Continuation of the Same Subject
“When I think,” said the King of Prussia, whom I always quote with pleasure, “that a fool, an imbecile like St. Ignatius found a dozen proselytes to follow him, and that I could not find three philosophers, I have been tempted to believe that reason is good for nothing.”1
Although this passage may be written in paroxysm, yet it is precious; the great man was on the right path. No doubt, in a certain sense, reason is good for nothing: we have the scientific knowledge necessary for the maintenance of society; we have made conquests in mathematics and in what is called natural science; but as soon as we leave the circle of our needs, our knowledge becomes useless or doubtful. The human mind, always at work, propagates systems that succeed one another without interruption: we see them born, shine forth, wither, and fall like the leaves of trees; the season is longer, that is the only difference.
And throughout the moral and political world, what do we know, and what can we do? We know the morality we have received from our fathers as a set of useful dogmas or prejudices adopted by national reason. But on this point we owe nothing to the individual reason of any man. On the contrary, whenever this reason has interfered, it has perverted morality.2
In politics, we know that we must respect the powers established we know not how or by whom. When time brings about abuses capable of altering the principles of governments, we know that these abuses must be removed, but without touching the principles, which requires great dexterity; and we can undertake these salutary reforms until the principle of life being totally spoiled, the death of the body politic is inevitable.3
It would be a very interesting work that would examine the powers of our reason and tell us exactly what we know and what we can do. Let us only repeat that individual reason4 produces nothing and conserves nothing for the general welfare: like this impure insect that soils our apartments, always solitary, always concealed, it produces nothing but annoying trivialities; swollen with pride, it is only venom, it works only to destroy, it refuses every association with works; and if a being like itself should chance upon its web, it rushes upon it and devours it.
But national reason resembles that other insect which Asia has presented to Europe; innocent and peaceful, it is only at ease with its fellow-creatures and lives only to be useful; carnage is foreign to it; all its substance is a treasure, and the precious cloth that it leaves us on dying forms the girdle of beauty and the mantle of kings.
That famous Frederick was surprised and indignant at being unable to find three philosophes to follow him. O great prince, how little you know of the true principle of all associations and all human institutions! Ah! By what right could your reason subjugate that of another and force it to march to the same tune? You have never known how to rise above the idea of force; and when you had collected some materials that you might have held together with your arms of iron, you thought they could do without cement. No, this is not how to create. You have disappeared from this theatre which you have illuminated and bloodied; but your contemporaries are still there.
Make no mistake: the successes of philosophy might dazzle inattentive eyes; it is important to appreciate them. If one asks these men what they have done, they will speak to you of their influence on opinion: they will tell you that they have destroyed prejudices and especially fanaticism, for that is their great word; they will celebrate in magnificent terms the kind of magistracy that Voltaire exercised over his century during his long career; but these words prejudice and fanaticism, in the final analysis, signify the belief of several nations. Voltaire has chased this belief out of a host of heads, that is to say, he has destroyed it, and this is precisely what I am saying. No less can be said of philosophy, so that a man given over to his individual reason is dangerous in the moral and political order precisely in proportion to his talents: the more genius, activity, and perseverance he has, the more disastrous his existence. He only multiplies a negative power and sinks into nothingness.
A pen friendly to religion, when it addresses reproaches to philosophy, is suspicious to a great number of readers who persist in seeing fanaticism wherever they do not see incredulity or indifferentism.
And so it will not be useless to borrow the phrase of a writer who exclaims in his own words, “O Providence, if you exist, answer! Who shall be able to absolve you?”5 … This man is surely not fanatical. See in what terms he confronts the philosophers:
And you, foolish philosophes, who, in your presumptuous knowledge, pretend to rule the world; apostles of tolerance and humanity; you who have prepared our Glorious Revolution, who have boasted of the progress of light and reason:
Come out of your tombs; come out into the midst of these corpses, and explain to us how, in this so highly vaunted century, thirty tyrants who commanded murder could find three hundred thousand executioners to commit it? Your writings are in their (the tyrants’) pockets; your maxims are on their lips; your pages shine in their reports to the tribune; and it was in the name of virtue that the most frightful robberies were committed; it was in the name of humanity that two million men perished; it was in the name of liberty that a hundred thousand Bastilles were raised: there is not one of your writings which would not be on the desk of our forty thousand Revolutionary Committees. They would put aside their Diderot for a moment to sign off on drownings! The sole fruit of your tirades was to teach crime to cover itself with polite language to carry out more dangerous blows. Injustice and violence were called sharp forms; rivers of blood, perspiration from the body politic … Did you think, so-called sages, that the seed of philosophy could sprout up on barren, arid, and uncultivated land? And in your frenzied paradoxes and your metaphysical abstractions, did you count men’s passions for nothing? etc.6
Rousseau has painted the portrait of the philosophes without suspecting that he was painting his own: it would be useless to cite here that striking piece which everyone knows;7 but there is one phrase which deserves particular attention: “If you count their voices,” said he, “each speaks for himself.” Behold, all at once, the condemnation of philosophy and the charter of philosophy inflicted on Rousseau by Rousseau himself. What is philosophy in the modern sense? It is the substitution of individual reason for national dogmas; and it is for this that Rousseau has worked all his life, his indomitable pride having constantly thrown him into dispute with all sorts of authority. Rousseau is, therefore, a philosophe, since he has only his own voice which has not the slightest right over that of others.
There is a book entitled De Jean-Jacques Rousseau considéré comme auteur de la Révolution, 2 vols.8 This book and the bronze statue that the National Convention awarded to Rousseau are perhaps the greatest opprobrium that has ever dishonoured the memory of any writer.
Voltaire, however, challenges Rousseau for the frightful honour of having made the French Revolution, and he has great authorities in his favour.
It was to him that Frederick II wrote: “The edifice of superstition, undermined at its foundations, shall collapse, and the nations will transcribe in the annals that Voltaire was the promoter of this Revolution of public opinion which took place in the eighteenth century.”9
It was he who wrote to Frederick: “We are losing taste but are acquiring thought; there is especially a M. Turgot who would be worthy of speaking to Your Majesty. The priests are in despair: here is the beginning of a great revolution; while we dare not yet declare ourselves openly; we secretly undermine the palace of imposture founded 1775 years ago.”10
It is of him that Rabaud de Saint-Etienne said: “All the principles of liberty, all the seeds of the Revolution are contained in his writings; he had predicted it, and he made it.”11
In fact, the glory of having made the Revolution belongs exclusively neither to Voltaire nor to Rousseau. The whole philosophical sect claims its share; but it is just to regard them as leaders of the chorus: the one undermined politics by corrupting morality, and the other undermined morality by corrupting politics. Voltaire’s corrosive writings have for sixty years gnawed away at the very Christian cement of this superb edifice, whose fall has made Europe to tremble. It is Rousseau whose moving eloquence has seduced the crowd, on which imagination has more hold than reason. He has everywhere breathed a contempt of authority and the spirit of insurrection. It was he who drew up the code of anarchy, and who, amid some isolated and sterile truths that everyone knew before him, laid down the disastrous principles of which the horrors we have seen are just the immediate consequences. Both were solemnly borne to the Pantheon in virtue of the National Convention’s decree, which has condemned their memory to the ultimate punishment.
At present, we are ecstatic about the influence of Voltaire and his ilk: we are told of the power they exercised over their century. Yes, they were powerful, like poisons and fires.
Wherever individual reason predominates, there can be nothing great: for all that is great rests on a belief, and the clash of individual opinions left to themselves produces only scepticism, which destroys everything. Universal and particular morality, religion, laws, venerated customs, useful prejudices—nothing subsists, everything melts away before it: it is the universal solvent.
Let us return always to simple ideas. Any institution is but a political edifice. In the physical and the moral order, the laws are the same; you cannot seat a great edifice on narrow foundations, nor a durable edifice on a moving or transient base. If, in the political order, we wish to build on a grand scale and build for centuries, we must rely on an opinion, on a belief broad and deep: for if the opinion does not dominate the majority of minds and is not deeply rooted, it will provide only a narrow and transient base.
Now, if we look for the great and solid basis of all first or second order possible institutions, we always find religion and patriotism.
And if we reflect still more attentively, we shall find that these two things coincide; for there is no true patriotism without religion; patriotism can only manifest in centuries of belief, and it always declines and dies with religion. As soon as man separates himself from divinity, he becomes corrupt and corrupts everything he touches. His action is false, and he acts only to destroy. To the extent that this powerful bond weakens in a state, all the conserving virtues are weakened; all characters are degraded, and even good deeds are petty. A murderous egoism incessantly harries public spirit and drives it back before it, like the enormous glaciers of the high Alps, which can be seen advancing gradually but frightfully on the domain of life and crushing the useful vegetation in their path.
But as soon as the idea of divinity is the principle of human action, this action is fruitful, creative, and invincible. An unknown force makes itself felt on all sides, animating, warming, vivifying all. With whatever errors, with whatever crimes ignorance and human corruption have defiled this august idea, it nonetheless retains its incredible influence. Amid massacres, men multiply, and nations display a dizzying vigour. “In former times,” said Rousseau, “Greece flourished amid the cruellest wars: blood flowed there, and the whole country was covered with men.”12 Without a doubt; but it was at that time a century of wonders and oracles; the century of faith after the manner of the men of this time, that is to say, the century of exalted patriotism. When one has said of the Great Being that He exists, one has not yet said anything: it must be said that He is Existence. “But He, being One, has with only one ‘Now’ completely filled ‘Forever’.”13 A drop of this immeasurable ocean of existence seems to detach itself and fall upon the man who speaks and acts in the name of the deity: his action astonishes and gives an idea of the creation. The centuries pass by, and his work remains. All among men that is great, good, agreeable, true, and enduring, comes from the Existence, the source of all existences; apart from this there is only error, putrefaction, and nothingness.
1 Oeuvres de Voltaire, vol. 86, 3rd in the correspondance. Letter 162.
2 Several writers have amused themselves by collecting the most frightful maxims scattered in the works of only French philosophers; but nobody, I believe, did it in a more striking way than an anonymous writer in the old Journal de France, 1791 or 1792. This search escaped me.
3 Rousseau, in making a vulgar comparison, advances, on the subject of political maladies, an incredible error which is good to read in passing, to make still better known his manner of reasoning, and to clarify even better this theory. “It does not belong to men,” he says, “to prolong their lives; but it is for them to prolong that of the state.” (Contrat Social, 3, II)
What! there is no medicine, no hygiene, no surgery! Diet and temperament are abuses; you need not bleed the patient for pleurisy! Mercury is useless to philosophers, and in the aneurysm we need not bind the artery! Here, for example, is a new discovery. Rousseau, however, would not have been embarrassed: as he was the foremost in the world in defending one error with another; he would have supported fatalism rather than back down.
4 <To those who know what esteem J. de Maistre professed for true philosophers, even pagan ones, it is obvious that, in these outbursts against individual reason, the author is in no way at odds with Lamennais [Hugues-Félicité-Robert de Lamennais, who argued for religion in his Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de religion on the basis of tradition and the general reason of mankind rather than on individual reason]. It is not a question here of the grounds for certainty, but only of the impotence of individual reason to procure general happiness, when it isolates itself and separates itself from national reason and from religion, when it shuts itself up in itself without taking any account of the truths recognised by the whole of mankind, and of religious teachings. Between the traditionalism of Lamennais, which denies all power and all certainty to individual reason, and the superb rationalism of those men who, disdaining the rest of the human race, flatter themselves to discover by their reason alone all that is important to know in order to ensure the happiness of the world, there is a happy medium, and it is in this medium that stands J. de Maistre.>
5 Accusateur public, No. 2, p. 22, lines 19 and 20.
6 Accusateur public, No. 2, p. 22, lines 19 and 20.
7 Emile, book II [the quote is actually from book IV].
8 This book is at once a laughable and deplorable proof of French impetuosity and of the precipitation of judgment which is the peculiar character of this nation. The Revolution is not ended, nothing presages its end. It has already produced the greatest of misfortunes, it announces yet greater ones; and while all those who may have contributed in some way to this terrible overthrow should hide themselves underground, here is Rousseau enthusiast presenting him as the author of this Revolution, to recommend him to the admiration and recognition of men; and while the author is writing his book, the Revolution is giving birth to every crime, every imaginable misfortune, and is covering an unfortunate nation with perhaps ineffaceable dishonour.
9 The King of Prussia to Voltaire. (Oeuvres of the latter, vol. 86, 248)
10 Voltaire to the King of Prussia, August 3, 1775. (Oeuvres. vol. 87, 185)
11 Précis de l’Histoire de ta Révolution, book I, p. 45.
12 Contrat social, 3, X. Note.
13 Plutarch, Moralia, dissertation on the Epsilon at Delphi [trans. by Frank Cole Babbit, Loeb Classical Library Vol. V, 1957].