day when ‘a few scoundrels killed a few scoundrels’.34 The only power capable of restoring order was absolute monarchy, uncontrolled by anything other than the monarch’s conscience and God. However, here he radically departed from the Gallican tradition, by arguing that the monarch must be subject to God’s vicar on earth, that is the pope, who embodied the only institution with a continuous eighteen hundred years’ existence.
Maistre saw the Revolution as so ‘radically bad’ that its evil bordered on the ‘satanic’. It was an unnatural event, something out of joint, season or sequence, such as the miracle of a tree fructifying in January. Its leading lights, and the philosophers who had inspired them, were guilty of the heaven-storming pride of Prometheus. He did not believe in social contracts and he thought written constitutions worthless. He divined a ‘fight to the death between Christianity and philosophism’. Refusing to believe in the ‘fecundity of nothingness’, he heaped scorn on the civic cults of the Revolution, on the incapacity of men invested with immense power and prodigious resources ‘to organize a simple holiday’. His attitude to the Rights of ‘Man’ was as follows: ‘there is no such thing as man in the world. In my lifetime I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc; thanks to Montesquieu, I even know that one can be Persian. But as for man, I declare that I have never in my life met him; if he exists, he is unknown to me.’35
He mocked the incessant deliberations of successive French assemblies, counting the 15,479 laws passed in six years. He doubted that three successive royal dynasties had legislated so much. Revolutionary irreligion struck at his deepest conception of political order: ‘Either every imaginable institution is founded on a religious concept or it is only a passing phenomenon. Institutions are strong and durable to the degree that they are, so to speak, deified. Not only is human reason, or what is ignorantly called philosophy, incapable of supplying these foundations, which with equal ignorance are called superstitious, but philosophy is, on the contrary, an essentially disruptive force.’36
Where the philosophes simply wanted to conform human society to laws putatively operating in the natural world, Maistre saw that nature consisted of infinite murder, in which every creature lives from whatever is weaker. Man was the greatest murderer of all. Murder took the form of war, which in the sacrifice of the innocent propitiated God for the sins of mankind: ‘The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar, upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death.’37 Modern liberals will never forgive his alighting upon society’s ultimate pariah–the executioner–as the force capable of keeping the flimsy hut of human society above the raging waters which perpetually threaten to engulf it. He described the sinister movements of such figures with all too apparent relish, as the hangman–pariah parted a gawping, shuddering crowd to smash human bones deliberately with iron bars, the pre-guillotine mode of public execution.38 They will also be inherently antagonistic to his bestselling ultramontane work Du Pape, overlooking the fact that Maistre regarded the papacy as an essential check on the untrammelled exercise of state power:
By virtue of a divine law, there is always by the side of every sovereignty some power or other that acts as a check. It may be a law, a custom, conscience, a pope, a dagger, but there is always some curb…Now, the authority of the Popes was the power chosen and constituted by the Middle Ages to balance the temporal power and make it bearable for men…In the Middle Ages, nations had within themselves only worthless or despised laws and corrupt customs. This indispensable check had therefore to be sought from without. It was found, and could only be found, in papal authority.39
Maistre’s main rival Louis de Bonald came from a noble family in Millau in the Rouergue. Born under the ancien régime, his life spanned the Revolution, exile, the glory of France under Napoleon, political office under the Restoration and, finally, disillusionment in the last decade of his life, when like Job he admitted that his pilgrimage had been short and hopeless.
After a short stint as a royal musketeer, Bonald became mayor of Millau in 1785, where he introduced free primary school education. So long as the Revolution consisted of provincial noble reassertion against central power, he was prepared to work within it, becoming a member of the departmental Council of Aveyron in 1790. A loyal Gallican with Jansenist leanings, he believed in reforming the Church. But he resigned from public office rather than enforce an oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. In late 1791 he joined the emigration in the Rhineland. He eventually settled in Heidelberg, where he wrote his three-volume Théorie du pouvoir politique et religieux dans la société civile. In 1797 he slipped back to Paris where he spent two years in hiding, during which time he read prodigiously, before emerging in the sunlight of Napoleon, who treated him as a minor amusement.
Bonald’s thought was more sociologically and less theologically inclined than Maistre’s, and his cast of mind was more scientific than Chateaubriand’s aesthetic appreciation of religion. Although Bonald moved in the same social circles, he regarded Chateaubriand as an intellectual lightweight who eschewed dogma in favour of flummery and nostalgia. His relations with Maistre were duplicitous, although in later life he discovered a similar capacity to outrage liberal opinion.
Bonald was one of the godfathers of modern sociology, whose concerns with status, hierarchy, ritual, integration, control and order reflect a conservative preoccupation with the atomised consequences of Enlightenment individualism. They were interested in what are called statics rather than dynamics, and in facts rather than ideal values.40 Bonald thought in terms of power and structures, the latter like formulae in algebra or figures in geometry: ‘power; force; will’ or ‘power; minister; subject’ being typical of his way of understanding society in groups of three concepts. Everything came in threes: ‘In cosmology God is the cause, movement the means, body the effect. In a State the government is the cause, the minister the means, the subject the effect. In a family, the father is the cause, the mother the means, the child the effect.’ Men of power, or leaders, constituted society, for without them a multitude of men would amount to a scattering of dust. Government was not based on contract; rather, those who governed should be separated from the governed by an impassable gulf of birth or wealth. Whereas Burke thought in terms of hereditary privilege as a means of checking royal absolutism, Bonald followed the Jacobins in believing in the desirability of unitary power. The nobility, who were central to all his writings, existed to implement the will of the monarch, with the rest of mankind functionally divided into those who pray, trade, work and so forth. The nobility were to be educated as a national caste, in special schools, and identified by a special gold ring. They would man virtually every significant office in the administration, the army, the judiciary and so on. Bonald was clearly influenced too by Rousseau’s views on the importance of civic cults, this being unusual in the wake of such experiments during the Revolution. Unlike other counter-revolutionaries who contented themselves with attempts to revitalise the Church, Bonald proposed a sort of hybrid medieval chivalric order with the visual symbols that the Revolution had appropriated from freemasonry. This must have made theocrats uneasy.
Society would be given symbolic focus by a pyramidal Temple of Providence in the geographic centre of France. Ringed by a vast circle and by statues of great men, this Temple would be the site for national rituals and the place where the heir to the throne and the most exemplary nobles lived. The function of Christianity (which played less of a role in his thought than in Maistre’s) was to symbolise the social hierarchy and to inculcate such values as sacrifice or respect. Here Bonald came very close to articulating a conservative civil religion:
Government is a real religion: it has its dogmas, its mysteries, its ministry; to annihilate or to submit it to discussion by every individual, amounts to the same…it lives only by the strength of the national reason, that is to say of political faith…The first need of man is that his emerging reason should be curbed by a double yoke, that is to say that it annihilates itself, that is to say that it merges with and becomes lost in the national reason, in order that it changes its individual existence into another common existence, like a river precipitating itself into the Ocean.41
In subsequent works, Bonald elaborated his view that the individual had only duties rather than rights, duties towards human nature, society and to God. He emphasised the family as the basis of society, with the professions and professional corporations higher up his social pyramid, until one encounters ‘power’ at the apex. A leading opponent of legalised divorce, he regarded the modern family as the breeding ground for such dangerous notions as equality. When married couples separated, he thought that the woman was to be confined in a convent; the man was to forfeit public office; and both were to deliver their children to the state. He envisaged the state determining who should be allowed to marry; and compounded his hostility to Protestantism with the view that Jews (whom he regarded as both alien and divisive) should be discouraged from bearing children by curtailing their ability to marry.
Bonald advocated a vast extension of state regulation, whether in relation to how people dressed (people were to be attired according to their functions) or in relation to what they were allowed to read, for he thought that far too many indifferent books were being published. People had to have a licence to possess weapons; how much more so should new books require official sanction. He thought there should be a national catechism, for ‘dogmas make nations’. The Académie Française was to be the regulative analogue of the Catholic Church in the greatly reduced field of letters. He was an enthusiast for censorship. As he grew older his detestation of the money-mad urban bourgeoisie and love for rural self-sufficiency increased, until in self-imposed isolation he duly turned on the regime whose propagandist he had tried to become.42
The Restoration was initially far more pragmatic in temper than the thought of these men suggests. In France the restored Bourbon monarch Louis XVIII sought to fuse the tradition he represented with the new spirit of the times. Dissimulation was probably inevitable, though it is apocryphal that as he blew kisses to a crowd he muttered ‘scoundrels, Jacobins, monsters’. He may have insisted on referring to 1814 as the nineteenth year of ‘our reign’, but he also called for collective amnesia regarding who had done what to whom in the recent past, a surprisingly modern and sophisticated approach to legacies of hatred. After a short moderate interlude, the implacable ultras regained the ascendancy when in early 1820 a Bonapartist saddler called Pierre Louvel killed the duc de Berry. Given impotence in high places, Berry was the de-facto heir to the throne. Although the widowed duchess would give birth to a ‘miracle’ son, the conservative ultras spoke darkly of the assassin’s knife as a ‘liberal idea’. Under the Villéle ministry the ultras would be in power for the following six years.
The ultras immediately sought to restore the influence of the clergy. The latter were integral to the cult of Bourbon pathos that enveloped the memory of the martyr king Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and other members of their family circle. The anniversary of that great crime on 21 January became a day of national expiation, although the price was that the centuries of Bourbon symbolism were jettisoned in favour of an imagery that derived from, at most, two decades of counter-revolutionary conservatism. It seemed pallid next to the rising romantic counter-mythology of the moody Minotaur on St Helena.
Clerics re-emerged where they were not welcome. Napoleon had centralised all higher and secondary education through the Sorbonne University. The ultramontane cleric Lamennais, whom we will shortly encounter, wanted the whole shop shut down:
I have no hesitation in saying that, of all Bonaparte’s conceptions, the most appalling to every considering man, the most profoundly anti-social, in a word the most characteristic of its author, is the University. When the tyrant thought he had made sure by so many horrible laws of the misery of the present generation, he raised this monstrous edifice as a monument of his hatred for future generations; it was as though he wanted to rob the human race even of hope.43
The centralised Napoleonic university was replaced by seventeen separate institutions under the Royal Council of Public Instruction. In 1821 this system was scrapped in turn, and Frayssinous, bishop of Hermopolis, was appointed grand master of the revived centralised system. A circular to the faculty opined: ‘He who has the misfortune to live without religion or not to be devoted to the reigning House cannot but feel that he is in some measure unsuited to be an instructor of youth.’ Eleven professors were dismissed and the lectures of the brilliant Protestant historian Guizot deleted. Two years later Frayssinous became head of a combined ministry of education and ecclesiastical affairs. Guizot commented: ‘This is a declaration of war by a considerable part of the Catholic Church in France upon French society as it is.’ There were concerted attempts to swamp entire swathes of France with Christian missionaries. Missions descended on areas that had few priests of their own because of the Revolution’s murderous assaults or natural wastage. Carnivals and dances were prohibited; church services were elaborated with massed outdoor sermons, communions, military parades and penitential processions.44
In September 1824 the Voltairean roué Louis XVIII was succeeded by his brother Charles X, the new king being an over-earnest reformed rake. His coronation was an opportunity to rehearse rituals of an archaic kind that Louis had avoided. The rood loft was decorated with France and Religion supporting the Crown in literal symbolism of the union of throne and altar. The flask containing the holy oil brought by a dove for the anointing of Clovis may have been smashed in the Revolution, but it was claimed that sufficient globules had adhered to the fragments for smearing on the new king’s brow. Anticlericals had a field day with this mumbo-jumbo, and especially with Charles X’s prostration before the altar, a gesture that must have seemed pathetic when juxtaposed with the Corsican emperor’s auto-coronation. The satirist Béranger did six months in jail for a piece entitled ‘The Coronation of Charles the Simple’:
In belt of Charlemagne arrayed,
As though just such a roistering blade,
Charles in the dust now prostrate lies;
‘Rise up, Sir King,’ a soldier cries.
‘No,’ quoth the Bishop, ‘and by St Peter,
The Church crowns you; with bounty treat her!
Heaven sends, but ’tis the priests who give;
Long may legitimacy live!’45
Clumsy financial schemes were introduced to compensate former émigrés–many of whom had borne arms against France–while nothing was done for peasants in the Vendée whose farms had been torched.
Liberal sensibilities were inflamed by a draconian sacrilege law, under which malefactors would have a hand chopped off before their head followed. Bonald blandly claimed that ‘by a sentence of death you are sending [the criminal] before his natural judge’, which only incensed enlightened liberal opinion further even if the sentence was never once imposed. Next, the ministry tried to reclericalise education. Primary schooling was placed in the hands of local bishops and in the senior schools lay teachers were replaced with priests. Seminaries were opened to youths with no priestly vocation in the hope that their minds might be moulded in a more conservative direction. In a disastrous development, Bonald was appointed chief censor. Moderate legitimists, such as Chateaubriand, began to draw closer to the liberal opposition, effectively signifying the drift of French Romanticism from right to left.46
Liberal opponents of these rather limited attempts to undo the Revolution were quick to alight upon conspiracy to explain their failure to do well in the intense competition for very few government jobs. An amorphous network called the Congregation had been founded in 1801 by a former Jesuit to encourage upper-class Catholics to live devoutly and to undertake charity. Its illustrious membership partially overlapped with a more secretive organisation called the Knights of Faith whose objectives were more political. The illegal presence of five hundred Jesuits in France added further layers of suspicion, especially since it was rumoured that Charles X himself belonged to the Society. Conservative Gallicans and Liberals credulously lapped up the conspiracy theories of a quixotic aristocrat, the comte de Montlosier who claimed that France was being run by an ultramontane conspiracy. It was said that the Jesuit house at Montrouge contained fifty thousand priests, who were learning how to use firearms rather than studying the writings of Ignatius Loyola. In fact, there were 108 Jesuit priests at the time in the whole of France. When Villéle lost the 1827 election, Charles attempted another tack with the comparatively restrained Martignac ministry. A year later he reversed course by appointing the ultra-reactionary Polignac, who in his pious conceit imagined that the Virgin had appointed him saviour of France. In the July Ordinances, Charles dissolved the Chamber, reduced the electorate from one hundred thousand to twenty-five thousand, and subjected all publications to government licence. The absence of the army in Algeria enabled disgruntled Bonapartist workers to dominate the streets as the liberal bourgeoisie looked on aghast. In the absence of a Bonaparte, Guizot, Lafayette and Thiers effectively made the duc d’Orléans king Louis Philippe. His coronation was a civil affair in which he swore to uphold the revised Charter, signing it in triplicate. Catholicism was described merely as ‘the religion of the majority of Frenchmen’. In France at least, the era of Restoration was over, along with the Bourbon dynasty. The rule of ‘middlingness’ took over.
The papacy owed the restoration of its temporal possessions to the Great Powers. Time and again, and not just in the conclaves where popes were chosen, they were popes by the grace of Metternich who prevented them being swept away by liberal revolutionaries. By this time, Pius VII was a very old and sick man, who went about his chambers attached to the walls by a cord because periodic paralysis and vertigo would otherwise have deposited him on the floor. Under these circumstances, what amounted to a provisional government under Agostino Rivarola was not encouraging: archaeological excavations in the city, gas lighting and vaccination were all prohibited, while the Jews were returned to the ghetto and the Inquisition revived. These measures were partly rescinded under the energetic secretary of state Ercole Consalvi, who displaced clerics from functions for which they had no competence, abolished onerous taxes and prohibited torture in a revised judicial system. The spirit behind these reforms was evanescent.
Leo XII excommunicated members of the secret societies on the ground that their rites were blasphemous, while his short-lived successor Pius VIII imposed the death penalty on those subversives his police force detected. Conditions in the Papal States were so bad that by May 1831 a conference of the ambassadors of the five major powers presented pope Gregory XVI with a memorandum that spelled out the changes he needed to make to his temporal government, such as financial reform and an enhanced role for laymen. A flurry of edicts resulted, to minimal effect. The papacy may have been pragmatic in its dealings with newly independent republics in Latin America, but in Europe it was a bastion of monarchical legitimism. It supported the status quo on the Italian peninsula, calling upon the Austrians whenever the Papal States were threatened, and it opposed liberal or nationalist revolution everywhere except Ireland. This included revolutions where Roman Catholics played a major part, notably in Poland and Belgium. Gregory XVI, an elderly former Camoldolese monk, whose knowledge of the world was very limited, endorsed the repression that tsar Nicholas I inflicted on Poland after the abortive November Rising, including measures that struck at the Church’s own privileges. In an 1832 encyclical to the Polish bishops, admittedly toned up under Metternich’s influence, the pope reminded them of the need to obey temporal authority and condemned the Polish revolutionary movement.
V LAMENNAIS AND BELGIUM’S MOMENT
Not all Catholic thinkers responded to the challenge of liberal and nationalist revolution by retreating behind the slogan ‘throne and altar’. Some recognised that the legitimist game was up, or regarded the altar as the more enduring part of this duopoly than the ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ occupants of earthly thrones. What if state power was actually crushing the Church, like a corpse locked in rigor mortis around someone still breathing? To explain this we need to venture into the history of Belgium, while relating this to the extraordinary life of one of the most remarkable figures in nineteenth-century Europe.
In 1814 the Great Powers assigned the former Austrian Netherlands and Liége (what we now know as Belgium) to the Calvinist William I of what became the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. William’s reign got off to an inauspicious start when he used ‘Dutch arithmetic’ (a euphemism for jiggery-pokery) to nullify the votes of the Belgian parliamentary deputies who refused to approve the new constitution. Those who abstained or voted no were counted as having voted yes. The ascendancy of what in the combined kingdom was the minority language of Dutch, and of Dutch-speakers in public office, so antagonised Belgian opinion that no amount of economic prosperity would persuade them of the virtues of Dutch rule. Uniquely, William I managed to create an alliance, or Union, of Catholics and Liberals by forcing candidates for the priesthood to take philosophy at what until 1835 was the state university of Louvain, while simultaneously imprisoning liberal journal editors. In the autumn of 1830 the Dutch regime was overthrown and an independent Belgian kingdom proclaimed under the Lutheran Leopold I. The February 1831 Constitution separated Church and state. It also granted the Church freedoms that it enjoyed nowhere else in Catholic Europe. These included autonomous control over the appointment of bishops, freedom to publish what it liked and unimpeded communication with the Catholic hierarchy in Rome.47
A young Breton cleric, Félicité de La Mennais, later known as Lamennais, was important in forging this improbable rapprochement between Catholics and liberals.48 Improbable because the papacy was in the vanguard of opposing freedom of opinion, while liberalism (especially in France) was often synonymous with anticlericalism, partly because liberals perceived the Church to be the weakest element in the marriage of throne and altar, and partly because clerics were easily identifiable at a time when other defenders of the status quo dressed much the same as their liberal opponents.
Lamennais had begun his meteoric career as an impassioned advocate of the limitless expansion of papal power so as to liberate the Church from state interference and the otherwise supine tyranny of the Gallican French bishops. The immediate pretext was Napoleon’s attempt in 1809 to circumvent the necessity of persuading the (imprisoned) pope to invest bishops canonically whom Napoleon had effectively appointed. Lamennais and his brother co-authored an enormous three-volume defence of the rights of the pope that was so unambiguous that Lamennais fled France during the Hundred Days. On his return, he published a major critique of the view that the truth of a religious doctrine is a matter of indifference, and hence that ethics can be detached from dogma and conduct from belief. When he went to Rome in 1824 pope Leo XII granted him private audiences, even if he was merely recognising a literary talent whose defences of the Church were winning wide admiration, rather than sanctioning the young priest’s opinions.
Lamennais’ critique of the superficial deference paid by the Restoration state to the Church came in a two-part work called De la religion considérée dans ses rapports avec l’ordre politique et civil (1825–6). It resulted in him being fined for attacking the king and the Gallican Articles. The book was banned. Lamennais argued that the Restoration had not ‘restored’ ancient arrangements, but had subordinated the Church to the state to the extent that it was no different from an art gallery, stud-farm or theatre. Politics separated from religion was nothing more than ‘force directed by interest’. Religion alone ensured that politics was something more than the satisfaction of material self-interest. As Lamennais pithily wrote: ‘A bazaar is not at all the same thing as a city.’ Gallicanism effectively dispensed rulers from any sense of obligation to the spiritual power and identified the Church too closely with national interests. Only the papacy could prevent rulers from ‘crushing all freedom, both in church and in state’, since it alone was external to all national interests. Lamennais’ logic was no pope, no church. No church, no Christianity. No Christianity, no religion. No religion, no society. The Church should abandon its compact with the state, coming to terms with the forces that claimed to represent the People. Only the pope could guarantee man’s freedom from state power, as well as the peace between peoples that the madcap Holy Alliance aspired to.49
Lamennais became the hub of a circle of talented admirers at his family estate at La Chênaie. He founded his own order, the Congregation of St Peter, which enabled regular clergy to live communally in an atmosphere of study, journalism and prayer. Although he was personally unprepossessing, Lamennais had some impressive disciples; they included Auguste Comte, Victor Hugo, Alphonse de Lamartine, Alfred de Vigny and Sainte-Beuve. Lamennais became convinced that the Bourbon monarchy was doomed and that the Church should not go down with it any more than lifeboats should sink with a ship. In contrast to the stuffy French ecclesiastical hierarchy, Lamennais welcomed the July 1830 Revolution that brought Louis Philippe to the throne. One of his disciples posed the apposite question of the defunct regime: ‘Did the Son of God die eighteen hundred years ago on a gibbet in order to re-establish the Bourbons on the throne?’50
In L’Avenir–the first Catholic daily paper in Europe–Lamennais suggested that, instead of supporting unpopular monarchies, the Church should make common cause with the most reasonable of the ‘progressive’ causes of the age, namely moderate liberalism, thereby freeing it to reshape society in a more Christian direction under the general guidance of the papacy. The causes the paper advocated ensured the hostility of the new monarchy (which Lamennais regarded as so much flim-flam in a regime where the people were sovereign) and the French hierarchy whose salaries he proposed to abolish: ‘The scraps of bread thrown to the clergy are the title deeds of her subjection…It was not with a cheque drawn on Caesar’s bank that Jesus sent his Apostles out into the world.’51 In L’Avenir Lamennais and his associates advocated the complete separation of Church and state, including the suppression of clerical state salaries; freedom for parents to educate their children as they chose; freedom of association and of the press; universal suffrage; and enhanced local autonomy and self-government. Lamennais also founded a General Agency for the Defence of Religious Liberty, the first lay organisation of its kind, which sprang into action whenever the state encroached on the freedom the Church had won. The ‘Mennaisians’, that is his followers, also took a keen interest in the fortunes of Catholic peoples elsewhere, hoping to form a liberal Catholic international. Their paper followed events in Belgium, Ireland, Poland, Portugal and Spain, where they were often sympathetic to rebellion, proving inconsistent only in denouncing as ‘anarchists’ and ‘Jacobins’ those who presumed to trouble the temporal rule of the pope. If in this respect they were out of step with Europe’s liberals, in another they were ahead of them. In a prescient piece, one of Lamennais’ associates wrote:
The debates in our parliament or in the international conference, the delimitation of the frontiers of Belgium [at the London Conference], the fall of a dynasty, parliamentary reform, these are questions of no importance by comparison with the leprosy of pauperism which is ravaging Europe. But like the astrologer who was so busy looking at the stars that he did not see the abyss that was open before him, we fix our attention on the lofty regions of the political world, as if the interests that are canvassed there must be a permanent influence on the fate of our country. If we want to know about that, we must look much lower down–into the midst of the multitudes who are called ‘the people’ when they are needed and otherwise ‘the populace’.52
Lamennais always claimed, perhaps disingenuously, that he had never changed his views; they had merely evolved from an initial ultramontanism resembling that of his friend Maistre. This was partially true. He simply substituted ‘democracy’ for ‘throne’ in a refashioned alliance with ‘altar’, and when he used the slogan ‘God and Liberty’ he meant the collective emancipation of Ireland or Poland rather than the freedom of individuals.53 After L’Avenir, whose readers were mainly younger priests, folded–there were more supporters than subscribers–he and his core supporters decided to appeal directly to the pope to win him over to the liberal-catholic ideas they espoused. Convinced that the corrupt Gallican hierarchy was preventing his message from reaching Gregory XVI, Lamennais and two younger sympathisers, Lacordaire and Montalembert, set off for Rome in December 1831 to persuade the aged pope that he should abandon his support for reaction. Since the papacy had admired his earlier fervent ultramontanism, he supposed he might persuade the pope to drink at liberalism’s well too. He expected him to come round to his view that the French Revolution was not just the judgement of God on a sinful world, but an opportunity for the Church and mankind as a whole. His enemies, the most important of whom were the French hierarchy, Metternich and the ambassador of the Russian tsar, managed to derail him before he had even spoken with the pope.
The Breton cleric underestimated the capacity of the papacy to kill off his kind of prophetic excitement simply by doing nothing. The winter weather in Rome was leaden and Lamennais’ opinions of the temporal regime of the pope that he had recently defended against anarchic Jacobins turned sour. In February he wrote to a friend:
I hope…I shall not have to stay in Rome much longer, and one of the happiest days of my life will be that on which I get out of this great tomb where there is nothing but worms and bones, Oh! How thankful I am for the decision I took, some years ago, to settle elsewhere…In this moral desert I should have led a useless life, wearing myself out in boredom and vexation. This was no place for me. I need air and movement and faith and love and everything that one vainly seeks amid these ancient ruins over which like filthy reptiles, in the shade and in the silence, the vilest human passions creep.
The pope is pious and means well; but he knows nothing about the world or about the state of the church and the state of society; motionless in the thick darkness by which he is surrounded, he weeps and prays; his role, his mission is to prepare and hasten the final convulsions which must precede the regeneration of society; that is why God has delivered him into the hands of the basest kind of men; ambitious, greedy, corrupt; frenzied idiots who call upon the Tartars to re-establish in Europe what they call order, and who adore the saviour of the church in the Nero of Poland, in the crowned Robespierre who is carrying through, at this very moment, his imperial ’93…Another twenty years of this kind of thing, and Catholicism would be dead; God will save it through the peoples: what else matters to me? For me, politics means the triumph of Christ, legitimacy means his law; my fatherland is the human race which he has redeemed with his blood.54
After a wait of two months, Lamennais’ party were finally granted an audience with ‘the only authority in the world I want to obey’. This lasted fifteen minutes, with desultory talk of Lamennais’ brother, of Geneva and of a silver statuette by Michelangelo, which the pope had to search for. In conclusion, the ‘only authority’ offered them snuff and blessed their rosaries before bidding them a courteous farewell.
On 15 August 1832 Gregory XVI issued his first encyclical Mirari vos: ‘Depravity exults; science is impudent; liberty, dissolute.’ In many respects anticipating the strident antimodernism of Pius IX, it lambasted freedom of conscience and freedom of the press (‘hateful’), religious indifferentism, the notion of just revolution, and Lamennais’ hobbyhorse, separation of Church and state: ‘Nor can we predict happier times for religion and government from the plans of those who desire vehemently to separate the Church from the state, and to break the mutual concord between temporal authority and the priesthood. It is certain that concord which always was favourable and beneficial for the sacred and the civil order is feared by the shameless lovers of liberty.’ The encyclical did not mention Lamennais, as a cardinal explained in a covering letter, but various passages clearly had the French priest in mind. He received a copy of the encyclical on a silver platter at a banquet in his honour in Munich given by among others Görres and Schlegel.
In a letter to a friend Lamennais wrote of the papacy: ‘Its ideas are like the swaddling bands that wrap up Egyptian mummies. It talks of a world that does not exist any more. Its sound is like those remote rumbles that are heard in the consecrated tombs of Memphis.’ Less charitably, he described Gregory XVI as a ‘cowardly old imbecile’.55
Whatever his not so private views, Lamennais appeared to submit to papal discipline in his initial responses to Mirari vos. Publication of L’Avenir was suspended, and the Agency closed down. However, one of these submissions included the qualification that ‘I have a duty to affirm that while Christians have only to hear and obey in the realm of religion, they remain entirely free in their opinions and words and acts in the sphere that is purely temporal.’ Some verses which he appended to a book that the poet Adam Mickiewicz wrote to strengthen the resolve of Polish exiles did not help, because, as we shall see in the next chapter, the pope had condemned the Poles’ rebellion against their Russian rulers. Worse, in April 1834 Lamennais published the controversial Paroles d’un croyant (Words of a Believer). People queued to read what the London Times described as ‘a fireship launched in the midst of the moral world’ and others more sensationally called the work of ‘Robespierre in a surplice’ or a ‘Jacobin red bonnet planted on a Cross’. Lamennais argued that the oppressed should seek salvation in Christ from unjust laws and tyrannical governments whom an apocalypse would soon sweep away. The monarchs of the Holy Alliance were arraigned alongside the great biblical tyrants in a manner that must have seemed shocking at the time. Not surprisingly they did not let this go unopposed. Metternich was quick to denounce Lamennais as ‘an anarchist’ who had gone mad, adding rather darkly: ‘the practice of burning heretics and their works has been abandoned: that is a matter for regret in the present instance’. The pope, who was ‘always happy to know your opinion which he likes best of all to know’, described Lamennais’ book as ‘the work of the most shameful and wild impiety, as the profession of faith of a complete revolutionary’. The pope duly issued a second encyclical, Singulari nos, which did name Lamennais and condemned a book ‘little in size but vast in perversity’. Lamennais abandoned the Church in the autumn of 1834 in disgust with the papacy for having missed its chance to align itself with the new spirit of the times. Contemporaries saw him scurrying about in civilian clothes, but with the haunted, preoccupied look of a Graham Greene priest. He had spent a lifetime promoting a highly elevated view of the papacy’s function only to be undermined by forces that had little or nothing to do with Christianity, at least as he understood it. He eventually settled on a philanthropic religion of humanity that was indistinguishable from several others on offer from the left. Lamennais died largely forgotten in February 1854, refusing to have a cross on his grave.56
We began by considering contemporary endeavours to provide a conceptual basis for the restoration of the alliance of throne and altar, even though the ideas concerned often subconsciously reflected the impact of the Revolution that these writers professed to despise. In the case of Lamennais, this gave rise to doubts that plunged him into a profound personal crisis. If Maistre saw the Revolution as a satanically inspired project, Lamennais wondered whether such a momentous event might be more than a scourge sent to afflict sinful humanity. Perhaps it contained the divine spark itself? Perhaps it was an unprecedented opportunity? He had become alienated from both the Gallican Church, which he regarded as a self-serving racket, and the Bourbon regime, which he viewed as moribund whatever its outward air of piety. Revolt against these might not be impiety at all. Indeed, revolt might itself denote a quest for deeper truths beyond the nostrums of the day, and hence provide an opportunity for Christianity to flood back into an appetent society through the breaches in the edifice of throne and altar, Church and state, that had bound the Church too tightly with the merely temporal. Perhaps the People themselves were God? In the next chapter we can turn to the nineteenth-century world of ‘chosen peoples’, to the nation as a form of religion.