UNIVERSITY
OF FLORIDA
LIBRARIES
COLLEGE LIBRARY
CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
Catholic Political
Thought
1789 - 1848
Texts selected, with an Introduction and
biographical notes, by
BELA MENCZER
UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME PRESS • 19 62
1
Copyright 1962 by
UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME PRESS
First paperback reprint
By arrangement with Burns & Oates, Ltd. London.
First published 1953 by
Burns Oates and Washbourne Ltd. London
Qjiia membra sumus corporis eius, de came eius>
et de ossibus eius.
TO MARJORIE
IN MEMORY OF ANOTHER DEDICATION
Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2011 with funding from
LYRASIS Members and Sloan Foundation
http://www.archive.org/details/catholicpoliticaOOmenc
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION
i. Authority and Liberty in the Western Con-
science ------ i
2. The Religious Character of the French
Monarchy ------ 5
.3. The Catholic Interpretation of the Secular
Order: Bossuet and Pascal 9
4. Decadence and Crisis: the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries - - 22
5. The Primacy of Politics : from Montesquieu
to Bonald ------ 38
6. The Primacy of Imagination : from Diderot
to Barbey d'Aurevilly — The Primacy of
Emotion: from Rousseau to Bloy and
Peguy ------ 49
I. JOSEPH DE MAISTRE: 1753-1821 - - 59
1. Human and Divine Nomenclature - - 61
2. War, Peace, and Social Order 66
3. On Sophistry and Tyranny - - - 69
4. Russia and the Christian West - - - 72
II. VICOMTE DE BONALD: 1754-1840 - - 77
1 . The Unity of Europe 79
2. On Domestic Society - - - - 89
III. FRANCOIS REN£ DE CHATEAUBRIAND:
1 768-1848 ----- 96
Progress ------ 99
IV. HONORfi DE BALZAC: 1799-1850 - - 108
Society and the Individual - - - 1 1 1
Vlll CONTENTS
PAGE
V. FRIEDRIGH VON SGHLEGEL: 1772-1829 - 119
The Regeneration of Christian States and
Nations - - - - - -120
VI. PRINCE CLEMENS METTERNICH: 1773-
1859 ------- 136
My Political Profession of Faith - 140
VII. JUAN DONOSO CORTES: 1809-1853 - - 157
1. The Church, the State, and Revolution - 160
2. Socialism - - - - - -177
VIII. JAIME BALMES: 1810-1848 - - - - 183
Faith and Liberty - - - - - 185
IX. LOUIS VEUILLOT: 1813-1878 - - - 192
The True Freedom of Thought - - 196
INTRODUCTION
i. AUTHORITY AND LIBERTY IN THE WESTERN
CONSCIENCE
Our Faith is of the stuff of history. The Old Testament differs
from all other sacred books venerated by the nations because
it is history — an account of events full of mystical significance.
Christian history differs from all other history because it
comprises an era, because it is an account of a fundamental
change in the order of the world, and the consequences of that
change.
Man alone of all created beings has a history. Of all the
records of human actions and events, the Old Testament is the
first to be fully related to society, and to be in full relationship
with the essential nature of man. Other civilisations have had
their annals and chronicles, but these were never intended to
reveal the essential. The names of Pharaohs have been
recorded, and those of the rulers of China ; their virtues were
praised, and some of their actions made known and trans-
mitted to posterity. Nearer to us in time, the historians of
Greece and Rome — Herodotus, Tacitus — tell the story of events
with a fuller and more personal characterisation of the actors ;
indeed they describe national characteristics with such
penetrating observation that in the field of literature they,
remain unsurpassed. But what makes the Bible unique, and
different in essence from all other venerated books of those
distant centuries, is its focus. The biblical story moves visibly
to a climax. Changes in institutions, the transition from the
rule of prophets to that of kings, forced migrations, catas-
trophes and conquests, victories and defeats — all these occur
because they have to occur. Nothing happens by mere chance.
Everything has a discernible cause. Events have their context
on a divine plane, the essentials of which are revealed. Reason
and power were revealed in the act of Creation; love and
sacrifice, as the essential relation of God to Man, were revealed
on the Cross; justice and judgement are foretold for the end of
the centuries.
2 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
Established on this threefold basis of will, sacrifice, and
preparation for final judgement, life derives from Christianity a
wholly new significance. Of all living things created, only man
can voluntarily destroy himself; and only man can accept life
voluntarily, in the full and certain knowledge of coming to a
material end. Christ condemned self-destruction, and pro-
claimed the relativity of the material end, but by no means the
insignificance of that end. He proclaimed its relation to the
three fundamental bases of will, love and judgement, these
three aspects of Divinity, faculties of supreme Reason.
Once the full truth has been revealed, a chosen people is no
longer needed to serve as an example ; mankind itself becomes
the example. Survival after death, sensed in the cult of the
Egyptians, stated in Buddhism, and pondered by the Greeks,
is now demonstrated and defined. It is given a complete sense
and a precise meaning, with no room left for either obscurity
or indifference. Christ revealed the mystery. He conquered
the world, and its conquest is final. History, the science of
human actions, becomes the science of the definite, the science
of accomplished finalities.
It was only a generation earlier that the poet Virgil, singing
the glories of the age of Augustus, had foretold fulfilment, the
coming fullness of time. Again, there is no place here for
speculation or change. The meeting of Christ and Rome was a
providential necessity; it was a message in action, a story with
no episode of secondary importance. All is precision, like the
Latin language itself, which as the common language of the
Church was to unite the Christian peoples of the West.
Thenceforward they live in Time, the time between Creation
and final Judgement. What is but a longing, a vague divina-
tion, in others, is for them a certainty; God conquers chaos
and sets an aim to history. Before conquering space, European
mankind recognised Time. It saw the dividing moment in
Time, the presence of God on earth. Now that limits had been
set to human time and history, it was to go out and conquer
space. European mankind carried history into space by carry-
ing Christ to distant peoples living in closed realms, who had
never had any notion of time and whose history had therefore
remained static. This achievement, which has altered the whole
image of the world in such a tremendous way during the last
few centuries, cannot be explained otherwise than by the fact
that the European nations had a different notion of history —
the Roman and Christian concept of history as a progress from
INTRODUCTION 3
Creation, through Redemption, to Judgement. " Discovery "
is a word peculiar to the vocabulary of a civilisation that is
founded on Revelation. Other nations may conquer, but the
Christian nations " discover ": they open closed realms to the
Light, and static realms to Time.
The evil inherent in the world becomes transitory. In the
words of Tertullian, the Teacher of the Church who coined the
expression unum necessarium: " God suffers, or the world breaks
into pieces." God's suffering is not only a plausible explanation
of the continued existence of the world, it is the only possible
explanation: Aut dissolvitur machina mundi, aut mundi creator
patitur. And St Augustine, otherwise so completely different
from Tertullian in his appreciation of pre-Christian learning,
says that this necessary belief is the necessary explanation of
the unity of human history, and of the survival of an Empire
in the throes of invasion and devastation.
To Christianity, and Christianity alone, we owe the historical
conscience of Europe. And it is to Christianity alone that we
owe the full meaning of both order and liberty.
The sense of order is an acceptance of Creation, the rational
acceptance of necessity. Liberty is the moral acceptance of
order, a voluntary action subject to final judgement. Liberty
means choice: the choice of voluntary sacrifice, the means
whereby a final and for ever undisturbed harmony of Order
and Liberty can be established; it means the offering of a
sacrifice made freely for the proclamation and explanation of
the law of Order — the death on the Cross — and our personal
participation in this supreme act of Liberty through the Mass.
Christ has set us free for all time. Liberty is as final as the
order of Creation: " The truth shall set you free."
The historical conscience which Christianity gave us is a
recognition of the eternal in what is passing and ephemeral, a
recognition of something which is not subject to change amidst
the infinity of material changes. This principle of eternity is
found in the very nature of an unchanging Creator. " All that
He ever created," says St Augustine, the father of a Christian
philosophy of history, " was in Him, in His unchanged fixed
Will eternally one and the same."
Thus everything within Creation, within Order, appertains
to the category of the necessary, and necessity is clearly
defined and demonstrated. Yet Creation itself was a voluntary
action, a gift, an effect of Liberty. Authority was established,
not for the sake of the Creator, but for the sake of the
4 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
creature: its establishment and acceptance should be equally
final.
This divine finality in History, this acceptance of the final
and definite in Revelation, of an authority freely given and
accepted, became the quintessence of the Western Christian
political doctrine. The elaboration and evolution of this
doctrine was bound up with the fate of Charlemagne's Western
Empire. Paris was the centre of the scholastic philosophy of
Scotus Erigena ; it saw within its walls St Albert the Great and
St Thomas; there Duns Scotus taught, the Franciscan Doctor
of the freedom of the will as the principal attribute of man,
which had been created by the free sovereignty of the divine
Will. Paris was also the capital of the monarchy of the heirs
of Charlemagne, the capital of the kingdom of chivalry. All
that survived the barbarian invasions of St Augustine's century
in the south and east of the pagan Empire of Rome, survived
because of its Christian baptism.
But this survival was not accomplished without pain and
difficulty ; it involved a temporary surrender of Caesarism to
Christ, followed by attempts to create a Church subservient to
Caesarism. It was in the West that the new Monarchy,
entirely Christian in its origin, came into being, the monarchy
of a Caesar who took the style and name of David, anointed by
the Pope as David had been anointed by the high priest — the
realm of voluntary obedience, sustained only by the tie of
Faith, Fides, which is the derivation of the feudal idea.
" Frank," the name of the people who accepted authority in
freedom, became synonymous in current language with sincerity
and loyalty. Privilege, freedom and personal right was given
the name " franchise " ; the granting of freedom became known
in Western languages as " affranchisement." From the time of
the Song of Roland, the first epic poem of Christian Chivalry,
through the Franciscan spirituality of the era of the Crusades
and Duns Scotus's elaboration of the doctrine of voluntary
creation, down to the very recent French spiritual revival on
the eve of the First World War — to the poetry of Charles
Peguy — we meet the same concept of free and voluntary sacri-
fice as the very essence of Christianity :
Comme fax criS Vhomme a mon image et d ma ressemblance,
Ainsifai crie la liberti de Vhomme a Vimage et a la ressemblance
De ma propre, de mon originelle liberie.1
1 Prieres, Charles Pdguy, Gallimard, Paris, 1 934, p. 66.
INTRODUCTION 5
2. THE RELIGIOUS CHARACTER OF THE FRENCH
MONARCHY
The Kingdom of the Franks, the Western Monarchy, was
the first modern nation, just as St Augustine, the teacher of the
West, was the first modern man. It was a nation with a history
which was not simply recorded, but was above all related by
all its laws, institutions and actions to the spiritual and moral
focal point of History. This notion of the focal point in History
replaced in the Western mind the idea of a geographical centre
of the world. Since the time of St Augustine, who postulated
the perfect unity of individual life with the universal and omni-
present life of the Divinity, the government of the World — of
the City of God — had become known as " temporal," or
" secular," adjectives which relate to Time and not to space;
the Western Empire meant temporal power, secular govern-
ment, related to the saecula saeculorum of the Western liturgy, a
temporal power which was related to Eternity. Thus the
people of the Western realm considered themselves to be the
chosen people of the New Testament, whose actions were mani-
festations of the Divine — gesta Dei per Francos. Charlemagne's
name became synonymous with a dignity, just as Caesar's had
been in the Empire of antiquity, and the Slav and the Magyar
titles for the new East European Royal dignity were taken from
the name Charlemagne, or Karl — Kralj, Kirdly.1
Yet, at the same time that the Kingdom of the Franks was
becoming the norm of Christian society the heritage of Charle-
magne suffered a division, and the imperial heritage of Charle-
magne ceased to be in the same hands as the royal sceptre of
France. To tell the story of this division, and to relate all that
followed upon it, would be nothing short of writing the
European history of eight full centuries. We are not engaged
here on such a tremendous task. Ours is infinitely more modest
in scope; we are dealing with the historical background to the
crisis of Authority and Liberty, which culminated in the French
Revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the
new direction of religious thought which originated in this
crisis and transformed every concept of the " profane " order of
Europe — we use the word in the sense underlined by Jacques
1 Important new research material, and for the first time a full historical survey
of the relations between the Kingdom of the Franks and East and Central Europe,
is given in The Making of Central and Eastern Europe, by Fr. Francis Dvornik, Polish
Research Centre, London, 1949.
D CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
Maritain in his Humanisme integral, as a contrast to " sacred " —
the crisis of Authority and Liberty in France, which is not yet
at an end in Europe or the world today.
We can thus only touch slightly upon the centuries of struggle
between the two branches of Charlemagne's Monarchy and
the Papacy, and just mention in passing that there were con-
flicts between France and the Papacy in the reigns of Philippe-
Auguste and Louis XII, as well as conflicts between the Papacy
and the Empire. It must however be said that Charlemagne's
quality as defender of the Papal sovereignty, his title of" eldest
son of the Church " and of Rex Christianissimus — a title which
sovereigns imitated at the time of the great dynastic rivalries,
when the successors of Ferdinand of Aragon called themselves
Catholic Kings of Spain, and the successors of Maria -Theresa
called themselves Apostolic Kings of Hungary — gave the
French Monarchy a religious character of the first importance,
a claim of primacy over the secular rulers of Christendom, a
consciousness of that primacy which was sometimes questioned,
but which was the unalterable basis of French policy, and of
the whole political doctrine of the nation for centuries.
The unity of the Kingdom and the unity of Christendom
became, in a way which must be considered providential, one
and the same cause. The two greatest religious events of the
Latin West, the scholastic movement of the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries and the Counter-Reformation of the
seventeenth century, evolved in the context of French national
history. Neither of them was an exclusively French historical
phenomenon, and neither was restricted in scope to France
alone, but they were replies to heresies which threatened to
disrupt the unity of the French Crown, as well as the unity of
Christendom and the Church. They were replies to the
Albigensian and the Calvinist heresies and to the Jansenist
aberrations, the controversy in each case centring round the
freedom of the human will.
This is a paradox which needs emphasising in this century,
because it was often overlooked in the nineteenth century.
Modern historians, writing with a more or less conscious, or
even virulent, anti -Catholic bias and intention, have com-
pletely reversed this phenomenon and affirmed the exact oppo-
site of the truth, by interpreting the various revolts in the
history of French Christianity as so many steps towards
" emancipation," an aim which was, according to them,
ultimately achieved with the triumph of the Great
INTRODUCTION J
Revolution, after several minor ones had proved abortive.1
This modern opinion, commonly held because it has been
spread by historians, omitted to bear in mind the theological
essence of the Albigensian, Calvinist and Jansenist movements,
although the doctrinal documents are easily accessible,
especially those concerning the two latter. They all challenged
the authority of the Church, and at the same time, the doctrine
of the freedom of the will; the relation between the two trends
is obvious. The Crown and the Church recognised that they
were a peril to moral responsibility, this indispensable basis of
every legal and social order. To be free means to be respon-
sible, and any doubt cast on this free, responsible and voluntary
action is a danger to Church and State alike, whether it is a
doctrine of predestination, or one which casts doubts on the
sufficiency and efficacy of Grace.
The Revolution, which made Liberty the first of its catch-
words, thus confessed its spiritual ancestry in all the negations
of freedom.2 The most memorable link in the chain from the
1 The French Liberal historians, the grave and philosophical Guizot, the often
attractive and epic Michelet, the frequently original and sometimes absurd Edgar
Quinet and, somewhat platitudinous in their conclusions, but on account of the
bulk of their researches and their output, the important Henri Martin and Ernest
Lavisse, as well as Seignobos — more scientific in his method — have all attempted to
show us that the movements which aimed at the disintegration of Christian unity
were steps on the road of Progress, that these Western heresies were the precursors
of the ideas of 1789. In the opinion of Jean Jaures, the intellectual leader of French
Socialism during the period when this movement had given up all idea of a new
revolution, and postulated the thesis that all its aims had been realised with the
" natural " development of the ideas of 1789, the unity of the Reformation and
the Revolution was a foremost axiom of modern times. He devoted the thesis he
wrote for the Sorbonne (one of the last ever to be written in Latin and almost
certainly the only Latin contribution to the literature on Marx, his doctrine and
his German precursors) to a demonstration of this unity. The postulate of a close
Franco -German friendship, based on the affinity of the Reformation and the
Revolution, became such a favourite rhetorical formula in Jaures' public activities,
that many of his followers left him on that account. This happened with the young
Peguy — as we know from his own Souvenirs and from the books which some of
P6guy's closest companions, such as Jean-Jerome Tharaud and Henri Massis,
devoted to his memory and the spiritual legacy he left behind. It also happened in
the case of Charles Andler, Professor of German at the College de France, who
took a less optimistic view of the " Germany of the Reformation " and its natural
love for liberty and peace, which Jaures saw in every historical phenomenon
" emancipated " from Catholic authority.
2 In the works of all its apologists, Michelet, Quinet and Jaures. A possible
exception is Alphonse Aulard, in whose analysis the Revolution is not so much the
continuation of those older religious phenomena, but a new phenomenon, a
rational, agnostic philosophy put into practice. But Aulard would admit that this
theory only holds good in that aspect of the Revolution represented by Danton
and Condorcet, and not in the one represented by Robespierre, who is the central
figure of the revolutionary history — or shall we say apologetics ? — of the late
M. Albert Mathiez, Aulard's successor in the Chair of Revolutionary History at
the Sorbonne.
8 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
Reformation to the Revolution was the thinker Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, who relegated freedom and personal responsibility
to the realm of his imaginary natural life, which was prior to a
civilisation in which man's action was corrupted by social rules
and regulations, his good intentions were frustrated by his sur-
roundings, and by the institutions of society and the State.
Inconsistent as it seems, the same determinist tendencies com-
mon, in various degrees, to the three great heretical movements
which in three different centuries shook the Christian Monarchy
in France to its foundations, proclaimed free and individual
judgement as the only criterion in matters of Faith. Yet, this
contradiction is more apparent than real: Christian ethical
rule cannot be separated from Authority, a word which, in the
vocabulary of the Christian, can only be derived from the
auctoritas of God, manifested in Creation by His free and
sovereign Will.
Any challenge to the notion of Authority must necessarily
and logically lead to a denial, or at least to some major restric-
tion, of the attributes which Man derives from Authority.
Like everything, or almost everything in spiritual matters, this
is largely a question of emphasis. We need not go so far as to
accuse Calvinists and Jansenists of a flat denial of the free,
voluntary action of God in Creation. This would assimilate
them to a more remote heresy, that of the Manicheans, in whose
theology God's own freedom becomes problematic, so that He
acts in rivalry with an equally powerful force of evil, and acts
by an inevitable necessity in an undecided struggle between Good
and Evil. Yet by removing the Church, which is Authority
incarnate, and the visible depositary of the divine guidance of
men, as the link between God and Man, the relationship
between them necessarily becomes more remote, so that Man
is a less perfect being, enlightened only by his own intellect,
and ultimately faced, as the Teachers of the Church are unani-
mous in underlining — St Augustine against the Manicheans,
St Thomas against the Albigenses, the early Jesuits and Bossuet
against the Reformation, and St Alphonsus Liguori against the
Jansenists — by the alternative of despotism or anarchy. Nearer
to our own day, the Spanish theologian Jaime Balmes shows, in
the analysis of Protestantism which he makes from the point
of view of historical progress and secular civilisation, that this
alternative has been the hallmark of modern times since the
sixteenth century.
INTRODUCTION 9
3. THE CATHOLIC INTERPRETATION OF THE
SECULAR ORDER: BOSSUET AND PASCAL
France is, on the historical plane, the centre of Western
Christianity. The contribution which other countries have
made is certainly not negligible; St Albert the Great, St
Thomas, Duns Scotus and other masters of the scholastic era
of Paris came from countries other than France. They came
from Orders founded by St Dominic and St Francis outside
France, although these Orders were largely founded to combat
heresies which in France herself were the causes of real civil
wars. From the extreme west of the Iberian Peninsula to the
Sarmatian steppes of Poland and Russia, there were Christian
Kingdoms and realms all over the European Continent. All
were rivals for the common glory of Christendom.
Hegemony was a new term which grew out of the rivalry
of the dynastic powers; thus in the political vocabulary of
Europe, it is not older than the sixteenth century. There was
no question in any modern sense of a French " hegemony " in
the Middle Ages. France could however claim seniority
through the succession of Charlemagne. Right up to the Revo-
lution and the Restoration of the Bourbon dynasty in the early
nineteenth century, we shall meet the argument — for the last
time in Bonald's Theorie de Pouvoir and in his Reflexions sur
VinterSt giniral de V Europe and in Joseph de Maistre's comments
on topical events from St Petersburg — that the Empire east of
the Rhine was a sort of political schism from the foundation of
Charlemagne, just as the Church of Byzantium was a religious
schism from Rome. The most monumental antagonist of this
argument in the political literature of Europe was Dante, a
keen enemy of the French kings and a supporter of the Imperial
power. Yet it was only in the nineteenth century, when the
Empire finally became Austrian and Danubian and withdrew
from the West,1 that the " seniority of Charlemagne's heritage "
disappeared as a fundamental thesis of French policy.2
1 A consequence and result of the Napoleonic wars, which the subsequent
defeat of Napoleon (though largely due to Austrian participation in the " War of the
Nations ") did not alter. Metternich preferred his monarchy to play the part of the
centre of a " European " system, and wisely renounced all western claims (which
in his position as one of the victors he could possibly have claimed from his allies) .
* Bonald's comments on the Vienna Congress in UintirU giniral de VEurope (like
much of his philosophy) are a distant echo of Leibnitz' political theories, which
aimed at a reconciliation between France and the Empire. They must be seen
against the background of the time of Louis XIV in France and of Eugene of
Savoy's liberation of the Christian Eastern Empire from Turkish rule and the
re -integration of the latter into the Habsburg dominions.
10 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
This is but a part, although an indispensable part, of the
central issue with which we deal in these pages, which is the
evolution, from the Christian foundations of European politics
and the European state-system, of the political conscience of
the West. We have to bear in mind the primacy of France, in
order to understand the central importance of the French
Revolution for modern times, and the significant part it played
in the dissolution of the European state -system. We cannot yet
see the end of the crisis, although we can already discern— as
even the best political intelligences of the generation of Bonald,
de Maistre and Friedrich von Schlegel could not know — that
in the twentieth century it means the growth and expansion of
the deeper European problems to other civilisations and con-
tinents.
The ultimate meaning of this expansion of systems and
institutions, which are themselves in a state of dissolution, may
be, as we can already see, the implication of the whole world
in concerns which are, for all those who are not satisfied with
the most superficial appearances, the concerns of Christendom.
A historical conjecture is that in a distant future the vocation
of the Church may be the consecration and consolidation of a
new world order and unity, which the European order failed
to create, but which may slowly come into being through the
spreading of a European chaos to distant parts of the globe.
We have previously indicated that each of the great steps
taken to consolidate the Western Monarchy coincided — provi-
dentially— with the end of a great crisis in Christendom. The
elevation of Clovis to the Kingdom of the Franks marked the
end of the barbarian invasions of the West, and the triumphant
emergence of Latin and Western Christianity, of the Catholicity
of Rome, from the Manichean and Arian confusions of the
East. The coronation of Charlemagne followed upon the first
decisive victory of Christian Europe over Asia, although as far
as the West was concerned, it was not a final victory. Its
significance lay in the creation by the Papacy of a secular
Christian order, or a monarchy which was spiritually dependent
upon the prior existence of the Papacy, as David's monarchy
was on Samuel's priesthood. French unity was achieved (apart
from some conflicts over the frontiers of the north-east, which
remained an open question until the wars of Louis XIV) by
the victory over the Albigenses. The final consolidation and
unity of the central monarchical power came about through
the civil wars of the sixteenth century — in other words, the
INTRODUCTION II
Reformation was responsible for the unity of the French
monarchy.
For many centuries, France enjoyed primacy, even in a more
strictly geographical sense. The diplomatic thought, language
and action which governed Europe for three centuries, and
of which Metternich was the last classic master and depositary,
used the expression " Central Europe " in the sense that the
central powers in Europe were those which bordered the Rhine
and the Alps, and were made the centre of Christendom by
Charlemagne.
In the closing chapters of his Lectures on the Philosophy of
History, Friedrich von Schlegel defined the key to German
history as a strong German participation in the European
system (an argument which was fairly general among the
Austrian and Prussian-inspired publicists between Napoleon
and Bismarck)1 by pointing out that the German crises — the
Lutheran Reformation and the Thirty Years' War — were bound
to affect the whole of Europe, that order or chaos inside Ger-
many were symptoms of the order or chaos of Europe; for
Germany is, for good or ill, a sort of miniature Europe, with
her naturally federal structure and local diversity, so that
socially and historically, as well as geographically, she is the
central nation.
France could also claim to be the " central nation " and that
is one of the reasons why a Franco -German controversy has
dominated the European scene for so long. The similarity
between these claims hardly hides the differences between
them, which make them ultimately irreconcilable. In France,
the outcome of religious crises meant consolidation and unity,
whereas in Germany similar crises led to disintegration, and an
almost complete dissolution and absence of power in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; with the result that only
Austria and Prussia, which were not purely Germanic powers,
remained in the German East, and only Holland and Switzer-
land, which again were not purely Germanic societies, in the
West.
One of the reasons for this evolution was certainly the
sympathy France received from the Papacy, whose constant
preoccupation was to keep the Emperor out of Italy. Richelieu
1 This argument was taken up by F. W. Foerster in his analysis of the Germany
between the two World Wars, The German Question and Europe, published in
America, and also by the French scholar Edmond Vermeil, Les doctrinaires de la
Revolution Allemande, 1938, and in L'Allemagne : Une tentative d' explication, 1940.
12 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
had the approval of Rome, not only because he safeguarded
French unity by subduing the Huguenots at La Rochelle, but
also because he opposed the Imperial power in the Thirty
Years' War, an opposition which went to the extent of sup-
porting Gustavus Adolphus and Protestant Sweden.
The preservation, restoration and the final triumph of French
unity under Henry IV, Richelieu and Louis XIV, became one
of the most significant events in Christendom, one of the
greatest periods in the annals of European mankind. It was a
secular event, but one which Bossuet — the mouthpiece of his
century and nation, and by no means an isolated man of
genius — interpreted as of the greatest religious significance. To
him we owe the vision of History as the working-out of the
designs of Providence. Bossuet had a mystical insight into
History (as later on Joseph de Maistre was to have after the
Revolution) and at the same time, in theology, he marked a
return to St Augustine from the formal logic of medieval
schoolmen, and a return to Revelation as a vision and a fact
from a philosophy of the Absolute, which approached Revela-
tion through syllogism. Bossuet's Discours sur VHistoire universelle
is an analogical synthesis. Religious and spiritual truth are
seen here in the analogy between the Divine and the human.
There are two histories for Bossuet: the universal history of
immutable truth, foreshadowed in Eternity, and gradually and
progressively revealed by action in time; and a history of
" variations," a history of human errors and aberrations, of no
final and definite significance, except that they prefigure what
will be rejected on the day of final Judgement.
The importance of Bossuet in his own century, and in the
whole of the intervening time between his day and ours, can
hardly be over-estimated. For some people, his name may
evoke the memory of stormy Gallican controversies which were
intense in the seventeenth century, and still more so in the
following one, not finally subsiding, indeed, till the Vatican
Council of 1869.1 How far Bossuet was the master-mind of the
Gallican theories, which claimed special privileges for the
French hierarchy and the French Crown — though neither he,
nor any other thinker of his time, considered it as a purely
secular government — and how far his theories encouraged the
1 Heralded in the French Church by Louis Veuillot's lively "ultramontane "
polemics against Mgr. Dupanloup and other " Gallicans " of the hierarchy, and
against secular political leaders of the Liberal -Catholic variety such as Falloux
and Montalembert.
INTRODUCTION 13
Gallicans who favoured a restriction of direct Roman inter-
ference in the Church of France, could be made the subject
of a special study. The question has been examined by many
writers on Bossuet; it is of no great concern here. All that need
be said is that Bossuet's Correspondance and the published docu-
ments concerning his diocesan archives of Meaux, show him to
have been a bishop of moderately Gallican tendencies. Such
was the opinion of many of his contemporaries. But the
Gallican controversy is dead. It never contained any actual
threat of schism, still less of heresy. It was an ephemeral
political symptom, which disappeared, as such symptoms do,
with the transformation of the whole historical context — with
the Vatican Council of Pius IX and his Bull of Infallibility.
The Gallican controversy was not of primary importance in
Bossuet's achievement. To assert the contrary is to belittle this
monumental landmark which stands at the beginning of modern
French Christian thought.
In the spiritual history of Europe, the influence of Bossuet
can be discerned in the religious thought of Leibnitz. The
great German philosopher's plan for a reunion of Christendom
and for a European " Harmony " through restoration of peace
between France and the Empire — a more profound political
synthesis, and one that was more aware of historical reality
than Spinoza's abstract conception of an " equilibrium," or
balance of powers, to be established more geometrico — were
largely the fruits of Leibnitz's long and extensive exchange of
ideas with the Bishop of Meaux.
In theology, as we have already indicated, Bossuet signified
a great step forward from formal logic to historical under-
standing and — in a cultural sense, this was of equal impor-
tance— a step forward from the scholastic formula to that
perfect artistry of personal style, which is the main feature of
the French grand siecle. The siglo de oro in Spain saw God and
His work in the colours of passion and glory ; the grand siecle in
France saw God and His work in the perfection of proportion
and form and language. It was the century of style — the style
of Boileau and La Fontaine, of Corneille, Racine and Moliere,
of La Bruyere and Madame de Sevigne — which Bossuet
epitomised on the plane of divine knowledge. The French
style became the vehicle for all the dignified secular and
profane concerns of modern Europe; it occupied the third
place in Christendom, after the Greek of the Revelation which
united Jew and Gentile, and the Latin of the monastic rule,
14 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
of the liturgy and of the scholastics who spiritualised the
Barbarian.
Bossuet made this triumph of style and artistic form a new
triumph for the Church in the grand siecle. He was the foremost
master of the unique and personal expression and the concise
word, the power of which lay in allusion, in the concise mani-
festation of the deeper, hidden truth of the sign, the image and
the symbol — in other words, the incarnation and fulfilment of
the Word, natum ante omnia saecula, the fulfilment of that time
which is contained within, and prefigured in, Eternity.
The French grand siecle changed the European vision by its
idea of style, by the directness of its images, by its presentation
of Truth, not in abstraction and reasoning, but in figure, image
and word, which, in Bossuet's hands, became apologetic
weapons wherewith to combat the heresy of a purely abstract,
intellectual and rational Christianity, such as Calvin and his
sect claimed to establish.
We are obliged to linger over Bossuet and his century, so
important is he as a landmark in the spiritual progress of
modern Europe. Indeed, without the grand siecle and Bossuet
in particular, there would have been no Vico or Hegel to
speculate on the unity of the spirit, as it is seen in its works and
manifestations amidst the variety of the temporal and material
order. A still greater loss, there would have been no Goethe,
at any rate we should not have had the best of Goethe, who
pushed rational effort to the extreme limit of the humanly
possible, in order to recognise in the end the symbolic transcen-
dence of all things created, Alles Vergangliche ist nur ein Gleichniss,
the inexpressible which has been accomplished, Das Unbeschreib-
liche, hier isVs getan, and transcendent purity, Das ewig
weibliche. . . .*
1 Hardly anyone who has seriously attempted to understand Goethe could avoid
quoting and analysing these lines. The latest comer is the French philosopher and
poet Jean Guitton, in La Pensie moderne et le Catholicisme, in which he states that
Goethe's concept of purity and his, " eternal feminine " are expressions of a
devotion, which is only a half conscious one, to the Blessed Virgin. Generally
distrustful as we ought to be when well-meaning Catholic attempts are made to
" annex " great thoughts from a strange or hostile camp to the Church — such
attempts are dangerous because they minimise gigantic errors which we should
face courageously — we feel that M. Guitton has probably said the last word on
Goethe's Christianity, a controversial subject now fully resolved by a remarkable
Catholic thinker of our own day.
An inevitable rapprochement of Goethe's Alles Vergangliche with the Luce intel-
lectual, pieno d'amore, with the light of the " Paradiso," chi transcende ogni dolciore
seems to contradict what we said above on the relation of Goethe to the French
style of the seventeenth century and points to a still nobler origin of his transcen-
dentalism. But between Dante and Goethe, there were the numerous attempts
INTRODUCTION 15
The French grand sikle was misunderstood in the subsequent
century, and has often been misunderstood since, as one which
worshipped style and form, these two words being used in a
pejorative sense to indicate an absence of " depth "; this was
unfortunate, because it prevented any true appreciation, and
even was an obstacle to any true understanding, of more recent
French Catholic thought of the highest significance, the
thought of Joseph de Maistre, Barbey d'Aurevilly, Ernest Hello
and L^on Bloy, to which we shall come back later on in these
pages.
It was not a century which worshipped style and form as an
external ornament, but one in which the Faith acquired its
modern style and expression. For Joseph de Maistre and the
young Chateaubriand (of the Genie du Christianisme and the
Essai sur les Revolutions) the Revolution meant a destruction of
style, an interpretation which the former gave with irony and
polemical wit, and the latter with melancholy. Chateaubriand,
however, was perhaps the first French author to see style as a
matter which only concerned aesthetics; unfortunately, this
lowered the metaphysical, historical and religious level of his
whole argument, so that the author of the Genie du Christianisme
ranks below Joseph de Maistre or Bonald among the classics
of modern apologetics. What de Maistre or Bonald considered
to be an expression of Order, in accordance with the correct
hierarchy of spiritual and social values which the Revolution
had overthrown and cast into confusion, was for Chateaubriand
an expression of subjective imagination and beauty. Therefore,
what de Maistre saw as incredible human presumption, a sub-
stitution of human judgement and human creation for the
divine, Chateaubriand was inclined to see as a mere rationalisa-
tion and levelling down of the poetic variety of imagination.
In Barbey d'Aurevilly's view, the whole post-revolutionary
period was marked by the decline of style, in a deeper sense
to separate the ideal nomina from created reality by abstractions which over-
spiritualised and over-rationalised the former. This unity was restored by the
French grand sticle, by " style," which, in other words, is unity in essence. It is a
unity between the supernatural and the natural, visible in the harmony and the
perfection of form and proportion. It was a unity that was restored above all by
Bossuet, who as a theologian never ceased to be a historian, and as a master of
prose never ceased to be a priest and bishop. The restoration of the unity between
the supernatural and the natural by means of style followed upon the two parodies
and caricatures of genius in France — that of the " purely natural " of Rabelais,
and of the " purely spiritual " which Montaigne gave in his Apologie de Raymond
Sibond — those parodies of genius which began the whole of modern French
literature.
l6 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
than was imagined by the English aesthetics of the nineteenth
century (whom Barbey d'Aurevilly admired during his early
days when he wrote his Dandyisme in the 1830's) from Byron to
Wilde and from Carlyle to Ruskin, who considered theirs to
be the century of utilitarian ugliness. Style declined during
this time because human personality, of which it is the expres-
sion, was no longer a reflection of the personal reality of God
in the current philosophies. It was a pantheist century, which
believed in the difformity of the masses, and either praised
difformity, or postulated uniformity under some future tyrant
which Democracy would one day produce; the pantheism of
Victor Hugo and of Michelet were the chief targets of Barbey
d'Aurevilly's critical genius.
For Leon Bloy, " les evenements historiques sont le style de la
Parole," the Word that was in the beginning and the full
meaning of which has been gradually unfolded in the dimen-
sion of time throughout the centuries, the Word born ante omnia
saecula and valid for Eternity. This philosophy, which under-
lies the whole of Leon Bloy's historical writing — his Revelateur du
Globe, his Byzance, Marie -Antoinette, L'Ame de Napoleon, Jeanne
d'Arc — gave him his whole vision of history: " // n'y a que les
saints, ou les antagonistes des saints, capables de delimiter I'histoire."1
Ernest Hello, that remarkable French mystic who was a monu-
mental figure in modern Catholic thought between Barbey
d'Aurevilly and Leon Bloy, and to whom some belated justice
is rendered by admirers in our day,2 thought that the century
of style was Catholic and French in the truest sense: the
Catholic Faith and French style have nothing in common with
vagueness — Faith is affirmation and style is precision.3 Essence
and form cannot be separated ; the appearance of Divinity in
form was the Word humanly incarnate. God spoke when He
made the Word incarnate. The vague, purely subjective value
given to words is the great aberration of romantic sensitiveness,
which characterised the century following Rousseau: " Quand
un homme s'egare, soyez sur qu'il vient de se chercher."4.
The commonplace in language is a fallen and debased frag-
ment of the Word, with nothing left of its mystic origin, as the
human beings who speak it are, so to say, fallen fragments
of the Divine Person. Yet true style in poetry and prose
1 La Femme Pauvre, Ch. XXII, p. 156 of the first edition. Paris. 1886.
2 Stanilas Fumet: Ernest Hello. Le drame de la lumiere. Paris. Egloff, 1946.
8 Ernest Hello: Le Style : Sa thiorie et son histoire. Paris. 1879.
4 Ernest Hello : Ibid. p. 216.
INTRODUCTION 17
can approach the divine and bring us back to the Word.1
We shall return later to this century of violent crises and
national catastrophes. Meanwhile we must come back to the
grand siecle of style, in order to consider it from another angle.
This is provided by someone who was perhaps as far removed
from Bossuet as it was possible for a French thinker of the same
century to be — by Pascal.
Pascal was the first lay apologist of the Church who developed
a theological argument, not against the " Variations " of the
heretical theologies, but against an enemy who never varies:
Worldliness. Pascal refuted, and, in his own wisdom, sur-
passed worldly wisdom, even such wisdom " of this world " as
can feel comfortable inside the Church and can conform
perfectly to a secular order of Catholic inspiration. Pascal gave
the full Christian answer to Montaigne and Descartes, and it
is mainly for this reason that we are concerned with him here.
His espousal of the Jansenist cause in Lettres a un Provincial
remains a controversial subject. His attitude can be explained
by his misunderstanding of the Jesuit case against the Jan-
senists, by his excessive austerity — perhaps even it was the
result of insufficient knowledge concerning the Spanish Jesuit
casuists, who were only known to him at second hand. As he
himself admitted, they were read for him by Jansenist friends,
who may well have been biassed. We may leave aside this, for
some time the most widely discussed aspect of Pascal's work,
as we left on one side the question of Bossuet's Gallicanism.
Pascal's defence of Jansenism consisted of the argument that
there was no such thing as "Jansenism," for the group who
were known under that name did not accept the propositions
which were condemned by the Sorbonne (and later by Pope
Innocent X), as issuing from Jansenius's book on St Augustine,
and that it was even doubtful if Jansenius, who died a Bishop
of the Church, ever really meant to propose a doctrine on free
will which was incompatible with that of the Church.
If Bossuet had only been a " Gallican," and Pascal only a
"Jansenist," how would their reputation have survived?
Who takes any interest today in the Abbe Noailles, who engaged
1 L£on Bloy commented on these thoughts of Hello in his Exigtee des lieux
communis. We may allude here to an important parallel: the critical approach to
contemporary German writing of two German masters of aphorism, Theodor
Haecker in Satire und Polemik, and Karl Kraus in the whole of his work.
We may also call attention here to Barbey d'Aurevilly's and Hello's analysis
of the romantic subjectivism which began with Rousseau, reflected in the critical
work of a later generation, in Pierre Laserre's Les Romantiques (1908) and in the
various books of Ernest de Seillieres.
l8 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
in the Gallican controversy at the Sorbonne ? And who reads
Pascal's friends Arnauld or Nicole, except perhaps to find some
references to Pascal ?
Pascal, however, is one of the thinkers who did more perhaps
than anyone else to make his century great. He was, in his
various aspects, the highest expression of his time and of
religious thought.
He was, above all, in that broader and more complex sense
which we have explained, a master of style, and it was he who
defined style better than any other writer:
Quand on voit le style naturel, on est tout itonne et ravi, car on
s'attendait de voir un auteur et on trouve un homme. . . . Ceux-ld
honorent bien la nature, qui lui apprennent qu'elle parle de tout et mime
de theologie.1
Un mime sens change selon les paroles qui V expriment. Les sens
regoivent des paroles leur digniti, au lieu de la leur donner.2
Eloquence qui persuade par douceur, nonpar empire, en tyran, non en roi?
For Pascal, and for all those who have ever meditated like
him on this particular problem, the full religious truth is also
the full social truth. If not the first, Pascal is at any rate the
most powerful master of the religious argument in defence of
the social order. His unerring sense of precision, his geometrical
sense of perfect proportion, his mathematical experience of the
extreme limits of rational and intellectual truth, make him a
major figure in the history of modern apologetics. Right up to
the twentieth century, a great deal of French thought was to be
a comment and a gloss on those unique fragments, providen-
tially left unfinished, which we know as the Pensees. As a
secular defender of the Faith, he is the spiritual ancestor of
Joseph de Maistre. His social doctrine on Order, which he
considers to be preserved by the sound sense of the common
people, who always instinctively prefer Order to anarchy, was
to be the social doctrine of Bonald. It was also to encounter the
criticism of Voltaire (for whom Pascal's relativism went too
far) and, more recently, that of Jacques Maritain, who, in his
attempt to define the Christian attitude to the Things that are
not Caesar's, and the Christian task in the Redemption du Temps,
accuses Pascal of a " Christian cynicism " which, in his view,
the Angelic Doctor would never have approved. We shall
return to this debate,
1 Pensies: Section I, 29, in the version edited by L6on Brunschvicg. Paris. 1904.
2 Ibid. Section I, 225. 8 Ibid. Section I, 130.
INTRODUCTION 19
From the diametrically opposite philosophical camp, Henri
Poincare's Science et Hypothese and Boutroux's whole system form
something of a belated commentary on (and confirmation of)
Pascal's fundamental thesis of the primacy of belief, which he
preferred to that primacy of thought formulated by Descartes.
Cartesian philosophy attempted to jettison Aristotelian and
medieval scholastics. In the end, it confronted man with the
Absolute, in a world of pure syllogism and lofty abstraction.
Pascal returned man to his natural level, he put human ethics
back into the social and historical context, gave a more natural
expression to notions of philosophy and gave Reason and
Will back their natural direction: La raison croit naturellement
et la volonti airne naturellement ... a surprising and paradoxical
statement at first sight, but it shows Pascal's wisdom at its
deepest. It comprises his whole philosophy in one short
formula, which can be meditated upon and commented on
almost indefinitely. It gives us perhaps the final word in the
controversy on the relation between Reason and Will, which
has been familiar in the Church since the days of St Thomas
and Duns Scotus. Pascal saw both Divinity and Humanity,
the attributes of God and the faculties of Man, in the fullness
of their nature. He fought two errors, two exaggerations : the
Cartesian separation of the Absolute from the complex nature
of Man, whose nature includes some of the attributes of the
Creator, and at the same time, the exaggeration of Montaigne,
who saw nothing but relativity, uncertainty and passing futility
in the human world. Man is ni ange, ni bite, a warning against
the exaggeration1 of Descartes and against the sensualist
dangers of Montaigne. These two dangers, in the following
century — the fatal eighteenth, preceding the Revolution and
the whole contemporary catharsis — marked the beginning, and
were the cause, of all the aberrations of the French mind and of
French-speaking Europe, since the grand siecle, the century of
style, had made Europe French-speaking.
Yet before we attempt a survey of the eighteenth century,
the period of the Revolution and the religious rejuvenation
which followed it, let us hint at a few more aspects of the enor-
mously extensive and rich inheritance which Pascal left us.
We often find an echo of Pascal in unexpected quarters. We
1 Jacques Maritain in Trois Rtformateurs — Luther, Descartes and Rousseau,
Paris, 1929, gives perhaps the fullest analysis of this " angelisme" in Descartes'
philosophy, the most systematic Catholic criticism of the postulate of knowledge
separated from human nature and from society. Already in Barbey d'Aurevilly's
Les Prophites du Passi, we see this criticism of Descartes.
20 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
find one in Theodor Haecker's passionate polemics against the
" neo-Manichean "x tendencies of our time, present in all his
books, against the modern primacy of Liberty over Order
which the nineteenth century tried to establish and which
denied a divine quality to Order and to Power, thus decrying
Power as an evil which men, formed in this mental atmos-
phere— Communists, Nazis and Fascists — passionately embraced
as the means to achieve their evil ends. It was Pascal who
defined Power, and the right place of Power, and who thus
defined Tyranny as power used in the wrong place; Force,
which claims love and affection instead of obedience; beauty
and loveliness which claim not love, but obedience; eloquence
which tries to persuade not by strong and conclusive, but by
ingratiating argument ; and above all, the human presumption
which assumes the force of absolute Justice, while the whole
condemned nature of Man can only hope to render that Power
and Force just, instead of transforming justice into Power — all
this signified for Pascal the various forms of tyranny. A contem-
porary of the English Revolution, Pascal had a foreboding of
the French Revolution and judged it one hundred and forty
years before it happened.
This is perhaps a somewhat neglected aspect of a much-
explored and much-commented-upon genius. There may even
be readers who are astonished to be told that Pascal was a
defender of Order. There are often indications to the contrary.
Many are inclined to see the author of the Pensees as the opposite
to Bossuet in every respect, and to class the latter as the spiritual
ancestor of more recent bien-pensants, of traditionalists, who
conform complacently ; some of these — unfortunately the least
attractive makers and defenders of platitudes, such as a Henry
Bordeaux or a Ferdinand Brunetiere — have often enough
attempted to cover their thin theories and thinner style with
Bossuet's great name and authority. In the face of all this,
does not Pascal represent a " revolutionary " sort of Catholi-
cism, an unconventional style in defence of conservative values,
an unorthodox system of reasoning which concluded in orthodox
truth; is he not the spiritual ancestor of all great Catholic
writers who, in an unorthodox way, have defended orthodox
truth — Barbey d'Aurevilly and Hello, Bloy and Peguy, and
1 " Neo-Manichean " is Theodor Haecker's own coinage. It originates in the
Manichean conclusion that the struggle between good and evil has no decisive
outcome, that God's power, not being the stronger of the two, does not give the
final word on the issue.
INTRODUCTION 21
outside France, of Chesterton, and in a less direct and con-
scious line, even of Kierkegaard and Dostoievsky ?
We have made an effort in the preceding pages to elucidate
the sense, and to ascertain the value of Bossuet's heritage, and
we have taken up our position in a recurring controversy about
classification. Bossuet and Pascal certainly form a contrast to
each other. The author of the Pensees is undoubtedly also the
spiritual ancestor of all those who defended orthodox truth in
an unorthodox style, those whom we have already named and
many more besides. Pascal's work is above all a demonstration.
The mathematician which he always remained began his
Pensees by distinguishing strictly between the esprit de giometrie
and the esprit de finesse. His work is a demonstration, made with
geometric precision, that Reason cannot exist without belief,
the Will without Love, or human life without God. Pascal
relegated all godless science to the chaos of the unthink-
able, all godless ethics to the chaos of the unlivable; he
it was who put Jacques Maritain on the right track when he
coined the phrase Vinvivable atheisme. The Pensies, despite its
fragmentary character, is the first fully elaborated study of
fallen nature, a study to which Pascal was after all brought by
his opponents the Jesuits, casuists of the school of Escobar, and
not by his Jansenist friends. It was the study which Balzac
was to take up later in his novels, Leon Bloy in his volumes of
spiritual autobiography — and far away from France and out-
side Catholicism — Dostoievsky and Kierkegaard. Pascal was
the foremost teacher of a vital Christianity, of an " existen-
tialist " Christianity, as it has lately been fashionable to say,
although he would probably be the last to take part in any
querelle d'Allemands on a possible separation of Essence and
Existence, and fortunately the last author whose support can
be claimed for any " ism."
Like most great spiritual figures, Pascal rejected worldliness
and easy conformity. He rejected and condemned acceptance
of the riches of this world by those who did so with an easy
conscience. He even went further; he rejected that wisdom
which, by serving the necessities of this world, or human
concerns only, provides an easy moral satisfaction here below.
The primacy of Order over Liberty was Pascal's final conclu-
sion. This primacy was manifest in the chronological sense in
the Bible, it was obvious on the level of theology and clear in
logic. It was a primacy established by a " revolutionary " — if
we care to apply this term to any man who feels a passionate
22 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
detachment from the world, which we do not dare to call holi-
ness, but which we feel cannot be far removed from it — but
a " revolutionary " who consciously judged in advance, and
more sternly, all the revolutions which were to come than he
judged the conventions and the platitudes of this world and of
his century. Pascal realised this primacy of Order better than
anyone else, better than those weaker minds and hearts who
came after him, and attempted to challenge and destroy it by
postulating an imaginary order which reflected Man's liberty
and free will alone. That was why he loved Liberty, the Liberty
of Man to know God and to love Him, the Liberty to follow the
dictates of his heart and to act accordingly. Dieu incline le
coeur. . . .
4. DECADENCE AND CRISIS: THE EIGHTEENTH
AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES
For about a century, Europe spoke French. Her princes
were brought up on Fenelon's Telemaque; the taste of the
educated classes was formed on La Fontaine from their earliest
years; La Bruyere and La Rochefoucauld were the masters of
every conversation; passion spoke the language of Corneille,
sentiment the language of Racine, good sense spoke the
language of Moliere and abstraction the language of Descartes.
All cathedral pulpits echoed the eloquence of Bossuet and
Bourdaloue, and few letters were written without a delicate
and charming touch of Mme. de Sevigne. Italy stood for
colour, rhyme and sound ; Spain had once meant romance and
imagination; now France epitomised thought, speech and
style, and as infinitely more people speak and write in prose
than in the language of colour, sound or image, France
dominated more minds and assimilated an infinitely greater
number of people, who, to think and write in French, needed
not much more than a few brief stays in Paris. We must cast
our imagination back to this French-speaking Europe, before
we can understand why and how the French Revolution
excited so many foreign passions, and why so many foreign
thinkers produced their best work on French issues, without in
the least feeling strangers to the quarrel — Burke and Horace
Walpole in England, de Maistre in Italy, young Metternich and
Friedrich von Gentz in Germany, Karl-Ludwig Haller and
Johannes von Miiller in Switzerland. There were great
INTRODUCTION 23
French writers in the " French century of Europe " (which in
the strict calendar sense began earlier than the eighteenth, and
lasted on longer) who were leading men in their own countries :
Joseph de Maistre, Ambassador and Minister of the Kingdom
of Piedmont-Sardinia, and Prince de Ligne, Field-Marshal and
Ambassador of Austria. They represented French thought,
style and wit wherever they were, even when de Maistre was
planning the downfall of Napoleon in St Petersburg, and even
when de Ligne asked for a last opportunity to practise the
principle of his life — tonner et itonner — at the head of an army
composed of Walloons, Hungarians and Groats pour ddcharle-
magniser Bonaparte. Right up to our own day, French has been
the intellectual language of Egypt and of modern Greece, and
hardly a generation has elapsed since Jose -Maria de Heredia
from Latin America and Jean Moreas from Greece were
considered French, or at any rate, Parisian poets.
This is a unique case of the extension of a civilisation which
is only equalled by the Hellenism of antiquity ; never since the
Oriental Philo and the Roman Marcus Aurelius wrote Greek
has there been a case of a universal language being adopted
voluntarily, for no other reason than love of style and intel-
lectual delight. Yet this enormous and almost unprecedented
peaceful conquest of a continent, based only on refinement of
thought, taste and style, has not been altogether a blessing for
France herself. The cause of the decay — the cause of all
decay — is facility, the easily acquired technique of imitation
and reproduction.1 In the second part of his Faust, this is
Goethe's vision of the Witches' Sabbath: an almost universal
devaluation, through easy reproduction, of everything noble,
even of everything sacred; the debasement of gold and of
honour — of everything except the cross on the hilt of the
Imperial sword, which pseudo-Field Marshals, as not truly
consecrated men, were incapable of using. If we accept the
proposed formula of facility as a warning of doom to come,2
we cannot do otherwise than discern the signs of approaching
catastrophe in the period of the French intellectual conquest
1 Perhaps this one formula will dispense us from recapitulating the volumes of
speculation on the decay of civilisations, which Vico, Hegel and Spengler, to
mention only the dead, spent their whole lives in producing.
* This certainly offers us no happy augury for our own century of mechanical
reproduction, although Catholics cannot fall into the aimless, unredeemed
pessimism and confessed emptiness of the representative voices of the century,
from the massive technician H. G. Wells to the refined intellectualist Paul Val6ry,
from the grave Andre Gide to the lucid cynic Jean-Paul Sartre.
24 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
of Europe. The Revolution itself, in all its consequences and
variations, the Revolution considered en bloc — as Georges
Clemenceau, a belated heir of Jacobinism, wanted to consider
it, that is, from 1 789 to the Third Republic — must have appeared
to those who were still near enough to the old ideal of greatness
and of style as facile imitation run riot. The Revolution
invented its Deity and its cult, it re-enacted its own version of
Sparta, Athens and Rome — rather than an innovation, it was
a vast imitation of models. Almost a whole century of hybrid
facility preceded it and another century of regret followed. As
an anonymous and, for that reason, probably widespread
criticism of Voltaire put it — il a fait de V esprit pour ceux qui n'en
out pas. The whole century which followed him, and the
Revolution which quoted him so often, but which would
probably have guillotined him had he lived to see it, was one
of undoubted intellectual expansion, although it may be
doubted whether this expansion brought us any nearer to real
greatness — to the greatness of form and style of Bossuet. In
the seventeenth century, greatness was within the reach of a
man whose thought did not aim higher than La Fontaine's;
in the nineteenth century, the love of greatness, of form and
beauty, took the form of desperate protests against their time
on the part of Flaubert and Baudelaire in France, of Carlyle
and Ruskin in England, of Jacob Burckhardt and his pupil
Nietzsche in the German-speaking world; we leave aside for
the time being those who found in God and the Church a
remedy to this aesthetic despair, as we have dealt with them in
another context, and shall have to return to them.
Decadence, a decay of greatness in style, began what has
grown into one of the greatest and most significant spiritual
and moral crises of modern mankind. Just as, in the mechani-
cal sphere, most mortal accidents occur because machines get
out of control, so in the sphere of human history and the history
of human thought all catastrophes can be traced back to words
and values which have lost their original meaning, and have
passed beyond the control of those minds which once fully
possessed their original sense. Three figures divided the intel-
lectual atmosphere of the grand siecle from the Revolution and
from the whole trend which began with the principles of 1 789,
that crucial trend which is not yet at an end. They are
Voltaire, Montesquieu and Rousseau.
The change was gradual with Voltaire; it was hardly
noticeable at the beginning of his literary output and only
INTRODUCTION 25
became final when, at a mature age and with a considerable
achievement behind him, he made a prolonged stay in England,
and received the influence of English thought and literature.
This was the only foreign thought which came to full maturity
later than the French, for the golden age of Dante and
Petrarch, Tasso and Ariosto, the siglo de oro of Cervantes and
of the great spiritual teachers of Spain preceded the full
maturity of French thought and expression. Voltaire inter-
preted, in a language which the whole of intellectual Europe
spoke and read, English thought from Hobbes to Locke. Even
before Candide, which was a challenge to the French-inspired
European thought of Leibnitz, political and social " Vol-
tairianism " hardly existed.
Voltaire had style, and according to the lights of his century
(the taste of which was largely formed by him) even poetry.
But unlike Corneille and Racine, in whom poetry and style
were the natural accompaniment to dramatic action, style in
Voltaire became merely decorative and moralising was the
chief aim of poetry.1 But rhyme and drama were accidental
forms of Voltaire's philosophy and do not concern us here.
We are not writing a French, or even a West European literary
history, but an analysis of the evolution of the theme of
Authority and Liberty in the Western, and above all in the
French mind, since the religious and moral crisis arising from
these two notions first broke over France, and by French intel-
lect was propagated throughout the world.
To decry Voltaire as an " atheist " is a simplification. Some
of his contemporaries applied this term to him: with a true
woman's instinct, Maria-Theresa detested him and his whole
sect of " philosophers," and Mozart frankly rejoiced at the end
of this " hideous atheist " whose dry reasoning was in such
contrast to his own simplicity and angelic purity as a musician.2
Since his own time, Voltaire has found a champion, surprisingly
enough, in Jacques Maritain, who, in his Humanisme Integral, is
1 A similar evolution of English literary style, a transformation of poetry and
style under the influence of the English philosophical movement of the eighteenth
century, which was the decisive influence on Voltaire's mind, is described in The
Life of Reason — Hobbes, Locke and Bolingbroke by D. G. James. London. Longmans,
Green & Co., 1949.
2 For the influence which conflicting opinions on Voltaire played on the
politics of the eighteenth century, it is useful to read Capefigue's Marie-Thirlse et
Fridiric II and his Madame Pompadour, although prudence and caution must be
exercised before accepting the views of this very enjoyable, but strongly anti-
revolutionary historian, who judged Voltaire and the Revolution from the per-
spective of Louis -Philippe's time and from his own loyalist feelings.
26 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
" grateful to him for his idea of civic tolerance," and in the
English Catholic poet Alfred Noyes, who (censored, it is true,
in Rome for so doing) saw in Voltaire a critic of the Church
who was imbued with a truly Catholic spirituality, and was
thus superior to all Protestant heresiarchs.
Voltaire is a very complex case indeed. He did not simply
open up a wrong path, as many others did, but he summed up
(so to speak) aberrations from the right path of Faith and
Reason: he epitomised the aberrations of all those who had
stopped half way before him on some wrong path. He was a
" Gallican " with Bossuet in his Siecle de Louis XIV, and in the
Essai sur les moeurs he was far more Jansenist than Pascal.1 A
believer in God, this champion of logic denied most of the
logical implications of Divine omnipotence, such as the
possibility of miracles and revelation.
Human wisdom was the only authority he accepted, yet — like
Berkeley, Hume, and Kant after him — he denied that the
human mind could ever know final certainty. That his passion
for justice was genuine and that he attacked real abuses and
scandals of his time, we do not want to deny. There was com-
passion and even charity in Voltaire; but a total lack of
humility spoiled even this, the highest of his gifts. Indignant
over the abuse of power, he proposed (again illogically enough
for a champion of Reason) that philosopher princes should
enjoy absolute power; yet, at the same time, this keen moralist,
in his Lettres sur V Angleterre, was ready to pay the heavy price of
oligarchical and aristocratic corruption, for the sake of
" Liberty." To sum up his importance in the field which is
our present concern, Voltaire secularised both Authority and
Liberty, not admitting that either had any other foundation
than human reason and human need. In this sense alone, he
is the father of Revolutions, yet no writer, thinker, or critic of
public affairs was more at home in a Catholic, monarchical
and aristocratic society. And nobody has felt more uprooted in
a secularist and democratic Republic than belated Voltairians
such as Charles Maurras and Anatole France. The first made
a desperate attempt, in the early part of our century, to recon-
struct mentally a monarchical and aristocratic society without
a religion, but founded on merely pragmatic necessities, recog-
nised by Reason; he even tried to construct a Church which
1 When it suited his purpose : when he wanted to argue the immediate presence
of divinity in the soul, which does not therefore need the mediation of Church or
priesthood.
INTRODUCTION 27
would teach doctrines that were admittedly problematic in the
light of Reason, but which were needed for the social discipline
of the masses. The second belated Voltairian clung desperately,
under cover of a self-imposed and permanent ironical smile, to
what remained of monarchical, clerical and aristocratic
France, to all the red robes of Cardinals, gala swords of
Academicians and tiaras of great ladies that survived in the
drawing-rooms of the Faubourg St Germain, until the eve of
the twentieth century and the First World War.
Opportet ut fiant scandala. . . . Voltaire was the scandal of
a narrow world which was disguised in the solemn robes of
Authority; but it sinned in its Liberty, for the substance of
Authority, the primacy of Order, was no longer present in its
mind and heart. He was the minor, very minor, scandal of a
world which had lost every Cartesian perspective of the
Absolute, every Pascalian sense of the Infinite, every sense of
the unity of essence taught by Bossuet, and thus even of every
measure of true human greatness. Even when this world, a
little more than a century after Voltaire had shaken it with
laughter rather than indignation, took " lessons in energy "
from Maurice Barres, or listened to the pious, complacent
reassurances of Paul Bourget, it will not deceive us. This was
just " the world," the one rejected by Pascal. The greatest
glory and the culminating point of French letters, as we said
before, came when Pascal, a man not of the Church but of the
world, rejected worldly wisdom, and at the same time made it
quite clear that the primacy of Order was the first principle on
which society was based, and when human society, a unit in
the natural order, received from a thinker in its own ranks a
declaration of its own supernatural nature. As the Abb6
Bremond1 said, the true history of literature, like the true history
of a nation, is the religious history of the people, and this is
more so in the case of France than of any other nation.
The Gospel tells us to judge people by their fruits. We may
weigh the fruits of Voltaire, Charles Maurras and Anatole
France, and we may taste them. They are not very substantial
or very sweet. The first of them adopted the pose of intran-
sigent affirmation and of strict doctrine: he assumed the
attitude of the depositary of a great classic, monarchical
1 Henri Bremond : Histoire du sentiment religieux dans la littirature franfaise depuis
le XVIIe siecle jusqu'd nos jours: a work whose chief trend may be described as
religious and Catholic romanticism, a religious history based on the study of
profane texts.
28 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
doctrine, dignified by the scarlet robe of Richelieu ; yet he was
nothing more than the teacher of rabid semi -literates, worthy
of the black shirt rather than of the scarlet robe. Maurras,
recognising a fellow-Voltairian in Anatole France, singled him
out as the great writer of his generation, despite the revolu-
tionary sympathies of this latter, arguing that his aesthetic
preference for every sort of intransigence was more favourable
to the anarchist worker than to the moderate bourgeois of the
Third Republic. The fact is that Anatole France's whole
message and style died with the moderate bourgeois of the
Third Republic, and in any case were no more worthy of
survival than this era itself. The said bourgeois felt that Balzac,
the " reactionary," execrated them; felt offended by the
impotent ill -humour of Flaubert; was shocked, not by the
opium-smoking of Baudelaire, or the absinthe-drinking of
Verlaine, but by the final conversion of both poetes maudits. He
was delighted and pleased, on the other hand, by Anatole
France, the " revolutionary " sophist; flattered rather than
disquietened by Maurras, the " monarchical " sophist, who
offered him plenty of justification for a comfortable social
immorality, and a comfortable escape from serious affirmation
into an easy and pleasant position of prolonged and unper-
turbed scepticism — a position which was compatible with the
external cult of those ancestors of the bourgeoisie, the Athenians
(much beloved by both Maurras and Anatole France) who put
Socrates to death.
A fruit of Voltaire, outside France, was Heinrich Heine.
Many critics on both sides of the Rhine have dwelt on the
Plutarchian parallel between this German who served the
French king, and Voltaire who served the King of Prussia.
The parallel goes further than that; but, unfortunately for
Voltaire, what was really noble in Heine was not his wit or
his persiflage, still less his grim and presumptuous laughter and
his facile sentiment, but the infinite regret, behind all this, at
the slow approach of a terrible end, the tragic collapse under
what he felt to be the double curse of Germany and Juda, his
break with atheism " not only out of disgust," but through " a
fear " which he admitted — the fear of a sensitive artist in the
face of Revolutions that were yet to come in an apostate
Germany, and a faithless modern Israel which had denied
Jehovah.
Perhaps the best spiritual descendant of Voltaire was
Stendhal. Practically ignored during his life-time, he was the
INTRODUCTION 29
last writer to belong to the eighteenth century, although he
wrote exclusively in the nineteenth.1 Stendhal was undoubtedly
of the family of Voltaire. In him there was no melancholy
regret, none of the nostalgia for a more beautiful past, which
began with Chateaubriand, the German romantics, young
Victor Hugo and Walter Scott, and continued throughout the
whole of the nineteenth century. This melancholy and
nostalgia sounded a more sincere note than all the artificial
paroxysms concerning the " future," all the semi -scientific,
optimistic philosophies which, in most cases, were nothing but
retrospective Utopias, transferred to the future from some
imaginary past. Stendhal, like Voltaire and the eighteenth
century as a whole, believed in the power of the senses, and in
almost nothing else. Curiosity concerning the sensual nature
of man comprised almost his only philosophy. His was an
exceptional case of a narrow and insufficient philosophy which
did not spoil the greatness of his art. He was fortunate in that
he inherited sensualism, rather than dry rationalism, from
Voltaire; and he nourished it with Italian impressions and
ample subjects for meditation drawn from history and politics,
especially in the Chartreuse de Parme. But Balzac, Stendhal's
pupil, who was greater than his master and who virtually dis-
covered him, saw in the author of the Chartreuse de Parme more
of Machiavelli than of Voltaire. He recognised in Stendhal's
Conte Mosca a portrait of his much-admired Metternich, a
homage to superior statesman-like principles and intelligence,
and he deplored the fact that only some fifteen hundred men
who formed the brain of Europe would be able to understand
Stendhal and the book which a nineteenth-century Machiavelli
would have written.2
Voltaire's heirs did not therefore always choose the side of
Liberty in the great debate between Authority and Liberty,
despite the blessing their master gave to Benjamin Franklin's
grandson in the name of" God and Liberty." We have already
pointed out that it would be very difficult indeed to make a
modern democrat out of the very loyal chronicler ofZ<? siecle de
Louis XIV and Le sikle de Louis XV, the man who at one moment
sought and obtained the favours of Madame de Pompadour
and her circle, and who, before his disgrace at Potsdam, was
1 Just as Chateaubriand was the first writer of the nineteenth century, although
his early period belonged to the eighteenth.
2 Etude sur M. Beyle, par Honore de Balzac. Epilogue to an 1846 Paris edition
of La Chartreuse de Parme, p. 484 sq.
30 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
at any rate a devoted friend of the King of Prussia. He admired
tyranny in Peter the Great, he admired the absolute philosophy
of China, he reproved Leibnitz for not making the new
Alexander, Charles XII of Sweden, his pupil, as Aristotle made
Alexander of Macedon his pupil. But when it comes to Charles
XII sending the royal boots to preside over the Stockholm
Senate, Voltaire expressed little democratic objection, just as
his much praised humanitarian tolerance did not go so far as
to make him a friend of the Jews — as Bonald remarked in La
Question Juive1 ( 1 806) .
The secularisation of Liberty by Voltaire, which we have
analysed above, required a full and complete Catholic answer,
which he did not live to receive, and which could not perhaps
even have been given without the practical experience of an
integral Voltairianism which mankind received with the French
Revolution. This answer was given by Joseph de Maistre. It
cannot be repeated too often that Christian thought has always
triumphed when it possessed the knowledge and the spiritual
weapons of its opponent. The Redeemer and His Apostles
knew the Scriptures better than did the Synagogue; St
Augustine knew Greek thought better than any of the pagan
philosophers, and the force of evil better than the Manicheans;
St Thomas was more unprejudiced and tolerant towards the
thought of those who did not possess the full measure of Chris-
tian grace than any of the Albigenses; St Ignatius was
superior both in independence of mind and self-discipline to
any Protestant; St Alphonsus Liguori was stricter and more
austere in his submission to Authority than any Jansenist, who
rejected it for allegedly purer forms of Liberty and austerity.
Pascal was superior to Montaigne in esprit de finesse and to
Descartes in esprit de geometries Joseph de Maistre had a finer
1 Oeuvres completes de M. le Vicomte de Bonald, Pair de France. Paris, 1859. Vol. 2,
P- 934:
" Quandje dis que les Juifs sont objet de la bienveillance des philosophes, ilfaut en excepter
le chef de Vicole philosophique Voltaire, qui toute sa vie a montri une aversion decidie contre
ce peuple injortuni.
" II est probable que cet homme cilebre ne haissait dans les Juifs que les dipositaires et les
timoins de la viriti et de la r&vilation qu'il a jure" d'andantir."
Thus Bonald discerned in Voltaire the beginnings of a more recent anti-
Christianism, disguised as hatred of the Jews, that anti-Semitism which moved
L6on Bloy to write Le salut par les Juifs.
1 We mean naturally esprit de giomitrie in philosophical thought and style. The
respective greatness of Pascal and Descartes in geometry and mathematics proper
is not our province, although creditable sources inform us that no scientific
authority questions that Pascal is entitled to the very highest rank. We have done
our best to study his scientific work as far as it is relevant for his philosophy and
theology.
INTRODUCTION 31
love of history than Voltaire and did not mind appearing, when
the necessity of the argument required, even pedantic. He was
fully prepared to appear as a " philosopher " in order to refute
the bad, eighteenth-century meaning of the word, which no
longer bore any relationship to the philosophia perennis, but
followed Descartes in purely individual reasoning, or Berkeley,
Hume and Kant in considering the consciously and confessedly
doubtful individual judgement as the final authority. When
he had to play this role, it was in order to establish a common
ground for discussion; then, after demolishing his opponent's
arguments, he appeared in his true colours as a man of the
philosophia perennis, as a Christian whose concern it was to
believe, rather than to be omniscient, for — this is the noblest
aspect of de Maistre's thought — he admitted fully that it is more
difficult to believe than to know, but he insisted that the effort
to believe, and the sacrifice which acceptance of belief entails,
is in itself heroic, and an act of moral greatness.
The primacy of morals is the subject of Joseph de Maistre's
great dialogues called Les Soirees de St Petersbourg. Taking
part in these conversations, in the first year of the century,
were an Imperial Russian Senator, a young French emigre'
nobleman in the Czar's service, and de Maistre himself. He
waited almost twenty years before he wrote them down. The
argument in the dialogues, however, is not addressed to the
elderly Russian and the young Frenchman, but to the whole of
the eighteenth century, in which Joseph de Maistre spent the
greater part of his life, forty -seven out of his sixty-eight years.
Voltaire separated morals from faith and dogma and put the
accent on morality. When Voltaire challenged Pascal by
coining aphorisms in opposition to the Pensees, he challenged
him on moral and intellectual sidelines, not indeed on real
fundamentals : belief in God and in Christ. Joseph de Maistre
replied to Voltaire. Voltaire said in essence that he was not
concerned with a man's beliefs, as long as his actions were
moral. D6 Maistre replied that, as a rational sceptic, he was
unable to trust anybody's morals, unless they were prepared
for the first and most difficult sacrifice of all, the effort to
believe. Voltaire and his whole century dismissed the Catholic
position by saying that it was easy to believe, that any child
could do so, whereas to know demanded a serious and manly
effort. Joseph de Maistre replied that it was quite easy to know,
but that it was a gift and a grace to believe; that it required a
heroic effort on the part of all the human faculties, purity,
32 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
imagination and emotion.1 And he illustrated his point with
his habitual sense of paradox : it was easy enough, he said, to
know the Theses of Wittenberg, the Thirty -nine Articles
of the Church of England, the Confession of Augsburg,
or the Helvetic Confession, whereas a man needed rhythm,
musical sense and deep emotions to sing the Nicene
Creed.
Joseph de Maistre created new matter and a new style for
apologetics, although there is no doubt that he owed much to
Pascal and to Bossuet.
He was indebted to Pascal for his sense of paradox and for
his wit, which defeated Voltaire and disconcerted the Vol-
tairians for ever. Wit, satire, jokes, these terrible arms which
Voltaire used against the Church, were mastered in the Soirees,
and turned against him. Only a few Voltairians in later years
dared to try to use them again after de Maistre: Paul-Louis
Courier, in whose hands the Voltairian weapons became either
vulgar or heavy and pedantic, like his German-inspired
Hellenic science, and Victor Hugo, when he wrote Les
Chdtiments. Yet ever since Peguy's brilliant exposure and
unmasking of Hugo's pseudo -democracy and pseudo-pacifism,2
we can never again believe, to Hugo's credit, that this grandiose
bard of military glories, this rhetorical but genuine mystic, was
ever a Voltairian. After all it was not the Church, but the
Liberal bourgeoisie, who rallied round the flag of conformity
waved by Napoleon III, which was the target of Les Chdtiments;
and we must not forget that, as we are told in the Memoirs of
Granier de Cassagnac, Hugo wished his disciples de dire franchement
que Voltaire est bete, many years before committing the blasphemy
in Actes et Paroles of comparing the tears of Jesus with the smile
of Voltaire, as the two most powerful weapons against the
evils of this world. Anatole France tried to make Voltairian
jokes ; he was at best an unconscious humorist when he created
1 We may quote here a few echoes, only partly conscious and direct ones, of
Joseph de Maistre and the Soiries : When Balzac declared so emphatically in the
Preface to the Comidie Humaine that he was on the same side as Bossuet and Bonald,
he certainly echoed de Maistre; also when he said that human society did not
need masters to teach it how to doubt, but masters who knew how to affirm and
how to believe, i.e. Authority, which, in the thought of this great inventor of an
imaginary society, was the keystone of social justice and happiness. Chesterton
found truth in the irresistible paradoxes of the Faith, and not in logical but
unimaginative reasoning. The whole life-work of Kierkegaard was an auto-
biographical comment on the moral value of the effort to believe. For Romano
Guardini, real knowledge begins " beyond the self-evident," in the mystical
sphere which can only be entered at the cost of sacrifice.
2 In Notre Jeunesse et Victor-Marie, comte Hugo.
INTRODUCTION 33
Professor Bergeret, and only succeeded in making us smile
happily in small masterpieces like Le Jongleur de Notre Dame, at
stories of child -like devotion. Joseph de Maistre banished the
enemies of the Church into that " Sorbonne-esque " and
pedantic gravity which they assumed in the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, amidst the scorn and the laughter —
and what laughter! — of Veuillot, Barbey d'Aurevilly, Charles
Peguy, Chesterton, and Theodor Haecker. He laughs longest
who laughs last, and thanks to Joseph de Maistre, the
Church laughed last on all the topics raised by the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But let us
rather quote de Maistre, the superior protagonist of para-
dox, before we show him as the spiritual son of Bossuet in
his graver, but not necessarily more mystical or greater
moments :
Rien rtegale la patience de ce peuple qui se dit litre. En cinq ans
on lui a fait accepter trois constitutions et le gouvernement revolution-
naire. Les tyrans se succedent et toujours le peuple obe'it. Jamais on
n'a vu reussir un seul pour se tirer de la nullite. Ses maitres ont reussi d
le foudroyer en se moquant de lui. Us lui ont dit: Vous croyez ne pas
vouloir cette loi, mais sqyez sdrs que vous la voulez. Si vous osez la
refuser, nous tirerons sur vous pour vous punir de ne pas vouloir ce que
vous voulez.1
He could show the party who believed in the primacy of
Liberty, fellow-exiles of his in Lausanne before his St. Peters-
burg period — Mme. de Stael and Benjamin Constant — those
who were later to be answered more fully by Bonald than de
Maistre ever cared to do, that he, the Piedmontese whose
mother-tongue was French, knew his Europe, and did not
suffer from any sort of French " provincialism," which Mme.
de Stael tried to overcome by recommending English politics
to France in her political writing, German learning and senti-
ment in De V Allemagne, and Italian emotions in Corinne. Not
only did he know his Machiavelli to such a degree that he could
be fair and just to this ardent republican, from whom he took
most striking arguments against attempts made to replace with
paper constitutions the natural conditions consecrated by
history and experience; but he knew his Kant and Lutheran
Germany, whose intellectual influence he saw spreading to
schismatic Russia, where the secular authority confined itself
to resisting the true authority of the unbroken tradition of
1 Considerations sur la France. Lausanne. 1797. Ch. VIII.
34 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
Rome, instead of resisting the intrusion of wild intellectual
liberties from heretical Germany.1 He knew English philo-
sophy and the English language well enough to conclude his
famous polemics against Locke with the half-serious, half-
comic lament: " L 'esprit europkn est emprisonne. ... It is locked
in."
When she was in Lausanne, Mme. de Stael delighted in the
frankness and naturalness of great military style, personified in
Prince de Ligne, for the publication of whose aphorisms and
recollections she was responsible.2 We share in this delight,
and are almost inclined to like Mme. de Stael better
because of it. But only Joseph de Maistre could show in
Les Soiries de St Pe'tersbourg the essence of military style
and morals, in a way which established a relationship
between all dedicated lives, and showed that all manifesta-
tions of purity come from a sense of dedication and
sacrament :
Le spectacle epouvantable du carnage rcendurcit pas le veritable
guerrier. Au milieu dusang qu'ilfaitcouler, il est humain comme V epouse
est chaste dans les transports de V amour.
And only he could explain so pleasantly, a little
further on in the Soiries, that it is love of liberty and
love of humanity that may make a man reject popular
revolutions and pacifist Utopias, which are inhuman and
only possible at the price of tyranny, and more cruel " wars
to end war."
It is rather an echo of Bossuet that we hear in the early de
Maistre of the Considerations sur la France. It is the belief in the
providential mission of Charlemagne's monarchy. For de
Maistre, it was the hand of Providence which had prevented
the destruction of France, the country which had been given
the mission of unifying Europe, not under a sceptre or a sword,
but in Christian civilisation and liberty. This devotion to
France — Joseph de Maistre was Piedmontese by citizenship, and
if he had a second country it was Russia — this devotion was such
1 Joseph de Maistre: Quatre chapitres inidits sur la Russie. Paris, 1859. The
volume was edited by Admiral Count Robert de Maistre, who during his father's
term of office at St Petersburg served as an officer under Czar Alexander I, and
who, with his uncle General Xavier de Maistre, the author of Voyage autour de
ma chambre, Lajeune SibSrienne, etc., had an immense and intimate knowledge of the
Empire of the Czars.
2 Cf. M. Louis Witmer's most interesting study of the an ti -revolutionary and
anti -Napoleonic party in Europe: Le Prince de Ligne, Frideric de Gentz et Jean de
Miiller. Leur correspondence inidite. Paris, 1925.
INTRODUCTION 35
a constant factor in everything that he wrote,1 from the
Considerations in 1797 to Du Pape, composed at the time of the
fall of Napoleon, that it is understandable that Friedrich von
Schlegel, or Joseph Gorres, reproached him for misunder-
standing the Germanic sacrum Imperium, concerning which de
Maistre was hardly less critical than Voltaire, and never far
removed from the views of the author ofEssai sur les m&urs, who
sided with the traditional French concept of European primacy,
but without the religious content and the significance of this
concept.
Joseph de Maistre is the great lay Doctor of Christian
Authority. He gave the various enemies of the Church a
nostalgia for a supreme religious authority. From the queer
sect of Saint-Simon, to the still queerer philosophical school of
Auguste Comte, called " positivist," from Mazzini and his
Young Europe down to Charles Maurras and his sect, this
nostalgia for a spiritual authority, for a social theology without
the Church, was to appear on every page, and in almost every
manifestation of the coming century of secular sects. This
applies even to the most highly organised and the most power-
ful of these sects, the only one among them to achieve material
power, the Communist International of Moscow. Theoretically
it even denies what the earlier sects had still affirmed — the
primacy of the spiritual — and replaces it by a crude and rough
materialism, apparently daring and intransigent, but in reality
1 Much of de Maistre's work remained in fragments during his life-time, and
the final picture of his intellectual evolution and a final analysis of his work in the
light of his biography is a fairly recent achievement. The best contributions have
been made by the Savoyard historian F. Vermale, who reconstructed his youth
and early life in ChambeYy and Turin; Georges Goyau: La pensie religieuse de
Joseph de Maistre, Paris, 1921, whose study was based on material which had
remained unpublished for a hundred years. For de Maistre's influence on German
romantic thought, we are indebted to Hermann von Grauert's Gorres und de Maistre,
in the Jahrbiicher der Gorres-Gesellschaft, Koln, 1922; and Richard von Kralik's
Das Neunzehnte Jahrhundert, in ^eitgemdsse Broschuren, Frankfurt, 1 905 ; and in the
same author's analysis of the romantic period Oesterreichische Geschichte, Wien, 1913,
p. 320 sq. On de Maistre's action in Russia, see the biography of Madame de
Swetchine by Alfred de Falloux, i860. C. Ostrogorsky: Joseph de Maistre und
seine Lehre von der hochsten Macht, Helsinki, 1932; M. Jugie: Joseph de Maistre et
Viglise greco-russe, 1922, and the publications — in Russian — by M. Makoshin and
M. Stepanov, under the auspices of the* Russian Cultural Centre in Paris, 1937.
See also Frederic Holdsworth: Joseph de Maistre et VAngleterre, Paris, 1935. The
most intuitive critical survey on de Maistre is to be found in Barbey d'Aurevilly's
Les Prophetes du Passe", 1 850. Among the serious and appreciative, although hostile,
students of de Maistre's thought, the first place goes to Sainte-Beuve. Among the
most recent studies, we may mention an analytical anthology with comments:
La politique expirimentale de Joseph de Maistre, by M. Bernard de Vaulx, Paris,
Fayard, 1940.
36 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
shameful and cowardly, calling itself " dialectical " to imply
the independence of the spiritual element, which it otherwise
denies. This usurpation of authority does not hesitate to con-
demn miscreants, brands " deviations " from the doctrine
without ever stating what it is that sets that doctrine above the
human level, and by what means that doctrine has been
authentically transmitted or can possibly be proved.
We have already shown that, challenged by Voltaire's
laughter, Joseph de Maistre drove the enemies of the Church
into an attitude of ridiculous gravity and imitation. He it was
whom even intelligent opponents like Sainte-Beuve tried to
decry as a mind preoccupied with praise of the past, who made
the clearest guess as to the future ; we can be more sure of this
than even Barbey d'Aurevilly was in 1850, when he first called
him a prophet. His central thesis was that Man is essentially
unfit to " create " anything, so that the attempt to create " new
worlds," instead of accepting the order of Creation, can only
lead to vast, grotesque and sanguinary scenes in future history.
With a genuine love of Russia, and a long personal devotion
to Alexander I, which was only too ready to overlook the well-
known weaknesses of this sovereign, and his tendency to strange
" illuminist " mysticism, de Maistre was perhaps the first
man to foretell prophetically the dangers which might one day
threaten Europe from this remote Empire of the North and the
East. His correspondence with Russian friends, and his
Quatre chapitres inedits sur la Russie show that he was full of these
anxieties. It was not the simple political anxiety, inspired in
Horace Walpole, in Joseph II and Kaunitz, by the size and
resources of Russia, her expansive ambition and the dynastic
instabilities which had often brought unscrupulous men and
women to posts of command in St Petersburg; neither was it
the anxiety which filled Metternich at the Vienna Congress,
and again during the Greek War of Independence and during
the various Polish crises, to combat which he tried, in the
months preceding the Cent Jours, and often afterwards, to make
Austria as much an ally of the West as of Russia, in order to be
able to play the mediating — or the decisive — part one day in
a conflict between East and West. Joseph de Maistre recog-
nised in the penetration of Western ideas to Russia, and in the
uncritical spirit in which Russia was ready to accept ideas from
the West, a perspective which was frightening for discerning eyes:
Tout me porte a croire que la Russie n'est pas susceptible d'un
gouvernement organise comme les notres; et . . . si la nation, venant
INTRODUCTION 37
d comprendre nos perfides nouveautis, si le peuple tiait ebranli et
commengait, au lieu d: 'expeditions asiatiques, une revolution d Veuro-
pe'enne,je n'ai point expression a dire ce qu'on pourrait craindre:
Bella, horrida bella!
Et multo JVevam spumantem sanguine cerno.1
Within less than ten years after de Maistre's departure from
Russia,2 and only four years after his death, the " December
conspiracy " disclosed to an astonished world the widespread
presence in Russia of "our perfidious novelties"; young
noblemen and Imperial officers who had won their promotion
during the campaigns in Germany and France, in the last phase
of the Napoleonic Wars, had dreamed in their secret societies
of a future United States of all the Slavs, had taken the Pan-
Slav oath3 and sworn on their daggers, to the glory of the
" Goddess of Reason," to build ports from Dalmatia to the
Arctic Sea, and to unite and " liberate " all Slav peoples in
Bohemia, Hungary and Transylvania, Moldavia, Wallachia
and Servia! Metternich's nightmare, that German philosophy
and Western modernism should prevail in Russia, rather than
the conservative and Christian concept of Monarchy, which
Russia held in common with Europe, was based on close know-
ledge of tendencies of this kind which were inherent in Russia's
political system and in the whole trend of the Czarist tradition
established by Peter the Great.4
One of the claims of Joseph de Maistre to the admiration o f
posterity is this: he was the first European who, more than
half a century before Dostoievsky, visualised the prospect of a
Godless Russia, and urged on the schismatic Empire the alter-
native which may yet come in the future — integration into the
spiritual unity and authority of Christendom, instead of the
degradation and catastrophe of Godlessness.
1 Op. cit. (Quatre chapitres, etc.), p. 218.
2 He left Russia in 1 8 1 6, and after meeting Vicomte de Bonald for the first time
in his life in Paris, returned to a post of no great importance, although it was of
Cabinet rank, in Turin. His last years in St Petersburg were embittered by the
conflict between Alexander I and the Holy See over the Church in Poland and
the Jesuit province in the Russian Empire. This cooled his relations with the
Czar. See Georges Goyau, op. cit.
3 La conspiration de Russie. Rapport de la Commission d'Enquete de St Pitersbourg d
S. M. Nicholas I, Empereur de Russie, Paris, 1826, p. 70. The general conclusion
(p. 10) was that German ideas and German secret student societies had acted ever
since 18 13 on the minds of young Russian officers.
4 In addition to the many references in Metternich's posthumous Mimoires et
Documents (1880), see Correspondence de Lebzeltern (Austrian Ambassador in St
Petersburg under Alexander I) published by the Imperial Russian Academy, St
Petersburg, 1913.
38 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
5. THE PRIMACY OF POLITICS: FROM
MONTESQUIEU TO BONALD
The second most important thinker in the eighteenth cen-
tury was, without any doubt, Montesquieu. The quintessence
of Voltaire lay in the independence of morals from belief;
Montesquieu's message was the primacy of politics over
religious concerns. The author of X' Esprit des Lois was infinitely
less hostile to Christianity than was Voltaire, he was even
perhaps the most positive Christian amongst the outstanding
writers of his century. He stated several times, in all sincerity,
we feel, and not out of mere opportunism, that he preferred his
own Catholic religion and that of his King to all others ; he
went so far as to engage in lengthy polemics with Pierre Beyle,
the ex -Huguenot leader of a " natural " religion, which
claimed that a perfect Christianity was incompatible with civic
virtues and the interest of the State. In contrast to the witti-
cisms of Voltaire, Montesquieu's humour and wit was never
malicious, or inspired by hatred or bitterness; his aphoristic
style is kindly and full of polish ; the irony of the Lettres Persanes
was not directed against sacred feelings.
Yet perhaps by reason of his greater moral seriousness and
his more unselfish literary purpose — he was more concerned
with objective truth than Voltaire ever was — the harm Montes-
quieu did was perhaps even greater than the harm Voltaire
intended to do, and in fact accomplished.
Montesquieu saw the co -existence of various forms of religion
in history. Some of them were more suitable in a Monarchy,
others in a Republic. Social forms were largely a question of
natural surroundings and climate. Even the desert could have
a religion which was politically and socially suitable — for
example, Islam. Political truth is relative; so, implicitly, is
religious. The best form Liberty can take is one in which the
three powers of the State, the executive, the judicial and the
legislative, enjoy the greatest independence one from the other.
Here again, more implicitly than explicitly, Montesquieu
denied the unity of purpose in a governing power, the essential
unity in diversity of social forms, the central significance of any
revealed law or Scripture, the primacy of any Order over
Liberty. The eighteenth century, still so near to Bossuet, inter-
preted the thesis of L 'Esprit des Lois as a negation of that of the
Discours sur Vhistoire universelle.
U Esprit des Lois was, of course, the great book of 1789 and of
INTRODUCTION 39
almost the whole Liberal school of the nineteenth century. The
separation and the balance of the three powers within the
State has been the profession of Faith of all moderate revolu-
tionaries, from Madame de Stael and Benjamin Constant, via
Guizot and Thiers, down to the recent constitution-makers of
the Fourth Republic in France. Precisely because Montesquieu
was sincere, and expressed in moderate terms his preference for
Christian Monarchy, his theory was taken up even by the post-
revolutionary and post-Napoleonic movements of Catholic
revival — Lord Acton in England and Montalembert in France
were both influenced by the ideal of a political and social
" equilibrium." We can recognise fragments of Montesquieu's
thought in the liberal-democratic half-truths of recent decades.
In the name of a political theory of equilibrium, some people
characterised Nazism as an " an ti -progressive " reaction and
Bolshevism as " dictatorship " — terms as politically adequate
as would be the medical description of cancer as " indigestion,"
and tuberculosis as a " spring-cold " — and they postulated
compromise between parties as the supreme political ideal. This
supreme ideal of an " equilibrium " is, they say, only possible in
a " Democracy," a vague term for a form of government which
does not even claim to be right by any absolute standards, but
only to be " tolerant " out of consideration for the counter-
balance of an opposition party, possessing likewise a half-truth.
One may easily argue of course that Montesquieu was
superior to the many belated and sometimes only half-conscious
imitators of his thought. Texts to this effect could certainly be
found in abundance, but this is not our concern here, and in
any case such a defence of Montesquieu would not differ from
any defence put forward by disciples of Machiavelli or Hegel,
for example, in justification of the original thought of their
master, which was in most cases superior to any latter-day
interpretation of it. It is enough if we sum up Montesquieu
as the thinker who taught the primacy of political expediency
over absolute religious truth on society, who for the first time
envisaged religious truth as subordinate to the pragmatic moral
aims of government and society, and who judged governments
and social systems according to an outward criterion of the
formal legitimacy, intactness and inviolability of the respective
sphere of each power.1 Only much later, when Equality
1 The best recent study of the intellectual and political atmosphere of
Montesquieu's time and doctrine is La crise de la conscience europienne au XVIIIe
sidcle by Paul Hazard, professeur au College de France. Paris, 1930.
40 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
became a new idol, one which was unforeseen by Montesquieu
— to whom aristocratic, senatorial and parliamentarian govern-
ments were more familiar than real democracies — was this
" inviolability of the spheres of power " combined with the
" people's will " as the criterion of formal legitimacy; this
caused no little surprise and considerable embarrassment to
those followers of Montesquieu who belonged mostly to the
privileged political and social classes, and who were unaware
that there was anything in the traditions of their master's
thought which justified such doctrines.
In the great debate concerning Authority and Liberty which
we have followed throughout the ages, until it reached its most
acute stage in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
Vicomte de Bonald1 was the counterpart of Montesquieu.
Bonald had more of a systematic, and even scholastic, mind
than Joseph de Maistre. Writing in a style which was not less
elegant than the latter's, he resisted all temptation to take his
opponent by surprise and deal the last stroke with some brilliant
paradox, which, final as it might be, would be questioned on
second thoughts by the defeated enemy. The author of the
Soirees de St Petersbourg preferred the liveliness of the Platonic
form, being a master of dialogue. The author of the Thtorie du
pouvoir2 was more of a pure Aristotelian. De Maistre gave the
impression that he greatly enjoyed scoring over an opponent.
Bonald hits out almost accidentally, although he did it
frequently enough, at the anglophile school of Benjamin
Constant and Mme. de Stael, at Voltaire, Rousseau and
Montesquieu, at Locke and Kant, si tristement ceUbre. Writing
in exile at Heidelberg, or in his provincial retreat during the
time of Napoleon (who would have much preferred to see this
Doctor of Authority serve him, " the restorer of Order and
Religion," instead of persevering in a discreet but indomitable
opposition), his starting point was naturally enough the
1 We use his name thus, as he expressly disapproved, in Considirations sur la
noblesse and in La thiorie du pouvoir, of the habit of putting Christian names instead
of titles before the family names of French noblemen, and because Joseph de
Maistre, himself less of a purist, in deference to his friend's insistence on this point,
requested a correspondent of his to write " Vicomte de Bonald," " M. de Bonald,"
or simply " Bonald," but never " de Bonald." The usual reference to the author
of the Soiries de St Pitersbourg as "Joseph de Maistre" and not " Comte de
Maistre " is to be explained by the fact that the title belonged also to his brother
Xavier de Maistre, who was hardly less known in the literature of his time.
1 Practically speaking, he wrote one book only. The Essai analytique sur les lois
naturelles ; the Intiret giniral de VEurope, Du divorce au XIXe siicle and his countless
shorter essays, maxims, aphorisms and fragments are mere extensions and applica-
tions of, or additions to, his Thiorie du pouvoir.
INTRODUCTION 41
contemporary French and European scene. Yet, going far
beyond the historical context of his time and country, he aimed
at stating absolute truth in theology and philosophy, at making
definitions which would hold good for all time.
Bonald gave a complete and full reply to almost every
proposition which was part of the intellectual currency of the
eighteenth century. The sensualist psychology of Condillac,
the " natural man " of Rousseau, Locke's and Diderot's theory
of knowledge which comes through the experience of the
senses, were all answered by his monumental theory concerning
language. He said that human language is unable to express,
and is not meant to express, anything that is not either an image
or an idea. The first proof of religious truth is the existence of
the idea, that is of the word " God " in every human language.
History is the evolution from the image to the idea, a transition
of mankind from childhood to maturity:
Un enfant a des images avant a" avoir des idies; ainsi un peuple
cultive son imagination avant de developper sa raison. Ainsi dans
Vunivers mime, la societe des images ou des figures, le judaisme, a
precede la sociite des idees, ou le christianisme, qui adore I Etre supreme
en esprit et en veriti.1
Instead of Montesquieu's theory of equilibrium through the
separation of powers, Bonald propounded the unity of power,
the unity of purpose seen in nature, because one mind has created
nature and established its laws, which are gradually and
progressively revealed to Man. We see a constantly recurring
motive in all the political theorising of Bonald, a three-fold
division, as in Montesquieu, but formulated differently and
re-stated in order to establish a different conclusion. According
to him, there is a singleness of purpose in society : Power is
given for the preservation of religion and morals and of the
natural law, i.e. for the preservation of identity to which every
species in Nature tends. Judicial and executive power provide
the means for this preservation, and fight the internal and the
external enemy, which are obstacles to preservation. Thus,
kings rule with the help of two classes, both of which are
symbolised by the Sword — the Sword of Justice and the Sword
of defence — although usually they are referred to as the noblesse
de robe and the noblesse d'epee. In the spiritual society, the
Church, power is transmitted to a spiritual successor. In the
natural society, the State, power is transmitted in natural
succession from father to son. The social unit is the family, not
1 Essai analytique sur les lois naturelles, p. 221 in the first edition of 1800.
42 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
the individual. The liberties people really care about are not
such things as the liberty of the Press, or the liberty of a jury,
for few people publish anything, and few ever have to appear
before a jury; but the liberty to preserve, in the form of safe
property, the fruit of a family achievement, the liberty of a
family to rise to a higher status, and the liberty to preserve this
status for future generations.
It is fairly usual to identify Revolution with optimism, and
post-revolutionary tendencies — the romantic period — as the
reaction of pessimism, although they still professed a " religious
attachment to Liberty."1 The Italian historian Guglielmo
Ferrero did much to spread this judgement in his numerous
essays on the post-revolutionary era; he later revised it in his
book Bonaparte in Italy, in which he classified the European
parties into " groups of violence " and " groups of fear."
Reading Bonald's Essai analytique, we see that progressive
optimism was not in the least absent from the anti-revolu-
tionary party. He greets the new century with great hope, as
one in which as much progress in the knowledge of the laws
governing society will be made as the eighteenth century made
in the knowledge of the laws governing nature. The law of
society, he declares, is still in its infancy, just as religion was in
the early centuries which saw the conversion of the Barbarian.
The appeal for the unity of Europe is made by the anti-
revolutionary party, not only in the writings of Bonald and
Joseph de Maistre (in his Essai sur le principe generateur des institu-
tions humaines, 1814) but also in the whole of the literature
which prepared the way for, or commented upon, the Vienna
Congress — Friedrich von Gentz, Adam Miiller, Johannes von
Miiller, Friedrich von Schlegel, Novalis — all of whom, in their
respective countries, looked for some principle to replace
Spinoza's and Montesquieu's theories concerning the " balance "
and the " equilibrium " of power; a principle which it was
impossible to maintain in SchlegePs view2 on account of the
British possessions in Asia, and the extent of the Russian Empire
the very vastness of which precludes any possibility of balance.
But we have to note a more radical change in European
political thought, which was due mainly to Bonald — the
revaluation of history as the science of social law and as the
principal weapon in apologetics and religious controversy.
1 Benedetto Croce: Storia de VEuropa nel decimonono secolo, Bari, 1932. See
especially the introductory chapter.
2 See his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, which we have already mentioned.
INTRODUCTION 43
The immense change in the European outlook and in the
modern historical sense, which pervades the artistic imagina-
tion with Chateaubriand, Walter Scott, the young Victor Hugo,
Schiller, the German romantics, and Manzoni in Italy, is con-
nected with the religious thought of the post -revolutionary era
as exemplified in Bonald. Others had defended the religion of
man: he would defend the religion of society; they had
proved religion by religion, but he intends to prove it by
history. Metaphysics is a science of realities; et si certains
ecrivains qui ont traite de Vetre sont vagues et obscurs . . . c'est qu'ils
ont voulu expliquer VStre pensant par Vetre pensant, au lieu de Vexpliquer
par VStre parlant, qui est son expression et son image.
Bonald was the reply to Montesquieu as was de Maistre to
Voltaire. As we have already pointed out, Montesquieu was
the man whose intellectual influence was the least intentionally
hostile to the Church in the eighteenth century. We find both
religious and spiritual truth in him, disguised as irony, or even
cynicism. When Montesquieu permitted himself such jokes as
a defence of monogamy on sensual grounds, saying that the
recollection of the by-gone youthful charm of women always
acted as an attraction for husbands, he was still defending — in
a curious manner — religious and social truth in the institution
of marriage. When he justified slavery on the ground that the
Africans are so stupid as to prefer shining glass to shining
diamonds, puis, Us ont le nez tellement ecrase qu'il est presque impos-
sible de les plaindre, he was stating the truth which Pascal never
tired of demonstrating by all possible means : the truth con-
cerning the extreme relativity and unreliability of every merely
human judgement, one which Pascal himself had to wrap up
in some cynical disguise. Bonald has much of Montesquieu's
manner; we cannot help thinking of Montesquieu when we
read Bonald's explanation of the English habit of eating raw
meat, and the English legal institution of divorce, as the two
signs of the raw and barbaric origin of this island people. But
how much more deeply he goes into any subject proposed by
Montesquieu for meditation, and how sternly he refuses to stop
at any half-truth! Yet it was only a part of Bonald's achieve-
ment to reply to Montesquieu; of greater importance in his
century was his discovery of a new field of historical and social
theology. This historical argument in theology received its full
elaboration in the work of Cardinal Newman, and still domi-
nates a new Catholic spirituality, with Chesterton, Hilaire
Belloc and Christopher Dawson in England, Theodor Haecker
44 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
in Germany, Jacques Maritain and fitienne Gilson and Jean
Guitton in France.1
Bonald stands for the transition from the individualist thought
of the eighteenth century to the social thought of the nineteenth.
It is sufficient to recall our last textual quotation from his
Theorie du pouvoir to show how conscious he was of a transition
period in human thought, the transition from individual to
social religion, from rational to historical theology. We may
also recall Metternich's frequent characterisation of his time as
a " transition " period, Metternich who was almost the only
statesman who understood Bonald's philosophy (and almost
the only statesman of his time worthy of the name, in the
opinion of Bonald's enthusiastic pupil, Honore de Balzac).
Metternich stood consciously at the close of an epoch, and was
heroically determined to face the end of his world. In his
view, the Primacy of Order was going to prevail2 after the
chaos which would separate the Old Europe from the New,
and he wished he could have been born round about 1900 or
later, so that he could have helped the new Europe come into
being, instead of burying the old one.
Just as the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who wrote
Greek in the same city of Vienna, was the last word of Classic
Hellenism, the Imperial Chancellor of Austria, who wrote
mostly in French, was the last great word of baroque, French-
speaking, monarchical Europe. But as the ancient Greek
wisdom expressed itself in melancholy, as befitted wise men,
and was conquered by Christian hope, the last great word of
monarchical Europe, Bonald or Metternich, gave a message
not of melancholy, but of a transition towards an ultimate hope.
We enter this period of transition from a rational to a historical
and social theology, as we said, in the nineteenth century.
Prophets in the Old Testament were men who announced a
1 We allude here more particularly to Theodor Haecker's epilogue to a German
translation of Cardinal Newman's The Grammar of Assent, written in 1921, to the
Redemption du Temps of Jacques Maritain and to Jean Guitton's comments on
Newman's historical theology in La justification du temps.
2 In his political testament (Mimoires et Documents, Vol. VII, p. 640) he writes
— in French, which we prefer to keep, because it is Metternich's grand style — Le
mot de liberti n'a pas pour moi la valeur d'un point de depart, mais celle d'un point d'arrivie
riel. C'est le mot d'ordre qui disigne le point de dipart. Ce n'est que sur I'idie d'ordre que
peut reposer Vidie de liberti (sic!). Sans la base de Vordre, V aspiration d la liberti n'est que
i 'effort d'un parti quelconque dans le but qu'il poursuit.
Dans V application d la vie positive, cette aspiration se traduira inivitablement par la
iyrannie. A toutes les ipoques, dans toutes les situations , y 'ai iti un homme d'ordre, etj'ai
toujour s vise d V ' itablissement de la liberti viritable et non d'une liberti mensonghe. La
iyrannie, quelle qu'elle soit, a toujours iti pour moi synonyme de la folie pure.
INTRODUCTION 45
transition in time; transition always moves towards a new
aspect of man's knowledge of God.
What was Bonald's concept of " Society " ? What does his
repeated emphasis on the " social " and " historical " truth
really mean ? He most certainly does not mean by " social
law " the primacy of material concerns, as our time under-
stands the term, led astray by a century of " material "
Socialism, which even some emotional Catholic, or at any rate,
Christian thought is ready to endorse and accept, confusing
it with the primacy of charity. Neither does he mean by his
notion of " historical situation " the distorted materialist
sophistry of a variable relativity, determined by the temporary
context of " economic conditions." He means the primacy of
Order, such as we have tried to define it in these pages; the
framework of real Liberty, that stability of consecrated Order,
which for him was the only safeguard against the tyranny which
the rule of individual judgement inevitably entails, for indivi-
dual judgement is the least safe of foundations, and can only
maintain its rule by violent means.
Society in Bonald's thought means first and foremost the
family, " domestic society," of which God Himself was the
legislator. The nations are extended domestic societies, i.e.
they are " public societies." The international and European
order is, or should be, a Society of Nations. The fundamental
principle of association in all these phases is the social law, the
law of God for the family, for the Church and for the nation.
History for Bonald is the science of the varying forms of an
unalterable essence. His study of History is a prophetic one, a
study of the transition from one stage of our knowledge of God
to the next one, this new stage always being in his view a
higher stage. There is a Progress. The word belongs to our
vocabulary, therefore only Christians can understand the true
meaning of the word. Only Christian society has known
progress; non-Christian empires, at any rate before their
contact with Christendom, only knew stability, so that the
Muslim East presents a picture of arrested progress to all
European observers.
With this summary of Bonald's thought, our earlier analysis
of Joseph de Maistre, and the above — to our mind almost
inevitable — comment on progress, we hope we have made it
clear that such common-place descriptions as " reaction,"
" traditionalism," etc., are quite out of place in any characterisa-
tion of Bonald and Joseph de Maistre, who was fully aware
46 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
of the truth that si la Providence efface, c'est pour krire. Even a
truly great mystic mind such as Leon Bloy could be so mistaken
as to see " mere " traditionalism, unaware of God's plan to
change the face of the world,1 in the Soirees de St Petersbourg, and
in both de Maistre and Bonald to hear only /' oraison funibre de
V Europe civilisee.2
Events inside the Church, however, were responsible for this
widespread misunderstanding of the two foremost thinkers of
the era of the French Revolution, which only a very close
study of both Bonald and Joseph de Maistre can dispel. When
on the death of Pope Gregory XVI in 1846, Cardinal Mastai
Ferretti succeeded to the Papal throne under the style of Pope
Pius IX, it seemed that the Catholic-Liberal school of thought
would come into the forefront of Catholic action all over
Europe.3 These Catholic Liberals in France were, roughly
speaking, the new variation of Gallicanism, as is shown by the
support given them by members of the hierarchy known to
have Gallican leanings — Mgr. Sibour, for instance, and Mgr.
Dupanloup. Gallicanism had its counterpart in Germany
under Joseph II, and derived new strength in the Napoleonic
period under the regime of the Confederation of the Rhine
and its Chancellor, Archbishop Dalberg. It also had its
counterpart in England in the circle of Lord Acton — a nephew
of Mgr. Dalberg, which is a biographical detail worth
noting.
Did Pope Pius IX disapprove of the intransigent views
expressed in Joseph de Maistre's Du Pape ? Did he ever disap-
prove of the same author's sharp criticisms (and Bonald's also)
of individual judgement as the basis of modern political institu-
tions ? There is not the slightest hint to this effect in any of
his pronouncements. What he tried to achieve by the
" Liberal " initiatives of his early years was the greater
independence of the Papal See from European Powers, and
what he achieved in his later period by the Bull of Infallibility
(opposed by the same groups in 1869 who had hailed the new
policy in 1846 — by Montalembert and his friends) was a
1 Leon Bloy: Le Dhespiri. Ch. XLV.
2 Leon Bloy: Les dernieres colonnes de VEglise (essays, or rather polemics, against
K. J. Huysmans, F. Brunetiere, Paul Bourget, etc.).
3 It had previously been discredited by the apostasy of Lamennais, though it
was later strengthened by the prestige of the Dominican Fr. Lacordaire (a priest
of holy zeal and ascetic spirituality, but at the same time a surprisingly con-
ciliatory defender of the Faith), by the attractive oratory of Montalembert, and
by the appearance in his circle of such a pure and zealous lay aposde as Frederic
Ozanam, the Catholic scholar and philosopher of the Romantic movement.
INTRODUCTION 47
strengthening of the central power of the Papacy over the
Universal Church. A monarch whose means of government
were essentially spiritual, Pius IX was satisfied by the definition
of this central power, and showed wise restraint and modera-
tion in the exercise of it, as his successors have done ever
since.
A whole generation after Napoleon's fall believed in the
imminent conflict between the two victorious powers, both of
whom were partly extra-European: Russia and Britain.
Metternich's personal prestige in St Petersburg was one of the
few obstacles to Russia's westward drive; Prussia's and
Austria's reluctance to help Russia in any conflict (except in
simple police operations against revolutionary upheavals,
where the monarchical principle was at stake) was pointed out
by Frederick von Gentz1 as the chief factor delaying a conflict
between East and West. Such a conflict Fichte had already
foretold in 1814,2 and its possibility was largely responsible for
the desire of Emperor Francis I and Metternich to strengthen
the Kingdom of Hungary by modernising reforms. With
Metternich an old man, and the romantic -theocratic atmos-
phere which prevailed in Berlin since the accession in 1840 of
Frederick-William IV (whom Europe believed to be a simple
satellite of his brother-in-law Nicholas I of Russia), the conflict
between East and West was more in the air than ever. Not
wishing to be involved by Austrian protection of Italy on the
side of schismatic and Muscovite concept of Imperial theocracy,
not wishing either to rely on the protection of Protestant
England and its Liberal and Radical admirers in Italy, the
Papacy took the lead in the action to achieve Italian unity and
independence. Two contemporary authors explain the full
European background to this Papal policy, both of them
Spaniards, Jaime Balmes and Donoso Cortes. Both were more
inclined towards a pro-French, than to the pro-British
tendency which prevailed over their country; for ever since
the help given to Spain by Wellington against Napoleon,
various British Foreign Ministers, and especially Lord Palmer-
ston, had tried to bring that nation into the British orbit,
through the influence of the Exaltados of the constitutional party.
Both Balmes and Donoso believed in the concept of a great
continental system of alliance to counterbalance the might both
1 Aus dem Nachlasse von F. v. Gentz. Edited by General Count Prokesch-Osten.
Wien, Leipzig, 1867. Vol. I, p. 206 seq.
2 In his Vermichtniss.
48 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
of Britain and Russia,1 and young as they were, they already
had some experience of the minor revolutions which the
Exaltados' admiration for British institutions and the British
party -system had brought to Spain ever since the Cadiz consti-
tution of 181 2. 2
With Balmes and Donoso, the leadership of Catholic thought
might have passed from France to Spain, the country which
had once led the way, before the grand siecle. A sign of the times,
the stronger and the more original though not the more systematic
of the two thinkers of the early years of Pius IX's reign was
not the priest and theologian Balmes, but the secular historian
and political philosopher, Donoso Cortes ; this was the century
of secular thinkers and of the secular concerns of the Church.
This promising new Spanish period of European Catholic
thought had no time to mature. Balmes died at the early age
of thirty-eight during the first phase of the European Revolu-
tion of 1848; Donoso lived only to his forty -fourth year, the
last five years of his life being spent watching the European
Revolution and its consequences from his diplomatic posts in
Berlin and Paris. He lived to see that Revolution which was
French no longer, but European in extent, and which we can
now see was the first step towards the World Revolution which
began with the 1914-1918 war, and in which we live today.
He lived to regret much of his own earlier writing, and to hear
Louis Veuillot refer to him as the future head of a new European
party, as the new leader of secular spirituality. He also lived
to suffer from the attacks of the neo-Gallican, Liberal-Catholic
tendencies represented by Mgr. Dupanloup and a few members
of the French hierarchy, but not long enough to see Rome set
her final approval to his thought, or to hear Barbey d'Aurevilly
call him " the third lay father of the Church " — Joseph de
Maistre and Bonald being the first and second. Donoso's
speeches and his thought provided melancholy consolation for
Metternich after his fall.3
1 A concept that was much discussed, and which owed its influence (in the
opinion of many observers) to the personal rapprochement between Metternich
and the French Prime Minister Guizot. Marx and Engels commented on it in
the Communist Manifesto as the New Holy Alliance between the Pope, Metternich
and Guizot against Communism, the mutual enemy.
2 That ideological banner of Spanish military revolts, and even of the revolu-
tionary movement in Italy, which began in Naples in 1820, where Spanish influence
was still uppermost.
3 See the present writer's Metternich and Donoso Cortis — Christian and Conservative
Thought in the European Revolution, Dublin Review, No. 444, 1948, and A Prophet of
Europe's Disasters — Juan Donoso Cortds, The Month, May 1947.
INTRODUCTION 49
A deeper mystical, more passionate and dramatic version of
Joseph de Maistre's and Bonald's thought began in France with
Donoso Cortes, on the morrow of the European Revolution.
Donoso sensed what Bonald and de Maistre had not yet
sensed : the profound and universal cultural crisis of Europe —
the great theme which Burckhardt and Nietzsche took up a
little later — that deepening crisis which was promoted (so to say)
by natural progress, the natural progress of mass movements of
religious aberration. This, in Donoso's vision, could ultimately
be arrested only by the triumph of supernatural over natural
force ; for the essence of history, according to him, is not the
natural triumph of evil over good, but the supernatural
triumph of good over evil.
6. THE PRIMACY OF IMAGINATION: FROM
DIDEROT TO BARBEY D'AUREVILLY — THE
PRIMACY OF EMOTION: FROM ROUSSEAU TO
BLOY AND PfiGUY
France was still the foremost theatre of the European
Revolution in the sense that here the social conflict predomi-
nated, whereas in other countries the principal element of the
Revolution seemed to lie in the various national aspirations.
The primacy of politics and of moral liberties, both of which
were proposed by Montesquieu and Voltaire, seemed to come
to an end. The dominating problem was henceforth to be the
individual and society. Bonald and de Maistre saw a world
which reasoned ill, erring in matters of religion, and removing
itself from truth and law. Veuillot now saw a world which was
ugly and decrepit in its self-sufficiency, and its vanity; his
biting, satirical pages in Les Odeurs de Paris make Flaubert's
aching sensitiveness, offended by bourgeois taste, and Baude-
laire's despair at the decomposition of every beauty in modern
life, appear as almost tame reactions to the social reality.
Bonald and Joseph de Maistre defended the Papacy and the
Monarchy against the " party of the philosophers," and against
the new institutions which Catholic Liberals tried to baptise
from inside, but at the risk of some compromise with their non-
Catholic theoretical and philosophical foundations. Barbey
d'Aurevilly saw the Revolution when it had advanced a stage
further; his main concern — and the concern of Bloy and Peguy
50 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
after him — was the defence, not of old and consecrated institu-
tions against new and man-made ones, lacking any authority
for their basis or support, but the defence of spiritual truth and
spiritual beauty against the materialistic ugliness of the masses,
which was promoted by intellectual conceit and intellectual
demagogy. Not that either Veuillot or Barbey d'Aurevilly, any
more than Bloy or Peguy after them, would ever have been
hostile to the " masses," or insensitive to the suffering of the
poor. There are plenty of signs to the contrary. Nobody in the
nineteenth century exalted the ideal of simplicity, or the virtue
of humble work, higher than did Louis Veuillot in Les Libres-
Penseurs; nobody imposed on himself the duty of active service
in the cause of the poor more rigorously than Veuillot's
master, Donoso Cortes.
Not in the sharpest polemical prose of Barbey d'Aurevilly
was charity ever absent, even towards opponents; and with
this went humanity and compassion for the multitude. Leon
Bloy had no aristocratic contempt for the weak and the poor;
on the contrary, his contempt was reserved wholly for the rich,
and he never tired of prophesying the victory of the poor,
although there was all the difference in the world in his eyes
between the victory of the poor and the " suppression of
poverty," which is the Socialist ideal — this debasement of man
to an artificial, inhuman and impersonal life. If Leon Bloy
disliked the Republic, it was because the republics of antiquity
were founded by slave-owners, while the " Kingdom " was the
promise given to the poor; because the poor delighted in
Christ the King, who stood above mankind and did not govern
a republic of equals. Finally, more than any other French or
even European poet, Peguy has the child -like simplicity and
sincerity of the hard-working and patient people.
There is a world of difference between the people and the
" masses," and souls devoted to the people are all united, how-
ever much they differ in other things, in their disgust at the
" masses," an ugly word for an uglier thing. The people are
composed of men and women who have souls, of children who
have hearts, the masses are a dead weight driven on by traffickers
in murdered souls:
lis ont voulu bannir Dieu et ressusciter Cesar. C'est a quoi Us travail-
lent et Us sont en train de reussir. Deja Us ne disent plus: Gloire d
Dieu, et deja. il rty a plus de paix. Us ont diminue le nombre des
hommes de bonne volonte, la bonne volonte a diminue avec ^intelligence
de la verite parmi ceux qui ont encore la verite, et il n'y a plus de gloire
INTRODUCTION 51
ni de paix pour personne. Par un enchatnement formidable de bassesse et
d'erreur, les peuples miprisent, haissent et obeissent, formant mille disirs
sauvages de briser lejoug et de se venger. lis se vengeront, mais Us ne
briseront pas lejoug, et plus Us le secoueront, plus il sera ignoble et dur.1
Louis Veuillot commented in these terms on the third revo-
lution he had seen, that of the Paris Commune of 1871 ; this
picture largely summarises the attitude of the great Catholic
polemical writers who bring the last century to an end and
usher in the present one.
We have seen the reply which Catholic thought gave to
Voltaire's paradoxical moralism in Joseph de Maistre. We have
seen also the full Catholic social and political theory which
Bonald stated in reply to Montesquieu. Now we come to the
third part of the dialogue between the eighteenth and the nine-
teenth centuries, that dialogue between Authority and Liberty
which ever since the Middle Ages has been present in the
Western conscience. This third and final part extends from the
European Revolution to the First World War, which in turn
began the World Revolution. The subject of the debate is now
the individual and the world. Diderot gave his opinion on this
subject as a neo -stoic, and worked out his argument in parti-
cular in a memorable discussion with a neo-cynic, Le neveu de
Rameau, Goethe's favourite French masterpiece. It is exactly
the same topic on which the stoics and the cynics of antiquity
argued. The world, they said, makes all true sensibilities suffer.
Diderot advised that moral principles should be elevated to a
level higher than the world, he wanted us to give a fine example
of principles, of a higher taste, of a sterner criticism of the
profane world, and in this way he inaugurated a criticism of
art and literature which was in itself literature, an art which
was sometimes higher and more inventive than imaginative
art — an art of which there have been many masters since
Diderot, Sainte-Beuve being the foremost. In other words,
Diderot postulated the stoic ideal of what we might call intel-
lectual aristocracy, an ideal which greatly appealed to Goethe
and attached him to Diderot more than to any of the other
French authors of his youth. The " three Musketeers " were,
as we know, four, and so were the three " masters of the
European mind " in the eighteenth century. Diderot has a
shadowy existence compared with the trio Voltaire, Montes-
quieu and Rousseau, and on account of his haughty artistic and
1 Louis Veuillot: Paris pendant les deux sieges en i8yo-i8yi. Vol. II, ch. xcviii,
P- 23.
52 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
scientific pedantry, was less popular in his sensual age than
Voltaire with his superficial brilliance, Montesquieu with his
irony and Rousseau with his sentimental emotion.
In reply to Diderot, and his aesthetic descendants — Sainte-
Beuve, Flaubert, the brothers Goncourt and others — Barbey
d'Aurevilly made havoc of the aesthetic ideals of pedants. He
showed that Judgement in the name of eternal law, rather than
an endless comparison of relativities, is the key to true art;
that true art, like true History above all, was a social respon-
sibility. It is not an individual fantasy, or a pastime for the
bored, or an emotional consolation for the over-sensitive. It
is a task for the manly and the brave, and for them alone. It is
a defence of Order for the sake of true Liberty. True art is
Justice, which despite the frequent verbal violences and the
unrestrained personal aversions, was the essence of Barbey
d'Aurevilly's immense critical work, collected in over thirty
volumes, Les oeuvres et les hommes. True art and true history mean
judgement in the light of Eternity, and only one light has ever
been cast on Eternity which was visible to human eyes. Barbey
d'Aurevilly called himself the sagittaire of his century, and still
near the preceding one in time, he replied to the eighteenth
century by shooting his arrows at it :
Ce temps d'anarchie si universelle que le desordre passait dans la
physiologie, faisant de Gustave HI de Suede homme-femme et de
Catherine femme-homme.1
Style is judgement, art is justice, history is a manifestation of
public conscience. This theme of Barbey d'Aurevilly was to be
elaborated and summed up in a very concise version in Ernest
Hello's truly monumental study on Le Style.
While Barbey d'Aurevilly demolished affectation and
pedantry, Louis Veuillot in the same generation was making
havoc of the solemn pose of " stoic virtue," of the rhetorics of
the politicians (" moderate," " understanding," " modern-
minded," Catholics not excepted !), and of the learned common-
places of all parties. Less of an artist than either Barbey d'Aure-
villy or Leon Bloy, he was not less vigorous as a fighter. Vain
are all the virtues, he showed, in which humility plays no part,
and vain is all the learning that has any other motive than the
charitable desire to teach those who have no knowledge.
Between them, Barbey d'Aurevilly and Veuillot defeated
presumption and pedantry.
But the virtuous neo-cynicism of emotional romance was to
1 Les oeuvres et les hommes. De Vhistoire, p. 333 of the first edition (1875).
INTRODUCTION 53
be defeated by the poets, and by them alone. The isolation,
the suffering which the hardness of this world inflicts upon the
sensitive man, the suffering which comes from the violence of
the senses, the hell-on-earth of poverty and loneliness — all these
things Rousseau showed in a self-indulgent and a self-pitying
way, to prove that man is intrinsically better than the society
which surrounds him. At first hearing, nothing seems to be
wrong with the proposition. Man has a soul, society has not.
The incorruptible, divine substance of the soul was given to
Man, the image of God, and not to society, to which only the Law
was given. A whole life, noted down day by day, with humility,
with humour, with outbursts of savage indignation and then again
with overwhelming love — Leon Bloy's life — was needed to show
not the abstract and the rational, but the vital and existential
proof of the falsity of a proposition which had at first sounded
plausible and seductive, and which has in fact seduced the world.
The immortal soul belongs to Man alone. But Man has a
Creator, who gave him liberty within His order, and within
His order alone. He suffers because God, in His moment of
human Liberty, chose to suffer on the Cross, and because — and
this is a thought so difficult to understand that it has separated
the Muslim world from Christendom, probably until the end
of History — He participates fully in human suffering. Leon
Bloy interpreted his sufferings as a call from God to him to
" conquer the world," to defeat worldliness. His Catholic
spirituality was of the militant sort. This volunteer of 1870
never ceased to have a warrior's soul. Nothing is further
removed from him than a Catholic spirituality of submission to
an unpleasant world, as taught by Claudel or Mauriac, and
while his polemics were direct and personal (and often coarse,
absurd or unjust, the very opposite of what Barbey d'Aurevilly
always strove to be) he was in the last resort infinitely more
charitable in his indignations than writers who are satisfied
with the mild observation of meanness and egotism, and the
bestowing of Catholic consolation on weak souls. In spiritual
as in physical suffering, the knife is often better than doubtful
pills, coated with chocolate. Perhaps Leon Bloy dismissed too
summarily the psychological approach to full and ultimate
spiritual truth seen in Henri Bergson; perhaps, after helping
Jacques Maritain towards conversion,1 he was too impatient to
1 See Madame Raissa Mari tain's Les Grandes amitiis, 1946; Jacques Maritain:
Lion Bloy, 1927; and the full and detailed biographical notes of M.Joseph Bollery
in the first analytical edition of Leon Bloy's Oeuvres completes, 1948-49.
54 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
see all " Bergsonians " travel along the same road — and as we
now know, he did not guess what the final great gesture of
Bergson's thought and life was to be. He ought perhaps to have
shown more patience and humility towards a noble and generous
Christian like Albert de Mun, who with the Austrians Vogel-
sang and Prince Aloys Liechtenstein began the Christian Social
movement in the 1890's. He should have made a better attempt
to understand the thought of Pope Leo XIII and Rerum Novarum,
and he should perhaps have foreseen the high spirituality of
Don Luigi Sturzo, Canon Cardijn and so many others, out of
which would grow, like a new triumph of Christ, the social
apostolate of the Church in an industrial society; perhaps he
should have done all this instead of persevering in his endless
mourning for the Salic Monarchy, destroyed, as he never
ceased to reiterate, by God's wrath at the sins of kings. It may
be that this hagiographer of the highest grace dwelt too long
on the literary vanities of a world of mediocrity, and wasted
time which he might otherwise have spent saying things that
only he could say, on the saints of his own time in France — St
Jean-Baptiste Vianney, the Cure d'Ars, on Chaminade and the
Sociiti de Marie, on Blessed Joseph Liebermann and his aposto-
late of the Holy Ghost in Africa, on the life of Pere Foucauld
and the White Fathers of the Desert.
The gravest and most frequent of his errors might have been
that he altogether misunderstood the essence of religious peace
in the secular order (as it is best defined by Friedrich von
Schlegel) and this arch-enemy of modern Democracy com-
pletely failed to see how much nearer religious peace — counting
mankind as spiritual units rather than as isolated individuals —
was to perfect social wisdom, than was the individualistic, soul-
less and numerical " representation," which, as we have since
seen in Germany and elsewhere, can only promote the domina-
tion of those units which are numerically and materially the
strongest. Differing from Joseph de Maistre and Bonald,
Balzac and Barbey d'Aurevilly, who were concerned to save
society, since the individual was condemned by fallen human
nature, he perhaps abandoned hope for society altogether, and
was concerned only for the salvation of the individual soul, a
path which once misled many into Protestantism or Jansenism.
Still, if we feel bound to register all these possible exceptions,
without examining them in detail, we are happy to record the
fact that chosen souls and hearts in our own days begin to
understand Leon Bloy; they quite rightly prefer to be over-
INTRODUCTION 55
whelmed and over-awed by him, rather than to approach him
by critical analysis, adequate enough for the spiritual artistry
of Mauriac or Claudel, and perhaps the right approach to the
passionate emotionalism of Georges Bernanos, but not the
means of grasping the essence of Leon Bloy. The Thankless
Beggar never wrote to please, to convince, or even to act.
He wrote in tears, to move others to tears, and he still
moves us.
We may dismiss the absurdities of his imagination, when
they occurred in the wrong place; we may miss the humble
sense of justice which -we find in Barbey d'Aurevilly, or the
immaculate elegance and the clear intelligence which reached
out to the supernatural in Joseph de Maistre, Bonald and
Donoso Cortes; yet it is in Leon Bloy that we find the prophetic
thunder of Judgement Day. Living in a conceited and pros-
perous world, he saw this world on the eve of the Apocalypse.
In a world of psychological curiosities, he could find the answer
only in eschatology. With the great geologist Pierre Termier,
he saw the full discovery of the physics and geography of the
earth as the approaching fullness of time, with its urgent alter-
native of Grace or Doom, unknown to the ages of indifference.
The Dreyfus affair was all that was needed to make him predict
the devastating hatred and persecution which would be the lot
of those Gentiles who were united in soul to the celestial
Jerusalem, following upon the hatred and persecution which
had fallen upon the Jews, the seed of Abraham. Of all those
who, during a hundred years of " emancipated " Jewry, spoke
and wrote on this question, Leon Bloy (and young Charles
Peguy, as he then was at the time of the Dreyfus case) knew
full well what was at stake in this controversy. For seven
generations the sins of the fathers will be visited upon the heads
of the sons, and for a thousand generations true love of God
will be rewarded, as we know from Genesis. The spectacle of
the material prosperity and the success of an apostate Jewry is
hateful enough to God. But infinitely more hateful to Him is
the envy of that success felt by Christians who desecrate the
name they bear, and in their hatred for Abraham's seed deny
the spirit transmitted through the seed of Abraham. The rest
is clamour: the clamour of Lenin and Trotsky in 191 7, the
clamour of Hitler in 1933. A deafening, horrid, poisonous,
unspeakable clamour, from which our generation seeks refuge
in the spirituality of Max Picard's Welt des Schweigens. The
clamour of horrid strident voices and desecrated words, which
56 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
still rages despite the silence which follows upon massacres and
exhausting famines.
The prophetic word on the eve of all this horror was said by
Leon Bloy, Charles Peguy, and by at least two Germans who
probably never knew either and were certainly unknown to
them: Theodor Haecker and the Austrian Karl Kraus.
Sovereign emotion, this poetic religion set up by the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth century, came to its plenitude
with these two Frenchmen and the two Germans, with a recall
to God, the Word that was in the beginning. All that followers
of the old sovereign emotion could describe after the First World
War was a confession of failure, movingly told by Andre Gide,
and differently by Paul Glaudel — by him in avowed submis-
sion and with the right conclusion, although still with a remnant
of vanity, and regret for out-moded forms.
Bloy, Peguy, Haecker, Kraus — these names mean the effort
to create new forms in the two principal peoples of the Conti-
nent. It is the effort of a language unalterably personal,
radically untranslatable and not for one moment utilitarian,
once it is spoken in the personally-felt presence of God. The
association of thought and word leads to such a complete
expression of the thought, that nothing is left unsaid and
nothing is left unexplored. They thirst for the spirit in its
entirety. Total are the means of possessing the earth, total the
means of destruction, and only the total Spirit can save the
world and even the human person. It is from this perspective
of the total dangers and the total hopes of consolation, that we
survey the great debate between Authority and Liberty,
between the individual and society, which is as old as the world.
To put the truth concerning this great debate into writing,
God gave the written Law on Mount Sinai, and His prophets
showed the writing on the wall. To demonstrate it fully, God
gave His only Son. The long and laborious effort of the men
of the West to understand it received its Crown, the Crown of
the Christian Monarchy of Order and Liberty placed on the
head of Charlemagne. Century followed century, until the
immense temple of the West was built up, with stone laid
correctly on stone, until the great age was reached when, with
a perfect economy of words, passion spoke in the right place
with Corneille, emotion with Racine, reason with Moliere,
divine truth and glory with Bossuet in the pulpit, while the
congregation answered de profundis with the words of Pascal.
Then came the time of weakness and of collapse. This or
INTRODUCTION 57
that stone of the Temple was removed, and faithless men trans-
formed passion and emotion, reason and humour, into thrones
from which to preside as lawgivers. The temple was slowly
reduced to fragments and ruins — and around it we heard the
lament and the tears of the prophets, of the children of the
desolate city. But the sacred stones of Charlemagne reached
far away lands of the earth. Even now the construction of a
greater temple has probably begun, and the foundation has
been laid by invisible workers, who have nothing but scorn
and laughter for those who try to build the Tower of Babylon
once more, instead of their own new Temple of the World
Jerusalem. The scorn from above answers the tumult of Babel,
a tumult which will die down as others did before it. On high
no struggle rages between diversity and unity, between quality
and equality. The voice of prayer alone is heard there from the
altar of the Temple :
Et in personis proprietas, et in essentia unitas, et in maiestate
adoretur aegualitas.
I. JOSEPH DE MAISTRE
1753 - 1821
Born in Chambery, Haute Savoie, a hundred and six years before
this province became part of France, Joseph de Maistre was a
subject of the King of Piedmont and Sardinia. He belonged to a
family of magistrates who had been honoured with the title of Count
and he made his own legal studies in Turin. Appointed to the Court
of Justice of Savoy in 1774 as Deputy Public Prosecutor, he became
a member of the Senate in 1788 (in his country a judicial and not a
legislative body). When the French Revolutionary armies invaded
Savoy in 1 793, Joseph de Maistre fled to Lausanne, where he took
part in the activities of his fellow exiles who were loyal to the King
of Piedmont, and was also in contact with the French Royalists.
It was in Lausanne that the extraordinary circumstances of the
political situation and the necessities of political action made him
a writer. Although from early youth a man of all-round curiosity
and wide studies outside his profession and his public service, his
first book, Considerations sur la France, was not published until 1 796,
when he was forty-three years old.
The Considerations were hardly intended to be more than a
pamphlet on the topical issues of the time, similar to many others
that were published in the same year in Switzerland, mostly by
authors belonging to the circle of Madame de Stael and Benjamin
Constant. Intellectually, this group was the most active amongst
those emigres who, after the fall of Robespierre and the end of the
Terror, believed that their hour had come, in the form of a moderate
parliamentary and constitutional regime under the leadership of
the educated and literary class — whom Napoleon contemptuously
defined as the ideologues — perhaps as a consolidated Republic, or as
a new constitutional — or rather merely " symbolic " — monarchy.
Joseph de Maistre was somewhat surprised to see himself put at
the head of a new school of thought, an echo of which was heard in
young Chateaubriand, and in the prodigious Vicomte de Bonald,
who in his solitude in another part of Switzerland thought out
independently much of Joseph de Maistre's philosophy long before
he entered into a personal correspondence with him and almost
twenty years before he actually met him after the fall of Napoleon,
in Paris.
Joseph de Maistre raised the controversy on French political
events to a clearly religious and metaphysical plane. Expounding
59
60 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
Burke's central theme, that constitutions are the slow, invisible
work of history and are never made by individuals assembled in
parliaments and conventions, which, at their very best, can only
make administrative regulations, and approve or disapprove the
way public money is spent, de Maistre goes a step further than Burke
and asks the questions : Whose will is the Law ? and Who moves
History ? Burke was certainly no agnostic; he was probably the
first Anglican who, when discussing French events, dared to defend
the Catholic Church, without fearing to be denounced by his fellow-
countrymen as a " papist." But de Maistre openly calls for a return
to the great tradition of the theologians, who see the problem of
human government as one entirely subordinated to the will of God,
politics as a branch of theology, and Providence as the only
acceptable explanation of history.
In 1799 Joseph de Maistre was sent to St Petersburg as the
plenipotentiary Minister of his King, who soon afterwards lost his
kingdom of Piedmont and was confined to the island of Sardinia.
Even before the accession of General Bonaparte to power, the
unfortunate King Victor Amadeus had felt compelled to adapt
himself to a policy of submission to French interests. Joseph de
Maistre was in these circumstances unwelcome at home, as a letter
captured by the French Republican army in Italy revealed that the
Comte de Provence — later King Louis XVIII — showed a great
personal interest in the author of the Considerations.
In the years that followed, Joseph de Maistre exerted a con-
siderable personal influence in St Petersburg, somewhat out of
keeping with his modest position as the Minister of a practically
powerless King. Czar Alexander I was interested in his thought,
which was considered, not without misgivings and suspicion by
Orthodox and Pravoslav circles, who had little or no objection to
the spread of " free " thought from the Protestant Universities of
Germany, propagated by the numerous German professors employed
in Russia, but who did their best to prevent the penetration of
"Jesuitism."
The sixteen years which Joseph de Maistre spent in St Petersburg
bore considerable fruit. Here he wrote his various fragments on
Russia, Orthodoxy and Protestantism, his comments on the philo-
sophy of Bacon, his Essai sur le principe generateur des institutions
humaines and, finally, the Soirees de St Pe'tersbourg, his greatest book,
publication of which he never lived to see. De Maistre left St
Petersburg after the fall of Napoleon, not without some bitter
disappointment over the anti -Jesuit decrees of Alexander I, which
temporarily put an end to the Society's activities in Russia; but he
had the joy of seeing some excellent converts from Orthodoxy,
amongst whom was Prince Dmitri Galitzin, S.J.
The main subject of the Soirees is the working of Providence in
human institutions and in history. It is perhaps the best philosophy
JOSEPH DE MAISTRE 6l
written in dialogue form since Plato; the persons taking part in
the conversations are a Russian, a member of the Imperial Senate,
a young French Royalist emigre and the " Comte," i.e. de Maistre
himself. Almost every subject is touched upon in these dialogues:
justice, human and divine, war and peace, social order and personal
liberty, but first and foremost — for de Maistre was a true philo-
sopher, though academic pedants deny him this title and treat him
as a " mere writer," on account of the brilliant wit of his style — the
ultimate sense and meaning of all words, which relate to the one
" Word Incarnate." To quote Leon Bloy:
"Joseph de Maistre said, almost a century ago, that man is too
wicked to deserve to be free.
" This seer was a contemporary of the Revolution; he meditated
like a prophet on the grandiose horror it inspired, and confronted
it face to face.
" He died, appalled at what he saw and full of contempt,
pronouncing the funeral oration over civilised Europe."
i. HUMAN AND DIVINE NOMENCLATURE1
One of the great errors of a century which professed all possible
errors, was to think that a political constitution could be
written down and created d priori, when both reason and
experience affirm that a constitution is a divine creation, and
that precisely what is most fundamental and most essentially
constitutional in the laws of a nation cannot be written down.
. . . The essence of a fundamental law is that nobody has
the right to suppress it: now how can it be above everybody, if
somebody made it ? The consent of the people is an impossible
foundation for it ; and even if it were otherwise, agreement by
consent in no way constitutes a law, and constrains nobody,
unless it is safeguarded by a higher authority. Locke attempted
to define the nature of law as an expression of united wills; a
fortunate man, who can thus discover the nature of law in
something which, on the contrary, excludes the very idea of
law. Indeed, united wills make a ruling, not a law, which latter
necessarily and manifestly pre-supposes the existence of a
higher will, strong enough to command obedience. " According
to Hobbes's system " — the same one which has had so great a
success in our century in the works of Locke — " the validity of
1 Extract from Essai stir le Principe Ginirateur des Constitutions Politiques. H.
Goemacre. Brussels. 1852.
62 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
the civil laws depends only on the consent of the people ; but
if no natural law exists which ordains the promulgation of the
laws that have been made, of what use are they ? Promises,
contracts, oaths, are only vain words: it is as easy to break this
frivolous link as it is to form it. Without the dogma of God the
Lawgiver, all moral obligations are merely an illusion. Strength
on the one hand and weakness on the other, that is all that
binds human societies together."1
The words of this wise and profound theologian on the subject
of moral obligation can be applied with equal truth to a political
or civic obligation. Law is only really law, possessing a real
sanction, when it is presumed to emanate from a higher will;
with the result that its essential characteristic is that it is not the
expression of the general will. Otherwise laws are mere rulings, as
we have just said, and as the author whom we have quoted
above goes on to say: " those who have been able freely to
enter into these agreements, did not debar themselves from the
right to revoke them ; and their descendants, who took no part
in them, are even less bound to honour them."2 From whence
it follows that primeval good sense, happily in existence before
the birth of sophistry, sought on all sides a sanction for laws in
an authority superior to man, whether such an authority
acknowledged that sovereignty comes from God, or whether it
venerated certain unwritten laws, as coming from Him.
The men who drafted the Roman laws discreetly interposed
a very remarkable piece of Greek jurisprudence in the first
chapter of their collet tion. " Amongst the laws which govern
us," says this passage, " some are written down, others are not."
Nothing could be simpler and yet more profound. Does anyone
know of a Turkish law which expressly allows the sovereign to
send a man to his death, without a court of law having first
pronounced sentence ? Does anyone know of any written law,
even a religious one, which forbids the Christian sovereigns of
Europe to do the same thing ?3 Yet the Turk is no more sur-
prised at seeing his master order the immediate death of a man,
than he is at seeing him go to the mosque. With the whole of
1 Bergier: Historical and Dogmatic Treatise on Religion. Vol. Ill, ch. iv, para. 12,
pp. 330, 331. (Following Tertullian, Apologia, 45.)
2 Ibid.
s " The Church forbids her children, even more formally than the civil laws,
to take justice into their own hands; and it is in this spirit that Christian kings
abstain from doing so, even in crimes of high treason, and hand over the criminals
to judges, so that they can be punished according to the laws and within the
framework of justice." (Pascal, Provincial Letters, XIV.)
This passage is very important, and ought to be better known.
JOSEPH DE MAISTRE 63
Asia, and indeed with the whole of antiquity, he believes that
it is a legitimate prerogative of the sovereign to exercise an
immediate power over life and death. But our princes trembled
at the very idea of condemning a man to death; for according
to our way of seeing things, this condemnation would be an
atrocious murder; yet I doubt if it would be possible to forbid
them to do it on the strength of a fundamental written law,
without causing far greater evils than those it was intended to
prevent.
Look at Roman history to see precisely in what the power of
the Senate consisted ; it throws no light on the matter, at least
as regards the precise limits of this authority. It is generally
speaking true that the authority of the people and that of the
Senate counter-balanced each other, and were consistently
hostile one to the other. It is easy to see that these dangerous
struggles were always brought to an end either by patriotism
or by lassitude, by weakness or by violence, but we know no
more than that.1 When we contemplate these great events of
history, we are sometimes tempted to think that events would
have turned out much better if there had been precise laws to
circumscribe authority. This however would be a great error:
such laws, perpetually compromised by unexpected happenings
and by out of the way exceptions to the rule, would not have
lasted six months, or they would have meant the overthrow of
the republic.
The English constitution provides an example nearer home,
and is therefore a more striking one to take. When we examine
it carefully, we see that it only works because it is unworkable (if I
may be allowed this play on words). It derives its stability
from the exceptions to the rule, rather than from the rule itself.
The habeas corpus, for example, has been suspended so often and
for such long periods, that one wondered if the exception had
not become the rule. Supposing for a moment that the authors
of this famous Act had had the presumption to state cases in
which it could be suspended, they would thereby have destroyed
it.
The theory of names is a very important question. Names
1 I have often meditated on this passage of Cicero (De Leg. II, 6) : Leges Liviae
praesertim uno versiculo senatus puncto temporis sublatae sunt. By what right did the
Senate assume this liberty ? And how did the people allow them to do so ?
It is certainly not an easy question to answer, but why need we be astonished at
this, since after all that has been written on Roman history and Roman remains,
men still have to write theses to show how the members of the Senate were
recruited ?
64 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
are in no wise arbitrary affairs, as so many men have affirmed
who had lost their names. God says of Himself: / am ; and all
creatures say of themselves: My name is This or That. The name
of a spiritual being relates necessarily to the action he performs,
which is his distinctive quality; whence it follows that among
the ancients, the greatest honour possible to a divinity was
polyonymy, or plurality of names, which proclaimed the number of
his functions or the extent of his power. Ancient mythology
shows us Diana, when still a child, asking Jupiter to grant her
this honour; and in the verses attributed to Orpheus, compli-
ments are addressed to her under the title of polyonymous spirit
(or spirit bearing many names). Which means, after all, that
God alone has the right to give a name. Indeed, He has named
everything, since He created everything.
It is the same with nations as with individuals: some there
are who have no name. Herodotus observes that the Thracians
would be the most powerful people in the world if they were
united. " But" he adds, " this union is impossible, for they all have
a different name.'''' This is an excellent remark. There are also
modern peoples who have no name, and there are others who have
several ; but polyonymy is as disastrous for nations as it has been
thought honourable for spirits.
Since names have nothing arbitrary about them, and since,
like all things, they derive their origin more or less directly
from God, we must not think that a man has the unrestricted
right to name even those beings of whose existence he has some
right to consider himself the author, and to impose on them
names according to his own ideas. God has reserved for
Himself in this matter a sort of immediate jurisdiction, which
it is impossible not to recognise. " Oh, my dear Hermogenus! the
imposition of names is a very important matter and one which cannot be
the prerogative of a bad or even of a vulgar man. . . . This right only
belongs to a creator of names (onomaturgos) ; that is, apparently, only
to the legislator; but of all human creatures, the rarest is a legislator."
Man however likes nothing better than to give names to
things. He does this, for example, when he applies significant
epithets to words; a talent which is a distinctive mark of a
great writer and especially of a great poet. The felicitous
choice of an epithet enhances a noun, which becomes dis-
tinguished under this new sign. Examples can be found in
every language ; but to confine ourselves to the language of the
nation which itself bears so great a name, since it gave its
name to frankness, or else frankness received its name from the
JOSEPH DE MAISTRE 65
nation : what cultured man is not familiar with miserly Acheron,
careful steeds, shameless bed, timid supplications, silvery rustling,
rapid destroyer, pale sycophants, etc. ? Never will man forget
his primitive rights; we can even say in a certain sense, that
he will always exercise them, but how curtailed have they
become because of his degradation ! Here is a true law, such
as God made it: Man is forbidden to give grand names to things of
his own making, and which he thinks important; but if he has acted in
a legitimate fashion, the commonplace name of the object will be
ennobled by the object itself, and will achieve greatness.
What is the real origin of this word Tuileries, which is so
famous ?1 Nothing is more commonplace; but the ashes of
dead heroes, mingling with the soil, had consecrated it and the
soil consecrated the name. It is somewhat curious that at such
a great distance in time and space, this same word Tuileries,
famous in olden days as the name of a tomb, should acquire
new lustre as the name of a palace. The authority which came
to dwell in the Tuileries did not think of giving it a more
imposing name, which might have been more fitting. If it had
committed this mistake, there would have been no reason why,
on the following day, the place should not have been inhabited
by pickpockets and street girls.
. . . There are therefore two infallible rules by which we
may judge all human creations of whatever kind : their basis
and their name, and these two rules of course are free from any
pejorative interpretation. If the basis is purely human, the
construction cannot last; and the more men there are who have
been concerned in it, the more deliberation, science and especially
writing, in a word, the more human the means of every kind that
have been employed, the more fragile the institution will be. It
is chiefly by applying this rule that we must judge all the enter-
prises of sovereigns or of assemblies of men in the cause of civil-
isation, and in the establishment or the regeneration of peoples.
. . . The second rule concerning names is, I think, neither
less clear nor less decisive than the first. If the name has been
imposed by an assembly; if it has been established by discussion
before the object itself was created, so that the name precedes
the object; if the name is pompous,2 if it has a grammatical
1 Tuileries, broadly interpreted, retains some connection with pottery.
2 Thus, for example, if a man other than a sovereign confers upon himself the
title of legislator, it is a sure sign that he is not one at all; and if an assembly has
the temerity to call itself " legislative," not only is it a sure sign that it is nothing
of the sort, but a sign that it has gone mad and will soon be the laughing stock of
the whole world.
66 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
relation to the object it represents; finally, if it has been taken
from a foreign language, especially from a dead language, all
the characteristics of nonentity are there, and we can be sure
that the name and the object will disappear in no time. The
contrary assumptions proclaim the principle of legitimacy, con-
sequently that the institution will last. We must take care not
to pass over this subject lightly. A true philosopher ought never
to lose sight of the language as a real barometer, the variations
in which are an infallible guide to good and bad weather. To con-
fine myself to the subject in hand, it is certain that the dispro-
portionate introduction of foreign words, applied in particular
to national institutions of every kind, are one of the most infal-
lible signs of the decadence of a people.
If the formation of every empire, the march of civilisation
and the unanimous verdict of all history and all tradition were
not enough to convince us, the destruction of empires would
complete the demonstration begun by their origin. Just as the
religious principle created everything, so the absence of this
same principle has destroyed everything. The sect of Epicurus,
which might be called the scepticism of antiquity, first degraded,
then destroyed every government which had the misfortune to
give it protection. Everywhere, Lucretius proclaimed the
coming of Caesar.
2. WAR, PEACE, AND SOCIAL ORDER1
The fearful sight of carnage does not harden the true soldier's
heart. Amidst the blood he sheds, he remains as human as a
wife is chaste in the ecstasy of love. Once he has sheathed his
sword, sacred humanity comes into its own again, and it is
probably true to say that the most exalted and the most
generous sentiments of all are felt by the soldier. Cast your
mind back, Sir, to the grand siecle in France. The harmony
which existed in that century between religion, military
courage and science, is responsible for the noble character
which all nations have hailed with universal acclamation as the
pattern of the European man. Take the first element away
from it, and the unity, or in other words, the whole beauty of
it, disappears. Men do not realise how necessary this element
1 Extract from the 7th Dialogue of the Soirees de St Pilersbourg. H. Goemacre.
Brussels. 1852.
JOSEPH DE MAISTRE 6j
is in all things, nor the part it plays in matters in which it might
seem irrelevant to superficial observers. The divine spirit,
which has singled out Europe as its dwelling-place, even miti-
gated the scourges of eternal justice and the type of war waged
in Europe will always be outstanding in the annals of the
universe. Men killed each other of course, burned and ravaged
and committed thousands of useless crimes, I admit, yet they
began their war in May and stopped in December; they slept
under canvas; the fighting was confined to soldiers. Never
were nations as such at war with each other, and weakness was
held to be sacred in the lamentable series of devastations which
this scourge brought in its train.
It was moreover a magnificent sight to see all the sovereigns
of Europe, restrained by a mysterious and irrepressible urge
towards moderation, refuse ever to demand the utmost, even
in moments of great peril, that their people could give them;
they used men gently, and all of them, guided by an invisible
inspiration, avoided dealing any of those blows to the
sovereignty of the enemy which could rebound on them: glory,
honour and eternal praise to the law of love which was un-
ceasingly proclaimed at the heart of Europe ! No one nation
triumphed over the other; the wars of antiquity were forgotten,
except in books, or amongst people seated in the shadow of death ;
fierce wars were brought to an end when a province, or a town
or even in many cases a few villages, changed hands. Mutual
consideration and the most delicate courtesy could be found
amidst the clash of arms. Bombs were never directed at the
palaces of kings; balls and displays on more than one occasion
interrupted the course of battle. The enemy officer, who was
invited to these celebrations, would come in order to joke about
the battle to be fought on the morrow; amidst all the horror of
the most sanguinary engagement, the dying man could still hear
the voice of compassion and words of courtesy. The first shots
were no sooner exchanged, than huge hospitals sprang up
everywhere: doctors, surgeons, chemists flocked to offer their
skill; from their ranks would arise the presiding genius of St
John of God, or of St Vincent de Paul, greater and stronger
than ordinary men, constant as faith itself, as active as hope,
and as skilful as love. Every victim of the battle who still
breathed was picked up, received treatment and was given con-
solation : every wound was touched by the hand of science and
of charity !
Gentlemen, the functions of a soldier are terrible, but they
68 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
surely derive from a major law of the spiritual world, and we
must not be surprised that all nations agree in seeing something
more particularly divine in this scourge than in the others.
Believe me, it is for a great and fundamental reason
that the title GOD OF HOSTS illumines every page of
Scripture. . . .
War is divine then of its very nature, because it is a law of
the world.
War is divine in its consequences, both general and parti-
cular, which are of a supernatural order; consequences which
are little known because few people care for them, but which
are none the less beyond all question. Who could doubt that
death on the battlefield entails great privileges ? Who could
think that the victims of this fearful judgement shed their blood
in vain ? Yet the time is not propitious for insisting on these
subjects; our century is not prepared yet to think about them.
Let us leave natural philosophy to this world and keep our
own eyes ever fixed on the invisible world, which will give us
the answer to everything.
War is divine in the protection granted to the great leaders,
even to the most daring, who seldom fall in battle, and then
only when their fame can reach no further heights and their
mission is fulfilled.
War is divine in the manner in which it is declared. I have
no desire to exonerate any man inopportunely, but how obvious
it is, that those men whom we consider to be the immediate
authors of wars are themselves swept along by circumstances !
At the exact moment prepared by men and prescribed
by justice, God intervenes to avenge the iniquity which
the inhabitants of the earth have committed against
Him. . . .
War is divine in its results, over which human reason specu-
lates in vain: for they can be totally different in two nations,
although both were equally affected by the war. Some wars
debase nations and debase them for centuries; others exalt
them, perfect them in every way, and within a short space of
time, even repair momentary losses with a visible increase in
population, which is very extraordinary. History often presents
us with the picture of a population which remains rich and goes
on increasing while the most desperate battles are being fought.
But some wars are vicious and accursed, which our conscience,
rather than our reason, recognises to be so: nations receive their
death-blow in these wars, both as regards their power and their
JOSEPH DE MAISTRE 69
character. Thus even the conqueror seems degraded and
impoverished, and although he is crowned with laurels, he is
left sad and lamenting, while in the vanquished country there
is soon not a workshop or a plough which is not working to
capacity.
3. ON SOPHISTRY AND TYRANNY1
Think of him, if you will, as possessing a fine talent; it is none
the less true that when we praise Voltaire, we ought to do so
with certain reservations, I nearly said with reluctance. The
unbridled admiration lavished on him by too many people is
an infallible sign of a corrupted soul. Let us be under no
illusion : if a man runs his eye over his book-shelves and feels
attracted to the Works ofFerney, God does not love him. People
have often laughed at ecclesiastical authority for condemning
books in odium auctoris; in reality, nothing was more just;
Refuse honours due to genius to the man who abuses his gifts. If this
law were severely applied, we should soon see poisonous books
disappear; but since we are not responsible for promulgating
it, at least let us beware of going to the extreme (far more repre-
hensible than we think) of praising guilty writers to the skies.
Voltaire above all. He pronounced a terrible judgement
against himself without realising it, for it was he who said, " A
corrupt mind never reached sublime heights."
Nothing is more true, and that is why Voltaire, for all his
hundred books, is never more than attractive. I make an excep-
tion of his tragedies, in which the nature of the medium obliged
him to express noble sentiments which were alien to his
character; yet even in his dramatic work, in which he
triumphed, he does not deceive the experienced eye. In his
best plays he resembles his two great rivals as the most cunning
hypocrite resembles a saint. I do not intend in any case to
question his merits as a dramatist, but maintain what I said
in the beginning: that as soon as Voltaire speaks in his own
name, he is nothing more than attractive; nothing can arouse
his enthusiasm, not even the battle of Fontenoy. He is charming,
people say; I agree, but I use the word in criticism of him.
Moreover, I cannot endure the exaggeration which makes him
1 Extract from the 4th Dialogue of Soirees de St Pitersbourg.
70 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
universal. To tell the truth, I see certain exceptions to this
universality. He is a complete failure in the ode: and no
wonder. His deliberate impiety had killed the divine flame of
enthusiasm in him. He is also a complete failure, even a ridicu-
lous failure, in lyrical drama, his ear being as completely deaf
to the beauties of harmony, as his eye was blind to the beauties
of art. In the genres which best suited his talent, he is dull :
he is mediocre, cold and often (who would credit it ?) heavy
and coarse in comedy; for the evil man is never comic. For
the same reason, he was unable to coin an epigram, the smallest
outpouring of his venom needing at least a hundred lines. If
he tries his hand at satire, he borders on scurrility; he is un-
bearable when he writes history, despite his art and the elegance
and grace of his style; no quality in him can replace those he
lacks, namely a feeling for the life of history, a serious pur-
pose, good faith and dignity. As for his epic poem, I
am not qualified to speak on it: for we have to read a
book before we judge it, and we must be wide awake before
we can read it.
A monotonous torpor hangs over most of his writings, which
consist of two subjects only, the Bible and his enemies: he is
either blasphemous or insulting. His jokes, which receive so
much praise, are however far from being beyond reproach:
the laughter they arouse is not real laughter; it is a grimace.
Have you ever noticed that the divine anathema was written
large on his face ? After the lapse of so many years, there is
still time to prove it for yourself. Go and gaze at his face in
the Hermitage Palace; never do I look at it without congratu-
lating myself that it has not been handed down to us by some
sculptor, who took his inspiration from the Greeks, and who
would perhaps have idealised it. Everything is as nature made
it in this portrait. There is as much truth in this head as there
would be if a death mask had been taken of him. Observe the
abject brow, which never blushed for shame, the eyes like two
extinct craters, in which lust and hatred still seem to be
seething. That mouth — perhaps I should not say so, but I can-
not help myself — that frightful grin stretching from ear to ear,
like a spring ready to open and release a blasphemy or a piece
of sarcasm, when his cruel malice demands it.
Do not talk to me of this man, I cannot endure the thought
of him. Oh, what harm he has done us ! Like the insect which
is the scourge of our gardens, because it attacks the roots of our
most precious plants, Voltaire unceasingly pricks with his goad
JOSEPH DE MAISTRE 71
at the two roots of society, women and young men; they
imbibe his poisons, which he is thus able to transmit from
generation to generation. It is in vain that, in order to cover up
his unspeakable outrages, his stupid admirers deafen us by
quoting the sonorous tirades in which he spoke of the most
venerated objects in a masterly fashion. These people, who are
wilfully blind, do not see that they are putting the final touch
to the condemnation of this guilty writer. If Fenelon had writ-
ten The Prince in the same style in which he painted the joys of
Elysium, he would be a thousand times more vile and more
guilty than Machiavelli. Voltaire's great crime is the abuse of a
talent, and the deliberate prostitution of a mind created to sing
the praises of God and of virtue. He cannot allege in excuse,
as so many other men can, his youth, thoughtlessness, the
allurements of passion, or, finally, the melancholy weakness of
our nature. Nothing can absolve him: his corruption is in a
class by itself; it takes root in the deepest fibres of his heart,
and is fortified by all the powers of his understanding. Always
closely linked with sacrilege, it defies God by leading men
astray. With a fury which is unequalled in this world, this
insolent blasphemer goes to the length of declaring himself the
personal enemy of the Saviour of mankind ; from the depths of
his nothingness, he dares to give Him a ridiculous name, and
the adorable law which the God -Man brought on earth he
calls infamous. Abandoned by God, who punishes by with-
drawing Himself, he throws off all restraint. Other cynics have
startled virtue, Voltaire startles vice. He plunges into the mud,
rolls himself in it, slakes his thirst with it; he delivers his
imagination up to the enthusiasm of Hell, which lends him all
its strength to drag him to the extreme limits of evil. He invents
wonders, monsters which make us grow pale. Paris crowned
him, but Sodom would have banished him. Shameless desec-
rator of the universal language, and of her greatest names, the
very last of men, after those who love him! How can I express
the feelings he arouses in me ? When I see what he was capable
of doing, and what he in fact did, his inimitable talents inspire
nothing less in me than a kind of sacred rage, which has no
name. Divided between admiration and horror, I sometimes
feel I would like to have a statue erected to him ... by the
hand of the common hangman.
. . . There is moreover a certain rational anger which goes
very well with wisdom ; the Holy Ghost Himself has expressly
stated that it is free from sin.
72 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
4. RUSSIA AND THE CHRISTIAN WEST1
" Human nature was created for the benefit of the few."
This maxim, expressed in natural terms, shocks us no doubt
by its Machiavellian turn of phrase, but from another point
of view it is well said. Everywhere the mass of the people is
led by the few ; for without a reasonably strong aristocracy, the
public authority is weak.
There were far fewer free men in antiquity than there were
slaves. Athens had forty thousand slaves and twenty thousand
citizens. Rome, towards the end of the Republic, had about
twelve hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom barely two
thousand were landowners ; which by itself proves the enor-
mous number of slaves that there were. One man sometimes
had several thousands of slaves in his service. Once four hun-
dred slaves were executed in a single house, by virtue of the
terrible law which pronounced that all the slaves who lived
under the same roof should perish when a Roman citizen was
killed in his own home.
. . . Then the divine law appeared on earth. It immediately
took possession of the hearts of men and changed them in a
way which arouses the eternal admiration of any sincere
observer. Above all, religion began to work unremittingly for
the abolition of slavery, a project which no other religion, no
other legislator or philosopher had ever dared to undertake, let
alone conceive. ..."
Generally speaking, human nature is only Jit to receive civic liberty in
proportion as it is penetrated and led by Christian principles.
Wherever any religion other than Christianity is practised,
slavery exists as of right, and wherever religion grows weak, the
political power becomes proportionately more dominant and
the nation is less fit to enjoy general liberty.
This paramount truth has just been demonstrated before our
very eyes in the most illuminating and terrible way. For an
entire century, Christianity suffered continuous attack by an
abominable sect. Those princes who were perverted by their
doctrine allowed them to pursue their work, and on more than
one deplorable occasion even helped on their ill-intentioned
endeavours, undermining, with the very hands that were
created to preserve, the pillars of the temple that later crashed
around them. What was the result ? There was finally too
1 Extract from Quatre Chapitres inidits sur la Russie, ch. i. Paris. Aug. Vaton. 1859.
JOSEPH DE MAISTRE 73
much liberty in the world. The depraved will of men, having
cast off all restraint, gave itself up completely to pride and cor-
ruption. The mass of emancipated men attacked the first insti-
tution in the land that had the greatest influence over all the
others. In less than twenty years, the European edifice
crumbled, and the principle of sovereignty still struggles to sur-
vive amidst the ruins, compromised perhaps for ever.
In our day, the two anchors of society, religion and slavery,
have been lost, so that the vessel of State has been cast adrift
and shattered by the storm.
These truths are so obvious that it is impossible to question
them. It is now an easy matter to apply our conclusions to
Russia.
If we ask why serfdom is still the common lot of the Russian
masses today, the answer is self-evident. Serfdom is present in
Russia because it is a necessity and the Emperor cannot rule without it.
The primordial antipathy between Rome and Constanti-
nople; the crimes and the orgies of the Byzantine Empire; the
extraordinary paroxysm which overwhelmed the West round
about the tenth century; the ill-chosen and consequently the
vicious Popes who were created at the time by petty, semi-
barbaric princes and even by base women who had seized
power; the Tartar invasion ; the previous invasion by a power
of another kind, which had entered Russia as a liquid flows
into an empty vessel; finally the disastrous dividing wall which
had been deliberately erected during the eleventh and twelfth
centuries; all these causes, I repeat, removed Russia perforce
from the general stream of civilisation and emancipation which
came from Rome.
... In the West, the civil authority did not abandon slaves
to their own devices when it freed them; they lived under the
protection of the priests, and in any case, life at that time was
very simple. Science had not yet kindled the pride which, like
a devouring flame, has already destroyed a part of the world
and will destroy the whole of it, if it is allowed to continue.
Circumstances in Russia are very different. Every lord, or
rather every noble, is a real magistrate, a kind of civil governor
who is responsible for the policing of his estate, and who is
endowed with the necessary authority to repress, at least to a
large extent, the reckless impulses of individual wills.
If this magistrature should ever be suppressed, what autho-
rity could the sovereign put in its place to maintain order ?
The laws, you will say; but the laws are precisely the weakest
74 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
part of this great empire. The tribunals all have more duties to
perform than authority to wield; they complain of public
opinion, which in turn is dissatisfied with the tribunals; these
grievances are one of the things that strike foreigners especially
the most forcibly. As a crowning danger, Russia, alone amongst
nations, ancient or modern, refuses to exercise the death
penalty in the public interest; a circumstance which must be
borne in mind.
. . . Now the great conservative and preservative force of
loyalty to the throne does not exist in Russia. Religion has a
certain influence on the human mind, but none at all on the
heart, the seat of all desires and all crimes. A peasant would
probably rather risk his life than eat meat on one of the forbid-
den days; but if the problem is to prevent an outburst of
passion, the outcome is uncertain. Christianity does not con-
sist of words only, it is a concrete thing; if it no longer possesses
its strength, its penetrating influence, its primeval simplicity
and a powerful priesthood, it is not itself any more, it is no
longer what it was when it made a general liberation of slaves
possible. Let the Russian Government beware: its clergy do
not even possess a voice in the State, they dare not speak and
are only consulted when it cannot be avoided ; a foreigner by
no means says: It is unfortunate', he simply says: It is a fact.
. . . The danger of rebellion, following upon an emancipa-
tion of the serfs, would be indescribably great on account of the
peculiar character of this nation, which is the most excitable,
impetuous and enterprising in the whole world. The writer
has sometimes said (and I hope the joke is not entirely without
foundation) " that if the longing in a Russian heart could be
imprisoned in a citadel, it would blow it to pieces." No man
longs for something as ardently as the Russian does.
Watch how he spends his money, and how he pursues all his
pleasures as the fancy takes him; you will see how he wants
things. Watch him as he engages in trade, even amongst the
poorer classes, and see how intelligent and alive he is to his own
interests; watch him as he fulfils his most hazardous enter-
prises, watch him finally on the battlefield, and you will see the
full extent of his daring.
If we imagine liberty being given to thirty-six millions of
men, more or less of this calibre — never can it be repeated too
often — we should immediately see the outbreak of a conflagra-
tion which would destroy Russia.
. - . Russia does not possess any powerful reinforcements to
JOSEPH DE MAISTRE 75
authority (such as Turkey possesses in the Koran,, or China in
the maxims and laws of Confucius) ; consequently she ought to
beware of giving full reign to too many individual wills. More-
over, her legislators ought never to lose sight of a fact of the
greatest importance: Russian civilisation coincided with the
period of the greatest corruption the mind of man has ever
known; and that a series of circumstances which we cannot
examine here put the Russian nature into contact with, and
amalgamated it, so to speak, with the nation which has been at
one and the same time the most terrible instrument and the
most pitiable victim of this corruption.
Such a thing has never been seen before. Priests and oracles
have always presided over the infancy of nations; here we have
the opposite. The germs of Russian civilisation were fermented
and developed in the corruption of the Regency period in
France. The dreadful literature of the eighteenth century
arrived in Russia suddenly and without any preparation; the
first French lessons which this people received consisted of
blasphemies.
This fatal disadvantage which Russia possesses over other
nations ought to make her rulers take special precautions when
it comes to the point of giving liberty to the immense mass of
the nation which still does not enjoy it. As these serfs receive
their liberty, they will find that they are placed between
teachers who are more than suspect, and priests who are weak
and enjoy no special consideration. Exposed in this unprepared
fashion, they will infallibly and abruptly pass from superstition
to atheism and from passive obedience to unbridled activity.
Liberty will have the same effect on these temperaments as a
heady wine on a man who is not used to it. The mere sight of
liberty given to others will intoxicate those who still do not
share it. With men's minds prepared in this way, any Univer-
sity Pugatscheff1 has only to appear (they can be manufactured
easily enough, as all the factories are open) and if we add
indifference, incapacity, the ambition of a few nobles, foreign
bad faith, the intrigues of a detestable sect which never rests,
etc., etc., the State, according to all the rules of probability, will
literally burst asunder, like an over-long beam which only holds
firm at the two extremities. Elsewhere there is only one danger to
fear; here there are two.
If an emancipation of the serfs is to take place in Russia, it
1 Pugatscheff: Leader of a peasant revolt in the reign of Catherine II, whom
his followers proclaimed to be the murdered Czar, Peter III. Executed 1775.
76 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
will come about in the course of nature. Quite unforeseen cir-
cumstances will make it generally desirable. The whole
process will take place quietly and will be carried through with-
out a hitch (like all great enterprises) . If the sovereign gives
his blessing to this national movement, it will be his right and
his duty to do so ; but God forbid that he should ever stimulate
it of his own accord !
II. VICOMTE DE BONALD
1754- 1840
Louis-Gabriel-Ambroise, Vicomte de Bonald, came from an
ancient noble family of Provence, was educated at the Oratorian
College at Juilly, and after serving with the Artillery he held a post
in the local administration of his native province. Elected to the
States General of 1 789 as a deputy for Aveyron, he strongly opposed
the new legislation on the civil status of the clergy and emigrated
in 1 79 1, as many Royalists did, to Germany, when Louis XVI, a
virtual prisoner of the Revolution, lost all control over the situation.
After serving for a few years in the Royalist army of Prince Conde,
Bonald retired to Heidelberg when the Conde army was dis-
banded. In 1797 he published his Theorie du pouvoir politique et
religieux dans la societe civile demontree par le raisonnement et Vhistoire in
Constance, which was banned by the Directoire in France. Although
he returned to France later, Bonald remained faithful to the
Bourbon dynasty and declined every offer of public service under
Napoleon. With his Essai analytique sur les lois naturelles (1800), Du
Divorce (1801), La Legislation primitive (1802), Recherches philosophiques
sur les premier objets des connaissances morales (1818) and with the hun-
dreds of shorter essays and newspaper articles on topical subjects
which he wrote, Bonald became for a generation the leading
theorist of Legitimism. He was also an active exponent of this
principle in the Peerage, in the French Academy, in the Royal
Council of the Universities, to which Louis XVIII appointed him,
and at the head of the Ministry of Education under this same King.
In 1830 Bonald retired from politics and adopted an attitude of
passive opposition towards King Louis Philippe and the Orleanist
monarchy.
Bonald is a foremost apologist of Catholic political and social
doctrine, combating the various schools of romantic political
thought and of English utilitarianism. His importance lies in the
fact that he was a most penetrating critic of the ethics of Kant, of
Rousseau's notion of the " general will " and of Montesquieu's
" division of powers." To Kant's individual judgement Bonald
opposes dogma and authority; against Rousseau he establishes the
primacy of thought over will in his analysis of primitive legislation
and of the origin of human language ; in place of Montesquieu's
" division of powers," he demonstrates his brilliant historical and
theological theory of the " unity of power," given by God for a
77
78 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
unique and undivided purpose. According to Bonald, the safeguard
against the misuse of power does not lie in institutions to curb
power, as the Liberal school thought, but in the ethical limitations
of power set by the religious conscience.
Bonald distinguishes between the " social " and the " political "
sphere, the first comprising all legitimate private concerns and
activities, and the second providing force in the service of justice.
The foundation of the Christian State is in Bonald's view justice.
The sword against the internal and the external enemy — the sword
of justice and the sword of defence — are one and the same and are
carried by the same monarch, in whose service there are two kinds
of nobility, the noblesse de robe and the noblesse d'epee. The foundation
of both society and State is the family, marriage being " eventual
society," which becomes " actual " with the birth of children. The
sacred character of family life safeguards it against interference by
the State in the social sphere. All ethical principles governing State
and society are derived from the family and thus Bonald wishes to
see at the head of the State, not a " first citizen," but a " first
family," and the political and public services assured, not by
individuals, but by such families who are ready to renounce other-
wise legitimate and lucrative private activities for political honours
and distinctions.
Bonald preached the essential unity of Europe as a society of
Christian public law, and he may be quoted as the classic opponent
of modern tendencies of nationalism, which he showed are of
revolutionary origin.
Among the great Catholic writers of the post-Revolutionary era,
Bonald occupies a first and unique place. Less of an elegant para-
doxical wit than Joseph de Maistre, with whose apologetic thought
he concurred in many essential points, he is a more systematic
thinker, whose achievement shows a rare consistency and unity in
thought, an unusual purity of style and an unmatched conformity
of life to the principles he constantly defended.
The light and the truth of the Christian heritage, reached by men
like Donoso Cortes, Louis Veuillot or Barbey d'Aurevilly after hard
struggles against the intellectual trends of their time, Bonald
inherited safely; he was never misled by the aberrations of his
century and transmitted it safely to future generations. In the
history of French philosophy, he will be mainly remembered for
his theory of the origin of human language. Bonald concluded from
the fact that the name of God exists in every language, that it
expresses a correct and plausible idea, and sees in this the proof of
God's existence : man, in his view, is only capable of imagining
what exists in reality. While Descartes, and the whole school of
thought which followed his method, took individual thought and
reasoning as their point of departure, the existence of society is for
Bonald the first and foremost problem. Society exists, in his view,
VICOMTE DE BONALD 79
for a Thought conceived, human association being the means
employed to achieve this end. The expression of this Thought is the
Word and the Word became incarnate in Christ.
Thus Bonald's reasoning leads to a perfect harmony and perfect
faith, and he is perhaps the first modern philosopher to rejoin the
great medieval tradition of Christian philosophy.
The first part of the following extracts was written by Bonald in
1799, the second in 181 9. The two essays from which they are
taken both relate to the same subject, the pacification of Europe
after the wars of the Revolution. In the Analytical Essay on the Law
of Mature we follow Bonald's thought during the period of consolida-
tion after the fall of Robespierre, and which soon afterwards took a
more definite shape in the Consulate of Bonaparte, proclaimed on
the 1 8th Brumaire of the Year VIII (November 9th, 1799). The
Essay on the General Interest of Europe (1814) was meant as a piece of
advice to the Congress of Vienna, and as a comment on the basic
principle of this Congress, which Metternich proclaimed to be the
restoration of " the public law of Europe, as it can be seen in facts
incontestably established by history." Bonald takes the principle
formulated in Vienna as his point of departure and also as a method
of approach. He underlines very emphatically the central impor-
tance of the Church in the making of Europe, and at the same time
he directs his polemics by implication against the political theories
of non-Catholic philosophical schools: Spinoza's theory of the
geometrical equilibrium in the division of powers, and Kant's
theoretically Republican " Eternal Peace," which neglect to define,
or relegate to the second plane the first principle of Power (a human
part of the divine attribute of the Almighty) and the principle of
facts and rights clearly established by history.
I. THE UNITY OF EUROPE
There has arisen in our time, in the midst of Christian Europe
and at the very heart of civilisation, an independent State
which has made atheism its religion and anarchy its system
of government. Although it was at war with society, this mon-
strous State has yet shown all the marks of a society; its
sovereign was a stupendous spirit of error and of lies; its basic
law, a hatred of all order; its subjects were men tormented by
the passions of covetousness and greed; its instruments of
80 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
authority and its ministers were men who were either thoroughly
corrupt, or had been wretchedly seduced from their duty, men
who, bearing titles and names which will remain for ever cele-
brated, united by the same oaths, united more closely still by
the same crimes, led this terrible action with all the devices of
genius and carried it out with the blind devotion of fanatics.
Scarcely had this sinister society been formed and so to say
constituted, than the inevitable and metaphysical distinction
between truth and error, and good and evil, which began with
man himself and will last as long as he lives, became a physical
reality. Then France, where this infernal State materialised for
a time, intoxicated with the wine of prostitution, and as if carried
away by a superhuman frenzy, despatched her principles, her
soldiers and the memory of her famous men to extinguish all
truth, to overthrow every semblance of order, and threatened
the whole world with a return to savagery.
Anarchy has been dethroned and the armies of atheism are
defeated; but the precedent lives on after these successes and
the principles survive the precedent. A generation has grown
up which hates authority and is ignorant of its duties, and
which will transmit to succeeding generations the fatal tradi-
tion of so many accepted errors and the noxious memory of so
many crimes which remain unpunished. The causes of dis-
order, which always subsist at the heart of society, will sooner
or later reproduce their terrible effects, unless the authority
vested in the different societies substitutes its unlimited powers
of preservation for this thorough system of destruction; unless
our rulers return to the natural constitution of societies, in order
to make their social action completely effective; unless finally
they bring the whole might of public institutions into play, to
fight and call a halt to the deadly consequences of occult insti-
tutions.
In France especially, it is both possible and necessary to
relate the question of authority, and those who administer it,
back to their natural origin; that is to say, to form a society.
France has always served as a model to other nations, in good
things as well as in bad; and alone perhaps in Europe, she is
in just the requisite position to establish a society in a final and
complete form, because she is, I think, the only nation which
has reached the limits set to her territory by nature. A nation
which has reached this stage ought not, and even cannot, have
any other ambition than to maintain her position, to arm her-
self only against the enemy from without, and still more
VICOMTE DE BONALD 8l
against the enemy from within : that spirit of pride and revolt
which, curbed but never destroyed, and ever present in society
because it is always alive in man, will wage an internecine and
stubborn war until the end, in the bosom of society as well as
in the heart of man. For let us make no mistake : society itself
is a real state of warfare, in which virtue combats error, and
good combats evil, while nature, which desires that all men
should combine in a society, wars against man, who tends to
isolate himself from society, or rather to create a society all by
himself; the name of the Lord of Hosts, which is assumed by the
creator and preserver of human nature, means first and fore-
most the God of societies.
We are approaching a great phase in the social development
of the world. The Revolution, which, like all revolutions, was
both religious and political, was the result of the general laws
governing the preservation of societies, and is to be compared to
a terrible and salutary crisis, by means of which nature roots
out from the social body those vicious principles which the
weakness of authority had allowed to creep in, and restores to
it its health and pristine vigour.
Hence the Revolution will restore to the principle of autho-
rity in France the requisite strength which will enable it to
preserve society, that same strength which it had lost in propor-
tion as it repudiated the real bases of authority and in some
cases over-estimated its scope. " Upheavals have always
strengthened the hand of authority," says Montesquieu, who
observes the fact without referring back to the principle. Hence
the Revolution will restore religious and political unity to
Europe, that natural constitution based on the authority of
religion and the authority of the State, from which she was
separated by the Treaty of Westphalia. It was, as a matter of
fact, in this treaty, famous for all time, that the atheistic dogma
of the religious and political sovereignty of man was first
propounded and in a sense consecrated, that principle of every
revolution and the germ of all the evils which afflict society,
the abomination of desolation in high places, in other words, in a
society which is subject to the sovereignty of God. Then it was
that the leaders of the nations, united in the most solemn act
that has been performed since the foundation of Christian
society, recognised the public and social existence of political
democracy, in the illusory independence of Switzerland and the
United Provinces, and of religious democracy, in the public
establishment of the reformed religion and the evangelical body
82 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
of German princes, thus legalising in Europe usurpations of
religious and political authority, which had hitherto only
received a provisional and precarious recognition in imperfect
States.
The treaties which sooner or later will bring the present war
to an end will be based on contradictory principles, irrespective
of the period in which they are signed. They will propose the
abolition of all government by the mob, the organisation of
Europe into great States, and perhaps even the overthrow of
that dividing wall which, thanks to a policy torn by party
hatreds, has separated certain peoples from the ancient faith
of Christian Europe. Already we see the opposition to religious
unity weakening in England, as, on account of the accession of
Ireland and other events which are perhaps already in prepara-
tion, she becomes more firmly attached to the principle of
monarchy. Russia, weary of the despotism which, as Montes-
quieu says, " is more burdensome to her than to her peoples
themselves," is progressing towards a unified and natural organi-
sation of political authority, through the law of succession
which she has recently promulgated; at the same time,
we can discern unequivocal signs in her government that she
is trying to return to religious unity and that she will perhaps
be able to bring the Orient back into that unity. Finally, in
France herself, pseudo-authority is refraining from persecuting
pseudo-religion, until such time as authority can lend religion
its support. Every event of this ever-memorable era brings
nearer to us the universal revelation of this fundamental truth
of the science of society : that outside religious and political unity,
man can find no truth and society no salvation.
The greatest genius the world has perhaps ever seen,
Leibnitz,1 who lived at the beginning of this century, and who,
placed historically as he was between the reverses which
afflicted the old age of Louis XIV and the upheavals which
were inevitable during the minority of his successor, dared, at
the time of France's greatest weakness, to foretell her future
greatness, and to write these remarkable words to his friend
Ludolphus: " Would you like me to tell you my fears more
explicitly ? It is that France, bringing the whole of the Rhine
under her domination, will, with a stroke of the pen, reduce the
College of Electors by one half, so that the foundations of the
Empire being already destroyed, the structure itself will fall
1 See Note 3, p. 94.
VICOMTE DE BONALD 83
into ruin." Leibnitz wrote in his Further Essays on Human Under-
standing lines which are no less prophetic : " Those who imagine
that they have broken free from the inconvenient fear of a
watchful Providence and a threatening future, give their brute
passions full rein and apply their minds towards seducing and
corrupting others. If they are ambitious and somewhat hard men,
they are capable of setting the four corners of the earth ablaze for
their own pleasure or advancement, and some I have known of
this metal. ... I have even come to the conclusion that
similar opinions, which gradually insinuate themselves into the
minds of those great men who control other men and are respon-
sible for government, and which slip into fashionable books,
prepare the way for the general revolution which threatens Europe. . . .
If we still have the strength to cure ourselves of the spiritual
infection, the bad effects of which now begin to be visible, the
evils can perhaps be averted ; but if it spreads, Providence will
punish the faults of men by that very revolution to which it will give
birth: for whatever happens, everything will in general and in the
long run happen for the best. . . ." In other words, all things will
tend towards the improvement of mankind or of society, an
opinion which is in conformity with this great man's system, a
religious and philosophical optimism which was misunderstood
and ridiculed by Voltaire,1 and to which so many other men
have subscribed, without fully understanding it.
Therein, and therein only, lies that social perfectibility which
is promised us by men who do not understand the term, and
whose opinions, at least in their consequences, drag down
society to a state of ignorance and barbarity. Writers who
attempt to hasten the progress of society reject it without
examination, when they defend the principles of morality,
reason and good taste against the encroachment of barbarians;
a remarkable contradiction in terms, which proves that truth
and error are often but the same things, seen from two different
angles. Indeed, the opponents of perfectibility can be excused for
failing to recognise it, when it is offered to them by men who,
in morality, politics and literature, mistake the unnatural and
the extraordinary for a novelty, who think that they are progres-
sive, when they are only caught in a circle of errors and follies
taken over from the Greeks in a new form, and when they see
happiness for the peoples of the world only in riches, and pro-
gress for society only in the arts.
1 See Note 4, p. 95.
84 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
II
Until the sixteenth century the life of Europe had been based
on the two principles of monarchy and the Christian religion.
Peace had been disturbed from time to time by wars between
neighbours. Yet these wars, in which hatred was unknown,
these passing disputes between peoples who were united in politi-
cal and religious doctrine, merely provided a means of testing
the strength of States, without there being any danger to their
power or their independence; furthermore, they had often
yielded to the intervention of the head of the Church, the
common father of all Christian peoples and the universal link
between members of the great family.
A great schism in religion occurred in the sixteenth century
and a great cleavage in politics was the inevitable result.
A new system of religion, which was soon extended to politics,
the presbyterian and popular system, hostile to the idea of
monarchy, was born in Europe. Principles so diametrically
opposed to each other were bound to come into conflict. So
the struggle began in Europe, and will never perhaps be con-
cluded.
The two great parties had resort to pen and arms alike; con-
troversy divided intellects and war disturbed States. Each
party endeavoured to retain power, or if it was not in power to
seize it; and when they were exhausted by this bitter struggle,
they drew breath under cover of treaties which were broken as
soon as they were signed, so that for a while they were evenly
matched. Then it was that Europe had its first glimpse of the
idea of political equilibrium, which the publicists of the
Northern countries1 adopted enthusiastically, hoping thereby
to tilt the balance in their own favour.
It might be interesting to examine this notion of political
equilibrium, at a time when it appeared to be as weighted and
steady as was possible. " After the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle,"
says Voltaire, " Christian Europe was divided into two great
parties, who treated each other with consideration, main-
taining in their own fashion the balance of power, this pretext
for so many wars, which was supposed to guarantee eternal peace.
One of these great factions consisted of the States of the Queen-
Empress of Hungary,2 a part of Germany, Russia, England,
Holland and Sardinia ; the other comprised France, Spain, the
1 See Note 1, p. 93. 2 See Note 2, p. 93.
VICOMTE DE BONALD 85
Two Sicilies, Prussia and Sweden. Each power remained under
arms. It was hoped that a lasting truce would result from the
fear that each half of Europe inspired in the other. They flat-
tered themselves for a long time that no aggressor could arise,
because each State was armed in self-defence. Vain hope. A
trifling quarrel between France and England over some native
territory in Canada led all the sovereigns of Europe to formu-
late a new policy." Such was, and always will be, the strength
and the extent of this system of the balance of power, in which
each power remains under arms. It is an exact parallel to the prin-
ciple of mechanical equilibrium, which only consists of a pause
of a second between the two swings of the pendulum.
In vain can weights be changed, or the two halves which
should counter-balance each other be combined in different
ways : only war will result. The reason is that according to this
system each power remains under arms, and it is only by putting
their swords into the balance that they can achieve a moment's
equilibrium : a situation more dangerous than ever today, when
third-rate powers produce, or hold in reserve, a military
strength which is quite disproportionate to the size of the popu-
lation. Moreover, when we balance interests, or even military
strength, is it possible for us also to put into the balance the
moral strength of nations and the passions and talents of those
who govern them ?
It was on less unsure foundations than this, that one of the
greatest kings of modern times, and one of the greatest minds of
all time, endeavoured to build order and peace in Europe.
Both of them set at the head of Christendom, as arbiter and
moderating influence, the common father of Christians.
Although this plan for a Christian republic would have been
difficult, not to say impossible, to realise, and although today
we could not persuade that part of Europe which has rejected
his spiritual supremacy to appreciate the political pre-eminence
of the head of the Church, we must be careful not to reject
contemptuously a plan which seemed practicable to Henry IV
and Leibnitz.1
These two excellent minds understood to the full that
Christendom is a great family, composed of young and old, a
society in which there are strong and weak, great powers and
small ones. The whole of Christendom was subject to the law
common to families and States alike, which are not governed
by a system of balances, but by various authorities.
1 See Note 3, p. 94.
86 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
Dare we hope that in the facts we are about to present, and
the opinion we are going to give, reason and experience will
triumph over national prejudices ?
Since the time of Charlemagne, there has always been an
authority in Europe which was respected, even by its rivals,
and recognised, even by its enemies: the preponderance of
France. It was not a preponderance based on force, for French
politics have always been more successful than her arms, but
it was based on the dignity, respect, influence and good counsel
which her age and her memories brought her. There was also
such consistency in the counsel she gave, her progress was so
felicitous, in spite of mistakes in administration and military
reverses, that a great Pope was moved to say that " France was
a kingdom governed by Providence." France was the eldest of
all these European societies. While the peoples of Great
Britain and the Germanic lands were still living in their forests
and marshes, Gaul, cultured through her study of Greek and
Latin literature, strong in the Roman discipline, educated in
the school of these masters of the World, refined by their arts
and their urbanity, which had even in the end been driven into
exile from Rome and had taken refuge within the confines of
the Empire; Gaul, like a well -prepared soil, received all the
advantages of Christian civilisation. Soon she became a
monarchy ; the antiquity of the noble line of her kings, itself
older than any other royal line, the excellence of her constitu-
tion, the virtues and the intelligence of her clergy, the dignity
of her magistrature, "the fame of her chivalry, the learning of
her Universities, the wisdom of her laws, her gracious way of
living, the character of her inhabitants, rather than the
strength of her arms, which were always evenly matched and
often unfortunate — above all, the genius of Charlemagne, had
raised her to a position in Europe which none contested. No
great political act was ever performed without France; she was
the trustee of every tradition of the great family, and the reposi-
tory of all the State secrets of Christendom. I dare to say that no
great act will ever be performed without her, and what assures
her of this pre-eminence for all time, and in a measure sets the
final seal on it, is the universality of her language, which has
been adopted by Cabinets and Courts, and is consequently the
language of politics: the mildest and at the same time the
strongest domination which one people can exercise over
another, since by imposing its language on others, a people
bestows at the same time a measure of its character, its spirit
VICOMTE DE BONALD 87
and its thought, which is faithfully reflected in its language.
Hence France has always exercised a sort of authority over
Christendom. She was always destined to teach Europe, some-
times by the example of her virtues, sometimes by the lesson to
be drawn from her misfortunes. If we can trace great motives
which led to great events, every nation is guilty and every
nation has been punished; and France, the guiltiest nation of
all, because she had received the most, has found a frightful
retribution in the terrible revenge which made her its instrument.
The most striking tribute however to the importance of
France in the social field, and to the political need for her
existence, comes from the prodigious events we have just wit-
nessed. I dare to say that no other society could excite the same
interest, or call forth the same effort. The peoples of the North
and East have had to join forces in order to restore to France
that legitimate authority over herself which she had lost, when
all they thought they were engaging in, and all they perhaps
had desired to do, was to escape from her tyranny. All the
noble scions of Christendom have had to bring back the first-
born of this illustrious family with their own hands, to the house
of his fathers. The elements themselves collaborated with man-
kind in this great undertaking; and when the head of the
family crossed the threshold of France, this superhuman autho-
rity, the most formidable that the world has ever seen, and
before whom the earth was silent, vanished like a dream, with all its
fortresses, its treasure and its armies. This mighty storm grew
calm in an instant and the last roar of gunfire seemed to be
the signal for the piping days of peace.
Let nobody place on France the entire responsibility for the
madness into which she fell, and for the unparalleled misfor-
tunes she brought on Europe; the foreign doctrines brought
into France over a period of years, and propagated by our
writers with such lamentable success, have had only too great
an effect on our destinies. It was easy to see through the foreign
intrigues, even in the very early days of our troubles. The
inconceivable tyranny beneath which in the end the whole of
Europe groaned was connived at and supported by people out-
side France; she can say with a clear conscience to other
governments: Let him who is without sin amongst you cast the
first stone.
It would be a big mistake at the present time, and a great
danger for the future, if political action, which is responsible
for the wellbeing of Europe, were consciously to be motivated
88 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
by memories of the past, instead of by a vision of the future.
This line of policy has been in the position of misleading
Europe for a long time. With her eyes turned towards the past,
she does not take the future sufficiently into account; in her
desire to be forearmed against any imaginary peril, she exposes
herself in her defenceless position to real dangers.
Because the House of Austria united for one historical
moment the most splendid parts of the Old and the New
World under her domination, France, who had no real reason
to fear her, always imagined that Austria was anxious to swallow
her up; their mutual hostility, under Charles V and Francis I,
brought about the ruin of Europe, since it gave Lutheranism
the opportunity to spread its influence. Richelieu reduced the
nobles to the status of courtiers and paid officials, because he
still feared the shadow of the great landed aristocracy which had
long since been broken. Coming to our own days, France was
only able to win such sweeping victories because the great
powers of the North could not forget that they were age-old
enemies and spent their strength in jealous rivalry.
There is no doubt that France has shown extraordinary
might and caused Europe infinite misfortunes; yet it was the
might that fever brings in its train, nay, a real frenzy. The revo-
lution, like some supernatural engine which had been applied
to a powerful nation, transformed her suddenly, and by means
of terror, into a blind and dumb instrument whose only action
was destruction and whose only movement was a flight towards
ruin. This incredible combination of events, inconceivable
until our own day, cannot happen again. To take precautions
against such an unlikely event at the expense of France would
be like conjuring up phantoms merely for the pleasure of
fighting them. It is not the revolutionary armies of France
which other States have to fear now, but rather the principles
of licence and insubordination which she has sown in Europe,
and which probably have more supporters outside France than
in France herself.
We must not therefore reproach each other with our mistakes
and errors, but must guard against the only danger which
peoples who have reached a high level of civilisation and know-
ledge need fear, the danger of false doctrines which impercep-
tibly undermine laws, morals and institutions. When Europe
emerges from this violent crisis, she cannot perish except by
wasting away. The day when the atheistic dogma of the
sovereignty of the people replaces in politics the sacred dogma
VICOMTE DE BONALD 89
of the sovereignty of God ; the day when Europe ceases to be
Christian and monarchical, she will perish, and the sceptre of
the world will pass to other hands.
* * *
As we have said before, Bonald defines the unity of Christendom as
a " Society of States," the State as a " public society " and the
family as a " domestic society." The family is therefore, in his
view, the first social unit, and the principle of the family is the basis
of every other larger association. In his Theory of Power, Bonald
expounds the idea that in the analysis of any phenomenon, three
problems have to be faced and denned by every philosophy worthy
of the name: the Cause, the Effect and the Means employed to
achieve the Effect. In the social order, this means power (or
authority, or will), ministry (or the service of power), and in the
religious society spiritual wellbeing, or in the political society the
security and the liberty of the subject. In the religious society, the
Power (or Authority, or Will) is God; the ministry is the clergy;
the effect aimed at is the salvation of the community. In the State,
the Power is represented by the principle of Sovereignty; in its
service, " ministry " is exercised by all those who administer the
law and defend the territory (i.e. all those who " combat the
obstacles to integral sovereignty," " the internal and the external
enemy ") ; the effect to be desired is the security and the liberty
of the subject to fulfil the natural purpose of Man, which is the
procreation and preservation of the divine substance through the
medium of the family. Within the family, the Power belongs to the
man, whose " ministry " is exercised by the woman, and the effect
desired is the child, i.e. the preservation of the divine and human
substance in a new generation.
It follows from these fundamental notions of Bonald's system of
philosophy, that in the political controversies of his time he con-
sidered the defence of marriage to be a foremost task. The following
extract is taken from Divorce in the Nineteenth Century, a pamphlet pub-
lished in 1802 and intended as a piece of advice to the Committee
presided over by the First Consul Bonaparte, which was to codify
the civil and penal laws of France. This was one of the rare writings
of Bonald which achieved an immediate and practical result: Bona-
parte read it, and under the influence of Bonald's arguments, he
took the initiative of withdrawing the original draft authorising
divorce.
2. ON DOMESTIC SOCIETY
The authors of the draft Bill on the statute book, after having
informed us " that until today, the nature of marriage has been
misunderstood, and that it is only in recent times that people
90 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
have had clear ideas on marriage . . . are convinced that
marriage, which existed before the establishment of Chris-
tianity, which preceded all positive law, and which derives
from the very composition of our being, is neither a civil nor a
religious act, but a natural one, which attracted the attention
of legislators and which has been sanctified by religion."
(Introduction, on the draft Bill of the statute book.)
It is well worth while to discuss the principles set forth in the
passage which we have just quoted, since they form the basis of
all the draft bills on the possibility of divorce, from the first bill
in which it was proposed to grant divorce, to the final one which
received the sanction of the legislature.
How has it been possible to maintain in France, after fifteen
centuries of the public profession of Christianity, that is, of
everything that was most perfect in public morality and in the
principles underlying the laws, according to all men in the most
enlightened nations who are versed in the knowledge of civil
and religious legislation, " that until today people have mis-
understood the nature of marriage," this element which is
present in all societies, this contract which really is social, the act
by which a family is founded, the laws governing which are at
the basis of all political legislation ? How has it been possible to
suggest " that it is only in recent times that people have had
clear ideas on marriage " ? And to which period do " recent
times " refer ? Are they referring to the time of Luther, who
allowed the dissolution of marriage, or to the period of modern
philosophy, which, not content with allowing the greatest
possible facility in the dissolution of the conjugal tie, has justi-
fied concubinage and extended its indulgence as far as adul-
tery ? And are they not already biased in favour of the useful-
ness of divorce, when they state in the preamble of the Bill
which authorises it, " that only in recent times has marriage been
understood " ?
" Marriage, which existed before the establishment of Chris-
tianity, which preceded all positive law, and which derives
from the very composition of our being, is neither a civil nor a
religious act, but a natural one, which attracted the attention of
the legislator and was sanctified by religion." Marriage existed
before Christianity and preceded all positive laws; but did it precede
the natural relationships between men in society, the most per-
fect evolution of which is seen in the Christian religion, and to
which all religions and civil laws give expression and bear wit-
ness ?
VICOMTE DE BONALD gi
The sentence we have just quoted deceives the mind, and the
differing meanings which it seems to suggest will not bear
examination.
Marriage is a civil affair from the point of view of the interests
at stake; it is religious, spiritually speaking; it is animal and
physical from the point of view of the body ; and as the family
has never at any time been able to subsist without the social
proprieties, and as man has always embarked on marriage in
possession of all his moral and physical faculties, it is true to say
that the nature of marriage has always fundamentally been a
simultaneous civil, religious and physical act. It was not a civil
affair in the earliest times, in the sense that the interests of the
family were protected by public authority and regulated
according to public laws, which comprise what we call our civil
status. But they were protected by domestic authority, which
is an element of the public authority, and regulated by domestic
customs and laws, which are themselves the germs of the public
laws, just as the domestic society, or the family, is itself the
element and the germ of public society. Marriage was not
religious in the sense that it was divine, and that the Creator
had said of the woman: " She shall leave her father and her
mother and cleave unto her husband," and of husband and
wife: " They shall be two in one flesh." It is because marriage
was, in the earliest times, and before the establishment of public,
political and religious societies, a divine and at the same time
a human act (I mean by human: moral and physical), just as
it has been a civil and religious act since the foundation of
public societies; I say it is because it derives from the very
composition of our being and of our nature, that it is a natural
act. For the real nature of man, and the true composition of
his being, consist in a natural relationship with the author of
his being, and in his natural as well as his moral and physical
relationship with his fellow-men. It is entirely because mar-
riage was a divine and a human institution, in the sense in which
I understand it, that it attracted the attention of civil legislators,
and that it was sanctified by religion. For if the orator, whose
reasoning I question, because he makes a distinction between
the natural and the civil or religious state, as if what is civil and
religious is not also natural, understands by nature the animal
instincts of man, he is falling into the same error as the senator
who submitted the government draft of this Bill, when he says :
" Philosophers are only concerned with the physical side of
marriage." They are certainly curious philosophers, be it said
92 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
in passing ; apparently only anatomists are allowed to consider
the union of man and woman in this light.
Natural marriage, which is neither civil nor religious, gives birth
to the natural man of J. J. Rousseau, who is likewise neither civil
nor religious', and to say that marriage is neither a civil nor a
religious act, but a natural act, is to suggest that the civil and
religious state is not within the nature of man. It is to descend
to the level of the doctrine of the writer whom we have just
quoted, when he says " that society is not natural to mankind,"
and elsewhere that " everything that is not contained in nature
has certain disadvantages, civil society having more than all the
rest put together."
Let us say then that marriage is simultaneously a social,
domestic, civil and religious act; the act by which domestic
society is founded, the interests of which are bound to be safe-
guarded by the civil authority as it comes to the aid of domestic
harmony, and in which religious authority introduces the
divine element in an external and sensible manner, in order to
consecrate the union of two hearts and purify the union of two
bodies.
No problem could be clearer in its principles, or more fruitful
in its consequences, than the question of divorce, since by its
nature it brings into play all those problems of authority and our
duties, which are fundamental to society. I do not hesitate to
affirm, and I hope even to prove, that on the dissolution or the
indissolubility of the conjugal tie depends the fate of the family,
of religion and of the State, in France and in the whole world.
Divorce was made legal in 1792, to the surprise of nobody,
since it was the inevitable consequence, long foreseen, of that
system of destruction which was pursued with such enthusiasm
at that time. But today, when we want to reconstruct, divorce
appears to be almost a principle at the base of the social edifice,
and those who are destined to inhabit it ought to tremble.
I will go further. Divorce was in harmony with that brand
of democracy which has held sway for too long in France, under
different names and in different forms. We have seen domestic
and public authority delivered up on all sides to the passions of
subjects', it brought about disorder in the family and disorder in
the State : there was an analogy between the disorganisation in
both of them. There is indeed, if one may say so, even some
semblance of order, when everything is confused in the same
style, and for the same reason. Furthermore, divorce is in
direct contradiction with the spirit and the principles of
VIGOMTE DE BONALD 93
hereditary or indissoluble monarchy. We have, then, order in
the State and disorder in the family, indissolubility of the one
and dissolution of the other, with a subsequent lack of harmony,
so that the situation is such that the family will finally dis-
organise the State or the State will have to govern the family.
Nay, more. In a democracy, the people have the privilege of
making the laws, or abolishing them, according to their fancy.
Since the magistrates they elect only hold office for a short time,
it rarely happens that individual men are powerful enough to
make the laws serve their passions, whereas in a monarchy,
where men hold eminent positions, which can be hereditary, or
else are conferred for life, and derive from them a great reputa-
tion and a great fortune, it can happen that laws are not made
by influential men, but are interpreted in their favour. What
judgements could be solicited with greater passion than those
concerning divorce, and what laws lend themselves to arbitrary
interpretation to a greater degree than those which limit or
extend facilities for divorce ? Now where great men have trod,
the crowd treads in its turn. What was once difficult becomes
easy; what was once rare becomes a frequent occurrence;
what was forbidden is now permitted; the exception acquires
all the force of law; the law is soon nothing but the exception
and the time comes when there is no other alternative to dis-
order than extreme disorder or revolution.
Note 1 : " publicists of the Northern countries."
Bonald mainly refers to the seventeenth-century Swedish
statesman of German birth, PuffendorfF, whose States of Europe was
for a century or more considered to be the classic handbook of
diplomacy. He may, however, equally have in mind Spinoza's
Tractalus theologico-politicus, another classic (and more metaphysical)
summary of the theory of the balance of power, the perfect balance
being the result of politics conceived more geometrico, like an archi-
tectural construction.
This idea of Spinoza was very popular among English Whig
publicists of the early eighteenth century. Dean Swift however
thought that the diplomatic balance of the European house might
become so perfect that any sparrow which settled down on the roof
would upset it!
Note 2 : " Queen-Empress of Hungary."
Maria -Theresa, Archduchess of Austria, daughter of Emperor
Charles VI, b. 1717, d. 1780. By the Act of Pragmatic Sanction of
94 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
her father, promulgated at the Hungarian Diet in 1723, she suc-
ceeded to the Crown of Hungary in 1740. As this Act was also
endorsed by the Imperial Diet, the hereditary " Kingdoms and
Provinces " of the House of Habsburg (Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia,
Upper and Lower Austria, Tyrol, Vorarlberg, etc.) belonging to the
Holy Roman Empire were to remain " undivided and inseparable "
under her rule, although on account of her sex she could not succeed
to the Empire, which fell in 1740 to the Prince-Elector of Bavaria,
who ruled as Charles VII until 1747, and to which Prince Francis
of Lorraine, Grand Duke of Tuscany, Maria-Theresa's husband,
was afterwards elected (d. 1765 and succeeded by his son Joseph II,
who, on his mother's death in 1 780, also became King of Hungary
and ruler of the hereditary States) . Thus, in the diplomacy of her
time, Maria -Theresa, ruling Queen in Hungary and Empress-
Consort, later Empress-Mother, was referred to as " Queen of
Hungary," or more ceremoniously as " Her Apostolic Majesty," a
title which referred exclusively to the Papal privileges of St. Stephen
of Hungary, and not to her other dominions.
The European situation here described by Voltaire underwent
changes, by reason of the fact that Britain and France could never
be on the same side during the great eighteenth-century rivalry.
During the War of the Austrian Succession, which ended with the
Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, Britain supported Maria-Theresa
against France and Prussia. Subsequently the Austrian Chancellor,
Prince Kaunitz, conceived the plan of a great continental alliance
between France, Austria and Russia, mainly in order to moderate
growing Russian aims in the East by having greater security on the
Western flank of the Austrian power. As a reply, Walpole and the
Whig party sided with Prussia, against both France and Austria.
The European situation which Voltaire summarises here and
Bonald quotes, prevailed between the end of the War of the
Austrian Succession (1748) and the Seven Years' War (1756- 1763).
Note 3: " Leibnitz."
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, 1646-1716, a German philosopher
writing mostly in Latin and French, a mathematician and scientist,
also an author on politics and international law, one of the most
versatile intellects of modern Europe. The fundamental notion of
his philosophical system is the " pre-established " or " pre-existing "
harmony between spiritual and material reality. Each species
(" Monadology ") follows its own intrinsic law and naturally tends
towards its reproduction for the sake of the perfect preservation of
its internal vaiue.
Bonald's Theory of Power which considers " preservation " as the
aim of the power established in religious and political societies,
and " perfectibility " (i.e. the capacity to realise the " best possible "
order), the principle of which is the " pre-established harmony of
VICOMTE DE BONALD 95
Creation," is very largely an application of the methods and
principles of Leibnitz in politics and society.
Leibnitz was the first Protestant thinker to advocate the reunion
of the Protestant communities with the Church : a leading idea in
his correspondence with Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux, which extends
over a period of years.
Note 4: " ridiculed by Voltaire."
Bonald alludes here to Voltaire's Candide, the grotesque and
fantastic story of an unfortunate young man educated in Leibnitz's
doctrine that the world lives under " the best possible order." The
aversion of Voltaire and of many other writers of the eighteenth
century to Leibnitz is to be explained by the fact that (unlike other
thinkers of the great European philosophical movement which
followed the religious wars and which relegated the theological
issue to a secondary plane), Leibnitz aimed at a definition of the
metaphysical world order, and not only at a method of individual
reasoning (like Descartes), at experimental science (like Bacon or
Locke), or an analysis of the critical mind (like Kant). In other
words, Leibnitz was the philosophical opposite, for the eighteenth
century, of rationalistic and ethical individualism.
At the same time, Leibnitz is still nearer to the Realism of St
Thomas than either Descartes or Bacon and he emphatically
recognises the primacy of belief and the conformity of rational
knowledge with the truth of Revelation.
III. FRANCOIS RENE DE CHATEAUBRIAND
1768- 1848
Chateaubriand's place in a chronological survey of Catholic
thought since the French Revolution comes immediately after
Joseph de Maistre and Vicomte de Bonald. The Considerations sur
la France of the first writer, the Theorie du Pouvoir of the second and
Chateaubriand's Essai sur les Revolutions were the three great com-
mentaries published on the events of 1789-93. All three were
written abroad and were influenced by, and to a great extent
inspired by an English book, Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution.
Bonald's book was the final expression and the systematic sum-
mary of the thought of an author in his forties; everything else he
wrote in his life was but an addition or glossary to it. Joseph de
Maistre, about the same age as Bonald, wrote his principal book —
the Soirees de Saint Petersbourg — a quarter of a century later; his
Considerations sur la France and even Du Pape were but prefaces to his
final thought. In Chateaubriand's case, however, his comment on
the Revolution was not so much as a preface even to the ultimate
summary of his thought and it merely marked one step towards the
final pinnacle of his style. The subject, however, was of immense
importance in his life. Like Joseph de Maistre and Bonald,
Chateaubriand, half a generation younger than they, became a
writer because of the French Revolution ; a principal feature in his
work is the new historical and political approach to theology, which
resulted from the context of the Revolution. Yet, he is, above all,
one of the masters, perhaps the foremost one, of a new concept of
literature. He is a master among the new post-Revolutionary
secular religious writers. He is the first of those modern poets who
are not craftsmen of rhyme and stage technique — there were many
such during the eighteenth century — and he it was who gave to the
word " poet " that larger, more universal meaning which it still
keeps in German. According to this new concept, the poet is a
writer, often a prose -writer (Chateaubriand himself wrote almost
entirely in prose, for his attempts at verse and at poetic tragedy
were a failure), who must be judged above all by standards of
personal feeling and temperament. In other words, Chateaubriand
was the father of Romanticism. In aesthetics he saved that part of
Rousseau's message which was valid truth, and the rest of which
was otherwise so disastrous in politics.
96
FRANCOIS RENE DE CHATEAUBRIAND 97
A recapitulation of Chateaubriand's life and work is hardly neces-
sary here; he is a writer whom few read today, but who is never-
theless known to all. This has happened because, as Oscar Wilde
said of himself, he gave to his books his talent only, while he gave to
his life his genius. Chateaubriand created at least one work of
genius, which was the story of his life, the Memoires d'outre-tombe.
The conclusion of these Memoirs tell what was the central inspira-
tion of his life and his work.
This inspiration was already clear in Le Genie du Christianisme and
in Les Martyrs. In his early sensualist outlook he was still a son of
the eighteenth century, of Condillac and especially of Rousseau.
His return to the old religious foundations of France was only partly
political and social in origin; it was to a large extent visual and
aesthetic. He rediscovered Gothic architecture at a moment when
medieval art found no defenders and when the Greek colonnade,
with its more geometrical form, was the fashionable ideal of the day.
He introduced into the art of epic prose imaginative detail, colourful
landscape, historical atmosphere and spectacular costume — all
visual elements — and so he became the master of Sir Walter Scott
and the historical novel. Chateaubriand revolutionised European
taste and European art almost more than any other writer contem-
porary with the Revolution. He discovered the East and the Holy
Land for many of his contemporaries; he was perhaps the first
French author fully to understand Shakespeare; the first modern
writer who interpreted the saints, the Fathers and the early teachers
of the Church as thinkers and mystical poets, rather than as theo-
logians and authorities on the liturgy — a new approach at the end
of the eighteenth century and an unusual and a new angle for
scholarship and letters, which before Chateaubriand had kept secu-
lar humanism and theology apart.
There are, of course, as we have already pointed out in the Intro-
duction, obvious limitations and shortcomings in this artistic and
aesthetic religiosity. They were already present in Chateaubriand's
work; they led to worse aberrations in his followers and imitators: to
a superficial pose of melancholy over a lost tradition and to the culte
du moi of Maurice Barres, for example. Chateaubriand had neither
the grave objectivity of-Bonald, nor the penetrating, critical wit
of Joseph de Maistre, so that ultimately little survives which is of any
objective value in his religious, political and philosophical thought.
As to his career as a statesman, he was Plenipotentiary Minister
of the First Consul Bonaparte to the Vatican, Ambassador in
London and Berlin and once more at the Vatican, and Minister of
Foreign Affairs for a short while under the Restoration ; he was the
author of pamphlets such as De Buonaparte1 et des Bourbons (1814)
1 By insisting on the Italian spelling of the name which the family abandoned
when they left Corsica for France during the Revolution, Chateaubriand wished
to emphasise the fact that he considered Napoleon to be a usurper.
98 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
and La Monarchic scion la Charte (18 16), great political events at the
time. Yet he left behind him only the memory of a temperamental
opposition, first to Napoleon, then even to the Bourbons, whose
cause he had promoted, and finally a long voluntary exile from the
political scene in Paris, at the memorable salon of Madame
Recamier, during which he foresaw the future triumph of Democ-
racy over Louis Philippe's imitation-Monarchy and over the
bourgeoisie, the " monarchic dc la boutique" and during which he
once more espoused the lost cause of the elder branch of the
Bourbons.
He ended his long career with this melancholy love for a cause
he believed to be lost, dying at the age of eighty on July 4th, 1848.
Mental decay preceding his physical end, during the last year of his
life he was hardly conscious of the new Revolution and of the
fighting at the barricades in June 1 848, which absorbed the general
attention, while Chateaubriand, the great personal link between
the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries in France, was on his
deathbed.
His life exhausted all the possibilities of an age. He saw America
during the life-time of Washington, Europe under Napoleon; he
knew the destitution and solitude of an exile in London during the
Revolution; he enjoyed the adventures of a soldier in the Royalist
cause and the flamboyant but hollow splendours of the victorious
diplomacy of the era of the Congresses. And to this life he gave an
imperishable monument, the great story of an indefatigable sensi-
bility, of the emotions of a long and varied life, of a personality
which was too exuberant to create a consistent system of thought.
Chateaubriand's greatness lies in his imagination, his sensibility and
emotion.
Any account of Chateaubriand's life is bound to centre round the
problem of" pose," so that both his critics and admirers must devote
a fundamental study to the question of sincerity and ostentation.
Chateaubriand, no doubt, liked ostentation. Yet there is hardly a
more insincere book in existence that Sainte-Beuve's attack on
Chateaubriand's sincerity. Sainte-Beuve, the least sincere of the
Romantic generation, the least loyal character among men of
talent, if anything a Jansenist in religion (not on account of a mis-
guided religious passion, but out of spite for the spiritual gifts of
others and out of spite for the Church), Sainte-Beuve was a bad
judge of Chateaubriand's sincerity in religion, and was not even
the best qualified judge of his genius. Sainte-Beuve's talent grew
in the service of those greater than he ; Chateaubriand, even at his
worst, was a sovereign temperament. The proud ostentation of
honour is to be preferred to that of informed pedantry; the pose of
a hopeless love for lost causes is preferable to the critical pose of a
bitter and pedantic talent, who, after all, placed himself volun-
tarily in Chateaubriand's shadow for over twenty years before he
FRANCOIS RENE DE CHATEAUBRIAND 99
discovered any blot on his sun. As the deliberate distortions and,
we may say, the bad faith of Sainte-Beuve's Chateaubriand et son
groupe litteraire has been exposed by two Catholic literary scholars
of incontestable probity, this debate may be considered closed.1
There is ostentation in Chateaubriand, but no morbid self-
seeking, no indecent and effeminate exhibitionism, nothing
approaching decadence. His place in the history of secular spiri-
tuality is best defined by himself in the conclusion to Memoires
d'outre-tombe which follows here.
PROGRESS2
During the eight centuries of our monarchy, France was the
centre of the intelligence, the continuity and the peace of
Europe; no sooner had that monarchy been lost than Europe
tended in the direction of democracy. The human race, for
good or for ill, is now its own master; princes once had the
keeping of it; having attained their majority, the nations now
claim that they have no further need of tutelage. From the
time of David down to modern days, kings have always been
called ; now the vocation of the peoples begins. Apart from the
short-lived and minor exceptions of the Greek, the Carthaginian
and the Roman republics, with their slaves, the monarchical
form of government was normal throughout the entire world.
Modern society in its entirety has forsaken the monarchy since
the flag of the kings of France no longer flies. In order to
hasten the degradation of royal power, God has in various
countries delivered up the sceptre to usurper kings, to young
girls who are either still in the nursery, or are just of mar-
riageable age; it is lions such as these, without any jaws,
lionesses without any claws and baby girls suckling at the
breasts, or giving their hand in marriage, whom the men born
of this believing age must follow.
The wildest principles are proclaimed under the very noses
of monarchs who imagine that they are safeguarding them-
selves behind the triple hedge of a doubtful protection. Democ-
racy is overtaking them; stage by stage, they are retreating
from the ground floor of their palaces to the topmost part, so
1 L'Abbe G. Bertrin: La sincSHU religieuse de Chateaubriand. 1893. Edmond Bir6:
Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo, Balzac. 1897.
2 Taken from the epilogue to Mimoires d'outre-tombe. Written in November 1841,
this epilogue was first published in La Presse, edited by Emile de Girardin, in
October 1850.
100
CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
that finally they will cast themselves upon the waters from the
attic windows.
Furthermore, consider a phenomenal contradiction: material
conditions are improving and education is spreading, yet
instead of this being a boon to the nations their stature is
diminishing — from whence comes this contradiction ?
The explanation lies in this : that we have deteriorated in the
moral order. Crimes have always been committed, but they
were not committed in cold blood, as they are today, because
we have lost all feeling for religion. They no longer fill us with
revulsion today, they seem only to be a consequence of the
march of time; if they were judged differently in former times,
it was because, as they dare to assert, our knowledge of human
nature was not advanced enough. Nowadays crimes are
analysed; they are passed through a crucible in order that we
may discover any useful lesson accruing from them, as chemistry
discovers constituents in garbage. Corruption of the mind, far
more destructive than corruption of the senses, is accepted as
a necessary result; it is not only to be found now in a few per-
verted individuals; it has become universal.
Men of this type would feel humiliated if it were proved to
them that they had a soul and that after this life they will dis-
cover the existence of another one; they would think them-
selves devoid of all steadfastness, strength and intelligence if
they did not rise above the pusillanimity of our fathers; they
accept nothingness, or if you prefer it, doubt, as an unpleasant
fact perhaps, but nevertheless as an incontestable truth. How
admirable is our fatuous pride !
The decay of society then and the increasing importance of
the individual can be accounted for in this manner. If the
moral sense developed logically from the increase in intelligence,
we should have a counterweight and humanity would increase
in stature without any danger, but the exact opposite happens ;
our apprehension of good and evil grows dim as our intelligence
becomes more enlightened; our conscience contracts as our
ideas broaden. Yes, society will certainly perish; liberty,
which might have saved the world, will not work, because it
has cut itself off from religion; order, which could have ensured
continuity, cannot be firmly established because the present
anarchy of ideas prevents it. The purple, which once denoted
power, will henceforth serve only to cradle disaster; no man
will be saved unless he was born, like Christ, on straw. When
the monarchs were disinterred at St. Denis, as the revolutionary
FRANCOIS RENE" DE CHATEAUBRIAND 101
tocsin rang out; when, dragged from their crumbling tombs,
they were awaiting plebeian burial, rag merchants came upon
this scene of the last judgement of the centuries; holding high
their lanterns, they gazed into the eternal night; they rum-
maged amongst the remains which had escaped the original
pillage. The kings were no longer there, but royalty was still
there; they tore it out of the entrails of time and cast it on the
rubbish heap.
So much for ancient Europe : it will never live again. Does
the young Europe offer us any higher hopes ? The world of
today, lacking any consecrated authority, seems faced with two
impossibilities: it is impossible to return to the past or to go
forward into the future. Do not run away with the idea, as
some people do, that if we are in a bad pass today, good will be
reborn out of evil; human nature, when it is out of order at its
very source, does not function so smoothly. The excesses of
liberty, for example, lead to despotism, but the excesses of
tyranny lead only to tyranny; tyranny, by degrading us,
makes us incapable of independence ; Tiberius did not have
the effect of making Rome return to the republican form of
government, he merely left Caligula behind to succeed him.
Not desiring to find the true explanation of our present
situation, men are content to say that a political constitution
which we cannot as yet discern may possibly be hidden in the
bosom of time. Did the whole of antiquity, including the most
splendid of its geniuses, understand that a society could exist
without slaves ? Yet we know that it can. People say — I have
said it myself — that mankind will increase in stature in this new
civilisation which is to come : yet is it not to be feared that the
individual man will decrease in stature ? We can well be busy
bees, engaged in making our own honey together. In the
material world, men group themselves together for the purpose
of work, because many people working together find what they
want quicker and by devious means; individuals working in
the mass can build pyramids; these individuals, studying each
in his own way, can make scientific discoveries and explore all
the corners of the physical creation. But do things work out in
this wise in the moral order ? A thousand brains can collaborate
in vain : they can never compose the masterpiece which comes
out of the head of a Homer.
It has been said that a city, all the inhabitants of which have
an equal share of wealth and education, will be a more pleasing
sight in the eyes of Divinity than was the city of our fathers.
102 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
The folly of the age is to achieve the unity of the peoples, while
turning the whole species into a single unit — granted; but
while we are acquiring these general faculties, is not a whole
chain of private feelings in danger of perishing ? Farewell to
the sweetness of home ; farewell to the delights of family life ;
amongst all these white men, yellow men and black men,
reputedly your brothers, you will not find one whom you can
embrace as a brother. Was there nothing then in your former
life, nothing in that restricted piece of space which you could
see from your ivy-mantled window ? Beyond your immediate
horizon, you conjectured the existence of unknown countries
from the presence of the birds of passage, the only travellers
that you saw in the autumn days. Happiness lay in knowing
that the surrounding hills would always be there; that they
would be the scene of your friendships and your loves ; that
the sighing of the night wind around your retreat would be the
only sound to lull you to sleep ; that the peace of your soul
would never be disturbed and that the familiar thoughts would
always be waiting for you to commune with them. You knew
where you had been born, you knew where your tomb would
lie; as you penetrated deeper into the forest you could say:
Beautiful trees that saw my birth,
Soon you will see me die.
Man has no need to travel to become more powerful; he
carries immensity within him. The impulses of your heart can-
not be measured, they find an echo in thousands of other
hearts ; he who has nothing of this harmony in his innermost
being will implore the universe to give it to him in vain. Sit
on a fallen tree-trunk deep in the woods: if in these moments
of complete self-forgetfulness, in your immobility and silence,
you do not find the infinite, it is of no avail to wander along the
banks of the Ganges.
What sort of a universal society would it be which possessed
no individual country, which would be neither French nor
English, nor German, nor Spanish, nor Portuguese, nor Italian,
nor Russian, nor Tartar, nor Turkish, nor Persian, nor Indian,
nor Chinese, nor American, or rather, what would all these
societies be like if they were rolled into one ? What would the
effect be on the way of life, on the sciences, the arts and the
poetry of a universal society ? What expression could be given
to passions felt at the same time by different peoples under
different climates ? How would this medley of needs and
FRANCOIS RENE DE CHATEAUBRIAND IO3
images which the sun produces in divers lands, and which light
up the youth, the maturity and the old age of men, enter into
the language ? And what language would it be ? Will a
universal idiom be born out of the fusion of societies, or will
there be a business dialect for everyday purposes, whilst each
nation retains its own language, or, on the other hand, will all
the divers languages be understood by all ? Under what sort
of rule and under what sort of universal law would this society
live ? How should we find a place on an earth which has been
extended by the power of ubiquity and shrunk by the small
proportions of a globe which is everywhere dishonoured ? It
only remains to ask science to show us how we can go and live
on another planet.
Let us suppose that you have had enough of private property
and that you propose to turn the government into a universal
landlord, who is to distribute to the destitute community that
share which each individual deserves. Who is to be the judge of
individual merits ? Who will have the strength and the
authority to carry out your decrees? Who is to be responsible
for and assess the capital value of this human property ? What
is to be the contribution of the weak, the sick and the stupid
in a community burdened by their unfitness ?
There is another suggestion : instead of working for a salary,
men could form limited companies, or limited partnerships
between manufacturers and workers, between intelligence and
matter, whereby some would contribute ideas and others their
industry and their work; profits would be shared in common.
It is an excellent thing thus to acknowledge complete perfec-
tion in mankind: excellent, if quarrels, avarice or envy are
unknown : but once an associate registers a grievance, the whole
edifice crumbles; dissension and lawsuits will henceforth
be the order of the day. This method, which is slightly
more plausible than the others in theory, is as impossible in
practice.
Would you prefer to follow a moderate line and build a
city in which each man has a roof, fuel, clothing and adequate
food ? You will no sooner have presented each citizen with
these things, than individual qualities and defects will either
upset your system of distribution, or will make it unjust: one
man needs much more food than the other; this man cannot
work as hard as that one can; men who are frugal and work
hard will become rich, those who are extravagant or idle will
104 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
relapse into poverty; for you cannot bestow the same tempera-
ment on all: an innate inequality is bound to reappear in spite
of all your efforts.
Do not be under any illusion that we are going to allow our-
selves to be caught up in all the legal processes which have
been invented for the protection of the family, for inherited
rights, the guardianship of children, claims to property, etc.;
marriage is notoriously an absurd oppression: we shall abolish
all that. If a son kills his father, it is not the son, as we can
very well prove, who is guilty of patricide, it is the father, who,
by the very act of living, sacrifices the son's chances. Do not
let us trouble our heads then with the labyrinths of an organisa-
tion which we intend to raze to the ground; it is a waste of
time to linger over the obsolete nonsense of our grandfathers.
Notwithstanding this, some of our sectarian modernists,
having an inkling of the impractibility of their doctrines, intro-
duce certain phrases concerning morality and religion, in an
attempt to make them more palatable; they imagine that all
they can realise at the moment is to bring us into line witlj the
American ideal of mediocrity, ignoring in their blindness the
fact that the Americans are not only landowners, but very
enthusiastic ones, which makes all the difference.
Others, who are of a kindlier disposition still, and who are not
hostile to the polish which a civilisation can confer on men,
would be satisfied if they could transform us into constitutional
Chinamen, atheist to all practical purposes, enlightened and
free old gentlemen, sitting for centuries amongst our flower-
beds in our yellow robes, whiling away our days in a wellbeing
which has spread to the masses, having invented all things and
discovered all things, peacefully vegetating amidst all the
progress which has been accomplished, carried in the train like
a parcel merely to go from Canton to the Great Wall to discuss
with another business man of the Celestial Empire a piece of
marshland which has to be drained, or a canal which is to be
cut. In either hypothesis, American or Chinese, I should be
thankful to have departed this world before such felicity befell
me.
There is one final suggestion: it could happen that, as a
result of the total deterioration of the human character, the
peoples of the world would be content to make do with what
they have got : love of gold would take the place of a love of
their independence, while kings would barter their love of
power for love of the civil list. A compromise would thus be
FRANgOIS RENE DE CHATEAUBRIAND IO5
reached between monarchs and their subjects, who would be
delighted to fawn upon them without let or hindrance in a
bastard political order; all men would display their infirmities
in front of each other, as they used to do in the old lazar houses,
or as sick people do today, when they take mudbaths as a cure
for their ailments; mankind would flounder in unmitigated
mud after the fashion of a peaceable reptile.
It is, nevertheless, a mere waste of time at the present stage
of our development to desire to replace intellectual pleasures
by the delights of physical nature. These latter, as we can well
imagine, filled the lives of the aristocratic peoples of antiquity;
masters of the world, they possessed palaces and vast numbers
of slaves ; their estates comprised whole regions of Africa. But
under which porticoes can you wander now, in your rare
moments of leisure ? In which huge and ornate baths can you
find nowadays the perfumes and flowers, the flute-players and
courtesans of Ionia ? You cannot be Heliogabulus1 for the
asking. Where would you lay hands on the necessary treasure
for these material delights ? The spirit is frugal, but the body
is extravagant.
And now, to be more serious, a few words on the question of
absolute equality: such an equality would mean a return not
only to bodily slavery, but to spiritual slavery; for it would
mean nothing less than the destruction of the moral and
physical inequality of the individual. Our wills, controlled and
supervised by all, would witness the atrophy of our faculties.
The infinite, for example, is part of our very nature; if you for-
bid our intelligence, or even our passions, to dream of un-
bounded prosperity, you reduce a man to the level of a snail
and you metamorphose him into a machine. For make no
mistake, if we cannot hope to penetrate the ultimate, if we do
not believe in eternal life, there is annihilation everywhere; no
man is free if he does not possess any property of his own ; a
man who has no property cannot be independent, he becomes
a member of the proletariat or he works for a wage, whether he
live within our present system of private property, or in a
future one of communal property. Property held in common
would mean that our society would be like one of those monas-
teries which used to distribute bread to the needy at the gates.
Property which we hold inviolate from our fathers is our means
of personal defence; property really means the same thing as
1 Roman Emperor, b. 204 a.d. Reigned from 218-222. The prototype of disso-
lute and pleasure -loving youth.
106 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
liberty. Absolute equality, which presupposes complete submission to
this equality, would make us revert to the most wretched servi-
tude; it would make of individual man a beast of burden, sub-
mitting to his bonds and obliged to walk endlessly along the
same path.
. . . Enlightened people cannot understand why a Catholic
such as I should so obstinately take my stand in the shadow of
what they think are ruins ; according to them, it is bravado on
my part, or prejudice. But for pity's sake, tell me where I could
find a family or a God in the individualistic and philosophical
society which you propose for my acceptance ? Tell me, and I
will follow you ; if you cannot, do not take it amiss if I lay
myself down in the tomb of Christ, the only refuge you left me
when you abandoned me.
No, it is not out of bravado: I am sincere; my conclusion is
this : that out of all the plans and studies I have made, and
after all my experiences, there only remains a complete disillu-
sionment with all the preoccupations of this world. As my
religious convictions developed, they absorbed all my other
convictions ; no man here on earth is a more faithful Christian,
or more sceptical in the things of this world, than I. Far from
being exhausted, the religion of the Liberator is just entering
its third phase, the political phase of liberty, equality and fraternity.
The Gospel — that verdict of acquittal — has not yet been pro-
claimed to all men; we have progressed no further than the
maledictions pronounced by Christ: Woe to you who weigh
men down with burdens too heavy to be borne, and who would
not touch them with the tips of your fingers !
The Christian religion, stable in its dogmas, is yet mobile in
its inspiration; as it develops, it transforms the whole world.
When it has reached its highest point, darkness will finally be
made light; liberty, crucified on Calvary with the Messiah,
will descend from the Cross with Him; it will put back into the
hands of the nations that New Testament which was written
for their benefit, and the message of which has hitherto been
fettered. Governments will pass, moral evil will pass and the
renewal will announce the consummation of the centuries of
death and oppression which started with the Fall.
When will this longed for day dawn ? When will society
be reorganised according to the secret ways of the principle of
generation ? No man can tell; the resistance which human
passions will offer cannot be measured.
Death will more than once engulf the peoples in torpor and
FRANgOIS REN£ DE CHATEAUBRIAND 107
will enshroud events in silence, as the snow fallen in the night
deadens the noise of the wagon. Nations do not develop as
rapidly as the individuals who comprise them, and do not
disappear so quickly. How long it takes to find out the meaning
of a certain event! The Byzantine Empire believed that its
agony would be prolonged for ever; the Christian era, already
so long drawn out, has still not seen the abolition of slavery.
Such considerations do not, I am aware, suit the French tem-
perament; we have never admitted the element of time in our
revolutions: that is why we have always been dumbfounded at
the results, which were the opposite of what we so impatiently
desired. Young men hurl themselves into the fray, animated by
generous courage; with their eyes on the ground, they climb
towards the heights which they can dimly see and which they
struggle to attain: nothing is more admirable; but they will
waste their lives in these attempts and when they have reached
the allotted span and piled error upon error, they will impose
on succeeding generations by bestowing the burden of their
disillusionment upon them, which they in turn will carry to
neighbouring graves; and so on. The times of the desert have
returned; Christianity starts afresh in the sterility of the
Thebaid, amidst a formidable idolatry, the idolatry of man for
himself.
History has two sequels, one which is both immediate and
instantly recognised, the other which is more distant and not
immediately perceived. They are often mutually contradictory,
for one derives from our brief human wisdom and the other
from the eternal wisdom. The providential event appears after
the human event. God is seen to have worked through the
actions of men. Deny as much as you please the supreme pur-
pose, refuse to acknowledge its action, quarrel over words,
name what the vulgar call Providence the force of circum-
stances, or reason — observe what the result of a certain course
of action was and you will see that the opposite of what was
intended invariably came to pass, if it was not primarily based
on standards of morality and justice.
If Heaven has not pronounced its final decree; if a future is
to come into being which will be both strong and free, this
future is still very distant, far beyond our present horizon; we
can only attain it with the help of that Christian hope whose
wings extend ever wider, as all things appear to betray it, a
hope which is more lasting than time itself and stronger than
disaster.
IV. HONORE DE BALZAC
x799 " l85°
An account of Balzac's life and even a short appreciation of his
immense achievement would be out of place here. Studies of the
great novelist's art abound in every language, as do anecdotes on
the great eccentric. He has even sometimes been introduced as a
moralist and author of aphorisms.
None the less, Balzac is little known as a defender of the Faith.
Despite the Preface to his Human Comedy, in which he describes him-
self as an author " definitely on the side of Bossuet and the Vicomte de
Bonald," and in which he expressly states that he wrote on human
society " in the light of the spiritual truth of the Church and the
social truth of the Monarchy "; despite his declarations of faithful
attachment to the elder branch of the Bourbons under Louis
Philippe and the Second Republic, not a few critics have tried to
prove that various contrary philosophies can just as well be derived
from the Human Comedy — a utilitarian Liberalism, which encourages
unlimited speculation for material gain, or a Socialism or a Com-
munism, which unmasks the corruption and the inner rottenness
of the rich ruling classes. Sometimes even Catholic critics — Ferdi-
nand Brunetiere, for example, whom some people considered to be
the official Catholic voice in literary criticism round about 1900,
and whom few care to read today — advanced the opinion that the
often -quoted appraisal of " the two great truths, the Church and
the Monarchy " is more vocal in the Preface to the Human Comedy
than it is borne out in the novels, in which the reader may easily
find a lesson of immorality.
Again, Balzac has often been claimed as a master and precursor
by schools far removed from Catholic spirituality : by Flaubert and
the Brothers Goncourt, as a master of minute observation and
description; by the numerous commentators and critics of Sainte-
Beuve's school, as the prophet of scepticism, and able exposer of
" conventional values "; even by Zola and the " Naturalists," as
the precursor of the " photographic " novel, which largely owes its
success to the needless accumulation of unsuppressed filth. The
most combative and fearless Catholic critics of Balzac's period and
of French society as a whole did not altogether accept the author
of the Human Comedy as one of their own. In his Literary Confessions,
Louis Veuillot is not too favourable to Balzac. He places him above
his imitators, but is hardly prepared to exonerate him from the
108
HONORE DE BALZAC I(X)
suspicion of being a literary exploiter of the commercial possibilities
of a well -described social corruption, and he praises him mainly
for stopping short at mere discreet allusion, where Eugene Sue
would have given a prolonged exhibition of bad taste and
cynicism.
Still, the whole case of Balzac is perhaps wrongly placed on this
plane of good taste and decency, to which a great part of contem-
porary criticism reduced it. Balzac is somewhat outside this central
concern of aesthetics, just as the moral lesson of his world is outside
the classic concern of ethics. This most strange and curious world
of his imagination has few, perhaps no characters which are sym-
bolic of moral virtues. Indeed, he would have been the last to
defend his invented world on moral grounds, and the last to claim
to be a teacher of good ways by inventing good examples, or by a
consoling and redeeming and extenuated representation of historical
and social reality. Balzac did not compose a world of essentially
good men, accidentally corrupted by society, such as the fictitious
Citizen of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He did not plead the mysterious
and unexplored laws of pathological heredity as an explanation of
vice, and an excuse for it, like Zola. His most monumental convict,
Vautrin, is not a half-innocent victim like Victor Hugo's Jean
Valjean. He is a hardened criminal, capable of one virtue only, a
frank and cynical appreciation of the ambition of others, and of one
sacrifice, to support the ambition of those men whose minds and
will he is prepared to recognise as superior to his own.
For it is this very harshness, this lack of any emotional element
or sentimentality, that brought Balzac close to the Church. He had
shown a world which was without hope — except for the Redemp-
tion. A society which was lost — except for the infinite wisdom of
the first Principle ruling it. A contemporary society which was
rotten, composed of men who were capable of doing anything —
except to strive after the ultimate social truth, which an infinite
and almighty wisdom had placed beyond their devilish and
devastating power, by sending them, not apostles and priests, whom
they would once more have scorned and in the end martyred, but
bad priests, who, in the shape of the unholy trio, Talleyrand, Fouche
and Sieyes, saved France from the French, their hidden theological
intelligence giving them the gift of statesmanship, although their
sinful hearts refused the milder gifts of Christ. (Une Tenebreuse
Affaire.) The ambition of a Napoleon and the intelligence of the
three bad priests saved France from the dissolution and anarchy
which was produced by the complacent sentimentality of Rousseau's
followers. Balzac was ultimately on the side of a God who saves
men, not because of their merits, but because He is infinitely more
wise and generous than men are. If Balzac sometimes failed to be
touched by the compassion of the Son, he did not fail to pay
trembling respect to the Father, nor to proclaim in humble admiration
110 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
the wisdom and the firmness of the Holy Ghost as man's surest
guide.
The redeeming feature in Balzac's mankind is its Secret, a word
used with a capital letter in Balzac's sense. The uncommon man
differs from the rabble because he has a Secret: the secret know-
ledge of the law governing the world. Balzac saw the Church as
the depositary of wisdom. Wickedness is stupid, although he
thought — and this may be a dangerous doctrine indeed — that
wisdom itself has no choice but to fight wickedness by evil means.
Christ never appeared to Balzac otherwise than as the Judge of the
Last Day, of iron firmness, like the vigorous, bare-armed figure
painted by Michelangelo on the wall of the Sistine Chapel. Per-
haps because he saw the shrewdness of the serpent too clearly and
praised it too often, Balzac was too inclined to forget the gentleness
of the dove, which should always take precedence over the serpent
for those who follow the evangelical precept. But if there are
dangerous precepts which could be derived from the philosophy
underlying Balzac's art, let us not have the slightest doubt on his
firm and unmistakable adherence to the Catholic order of values
and Catholic reasoning. He often described moral and even
physical filth at great length, just like Zola and the naturalists who
came after him. But he put it into its right sphere, into the sphere
of the grotesque and the comic (Les Contes drolatiques, or the descrip-
tion of the boarding-house in the Rue Neuve Ste. Genevieve in
Pere Goriot) . He was not the father of Zola, but the son of Rabelais.
Not the finest spiritual ancestry, to be sure, and no guarantee
against grossness and even a streak of vulgarity.
We need not idealise* either Balzac or Rabelais. Rabelais was a
scandalous friar, who ran away from his monastery, which would
have been wiser to chase him away in time, and what he wrote was
of course not intended to be an auxiliary of the Daily Missal, or a
companion-book for readers of the Imitation. An avowed spiritual
descent from Rabelais does not put Balzac necessarily among the
guides to good religion and good morals. Yet, may we not argue
that a healthy faith is better than " good religion," for the very
reason that it is a more definite and precise term? " Religion " may
be vague, may stand in danger of being " a " religion, or even of
degenerating into " some sort of religion," " the religious need of
mankind," and like things that we hear from doubtful quarters
today. Faith, however, does not tolerate misunderstanding. A man
believes, and then he is ready to sacrifice intellect to belief, or the
belief is missing, and the lack of it deprives a man of all the gifts
of the intellect. Balzac believed in the primacy of the gifts conferred
by Faith. Much as he thought intellect to be a supreme agent in
history and in human action, his search was for the Absolute, not
for " lost time," not for subtle observation and not for good social
HONORE DE BALZAC III
guidance, as did his decadent imitators of later generations. Faith
stood in the same relation for him to the intellect, as Charity stood
to Faith for St. Paul.
SOCIETY AND THE INDIVIDUAL
Man is neither good nor bad. He is born with certain instincts
and aptitudes. Society, far from corrupting him, as Rousseau
says, perfects him. But self-interest brings out his evil propen-
sities also, and Catholicism is the only complete system which
represses the vicious tendencies in man. Hence it is the greatest
element in social order.
Every thinking man must march under the banner of Christ !
He alone consecrated the triumph of spirit over matter; He
alone revealed in practical terms the intermediate world which
separates us from God.
Christianity created the nations of the modern world; it will
preserve them.
Nations can only achieve long life by husbanding their
vitality. In this the life of society resembles the life of a man.
Education, or rather up-bringing, by the religious bodies is
therefore the great principle on which the existence of nations
depends.
Crimes which are of a purely moral order and escape human
justice are the vilest and the most hateful of all. . . . God
often punishes them on earth. Herein lies the explanation of
those dreadful misfortunes which seem incomprehensible to us.
Any moral regeneration which does not spring from a deep
religious feeling, and which is not pursued within the bosom of
the Church, rests on foundations of sand. All the practices
prescribed in such detail by Catholicism, and which meet with
so little comprehension, are so many breakwaters indispensable
to withstand the storms of the Evil One.
1 Extracts from Balzac's Maximes et Pensies, collected and edited by Barbey
d'Aurevilly.
112 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
The cult of a religion lies in its form, and societies only exist
by their form : the national colours and the Cross.
Have you noticed the deep sense of security in the true priest,
when he has given himself to God, listens to His voice and
strives to be a submissive instrument in the hands of Provi-
dence ? . . . There is neither vanity nor pride left in him, nor
anything which, to those in the world, is a continual source of
offence. His tranquillity is as complete as that of the fatalist
and his resignation helps him to endure all things.
All the religious who were forced to leave their monasteries
by the Revolution and who engaged in politics have proved, by
the coolness of their demeanour and their reserve, the superiority
which ecclesiastical discipline confers on all the children of the
Church, even on those who desert her.
Patriotism only inspires transitory sentiments. Religion gives
them a permanent character. Patriotism is a momentary
forgetfulness of self-interest, whilst Christianity is a complete
system of opposition to the corrupt tendencies in man.
Christianity is a perfect system which combats the corrupt
tendencies in man and absolutism is a complete system which
controls the divergent interests of society. Each one is necessary
to the other. Without Catholicism the law has no sword to
defend it, and we see the result of this today.
Protestants have done as much harm to art as they have done
to the political body.
That man amongst us who makes the most fun of his religion
in Paris would not abjure it in Constantinople.
The Virgin Mary (even if we only consider her as a symbol)
eclipses in her greatness all Hindoo, Egyptian or Greek proto-
types. Virginity, the mother of great things, magna rerum parens,
holds the key to higher worlds in her fair white hands. In short,
this grandiose and terrible exception deserves all the honours
which the Catholic Church bestows upon her.
In the Protestant faith, there is nothing woman can do after
her fault, whilst in the Catholic Church, the hope of forgiveness
makes her sublime.
HONORE DE BALZAC II3
Suicide ought to be the final word of unbelieving societies.
When it beheaded Louis XVI, the Revolution beheaded in
his person all fathers of families. The family no longer exists
today; there are only individuals. When they wanted to
become a nation, Frenchmen gave up the idea of being an
empire. By proclaiming the equal division of the father's
property, they killed the family spirit and created the tax-
gatherer mentality ! On the other hand they paved the way for
the weakening of the better elements, and the blind impulses of
the masses, the extinction of the arts, the reign of self-interest,
and opened up the path to conquest.
The family ! I repudiate the family in a society which, on the
death of the father or mother, divides up the property and tells
each member to go his own way. The family is a temporary
and fortuitous association, which is dissolved immediately by
death. Our laws have broken up our homes, our inheritance,
and the perennial value of example and tradition. I see only
ruins around us.
The march of civilisation and the wellbeing of the masses
depends on three men: the priest, the doctor and the judge;
these are the three authorities who can immediately make
people conscious of the interplay of actions, interests and prin-
ciples— the three great consequences brought about in a nation
by events, property and ideas.
With the advent of Luther, the question at stake was not the
reformation of the Church, but rather the undefined liberty
of man, which means the death of all authority.
Authority can only come from above or from below. To
attempt to find it half-way is to want to make nations walk on
their belly, to lead them by the lowest interest of all, indivi-
dualism.
There are no more than fifty or sixty dangerous men in a
nation, whose minds are on a level with their ambition. The
secret of government is to know who these men are, so that
they can either be executed or bought.
A feudal aristocracy can be subdued by cutting off a few heads,
114 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
but a hydra with a thousand heads cannot be subdued. No,
unimportant people are not crushed; they are too flat under
the feet!
When Europe is no more than a drifting herd of men, she
will have no leaders and will be devoured by uncouth con-
querors. Twenty times has the world presented us with this
sight. Europe will repeat the process. Ideas eat up the cen-
turies as men are eaten up by their passions. . . . When man
is cured, humanity will be able to cure itself perhaps ; but will
man ever be cured ? . . .
The prophecy of the eagle plucked by diplomacy will be ful-
filled before the eyes of a selfish generation, lacking in all
religious sentiment, which is the principle of resistance, in
patriotism, which has been destroyed by revolutions, and in
fidelity to an oath, which is a peculiarly monarchical principle.
There are in the world countries which are no longer defended
by their peoples: countries where individuals are no longer
linked together and where nationality is replaced by personality.
M. Laine1 has said: "Kings are disappearing." He might
have added: Nations are advancing, but they advance from
North to South. People who like to lie peacefully in their beds
at night say: " Our industry is flourishing, our arms are equal
to the enemy and nations do not easily let themselves be swal-
lowed up." Does anybody think by chance that the invasions
of the Goths, Franks and Saxons did not find flourishing indus-
tries and armed nations barring their way ? The interests of
the fourth century were the same as those of the nineteenth.
Only they took a different shape, and the barbarians found
themselves faced by rival interests, just as we see today.
The day will come when people will say to each other: " Why
not the Czar ? " as once they said: " Why not the Duke of
Orleans ? " People do not care much about anything nowa-
days (1840). In fifty years time they will not care about any-
thing at all.
If the Press did not exist, it would not be necessary to invent
it.
1 Vicomte de Laine, Minister of the Interior under Louis XVIII, a leading
Parliamentarian of the Constitutional Royalists and opponent of the " ultras."
HONORE DE BALZAC II5
We all know that newspapers outstrip kings in ingratitude,
the shadiest business enterprise in speculation and cunning, and
that they destroy our intelligence with the mental raw spirits
which they sell us every morning ; but all of us write in them,
like those people who exploit a quicksilver mine, knowing that
they will meet their death thereby.
There was once a journalist who confessed to having written
the same article every day for twelve years. His now celebrated
confession makes us smile, but ought on the contrary to make us
shiver. Does not a mason always strike at the same spot with
his pick-axe, in order to demolish a particularly fine building ?
111
In order to destroy the principle of authority, the new political
doctrines (an absurd phrase, since authority can only take one
of two forms: aristocracy or democracy) claim that systems
are born and grow, that a total philosophy would be an abso-
lute science and an impossibility. This assertion is made by
people who talk nonsense about free-will and liberty. The doc-
trine of authority is complete and final.
There is no absolute authority in the universe. The only
absolute authority which the imagination has been able to
conceive, the authority of God, works according to rules which
He has imposed upon Himself. He can destroy all His worlds
and return to His rest, but while He allows them to exist, they
continue to be governed by the laws which together create
order.
Politically speaking, man is the basis of society. It would be
a mistake not to understand by man, three people : a man, his
wife and child. " Man " means " family."
When man existed in a primitive state, did he live alone ?
This question is very important, for many philosophers, in fact
all who have wanted to apply their theories on man to society,
and their theories on society to religion, have first begun by
examining man in his primitive state, to find out whether he
was naturally good or bad, and whether society corrupted or
perfected him.
Hobbes said: Man is born bad and society perfects him.
1 Extracts from the unfinished Catichisme Social.
Il6 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
J. J. Rousseau said : Man is born good and society corrupts
him. Religion says: Man is born with the stain of original sin
and religion helps him to curb all his passions, so that he may
be made worthy of God, Who holds the secret of his destiny.
Imagine a fight between five Iroquis, a hundred leagues away
from their own country, and five Mohicans. They have had
nothing to eat for many days. The Iroquis kill a Mohican and
remain masters of the field and of the enemy; they proceed to
eat their prisoner.
It is an easy step to make a custom out of something which
was done once out of necessity. Custom can engender abuse,
just as it can in Society. The aim of religion is to curb bad
desires and inculcate good ones. Religion comprises the whole
of society. If it were not a divine institution, it would be a
human necessity.
Men have always wanted to discover the laws which govern
society in nature, but when we observe the laws of nature care-
fully, we find that they provide a complete justification for the
social laws, such as every society has always imagined them to
be, and which prove that Equality is the most terrible illusion.
The earth has no exact geometrical limits and cannot be
separated from the surrounding atmosphere. It has been proved
that none of her products, neither man, animal, nor plants,
could survive without this girdle of air, which determines their
food, their physical shape and their species.
Hence, nature has given all its earthly creations the right to
live on this sphere, the right to draw from it the elementary
substances which they need. Here we have a complete picture
of social rights. Social rights, taken in the broadest sense, really
mean the right to moral and physical life, in a given environ-
ment and in a given place, the whole regulated by a network of
customs. The analogy is not only an exact one; it is perfect.
What do we see as the result of the natural and visible law
which governs the creatures of the earth, and allows them to
develop in these atmospheric conditions ? The most striking
inequality, and a variety of species which is the signal beauty of
the universe.
Man's free-will lies at the heart of any problem of his liberty.
If man has no free-will, the question of his liberty does not arise.
The problem is no longer whether he should be allowed to
gratify every whim, but what society allows him to do. If
HONORE DE BALZAC 117
nature has set limits to man's action, instead of giving him un-
limited powers, and confines this action within a ruthless circle,
society is not under a greater obligation to its citizens than man
is to nature.
Free-will means then in its truest sense the power a man
possesses to do what he likes, without any let or hindrance, and
without being influenced in his decision by any moral or
physical law.
Industry attracts workmen, and concentrates them in centres
where they are not able to produce any food. Industry, while
it doubles the population, does not increase agricultural
products two-fold; on the contrary, by forcing up the price of
labour, it forces up the price of food. A clash between industry
and agriculture is inevitable, for industry, which is up against
competition, wants food to be cheap, so that the cost of labour
may fall, while agriculture cannot afford to sell food at prices
below cost. This is a problem which modern politics finds
insoluble.
The poverty of a certain section of the population is not only
a reproach to a government, it is an indictment which will
bring about its fall. When the numbers of the oppressed pass a
certain limit, and they see how many rich people there are in
the world, revolution soon breaks out. All revolutions depend
on a leader, and on a contingency which suddenly precipitates
it; every contingency has a leader, since every leader knows
how to engineer the necessary contingency.
Religion is based on an innate sentiment in man, which is a
universal phenomenon; no uncivilised peoples, tribes, hordes
of savages, or men in a state of nature, have ever been dis-
covered, who did not have a faith of some sort. This emotion,
inborn in man, is the mine which has been exploited by all the
philosophies of the world, and which has furnished them with
weapons against the so-called sensualist and materialist schools
of thought, etc. . . .
This sentiment, which is so strong in peoples who lived
nearest in time to the disaster known as the Flood, pre-supposes
a fall, a punishment, the result of a battle, a decline in the
knowledge of a superior being and an angry victor.
The scientific knowledge which we possess today, thanks to
progress and the indefatigable human brain, corroborates this
feeling in man. Mammoth creatures belonging to the early life
Il8 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
of the earth have now disappeared. Earth itself has perhaps
fallen and become detached from a hierarchy of superior
worlds. It has certainly undergone modification. Material
science has vindicated the idea of religion, which is the common
basis of all societies : in other words, divine revelation. The
idea of reparation is almost universally accepted also.
These two general ideas, common to man, or this divine
revelation, are at the root of Christianity. These findings, this
conclusion of history, are beyond dispute. Whether God co-
exists in the world, or is separated from His creation, whether
He exists in Himself and for Himself, or is indissolubly linked
to His creation or not, we can see that a part of that creation
has been vitiated and punished, and while it has not been with-
drawn from the whole, it has been condemned to undergo
modification and purification, before it returns to the general
stream.
Hence humanity can journey from worse to better (or from
better to worse, if the globe has a life of its own, for it is going
towards its death). Humanity has a future, and man likewise.
It is dangerous for man and for society to lose sight of these
points. They contain the idea of obedience, which is funda-
mental to any society.
Catholicism is the most perfect religion of all, because it
condemns the discussion of questions on which the Church has
pronounced judgement, and because the Church admits those
time-honoured practices of religious observance, which thereby
bring us nearer to God. The fate which the various heresies
have brought on Europe is an argument in favour of Catholi-
cism. Revelation is always present within the bosom of the
Church; it is restricted in the heretical sects.
When authority comes from the people it is vacillating ; when
it comes from God it is steadfast. It is either beyond all ques-
tion, or it is no authority at all. Such is the lesson of history.
V. FRIEDRICH VON SCHLEGEL
1772 - 1829
Friedrich von Sghlegel, poet, historian and translator of
Shakespeare, together with his brother August-Wilhelm, the poet
and philosopher Friedrich von Hardenberg (better known under
his pseudonym, Novalis), Clemens Brentano, and Count Friedrich
Stolberg — these are the Germans of the period who, as the result
of the French wars, the Napoleonic conquests and the fall of the
last remnants of the Empire, moved towards the eternal and central
light of European history and culture, and who gave a Christian
and European meaning to a belated German Renaissance. Cer-
tainly none of them is a major teacher of the Church, fighting the
aesthetic -pantheist heresy of the nineteenth century (which was
mainly German) in the sense that St Augustine fought the Mani-
chean heresy, or St Thomas the Albigensians. All the same, the
German convert thinkers of the Napoleonic era, by the very fact
of their conversion, took up the struggle against all the perils of
agnostic deviation from a firm system of truth, against the trend in
German philosophy which reached its fullest expression in Hegel's
dialectics, against all the pitfalls of a " historicism " which confuses
all standards by its pantheism.
It was a Protestant historian, the Swiss Johannes von Muller,
who first showed, with great brilliance and learning, that the law
of Europe governing the relations between the individual states was
originally laid down by the Papacy, and that the European concept
of personal liberty is inseparable from the law of Christian morality.
It was a Protestant publicist, the Prussian Friedrich von Gentz (who
later became an Austrian, for some decades the theoretical organ of
Metternich's policy), who showed the dogmatic — ultimately the
theological — character of the common law of Europe. But the last
consequences of the principles laid down by German political
thinkers in the struggle against Napoleon were drawn by such
Germans who, in the critical years of Napoleon's rise to hegemony,
placed their hopes in Catholic Austria. For some years, Vienna
was the centre of German thought and the German awakening.
Johannes von Muller (born in Switzerland) and Friedrich von
Gentz (born in Prussia) spent the most important years of their
lives in the Imperial city, the birth-place of the " Romantic "
school of thought and of art.
The central figure of the Vienna circle was a priest and preacher
"9
120 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
who, less than a hundred years after his death in 1820, became a
canonised saint of the Church, the Redemptorist Father Clemens
Hofbauer, whose Congregation, for forty years, replaced the dis-
solved Society of Jesus. From all parts of the German-speaking
world, converts came to Vienna, the philosophers of a re-
Christianised Europe: Zacharias Werner, Adam Muller and many
other outstanding scholars and writers, some of whom were not
only received into the Church, but even followed the priestly voca-
tion among the Redemptorists of Father Hofbauer.
The following pages of Friedrich von Schlegel were written in
1827. They form the epilogue to his Lectures on the Philosophy of
History, given in Vienna some twenty years earlier. Between these
lectures and the epilogue, important events occurred in Schlegel's
life: his failure to persuade his brother August-Wilhelm to follow
him into the Church; his disappointment over Goethe's hostility
to the " romantic " tendency and to Catholicism. There were also
the years he spent on Metternich's staff at the State Chancellery of
Austria, and his journey to Rome in 1819 in the Chancellor's com-
pany in connection with important negotiations with Pope Pius VII
and Cardinal Consalvi. The close links which existed between
Metternich and Friedrich von Schlegel allow us to consider the
pages that follow as the foremost document of the political theory
of a whole era of German and European history.
THE REGENERATION OF CHRISTIAN STATES
AND NATIONS1
There are, in the History of the eighteenth century, many
phenomena which occurred so suddenly, so instantaneously,
and were so contrary to all expectation, that although on
deeper consideration we may discover their efficient causes in
the past, in the natural state of things and in the general situa-
tion of the world, yet there are many circumstances which
prove that there was a deliberate, although secret, preparation
of events, as indeed has been actually demonstrated in many
instances. I must now say a few words on this secret and
mysterious branch of illuminism, and on the progress it made
during the period of its influence, and show the influence of this
principle, both in regard to the origin and general spirit of the
revolution (which in its fanaticism believed itself to be a
regeneration of the world) and in regard to the true restoration
1 Friedrich von Schlegel: Lectures on the Philosophy of History (Lecture XVIII).
Translated from the German by James Burton Robertson, London, Henry G.
Bohn, 1846 (slightly revised).
FRIEDRICH VON SCHLEGEL 121
of society founded on the basis of Christian justice. One cir-
cumstance, however, is peculiar to this historical enquiry, that
those who could best speak from their personal experience can-
not always be considered the most reliable eye-witnesses; for
we never know, or can know, what their particular views and
interests may lead them to say, or conceal, or suppress. However,
it has so happened that, in the universal convulsion and over-
throw of society, many things have come to light on this
mysterious and esoteric clue in modern history — things which,
when combined together, furnish us with a not incorrect and
reasonably complete idea of this mighty element of the Revolu-
tion, and of illuminism both true and false, which has exer-
cised so evident and varied an influence on the world.
As to the origin of this esoteric influence, the impartial
enquirer cannot doubt that the order of Templars was the
channel by which this society in its ancient and long-preserved
form was introduced into the West. The religious Masonic
symbols may be explained by the traditions of Solomon con-
nected with the very foundation of the order of Templars; and
indeed the existence of these symbols may be traced in other
passages of Holy Writ, and in other parts of sacred history, and
they may very well admit of a Christian interpretation. Traces
of these symbols may be found in the monuments of the old
German architecture of the Middle Ages. Any secret spiritual
association however, spread simultaneously amongst Christians
and Mahometans, cannot be of a very Christian nature, nor long
remain so. Indeed, the very idea of an esoteric society for the
propagation of any secret doctrines is not compatible with the
very principle of Christianity itself; for Christianity is a divine
mystery, which according to the intention of its divine Founder
lies open to all, and is daily exposed on every altar. For this
reason, in a Revelation imparted to all alike, there can be no
secrecy, as in the pagan mysteries, where, side by side with
popular mythology and the public religion of the State, certain
esoteric doctrines were inculcated amongst the initiated alone.
This would be to constitute a church within a church — a
measure to be as little tolerated or justified as an imperium in
imperio; and in an age where worldly interests and public or
secret views of policy carry far more weight than religious
opinions or sentiments, such a secret parasitical church would
unquestionably, as experience has already proved, be very soon
transformed into a secret directory for political changes and
revolutions. That in this society the unchristian principles of a
122 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
negative illuminism, disguised as they often were into senti-
ments of universal philanthropy, were reasonably modern in
date, all historical analogies would lead us to suppose. On the
other hand, the Christian opinions which survived in this order
(although in our day the adherents to Christian principles form
a minority in our society, agitated as it is by the quarrels of in-
numerable factions) assumed, in conformity with the historical
origin I have described, more of an oriental and Gnostic
character. The great, or at least not inconsiderable influence
which this society exercises in politics, we may discover in those
revolutions which, after having convulsed our part of the globe,
have rolled onwards to the New World, where the two principal
revolutionary factions in one of those South American states
whose troubles are not yet at an end, are called the Scots and the
Yorkists, from the two parties which divide the English Masonic
lodges. Who does not know, or who does not remember, that
the ruler of the world in the period we have just lived through
made use of this vehicle in all the countries he conquered, to
delude and deceive the nations with false hopes ? And on this
account he was styled by his followers the man of his age and,
in fact, he was a slave to the spirit of his age. A society from
whose bosom, as from the secret laboratory of Revolution, the
Illumines, the Jacobins and the Carbonari have successively
proceeded, cannot possibly be termed, or in fact be, very benefi-
cial to mankind, politically sound, or truly Christian in its
views and tendency. Still, I must observe here, that it has been
the fate of the oldest Of all secret societies to have its venerable
forms, which are known to all the initiated, made a cloak for
every new conspiracy. In the next place, we must not forget
that this order itself appears to be split and divided into a multi-
tude of different sects and factions; and on this account we
must not suppose that all those fearful aberrations and wild
excesses of impiety, all those openly destructive or secretly
undermining principles of revolution were universally approved
by this society. On the contrary, such a supposition would be
utterly false, or at least very exaggerated. A glance at all the
highly estimable characters, mistaken only on this one point —
most distinguished and illustrious personages in the eighteenth
century, who were members of this association — would be
sufficient to remove, or at least materially to modify, this
sweeping censure. From many indications, we may consider it
certain, or at least extremely probable, that in no country did
this esoteric society harmonise so well with the State and the
FRIEDRICH VON SCHLEGEL 123
whole established order of things as in that country where all
the conflicting elements of morals and society are combined in
a sort of strange and artificial balance — I mean England. If
now we turn our attention to the continent of Europe, and
even to those countries which were the chief theatre of the
Revolution, we shall see that there, among many other factions,
a Christian party had sprung up in this society, a party which,
although it formed a very small minority in point of numbers,
possessed by its profounder doctrines and the interesting frag-
ments of ancient tradition it had preserved, a great moral
ascendancy; and this, many historical facts and many written
documents which have since been published place beyond
the shadow of a doubt. Instead of mentioning the names of
some German writers less generally known, I prefer to quote in
confirmation of what I have said the example of a French writer
who is typical of the internal and more hidden character of the
revolution. The Christian theosophist St Martin, who was a
disciple of this school, stands quite apart in his age from the
other organs of the then prevailing atheistic philosophy. He
was, however, a most decided revolutionary (yet at the same
time a disinterested fanatic whose conduct was entirely guided
by high moral motives) because of his utter contempt and
abhorrence for the whole moral and political system of Europe
as it then stood — a contempt in which, if we cannot entirely
agree with him, we cannot in many instances withhold from
him at least a sort of negative approval; and secondly, he was
a revolutionary by reason of his enthusiastic belief in a complete
Christian regeneration of society, conceived it is true according
to his own views, or the views of his party. Among the French
writers of the Restoration, no one has so thoroughly under-
stood this remarkable philosopher and so well understood how
to appreciate him in all the depths of his errors, as well as in
the many excellent things which his writings contain, as Count
de Maistre.
This secret clue in the history of the revolution must not be
overlooked, if we desire to form a due estimate of its character;
for it greatly contributed to the illusion of a great many by no
means ill-intentioned persons, who saw, or wished to see, in
the revolution merely the inevitable and necessary, although in
its origin harsh and severe, regeneration of Christian states and
nations, which had then gone so far astray from their original
course. This illusory notion of a false restoration of society was
particularly prevalent during the imperial rule of that
124 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
extraordinary man whose true biography — I mean the high moral
law of his destiny, or the theological key to his life — still seems
to exceed the critical powers of our age. Seven years were
allotted to him for the growth of his power, for fourteen years
the world was delivered up into his hands; and seven years
were left him for solitary reflection, the first of which he misused
by embroiling the world anew. On the use he made of the
extraordinary power that had been granted him, of that for-
midable dominion which had fallen to his lot, history has long
ago pronounced sentence. Never is it permitted to exercise
such power, unless it is in a period of some awful reckoning to
which it leads, for the purpose of a still more fearful probation
of mankind. But if his restoration — that is to say, the restora-
tion which his infatuated supporters attributed to him — was
most certainly a false one, the question naturally occurs
whether the restoration which his successors attempted to effect
has been perfectly sound, or at least quite complete; and what
are the defects in the new system and how can they be
remedied ?
A mere treaty of territorial adjustments could not, and never
can, constitute a great religious and international pacification
of the whole of Europe. The re-establishment of subverted
thrones, the restoration of exiled sovereigns and dynasties will
not in themselves have any security or permanence, unless*they
are based on moral principles and maxims. After the severe and
unexpected lesson which was again inflicted upon Europe,
religion was at last made the basis of European policy ; and we
must not make it a matter of reproach that this principle still
retained so indefinite a character; for this was necessary, at
least in the beginning, in order to remove any misconception,
or any possible suspicion of interested views. And not only does
the stability and future existence of the whole Christian and
civilised world depend on this bond of religious confederation
— which we can only hope will be ever more and more firmly
knit — but each individual great power is especially called upon
to play its part. That the moral strength and stability of the
Russian empire mainly depends on religion, that every
departure from its sacred spirit must have the most fatal effects
on its whole system, has already been stated by her late
monarch, distinguished alike in adversity and in prosperity, and
is an axiom of State policy, which can hardly ever be forgotten
again. But in that country, where the elements of Protestant-
ism (to use that word in its most comprehensive sense) obtained
FRIEDRIGH VON SGHLEGEL 125
such weight at the outset of its literary refinement, and are
incorporated to such a degree into the whole political system
of the State, the toleration extended to every form of worship
should not be withheld from that Church which is the mother-
Church of the rest of Europe, including Poland; nor should the
religious liberty of individuals be in that respect at all restricted.
It is equally evident that in that country of Europe where
monarchy has been restored, the restoration of religion must go
hand in hand with that of monarchy, and that the latter would
lose all security if the former were removed. In the peace-
loving monarchy of Austria, unchangeably attached as she is to
her ancient principles, religion, rather than any other principle,
has always been the recognised basis of her existence. As to the
fifth Germanico -European monarchy of Prussia, recently
created, the solid maintenance of religion is the only means of
allaying the disquiet inevitably caused by such a State, and of
securing its future existence. Any act of even indirect hostility
towards the Catholic body — one half of the nation — any
infringement of the liberty of individuals in that sacred concern
— a liberty which must be guaranteed not only by the letter of
the law, but by real, effective and practical measures — would
not only be in complete opposition to those religious principles
rapidly spreading as they are all over Europe and particularly
in Germany but would violate and render insecure the great,
fundamental and long-established principle of toleration, such
as it has up to now been understood. It is only in England that
Anglicanism has raised her doubts as to the utility of a religious
fraternity among the Christian states and nations — doubts
which are connected with the still exclusively character of the
English constitution, and which on many occasions may lead
England to a sort of schismatic rupture with the rest of Europe.
On several occasions, we must regretfully note that mighty
England, in the eighteenth century so brilliant and so powerful
by the influence she exerted over the whole European mind, no
longer seems to feel herself at home in the nineteenth century,
and no longer knows where to find her place in the new order
of things.
If we consider Europe as a whole, the maxims and principles
of liberalism are but a partial return to the revolution — they
can have no other tendency than to revolution. Liberalism
will never obtain a majority among the well-thinking persons
of any of the European states, except by some gross error, some
singular degeneration in that party, which really does not
126 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
constitute a party and ought not to be called such — I mean the
men who in politics are attached to the monarchy, and in
religion to Christianity.
The mere principle of a mechanical balance of power, to
serve as a negative check on excessive power — a system which
emanated from England and was in the eighteenth century
universally accepted — has ceased to be applicable, or to be of
any service in the existing state of things in Europe ; for all the
remedies which it can offer tend only to aggravate the evil,
when once it has occurred. In religion alone are to be found the
remedies, the safeguards, the emancipation and the consolida-
tion of the whole civilised world, as well as of each individual
State. The most imminent danger for our age, and the possible
abuse of religion itself, are the excesses of the absolute. Great
is the danger when, in a vindictive spirit of reaction, a revolu-
tionary conduct is adopted by the legitimist party; when
passion itself is consecrated into a maxim of reason, and held up
as the only valid and just way of proceeding; and when the
sacredness of religion itself is hawked about as if it were some
fashionable opinion; as if the world -redeeming power of faith
and truth consisted only of the dead letter and the recited for-
mula. True life can only spring from the vivifying spirit of
eternal truth. In science, the absolute is the abyss which swal-
lows up the living truth, and leaves behind only the hollow idea
and the dead formula. In the political world, the absolute in
conduct and in speculation is that false spirit of time, opposed to
all good and to the fulness of divine truth, which in a great
measure rules the world, and may entirely rule it and lead it for
ever to its final ruin. As errors would not be dangerous or
deceptive, and would have little effect, unless they contained a
portion or an appearance of truth, this false spirit of time, which
successively assumes all forms of destruction, since it has aban-
doned the path of eternal truth, consists in this : it withdraws
particular facts from their historical context and holds them up
as the centre and term of a system, without any qualification
and without any regard for historical circumstances. The true
foundation and the right term of things, in the history of society
as in the lives of individuals, cannot be severed in this way from
their historical context and their place in the natural order of
events. In any speculation or enterprise conducted by this
passionate spirit of exaggeration, the living spirit must
evaporate, and only the dead and deadening formula survive.
What idols may successively be worshipped by the changing
FRIEDRICH VON SCHLEGEL 127
spirit of the age, which easily jumps from one extreme to the
other, cannot be determined beforehand. It is even possible
that for a while eternal truth itself may be profaned and per-
verted to such an idol of the day — I mean the counterfeit form
of truth ; for the spirit of the age can never attain the inward
essence and living energy of truth, even if it assumes the
appearance of it. Whatever may be the alternative idol, and
the reigning object of its worship, or of its passionate rhetoric, it
still remains essentially the same — that is to say, the absolute,
as deadening to the intellect as it is destructive to life. In
science, the absolute is the idol of vain and empty systems, of
dead and abstract reason.
The Christian faith has the living God and His revelation
for its object, and is itself that revelation; hence, every doctrine
taken from this source is something real and positive. The
defence of truth against error will then only be attended by
permanent success when the divine doctrine, in whatever
department it may be, is represented with intellectual energy
as a living principle, and at the same time is placed in its
historical context, with a due regard for every other historical
reality. This calm, historical judgement of things, this acute
insight into subjects, whether they be real facts or intellectual
phenomena, is the invariable concomitant of truth, and the
indispensable condition to the full knowledge of truth. This is
the more so, indeed, as religion, which forms the basis of all
truth and of all knowledge, naturally follows with an attentive
eye the mysterious clue of divine Providence and divine permis-
sion through the long labyrinth of human errors and human
follies, both of a practical and of a speculative nature. Error,
on the other hand, is always unhistorical ; the spirit of the age
is almost always passionate; and both, consequently, are untrue.
The conflict against error cannot be brought to a prompter or
more successful issue by separating, in every system of moral
and speculative error, and according to the standard of divine
truth, the absolute, which is the basis of such systems, into
its two component parts of truth and falsehood. For when we
acknowledge and point out the truth to be found in those
systems there only remains error, the stupidity of which it
requires little labour, little cost of time or talent, to expose and
make evident to every eye. But in real life, the struggle of
parties often ceases to be purely intellectual, their physical
energy is displayed in violent upheavals and in proportion as
all parties become absolute, so their struggle becomes one of
128 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
violent and mutual destruction, a circumstance which most
fatally impedes the great work of religious regeneration —
the mighty problem of our age — which so far from being
brought to a satisfactory conclusion is not yet even solved. In
this respect, it is no doubt a critical fact, that in certain parts of
Europe, nay, even in some entire countries, parties and govern-
ments should be more and more carried away by the spirit of
absolutism. For this is not a question of names, and it is very
evident that those parties which are called, or call themselves,
absolute, are not the most so in reality; since now, as in all
periods of violent party struggles, a whimsical mistake in
names, a great disorder of ideas, and a Babel confusion of
tongues, occur even in those languages otherwise distinguished
for their clearness and precision.
. . . The dogmatic decision and definiteness of Catholic
faith on the one hand, and the firmly rooted private convictions
of Protestantism on the other, are very compatible with an
historical judgement of historical events. Difficult as this may
appear to the absolute spirit of our age, it is this very historical
impartiality which must prepare the way for the complete
triumph of truth and the consummate glory of Christianity. In
the absolute spirit of our age and in the absolute character of its
factions, there is a deep-rooted intellectual pride, which is not
so much personal, or individual, as social, for it refers to the
historical destiny of mankind, and of this age in particular.
Actuated by this pride, a spirit exalted by moral energy or
invested with external power fancies it can give a real existence
to that which can only be the work of God, as from Him alone
proceed all those mighty and real regenerations of the world,
Christianity among them — a revolution in the high and divine
sense of the word — occupying the first place; and in these
plastic moments, everything is possible that man can wish or
dare to hope, if, in what he adds for his own part, he does not
mar in any considerable degree what the bounteous monarch
of the universe pours out upon His earth from the overflow of
His ineffable love. For the last three hundred years, this human
pride has been at work, a pride that wishes to originate events,
instead of humbly awaiting them, and of resting content with
the place assigned to it among those events, and of making the
best and most charitable use of those circumstances which
Providence has decreed.
The idea of Illuminism is perfectly blameless, and it is unfair
to pronounce on it an indiscriminate censure, and to treat it
FRIEDRICH VON SCHLEGEL 129
as an unqualified abuse. It was indeed a very small portion of
this Illuminism of the eighteenth century that was really
derived from the truths of Christianity and the pure light of
Revelation. The rest was the mere work of man, consequently
vain and empty, or at least defective, corrupt in parts and, on
the whole, destitute of solid foundation, and therefore devoid
of all permanent strength and duration.
But when once, after the complete victory of truth, the divine
Reformation appears, then that human Reformation which has
existed until now will sink to the ground and disappear from
the world. Then, with the universal triumph of Christianity
and the thorough religious regeneration of the age, the era of
a true Christian Illuminism will dawn. This period is not per-
haps so remote from our own as the natural indolence of the
mind, which after every great occurrence loves to sink again
into the death-sleep of ordinary life, is disposed to believe. Yet
this exalted religious hope, this high historical expectation,
must be coupled with great apprehension as to the full display
of divine justice in the world. For how is such a religious
regeneration possible, until every species, form and denomina-
tion of political idolatry is eradicated and finally extirpated
from the earth ?
Never was there a period that pointed so strongly, so clearly,
so generally towards the future as our own. On this account,
we should endeavour clearly and accurately to distinguish
between what, on the one hand, man may by slow, progressive,
but unwearied exertions, by the pacific adjustment of all dis-
puted points, and by the cultivation of his intellectual qualities
contribute towards the great work of the religious regeneration
of government and science, and what, on the other hand, he
should look for in silent awe from a higher Providence, from
the new creative fiat of a last period of consummation, unable
as he is to produce or call it into being. We are directed much
more towards the future than the past; but in order to under-
stand the problem of our age in all its magnitude, it is not
enough to seek this social regeneration in the eighteenth cen-
tury— an age in no way entitled to praise — or in the reign of
Louis XIV and his times of false national glory. The birth of
Christianity must be the great central point to which we must
recur, not to bring back, or counterfeit the forms of past ages,
which are no longer applicable to our own; but clearly to
examine what has remained incomplete and what has not yet
been attained. For, unquestionably, all that has been neglected
I3O CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
in the earlier periods and stages of Christian civilisation must
be made good in this true, consummate regeneration of society.
If truth is to obtain a complete victory — if Christianity is
really to triumph on the earth — then the State must become
Christian and science must become Christian. But these two
objects have never been generally or completely realised,
although during the many ages in which mankind has been
Christian it has struggled for the attainment of both, and
though this political struggle and this intellectual aspiration
form the purport of modern history. The Roman Empire, even
after the true religion had become prominent, was too
thoroughly and too radically corrupt to form a truly Christian
State. The sound, unvitiated, natural energy of the Germanic
nations seemed far better fitted for such a destiny, after they had
received from Christianity a high religious consecration for this
purpose. There was, if we may say so, in the interior of each
State, as well as in the general system of Christendom, a most
magnificent foundation laid for a truly Christian structure of
government. But this groundwork remained unfinished, after
the internal divisions in the State, then the divisions between
Church and State, and lastly the divisions in the Church and
in religion itself, had interrupted the successful beginnings of a
most glorious work.
The ecclesiastical writers of the first ages furnish a solid
foundation for all the future labours of Christian science; but
their science does not comprehend all the branches of Christian
knowledge. In the Middle Ages, undoubtedly, the foundation
of a Christian science, laid down by the early Fathers, was
slowly and in detail advanced ; but on the whole, many hurtful
influences of the time had reduced science and speculation to a
very low ebb, when suddenly, in the fifteenth century, all the
literary treasures of ancient Greece, and all the new discoveries
in geography and in physics, were offered to philosophy.
Scarcely had philosophy begun to examine these mighty stories
of ancient and modern science, in order to give them a Christian
form, and to appropriate them to the use of religion and
modern society, when the world again broke out into disputes ;
and this noble beginning of a Christian philosophy was inter-
rupted, and has since remained an unfinished fragment for a
later and happier period. Such, then, is the two-fold problem
of a real and complete regeneration which our age is called
upon to solve; on the one hand, the further extension of
Christian government and of Catholic principles of legislation,
FRIEDRIGH VON SCHLEGEL 131
in opposition to the revolutionary spirit of the age and to the
anti -Christian principle of government hitherto so exclusively-
prevalent; and on the other hand, the establishment of a
Christian philosophy, or Catholic science. As I have already
characterised the political spirit of the eighteenth century by
the term Protestantism of State (taking that word in a purely
philosophical sense, and not as a religious designation), a system
which found its one main support in an old Catholic Empire —
Austria; and as I characterised the intellectual spirit of the
same age by the term Protestantism of science, a science which
made the greatest progress and exerted the widest influence in
another great Catholic country — France; systems in which
nothing irreligious was originally intended, but which became
so by their too exclusive or negative bearing: so I may here
permit myself to say in like manner that the destiny of this age,
the peculiar need of the nineteenth century, is the establishment
of those Catholic principles of government and the general
construction of a Catholic system of science. This expression
is used in a purely scientific sense, and refers to all that is posi-
tively and completely religious in thought and feeling. In the
certain conviction that this cannot be misunderstood in an
exclusive or polemical sense, I will expressly add that this
foundation of Catholic legislation for the future political
existence of Europe may be laid by one, or more than one,
non-Catholic power; and that I even cherish the hope that it
is our own Germany, one half of which is Protestant, which
more than any other country is destined to complete the fabric
of Catholic science and of a true Christian philosophy in all the
departments of human knowledge.
The religious hope of a true and complete regeneration of
the age by a Christian system of government and a Christian
system of science forms the conclusion to this Philosophy of
History. The bond of a religious union between all the Euro-
pean states will be more closely knit and more comprehensive,
in proportion as each nation advances in the work of its own
religious regeneration, and carefully avoids any relapse into the
old revolutionary spirit, any worship of the false idols of mis-
taken freedom and illusory glory, and rejects every other new
form or species of political idolatry. For it is the very nature of
political idolatry to lead to the mutual destruction of parties,
and consequently it can never possess the elements of stability.
Philosophy, as it is the vivifying centre of all other sciences,
must be the principal concern and the highest object of the
132 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
labours of Christian science. Yet history, which is so closely
and so variously connected with religion, must be by no means
forgotten, nor must historical research be separated from philo-
sophic speculation. On the contrary, it is the religious spirit
and views already pervading the combined efforts of historical
learning and philosophical speculation that chiefly distinguish
this new era of a better intellectual culture, or as I should
rather say, this first stage of a return to the great religious
restoration. And I may venture to assert that this spirit, at least
in the present century, has become ever more and more the
prevailing characteristic of German science and on this science,
in its relation to the moral needs and spiritual callings of the
nineteenth century, I have now a few observations to make.
Like an image reflected in a mirror, or like those symptoms
which precede and announce a crisis in human events, the
focal-point of all government, or the religious basis of legislation,
is sure to be reflected in the whole mental culture, or in the
most remarkable intellectual productions of a nation. In
England, the equilibrium of a constitution that combines in
itself so many conflicting elements is reflected in its philosophy.
The revolutionary spirit was prevalent in French literature of
the eighteenth century long before it broke out in real life, and
the struggle is still very animated between the intellectual
defenders and champions of the monarchical and religious
Restoration and the newly-awakened liberal opposition. In
like manner, as the German people were, and still are, half
Catholic and half Protestant, it is religious peace which forms
the basis of their modern intellectual culture in all literature,
and particularly in philosophy. The mere aesthetic part of
German letters, as regards art and poetry — that artist -like
enthusiasm peculiar to our nation, the struggles which con-
vulsed our literature in its infancy, the successive imitation and
rejection of the French and English models, the very general
diffusion of classical learning, the newly-enkindled love for our
native speech and for the early history of our country and its
older monuments of art — all these are subjects of minor interest
in the European point of view which we take here, and form
but the prelude and introduction to that higher German
science and philosophy which is now more immediately the
subject of our enquiries. Historical research should never be
separated from any philosophy, still less from the German; as
historical erudition is the most effective counterpoise to that
absolute spirit, so prevalent in German science and speculation.
FRIEDRICH VON SCHLEGEL 133
Art and poetry constitute that department of the intellect
in which every nation should in general follow the impulse of
its own spirit, its own feelings and its own turn of fancy; and
we must regard it as an exception when the poetry of any parti-
cular nation (such, for instance, as that of the English at the
present day) is felt and received by other nations as a European
poetry. On the other hand, history is an intellectual field open
to all European nations. The English, who in this department
were extremely active and distinguished, have, in recent times,
produced works on their own national history which really
merit the name of classical monuments of the new religious
regeneration. Science in general, and philosophy in particular,
should never be exclusive or national, should never be called
English or German, but should be general and European. And
if this is not so entirely the case as in the nature of things it
ought to be, we must ascribe it to the defects of particular
forms. The example of the French language may convince us
of this truth; for no one will deny the metaphysical profundity
of Count de Maistre, or the dialectic perspicacity of the
Viscount de Bonald. Although these absolute principles which
appear to characterise the European nations at this time have
much less influence on real life and on social relationships in
Germany than in any other country, yet the false spirit of the
absolute seems to be quite native to German science and philo-
sophy, and for a long time has been the principal cause which
has cramped the religious spirit and feelings so natural to the
German character, or at least has given them a false direction.
That in this progress of mankind a divine Hand and guiding
Providence are clearly discernible; that earthly and visible
power has not alone co-operated in this progress and in the
opposition which has impeded it, but that the struggle has
been carried on in part under divine and against invisible might
— this is a truth, I trust, which if not proved on mathematical
evidence, has still been substantiated on firm and solid grounds.
We may conclude with a retrospective view of society, con-
sidered in reference to that invisible world and higher region
from which the operations of the visible world proceed, in
which its great destinies have their root, and which is the ulti-
mate and highest term of all its movements.
Christianity is the emancipation of the human race from the
bondage of that inimical spirit who denies God, and, as far as
in him lies, leads all created intelligence astray. Hence the
Scriptures style him " the prince of this world," and so he was
134 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
in fact, but in ancient history only, when among all the nations
of the earth, and amid the pomp of military glory and the
splendour of pagan life, he had established the throne of his
domination. Since this divine era in the history of man, since
the beginning of his emancipation in modern times, this spirit
can no longer be called the prince of this world, but the spirit of
the age, the spirit opposed to divine influence and to the
Christian religion, which is apparent in all those who consider
and estimate time and all things temporal, not by the law and
feelings of eternity, but for temporal interests, or from temporal
motives, change or undervalue and forget the thoughts and
faith of eternity.
In the first ages of the Christian Church, the spirit of the age
appeared as a beguiling sectarian spirit. This spirit attained its
highest triumph in the new and false faith of a fanatical
Unitarianism, utterly opposed to the religion of love, and which
severed from Christianity so large a portion of the Eastern
Church, and whole regions in Asia. In the Middle Ages, this
spirit displayed itself, not so much in hostile sects, as in
scholastic disputes, in divisions between Church and State, and
in the internal disorders of both. At the beginning of the new
era of the world, the spirit of the age claimed as an urgent need
of mankind, full freedom of faith, the immediate consequence of
which claim was only a bloody warfare and a fatal struggle of
life and death, protracted for more than a century. When this
struggle was brought to an end, or rather appeased, it was
succeeded by an utter indifference for all religions, provided
only their morality was good; and the spirit of the age pro-
claimed religious indifferentism as the order of the day. This
apparent calm was followed by the revolutionary tempest;
and now that this has passed away, the spirit of the age has in
our days become absolute, that is to say, it has perverted reason
to party-passion, or exalted passion to the place of reason : and
this is the present form and last metamorphosis of the old, evil
spirit of the age.
Turning now to that Divine aid which has supported man-
kind in its everlasting struggle against its own infirmities,
against all the obstacles of nature and natural circumstances,
and against the opposition of the evil spirit; I have endeavoured
to show that in the first thousand years of primitive History,
Divine Revelation, although only preserved in its native purity
in the one original source, still flowed in copious streams
through the religious traditions of the other great nations of
FRIEDRICH VON SCHLEGEL I35
that early era; and that troubled as the current might be by
the admixture of many errors, yet it was easy, in the midst of
this slime and pollution, to trace it to its pure and sacred
source. Every religious view of universal history must begin
with such a belief. We shall prize with deeper, more earnest,
and more solid affection, the great and divine era of man's
redemption and emancipation, the more accurately we discri-
minate between what is essentially divine and unchangeably
eternal in this revelation of love, and the elements of destruc-
tion which man has opposed to it, or mingled with it. And it
is only in the spirit of love that the history of Christian times
can rightly be understood and accurately judged. In later
ages, when the spirit of discord has triumphed over love,
historical hope is our only remaining clue in the labyrinth of
history. It is only with sentiments of grateful admiration, of
amazement and awe, that we trace in the special dispensations
of Providence for the advancement of Christianity and the
progress of modern society, the wonderful concurrence of
events towards the single object of divine love, or the un-
expected exercise of divine justice long delayed.
VI. PRINCE CLEMENS METTERNICH
1773 -1859
The name Metternich signifies a European era. Without any
exaggeration, we can, as many historians do, sum up the Europe of
the nineteenth century under three names: Napoleon, Metternich
and Bismarck. Yet it is true that this century can also be charac-
terised— perhaps more adequately — by the one phenomenon which
these three outstanding figures fought with only temporary success:
the Revolution.
What was this Revolution, which was invincible until it was
conquered by its own demon, and by that universal exhaustion,
disillusion and fear in which the remainder of Europe still lives after
the Second World War ? Metternich can best define it. He does so
in the following pages, in a memorandum written for the personal
use of the Czar Alexander I in 1820, a copy of which the Austrian
Chancellor communicated to his own sovereign, the Emperor
Francis of Austria, as " a not very diplomatic document."
Metternich is less often remembered for what he wanted than for
what he feared. As his English biographer, Algernon Cecil,
remarks, he dominated his era " not by the sheer force of genius, but
by the highest quality of understanding."
The tragedy of genius in action is a spectacular fall. The tragedy
of intelligence and understanding is that it encounters a lasting
misunderstanding. So lasting has been this misunderstanding of
Metternich, that posterity is inclined to see him as the merely
negative force of his age.
Metternich's life spans a long era of European history, which
has often been described, and which will no doubt still be written
about, for landscapes change with every move of the sun and with
every step the spectator takes, and the history of an era provides
just such a landscape. The light changes with the passing of time.
After the First World War, the Vienna Congress, over which Metter-
nich presided, became a popular subject for study. Harold Nicol-
son's book, and the Talleyrand of Duff Cooper, were the outstanding
contributions in the inter -war years to the popular analogy between
the statecraft of the peacemakers of the " post-war " which began
in 1 81 4, and that which began in 191 9. Metternich's policy of
peace and reconstruction contrasted very favourably for its eleva-
tion of thought, genuine concern for true civilisation, humanity and
understanding, with the meanness, ignorance and hypocritical
136
PRINCE CLEMENS METTERNICH I37
formalism of the parliamentary democracies. The new appreciation
of the policy came from a very unexpected quarter : it was suggested
by the Italian statesman Francesco Nitti, in his Europa senza Pace.
An Italian and a Liberal was indeed the last man one would have
expected to stir up a historical controversy in favour of Metternich.
Memory connected the name of the Austrian Chancellor with the
persecution of the secret patriotic societies working for Italian
unity, and there was hardly a name which was more synonymous
with anti-Liberalism, or with the authoritarian theory of the State,
than Metternich's.
But after the First World War events moved quickly in Europe.
The outlook changed. Interest shifted from politics to society, to
culture and religion. Once the crisis was diagnosed as a lasting
phenomenon, and once it was diagnosed in its full context as the
crisis of moral and social values, politics and political economy
receded into the background, and once more the religious issue
became apparent. Before political or economic remedies could be
applied, politics needed to be re-defined, and so did economics.
The very principles of social life seem now to be at stake, just as
they seemed to be to Metternich. Thus from Metternich, the peace-
maker of 1 81 4, and his colleagues and antagonists at the Congress
table of 1 8 14- 1 5, interest has shifted to Metternich, the European
statesman of a long period, in which he was almost alone in per-
ceiving the central importance of the revolutionary phenomenon,
and in observing it with deep misgivings.
Was it out of fear for the material possessions of the governing
class to which he belonged ? This primitive and over-simplified
interpretation must be left to a primitive school of thought, or rather
to the Marxist school of thoughtless repetition. The usual classifica-
tion, into those who defend and those who attack an established
order of State and society, discloses little of the figures of a period.
Were they right or were they wrong to attack a fortress, the
strength of which is anyhow a fading memory ? Is a " governing
class " wrong in itself? Are we bound to take it for granted, and
on whose authority, that the will to preserve — the most fundamental
of social facts, whether we are dealing with the initial social pheno-
menon of the family, or the more complex and broader phenomenon
of the State and the nation — is in itself an evil, and that upheavals
and radical changes are necessarily an improvement on the prin-
ciple of preservation ?
These problems of political philosophy inevitably arise when we
deal with the judgements which are still current on the most sym-
bolical historic figure of the principle of preservation, or European
Conservatism. For Metternich was that figure, and neither praise
nor blame, nor any new historical interpretation, can turn him into
anything else.
What did Metternich see as the peril of the time and of the future,
I38 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
and for what, and against what, did he struggle ? He gives the answer
himself in the pages which follow. Society is governed, in his view,
either by an eternally valid concept of God and Man, or it becomes
a mere administration of ephemeral needs : worse still an ambitious
scheme of " politics," conceived according to lights which are not
more than human. Metternich always discriminates very strictly
between " government " and " administration." He distrusts ad-
ministration as such, "bureaucracy " — a word which he was possibly
the first to coin in criticism of the administrative machinery of Austria.
This arch-enemy of " doctrinaires " in politics delighted in formu-
lating axioms, in bringing experimental wisdom to its highest
theoretical expression. He gives the primacy always to the " social
principle," which he interprets in the same way as Bonald; politics
take second, and administration the third place only. The social
principle is that of the family, the principle of preservation and
continuity. Once political institutions or administration intrude
upon the first principle, which is the preservation of personal rights
and the rights of the family, there is no limit to further incursion by
tyranny.
In the political testament which he composed after his resignation
in 1848, Metternich strongly protests against a confusion of his
principles with " Absolutism." He rejected, he says, both Absolu-
tism and Democracy, two different names to describe the same evil,
namely the placing of the human will and human judgement above
the facts established by history, above fundamental laws such as that
of inheritance, the Christian religion, the unwritten moral code.
To recognise no limits to the power of a ruler, to admit his claim
to make himself the supreme authority in matters of religion and
conscience, to admit his right to confiscate inheritance, to interfere
with autonomous institutions, such as academies, universities,
professional bodies, is bad enough — as the short experience of the
rule of Joseph II of Austria proved in Metternich's youth. It was
bad enough to concede such rights to monarchs, who are at least
bound, by the very principle which brought them to their thrones,
to recognise the rights of the family, and by the religious character
of their hereditary office to preserve some amount of Christian
morality. But it was infinitely more dangerous to vest these powers
in assemblies and elected authorities, not bound by the principle
of their existence to respect any inheritance, spiritual or material.
Metternich saw that Liberty could be safeguarded only by dogmatic
authority of a spiritual nature. He believed, perhaps with some
exaggeration, that movements of national independence were
usually a pretext to establish a power which would remove all
religious and spiritual safeguards, in order to institute political
tyranny over the individual.
This vision of the problem set by the nineteenth century can hardly
be said to be out of date, judging from our present perspective.
PRINCE CLEMENS METTERNICH I39
We have the same problem today, and the statesmen of our
day quote Metternich's arguments more often than they realise —
although few share his strong, somewhat unconditional condem-
nation of " democratism " and " parliamentarianism " as the
potential source of arbitrary power and tyranny.
If Metternich opposed German unity, it was because he saw that
the autonomous regional institutions offered the only safeguard to
German liberty, to Germany's real, historically established consti-
tution. A German confederation of autonomous states would be
at liberty to participate in the political transactions of Europe, and
have a permanent interest in preserving a European order. It
would also, he thought, be the only means of avoiding either a
bellicose Germany (which, in her isolated, central position, would
conceive ideas of domination) or a Germany which, seceding from
Europe, would unite all the other powers in alliance against her.
Who could say that Metternich was a bad prophet, when we read
such an analysis of Germany's position in the world ?
His opposition to Italian unity must be understood in its historical
context. His reference to Italy as a " geographical expression,"1
more often quoted than correctly understood, was a warning against
the possible consequences of a secular and national power threaten-
ing the perfect independence of the Holy See. The latter, with the
accession of Pius IX in 1846, repudiated any protection on the part
of Austria (which Metternich was bound to defend in theory) and
turned towards the concept of an independent confederation, under
Papal leadership and with the participation of Austria, the natural
ally of Italy in the political and economic field. Once more, could
a retrospective history claim that Metternich was wrong ?
And are we not bound to recognise that his fear of Russian expan-
sion, and a return to Russian barbarism was legitimate, unless those
two factors which acted as a brake on Russia, Christianity and the
Monarchy, brought Russia into a European system of alliances ?
If he considered such an alliance as the only means of curbing
Russia, he did not consider it to be a perfectly safe means, as we
know from his correspondence with Ambassadors and Plenipoten-
tiaries in Constantinople and Athens. He was fully aware of the
dangerous tendencies existing in Russia, and attributed them, again
not so wrongly, to circles which propagated innovations from the
West.
Metternich's thought seldom reached the summits of Catholic
theology. To prove the truth of theology by human tradition, as it
1 Metternich: Mimoires, Vol. VII, p. 415. Dipeche circulaire, 6.8.1847, to Count
Apponyi, Imperial Ambassador in Paris. N. 16 10:
" L'ltalie est une expression giographique. La pininsule italienne est composee d'Etats
souverains et independents les uns des autres. V existence et la circonscription de ces Stats sont
fondies sur des principes de droit public general et corrobories par les transactions politiques
les moins sujettes a contestation. L'empereur, pour sa part, est dicidi d respecter ces transactions
et d contribuer autant qu'il est en son pouvoir d leur inalterable maintien."
140 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
is seen in the law of nations, is one-sided, and, as the Spanish
philosopher Menendez y Pelayo remarks in his Historia de los Hetero-
doxos Espanoles, the Church only tolerated the traditionalism of
Joseph de Maistre, Bonald and Donoso for the great merits of these
thinkers, preferring St Thomas's proof of absolute truth to that of
tradition alone. Yet, one-sided as this traditionalism may be, Metter-
nich saw in it the source of political and social wisdom, as he says
in his despatch to Count Liitzow, his Ambassador to the Holy See :
" Je suis, Monsieur VAmbassadeur, un homme d'eglise, un franc et severe
catholique, et c 'est pour cela meme que je me crois a lafois un homme d'etat
pratique. La ve'rite est une et VEglise en est le premier depositaire. Entre les
verites religieuses et les verites sociales, il rty a point de difference, car la
societe ne peut vivre que par lafoi et la morale religieuse.,n
MY POLITICAL PROFESSION OF FAITH*
" Europe," a celebrated writer said recently, " arouses pity in
the heart of the thinking man and horror in the heart of the
virtuous man."
It would be difficult to give in fewer words a more exact
picture of the situation at the moment of writing these lines !
Kings have reached the stage of wondering how much longer
they are going to last; passions are let loose and are in league
to overthrow all that society has hitherto respected as the basis
of its existence: religion, public morality, laws, customs, rights
and duties; everything is attacked, confused, overthrown, or
made a matter of doubt. The great mass of the people looks
calmly on, in the face of so many attacks and upheavals,
against which there is an utter lack of any sort of protection.
Some of them are lost in vague dreams, whilst an overwhelming
majority desire the maintenance of a public order which no
longer exists, the very first elements of which seem to have been
lost.
What is the cause of so many disorders ? By what means
have they become established and by what means do they
penetrate into all the veins of society ?
Are there any means of halting the growth of this disorder
and in what do they consist ?
Such are doubtless the questions which are most worthy of
the earnest attention of any man of good will, any true friend
1 Metternich : Mimoires, Vol. VII, p. 427; N. 1614, Oct. 10, 1847.
2 Taken from Mimoires, Documents et Ecrits divers. Edited by his son, Prince
Richard Metternich (E. Plon et Cie. Paris, 1881).
PRINCE CLEMENS METTERNICH I4I
of law and order, these two elements which are inseparable in
their principles and which are the first necessity and at the same
time the foremost good of humanity.
Has the world then not created any institution really worthy
of this name ? Has truth then always been confused with error,
ever since societies thought that they had the power of dis-
tinguishing one from the other ? Has all the experience bought
at the price of so many sacrifices, and reiterated at so many
different periods of history, and in so many different places,
always proved wrong ? Has a torrent of light suddenly been
shed over society ? Has knowledge in itself become an inspira-
tion ? If a man could believe in such phenomena, he would
still need to be first convinced of the reality of the fact. Nothing
is as fatal as error, whatever the question at stake and it is our
desire and intention never to abandon ourselves to it. Let us
examine the situation.
THE CAUSES OF OUR DISORDERS
The nature of man is immutable. The first requirements of
society always remain the same, and the differences we can see
between them, when we reflect on the question, can be ex-
plained by the diversity of influences which natural causes
exert on the race of men, such as diversity of climate, the barren-
ness or the richness of the soil, whether men live on an island
or on the continent, etc., etc. These local differences no doubt
produce effects which extend far beyond purely physical needs ;
they create and determine individual needs in a higher sphere;
they finally settle types of legislation and their influence, even
in the matter of religion, cannot be contested.
On the other hand, the same thing happens to institutions as
to everything else. Uncertain in their origin, they go through
periods of development and perfection, only to fall into decay,
and conforming to the same laws which govern the nature of
man, they have, like him, their infancy, their youth, their
reasoned maturity and their old age.
Two elements alone remain at the height of their strength
and constantly exercise their indestructible influence with a
like authority. These are the precepts of morality, both religious
and social, and the local needs of man. Once men begin to
move away from these bases and to rebel against these
sovereign arbiters of their destiny, society is in a state of unrest,
which sooner or later will cause an upheaval. The history of
142 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
every country can show blood-stained pages which tell the
story of the consequences of such errors; but we dare to put
forward this suggestion, without any fear of contradiction: that
we should search in vain for a period when a disorder of this
nature has spread its ravages over as vast a field as it has done
in this present age. The causes underlying this state of affairs
are natural ones.
History only embraces a very restricted lapse of time.
It only begins to deserve this name long after the fall of great
empires. Where it appears to bring us to the cradle of civilisa-
tion, it leads us only to ruins.
We see republics come to birth and develop, fight and then
suffer the rule of a fortunate soldier.
We see one of these republics pass through all the phases
common to society and end in a Monarchy that was almost
universal, that is to say that it conquered all the scattered parts
of the then civilised world.
We see this Monarchy suffer the fate of every body politic ;
we see the original elasticity grow weak and bring about its
own decay.
Centuries of darkness followed the barbarian invasions. The
world however could not return to barbarism. The Christian
religion had appeared on earth; imperishable in its essence, its
mere existence was enough to dispel the darkness and re-
establish civilisation on new bases, applicable to all times and
all places, satisfying the needs of all on the basis of a pure and
eternal law!
The Crusades followed the formation of new Christian states
— a curious mixture of good and evil.
Three discoveries soon exercised a decisive influence on the
fate of civilisation : the invention of printing, the invention of
gunpowder and the discovery of the New World.
The Reformation then came, another event the consequences
of which were incalculable, because of the moral effect it had
on the world. From that time onwards, the face of the world
was changed.
The communication of thought, facilitated by the invention
of printing; the complete transformation of the means of
attack and defence brought about by the invention of gun-
powder; the sudden increase in the natural value of real estate
produced by the great quantities of metal put into circulation
following the discovery of America; the spirit of adventure
which was encouraged by the opportunities of making a fortune
PRINCE CLEMENS METTERNICH I43
in a new hemisphere; the modification which so many and
so great changes had introduced into social intercourse — all
this underwent still further development and in some measure
was crowned by the revolution which the Reformation brought
about in the moral order.
The march of the human spirit was therefore exceedingly
rapid throughout the last three centuries. This march having
progressed with a more rapid acceleration than the course of
wisdom — the unique counterbalance to passion and error — had
been able to take, a revolution, prepared by false systems of
philosophy, and by fatal errors into which several sovereigns,
the most illustrious of the second half of the eighteenth century,
had fallen, at last broke out in that country which was one of
the most advanced in intelligence, the most weakened by a
love of pleasure, in a country inhabited by a race of people
who can be considered the most frivolous in the world, con-
sidering the facility they have in understanding, and the diffi-
culty they experience in judging an issue calmly.
We have glanced rapidly at the primary causes of the present
state of society; now we must show in greater detail the nature
of the disorder which threatens to disinherit it at one blow of a
very real patrimony of benefits, the fruits of a real civilisation,
and to disturb it in the enjoyment of these things. We can
define this disorder quite simply in a single word : presumption,
the natural result of such a rapid progress of the human mind
in material improvements.
It is presumption which draws so many people today into
the paths of error, for the sentiment has become widespread.
Religion, morality, legislation, economy, politics, adminis-
tration, everything seems to have become common property,
accessible to all. People think that they know everything;
experience does not count for the presumptuous man ; faith means
nothing to him; he substitutes for it a so-called personal con-
viction and feels himself dispensed from any examination or
course of study in order to arrive at this conviction, for these
means seem too lowly to a mind which thinks itself powerful
enough to take in at a glance a general review of problems and
facts. Laws are of no value in his eyes because he did not help
to make them and because it would be beneath the dignity of
a man of his calibre to recognise the milestones traced by
brutish and ignorant generations before him. Authority resides
in himself; why should he subject himself to what is only of
use to a man deprived of intelligence and knowledge ? What
144 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
had formerly, in his view, been sufficient at a tender age no
longer suits a man who has reached the age of reason and
maturity, that degree of universal perfection which the German
innovators designate by the idea, absurd by its very nature, of
the emancipation of the peoplesl Morality alone is not openly
attacked, for without it he would not be sure of his own exis-
tence for a single moment ; but he interprets it according to his
own fancy and allows everybody else to do the same thing,
provided that the other man neither kills nor robs him.
By sketching the character of the presumptuous man in this
way, we think we have drawn a picture of the society of today
which is composed of similar elements, if the name of society
can be applied to- an order of things which only tends in prin-
ciple to individualise all the elements which compose society,
and to make each man the head of his own dogma, the arbiter
of laws according to which he can deign to govern himself, or
allow others to govern him and his fellows, in a word, the only
judge of his faith, of his actions and the principles according
to which he means to regulate them.
Do we need to prove this last truth ? We think we furnish
the proof by calling attention to the fact that one of the most
natural sentiments in man — nationality — has been erased from
the Liberal catechism, and that where the word continues to
be used at all, it only serves as a pretext for the leaders of the
party to fetter governments, or else as a lever to encourage
upheavals. The true aim of the idealists of the party is religious
and political fusion and, in the last analysis, is no other than to
create in favour of each individual an existence which is
entirely independent of all authority and all will, except his
own — an absurd idea, which is contrary to the spirit of man and
incompatible with the requirements of human society.
THE COURSE WHICH THE DISORDER HAS FOLLOWED AND STILL
FOLLOWS
The reasons for which the disorder which weighs on society
has acquired such a deplorable intensity appear to us to be of
two kinds.
Some are so intimately bound up with the nature of things
that no human foresight could have prevented them.
Others must themselves be sub -divided into two classes,
however similar they may appear to be in their effects.
Some reasons are negative ones, others positive. We place
PRINCE CLEMENS METTERNICH 145
amongst the first the weakness and inertia of governments.
It is enough to cast a glance at the course governments have
followed throughout the eighteenth century, in order to be
convinced that none of them had any conception of the disease
or the crisis towards which the body politic was moving.
It was quite otherwise with some men, unfortunately endowed
with great talents, who were conscious of their own strength
and who were not slow to appreciate the inroads of their
influence, and to realise the weakness or the inertia of their
opponents, and who knew the art of preparing and leading
minds to the triumph of their hateful enterprise, an enterprise
all the more odious because they pursued it without any thought
for the consequences they would bring about, giving them-
selves up completely to the one sentiment which moved them:
hatred of God and His immutable laws !
France was the country which was unfortunate enough to
possess the greatest number of these men. It is within her
bosom that religion, with all its most sacred associations, that
morality and authority, with all their implied power to govern
men, were attacked by them with systematic method and fury,
and it is in that country that the weapon of ridicule was used
with the greatest ease and success.
Drag the name of God in the mud and the authority instituted
by His Divine decrees, and the road is open for revolution!
Talk of a social contract and the revolution is a fact ! It was in
the palaces of kings, in the salons and the boudoirs of various
towns that the Revolution was already a reality, while the way
for it was still being prepared amongst the mass of the people.
It is not possible to omit here any reference to the influence
which the example of England had exercised for so long on
France — this country of England, placed in such a special
geographical situation that we feel ourselves able to affirm
boldly that no forms of government, no habits or institutions
that are possible in this State, could ever suit a continental
State, and that where it is taken for a model the result can only
be defective and dangerous, without a single advantage
accruing from it.
The intellectual atmosphere was such in France at the time
of the convocation of the States General, and the influence on
public opinion during the previous fifty years had been such —
an influence which in the last instance had been reinforced,
and in some measure made peculiar to France by the impru-
dent aid which the French Government had recently given
I46 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
to the American Revolution — that all reforms in France which
touched upon the very foundation of the Monarchy were neces-
sarily transformed into a revolution. What ought to have been
foreseen, and what had in fact been foreseen by practically
everybody, with the single exception of the Government, came
to pass only too soon. The French Revolution broke out and
went through a complete revolutionary cycle in a very short
period of time, which only appeared long to its victims and its
contemporaries.
The scenes of horror which marked the first phases of the
French Revolution prevented the rapid propagation of its sub-
versive principles beyond the frontiers of France, and the wars
of conquest which succeeded them inclined public opinion
abroad to view the progress of the revolutionary principle with
disfavour. That is why the first criminal hopes of Jacobin
propaganda failed.
The revolutionary germ however had penetrated every
country and was more or less widespread. It developed still
further during the period of the military despotism of Bonaparte.
His conquests changed a great number of sovereignties,
institutions and customs, and broke all those links which are
sacred for all peoples, and which resist the inroads of time even
more surely than certain benefits do which innovators some-
times impose upon them. As a result of these disturbances, the
revolutionary spirit in Germany, in Italy, and later on in Spain,
was able to hide beneath the cloak of genuine patriotism.
Prussia made a serious mistake when she called to her aid
weapons as dangerous as secret societies always prove to be;
a mistake which cannot be justified by the deplorable situation
in which that Power then found herself. It was she who first
gave a vigorous impulse to the revolutionary spirit in her State
and this spirit made rapid progress, supported as it was in the
rest of Germany by the growth of a system of foreign despotism
from 1806 onwards. Princes of the Rhenish Confederation in
particular made themselves the auxiliaries and accomplices of
this system, to which they sacrificed institutions in their
countries which had from time immemorial served as safe-
guards against arbitrary action and the rule of the mob.
The War of the Alliance, by setting limits to the prepon-
derance of France, was enthusiastically supported in Germany
by the very men whose hatred for France was in reality nothing
more than a hatred of the military despotism of Bonaparte, and
who also hated the legitimate power of their own masters.
PRINCE CLEMENS METTERNICH 147
If only governments had shown wisdom and firmness in their
principles, the end of the war in 1814 could still have assured
a perfectly happy and peaceful future for the world. Much
experience had been acquired and the great lessons which had
been learnt could have been applied to some useful purpose.
But fate decided otherwise.
The return of the usurper to France and the completely
erroneous direction which the French Government took from
1815-1820 amassed for the whole of civilisation new dangers
and immense disasters. It was to the first of these misfortunes
that the critical state in which France and the whole of the
body politic lie is in part due. In one hundred days Bonaparte
wiped out the work of the fourteen years during which he had
exercised power. He let loose the revolution which he had
managed to hold in check in France; he rallied men's minds,
not to the time of the 18th Brumaire, but to the principles
which the Constituent Assembly had adopted in its lamentable
blindness.
The harm which Bonaparte did in this way to France and to
Europe, the serious errors which the French Government made
and into which other governments fell later on in their turn —
all these fatal influences lie heavy on the world today; they
threaten with total ruin the work of restoration, the fruit of so
many glorious efforts and of a union between the first Monarchs
of the world which was without any precedent in the annals of
history, and foreshadow incalculable disasters for society.
We have not yet in this present Memorandum touched on
one of the most active and at the same time most dangerous
instruments of which revolutionaries make use in every
country, with a success that none can deny. These are the
secret societies, which constitute a real power, all the more
dangerous because it works in the dark and undermines all
parts of the body politic, depositing everywhere the germs of a
moral gangrene which will soon mature and bear its fruit. This
scourge is one of the most real which governments who are the
friends of public order and of their peoples should watch care-
fully and fight.
CAN THIS EVIL BE REMEDIED AND BY WHAT MEANS?
We regard it as a principle that every evil has its own
remedy, and that a knowledge of the true nature of the one
leads to the discovery of the other. Few men, however, take
I48 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
the trouble to make a deep study of the evil against which they
propose to fight. Few men are exempt from the influence of
various passions and nearly all are blinded by prejudice; a
great number are guilty of a fault which is even more dangerous
because of its flattering and often brilliant exterior; we mean
those who are animated by intellectual pride ; this pride, which
is invariably in error, but which is indefatigable, audacious,
insensitive to any rebuff, which satisfies the men who are
imbued with it (for they inhabit and administer a world of their
own), is all the more dangerous for the inhabitants of the real
world, so different from the one created by intellectual pride.
There is another class of men who, seizing upon the outward
form only of an evil, confuse the accessory manifestations with
the evil thing itself, and who, instead of directing their efforts
towards the source of the evil, are content to combat a few
passing symptoms.
Our duty is to endeavour to avoid both of these two reefs.
The evil exists, and it is an immense one. We do not think
we can give a better definition of it and the primary cause of
it, which is perpetually at work everywhere and at all times,
than we did when we used the word presumption, this inseparable
companion of half-digested knowledge, this driving force of
boundless ambition, which is easily satisfied at times of stress
and upheaval.
The middle classes of society are the ones which are chiefly
infected by this moral gangrene and the real coryphees of the
party are only to be found in this section of society.
This gangrene is powerless against the great mass of the
people and has no hold over them. The type of work to which
this class — the real people — has to devote itself is too obvious and
too positive for them to give themselves up to vague abstrac-
tions and the uncertain path of ambition. The people know
that their greatest blessing is to be sure of the morrow, for it is
only the morrow which brings them any reward for the
troubles and the hard work of today. The laws which guarantee
a just protection for the highest good of all, the security of
individual families and the security of property, are simple in
essence. The people distrust change, which is bad for trade and
invariably brings in its train an increase of burdens.
Men of a higher class in society, who embrace the revolu-
tionary career, are either ambitious hypocrites or perverted
and lost minds in the widest sense of the word. Their career is
for this reason usually short. They are the first victims of
PRINCE CLEMENS METTERNICH I49
political reforms, and the part which the small number of sur-
vivors amongst them play is usually that of hangers-on, who are
despised by their inferiors as soon as these latter have reached
the highest dignities in the State.
France, Germany, Italy and Spain today offer many living
examples of the theory we have just put forward.
We do not think that new upheavals of a directly revolu-
tionary intention, other than palace revolutions and changes in
the highest government posts, are to be feared today in France,
if we take into account the profound aversion of the people to
all that could disturb the tranquillity which it now enjoys,
after so much suffering and so many disasters.
In Germany, as in Spain and Italy, the nations only ask for
peace and law and order.
In these four countries, the dissatisfied classes comprise
moneyed men who are really cosmopolitans, acquiring their
profits at the expense of any existing order of things; civil
servants, men of letters, lawyers and foolish professors.
The ambitious hypocrites belong also to these intermediary
classes, few in number amongst the lower conditions of men,
but more numerous amongst the higher ranks of society.
Furthermore, there is hardly a period in history when the
various factions have not used some catchword.
Since 1815, the catchword has been constitution. But do not
let us be under any illusion — this word, which lends itself to so
wide a latitude in interpretation, is only imperfectly understood
if we suppose that the various factions attach the same meaning
indiscriminately to it under different forms of government.
This then is not the case. Under autocratic Monarchies, it
means national representation. In countries recently subjected to
representative government, it calls itself development and
guarantee of charters and fundamental laws.
In the one State which possesses an ancient national repre-
sentation, it has reform for its objective.
Everywhere it means change and disturbance.
Paraphrased, it means under a despotic Monarchy: " Your
heads too must suffer the levelling process of equality; your
fortunes can pass into the hands of others; your ambitions,
which have been satisfied for centuries, can give place to our
impatient ambitions, which up to now have been denied."
In States subjected to a new regime: " Let ambitions which
were satisfied yesterday give place to those of tomorrow, for we
belong to tomorrow."
I50 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
Finally, in England, the only country to be placed in the
third class, the catchword — reform — combines the two mean-
ings.
So Europe presents a deplorable and curious picture to the
impartial observer.
We find peoples everywhere who desire only the maintenance
of law and order, who are faithful to God and their Princes,
and remain strangers to the increasing seductions and attempts
made by factions who call themselves their friends and try to
draw them into a movement against their will!
We see governments which have lost confidence in them-
selves, and are frightened, intimidated and routed by the catch-
word of this intermediate class of society, which is half-way
between the kings and the peoples, which breaks the sceptres of
the former and usurps the voice of the latter — seizing every
avenue to the throne — of this same class which has so often been
rejected by the people, when it presumes to speak in the people's
name, yet is listened to, caressed and feared to excess by those
who, with a single word, could drive them back to obscurity.
We see this intermediate class giving itself up with blind fury,
and with a desperation which betrays its own fears far more
than it reveals confidence in the success of its enterprises, to all
the means which it thinks will assuage its thirst for power;
applying itself to persuade kings that their rights do not go
beyond sitting on a throne, while the caste has the right to
administer and to attack all the sacred and positive things
which the centuries have bequeathed for the respect of men ;
finally we see this class denying that the past is of any value and
declaring that they are the masters and can create a future.
We see them assuming any sort of a mask, uniting or forming
splinter groups according to need, helping each other on the
day of danger and tearing each other's throats on the morrow of
each new conquest. That is the class which has seized control
of the Press, which runs it and only uses it for the sole purpose
of extolling impiety, disobedience to the laws of Religion and
the State, and has even forgotten itself to such an extent that
it preaches murder as a duty for any man who is sure of what he
wants.
One of their leaders in Germany gave this definition of
public opinion: " The will of the strong man in the mind of the
party" a maxim which is put into practice all too often and is
all too little understood by the men whose right and duty it is
to save society from its own errors and weaknesses, and from
PRINCE CLEMENS METTERNICH I5I
the crimes which factions commit when they claim to act in its
interest.
The presence of the evil is evident ; the means used by the
disruptive faction are so much to be condemned on principle,
they are so criminal in their application, they even offer such a
total of dangers for the faction itself, that what short-sighted
men, whose heads and hearts are shattered by circumstances
which are stronger than their own calculations or courage, look
upon as the end of society, can become the first step towards a
better order of things. These weak men will be proved to be
right, unless men stronger than they come forward, close their
ranks and make sure of victory.
We are convinced that society can be saved only by strong
and vigorous determination on the part of governments which
are still free in thought and action.
We think also that it can still be saved if these governments
face the truth squarely, if they cast off their illusions, if they
close their ranks and stand firm on a line of correct principles,
from which all ambiguity is absent, and which are frankly
upheld and stated.
By acting in this way, Monarchs will fulfil the first of the
duties imposed upon them by Him who, by giving them power,
charged them to uphold justice, the rights of each and all, to
avoid the byways of error and to tread firmly the path of truth.
Placed as they are outside the sphere of passions which rend
society, it is above all during times of crisis that they are called
upon to strip reality of all false appearances, and to show them-
selves for what they are, fathers invested with all the authority
which rightly belongs to the head of the family, to prove that
in times of disaster they can be just and wise and therefore
strong, and that they do not abandon the people, whom it is
their duty to govern, to the sport of factions, to error and its con-
sequences, which inexorably bring about the ruin of society.
The present moment, when we put down our thoughts in these
pages, is one of those moments of crisis; the crisis is grave; it
will be decisive according to the party-decisions we make, or
refuse to make.
There is a rule of conduct common to individuals and to
States, sanctioned by the experience of centuries, as well as by
that of every day ; this rule states : It is not in the stress of
passion that we ought to think of reform ; wisdom decrees that
in such moments we should confine ourselves to preserve.
Let Monarchs adopt these principles whole-heartedly, and
152 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
let all their resolutions bear the imprint of them. Let their
actions, the measures they take, and even the words they utter,
state this determination to the world and prove it; they will
find allies everywhere. When governments establish the prin-
ciple of stability, they in no wise exclude the development of
anything that is good, for stability does not mean immobility.
It is, however, for those who are burdened with the heavy task
of government to improve the wellbeing of their peoples ! It
is for the governments to decide the pace, according to needs
and to circumstances. It is not by the concessions which the
various factions think they can impose on the legitimate
authority, and which they have neither the right to demand,
nor the power to restrain within just limits, that wise reforms
can be achieved ! Our most ardent wish is that the utmost good
should be done; but do not let what is not good be confused
with what is good, and even let real good only be done by those
who combine under the law authority and the means to do it.
Such should also be the sincere desire of all peoples, who have
learnt only too well at their own expense how to appreciate
the worth of certain words, and the nature of certain
caresses.
Respect for all existing things ; liberty for every government
to watch over the wellbeing of its own people; an alliance
between all the governments to fight factions in every State;
contempt for words devoid of meaning, which have become the
catchwords of mischief-makers; respect for the progressive
development of institutions according to the law; refusal on
the part of every Monarchy to help or succour dissident
elements, in whatever disguise they may appear: such are hap-
pily the thoughts of every great Monarch; the world can be
saved if they are translated into action, it is lost if they are
not.
Union between Monarchs is the fundamental basis of the
policy which must be followed to save society from total ruin.
To what particular end should this policy be directed ? The
more important this question is, the more necessary it is to
resolve it. A principle counts for much; it only acquires real
worth when it is applied.
The primary causes of the evil which overwhelms the world
have been summed up by us in this little work, which does not
claim to be more than a sketch. The progressive causes of this
evil are here indicated ; if in its relation to individuals it was
defined as presumption, we think that when we apply this word
PRINCE CLEMENS METTERNICH 153
to society as a whole, it also describes the evil which exists in
that vagueness of thought which is due to an excess of generalisation.
Let us see what disturbs society today.
Principles which have hitherto been considered as fixed are
now attacked and overthrown. In religious matters, private
judgement and examination of the subject replace faith ; Christian
morality is to take the place of the law of Christ, such as it has
always been interpreted by the relevant Christian authorities.
In the Catholic Church, Jansenists and a host of isolated
sectarians who desire a Religion without a Church devote them-
selves to this enterprise with eager zeal; in the Protestant sects
we have the Methodists, themselves subdivided into almost as
many sects as there are persons, then the enlightened promoters
of Bible Societies, and the Unitarians, or promoters of a fusion
between the Lutherans and the Calvinists in an evangelical
community.
The common aim of these men, irrespective of the sect to
which they ostensibly belong, is no other than to overthrow
authority. In the moral field, they want to set souls free, just as
those men amongst the political revolutionaries, who do not
abandon themselves exclusively to a calculating personal ambi-
tion, want to set people free.
If the same elements of destruction which today convulse
society have existed in every century — for every age has seen
the birth of unscrupulous and ambitious men, hypocrites, hot-
heads, pseudo-intellects and builders of castles in the air — our
own age however, by the single fact of the licentiousness of the
Press, possesses more possibilities of contact, of corruption and
of influence, which are greater and more easily set in motion,
and more susceptible of working upon this class of men, than
any other age.
We are certainly not alone in wondering whether society can
continue to exist when the liberty of the Press prevails, this
scourge which was unknown in the world before the latter half
of the seventeenth century, and only practised until the end of
the eighteenth century, with few exceptions, in England, in this
part of Europe separated from the Continent by the sea, as
much as by its language and its individual customs.
The first principle which Monarchs, who are united in will
as well as by the uniformity of their desires and their judgement,
ought to proclaim is the stability of political institutions, in face
of the disintegration which has taken hold of men's minds;
the rigidity of certain principles, in face of the mania for
154 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
interpreting them ; and respect for existing laws, instead of the over-
throw of these laws.
The hostile section is divided into two very distinct groups.
One consists of the levellers, the other of the doctrinaires.
United on the day of revolution, these men are divided when
they play a merely passive role. It is the business of govern-
ments to know who they are, and to keep them in their place,
in accordance with their real value.
Among the class of levellers, there are to be found strong-
willed and determined men. The doctrinaires never count such
men in their ranks. If the first category is more to be feared on
the day of revolution, the second is more dangerous in those
deceptively calm days which precede a storm in the social
order, just as they do in the physical order. Constantly in the
grip of abstract ideas which it would be impossible ever to
apply to real issues, and which are ordinarily even in contra-
diction with those issues, it is men of this class who perpetually
stir up the people with imaginary or simulated fears, and
weaken governments in order to force them to deviate from the
right path. Men want to be governed by facts and in accor-
dance with justice, not with words and theories; society needs
first and foremost to be upheld by a strong authority (any
authority which lacks real strength is unworthy of the name) ,
not to govern itself. If we calculated the number of disputes in
which the various groups in mixed governments, and the num-
ber of just grievances -to which an aberration of power in a
Christian State can give rise, the result of this comparison
would not be in favour of modern theories. The first and most
important matter for the overwhelming majority of the nation
is the stability of the laws, their continuity, and by no means
their overthrow. Let governments govern then, let them main-
tain the fundamental bases of their institutions, ancient as well
as modern; for if it is dangerous in any age to alter them, it is
certainly not a propitious time to do so today, amidst the
general unrest.
Let them acquaint their peoples openly with this determina-
tion and let them prove it by acts. Let them reduce the doc-
trinaires within their States to silence, and let them show their
contempt for those who are beyond their frontiers. Let them
not give colour by their demeanour, or by their acts, to the
suspicion that they are either favourable to error, or indifferent
to it; let them not give the impression that the lessons of
experience go for nothing, and make way for experiments
PRINCE CLEMENS METTERNICH I55
which, to say the least, are hazardous. Let each one of their
words be precise and clear, and let them in no way try to win
over by concessions those groups whose only aim is the destruc-
tion of all authority which is not in their own hands, who
could not be won over by concessions, and who would become
the more emboldened in their pretensions if they were granted
concessions.
Let them be more cautious in troubled times than at any
other time, in their approach to the questions of reforms which
are genuine, and not demanded imperiously according to the
exigencies of the moment, so that the very good that they do
will not be turned against them — a contingency which can
easily happen, if a government measure appears to have been
granted out of fear.
Let them not confuse in this way concessions made to rival
groups, with the good which they can confer on their peoples
by modifying, according to acknowledged requirements, any
particular branch of their administration which could benefit
by such a measure.
Let them devote the most careful attention to the state of the
finances of their country, so that their peoples may enjoy, by a
reduction in taxation, the benefits of a period of real and not
illusory peace.
Let them be just but firm; kind yet severe.
Let them uphold religion in all its purity, not suffering any
attack upon dogma, or allowing morality to be interpreted
according to the Social Contract, or the visions of simple sec-
tarians.
Let them suppress secret societies, this gangrene which preys
upon society.
Finally, let all the great Monarchs come closer together and
prove to the world that if they are united, it can only be
beneficial, for union between them will assure the political
peace of Europe ; that they are only firmly united in order to
maintain public order at a time when it is menaced on all sides;
that the principles they profess are as paternal and as much
intended for the protection of good citizens, as they are repres-
sive for dissident factions.
Governments of lesser Powers will see in such a projected
union the anchor of their salvation and will hasten to associate
themselves with it. Peoples will regain confidence and courage,
and the deepest and most salutary pacification which the world
has ever witnessed in all its long history could be established,
I56 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
for such a peace would first of all include all those States which
are still left standing; it would not remain without a decisive
influence on the fate of those which are threatened with immi-
nent subversion, and even on the restoration of those which
have already suffered the scourge of revolution.
Every great State which is determined to survive the turmoil
of the time still has a good chance of salvation.
A firm union between States on the principles which we have
just laid down will vanquish the turmoil itself.
VII. JUAN DONOSO CORTES
1809 - 1853
A few years before the European Revolution of 1848, which, in a
very short time, had shown in a concentrated and spectacular form
all those modern trends which for good or ill have dominated
Europe ever since — Germanism and Slavism in the East and the
social conflict in the West — one of the principal prophets of the Slav
awakening, the romantic poet Kollar, who brought home to his
Slovak mountains a somewhat rough, but still unadulterated, version
of Hegel's philosophy from his Lutheran theological studies at Jena,
wrote: " In the East, amongst the Slavs and for the Slavs, the sun
is rising. Over the Germanic lands it is broad daylight. Over
England it is high noon, over France and Italy the sun is already
setting, over Spain and Portugal it is dark night."
The Slav poet, Lutheran in his religion, Hegelian in his philo-
sophy, and Liberal in his politics, was not alone in considering the
Spain of the post-Napoleonic era as the country of dark night. This
opinion was general and most believers in the ingloriously, although
somewhat slowly, expiring deity called the Zeitgeist, concurred in
seeing in Spain nothing but a ruin and a past.
Few, far too few, eyes turned towards the " Far West," as some
modern Spaniards like to call the Iberian peninsula and its trans-
atlantic extension. The Spanish ochocientos presented a disturbed,
almost chaotic picture of changing dynasties and ephemeral
political regimes, of military upheavals and conspiracies, of a society
near to disintegration, which the keenest observer was discouraged
from penetrating and understanding. Yet, can we forget that Napo-
leon's first failure was in Spain, and that the whole historical and
ideological trend symbolically summarised by the Battle of the
Nations began on the Peninsula ? It was in Spain too that the
conclusion of the great European crisis was summed up in terms of
the philosophy of history, in terms of an eschatological interpretation
of State and society, and above all in those deep accents of prophecy
which only posterity appreciates at its full value. Two meteor-like
figures of thinkers stand out in this post-Napoleonic generation in
Spain: the philosopher -statesman Juan Donoso Cortes and the
theologian and philosopher Jaime Balmes. Neither of them lived to
be old. Donoso died when he was only forty-four, the great priest
of Catalonia, Jaime Balmes, at the age of thirty-eight.
The Battle of the Nations at Leipzig in October 181 3 was to some
i57
I58 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
extent prepared and summarised by a philosophical movement in
Germany which had an immense importance for the rest of Europe.
Fichte and Hegel, and their common master Immanuel Kant,
revolutionised European thought by the importance which they
achieved as the ideological masters of their people during the
national resistance to Napoleon. They educated Germany in the
role she was to play from the time of the French Revolutionary wars
to Napoleon. The great German innovation consisted of a new
metaphysical approach to History, to art and human society, a new
emphasis on the subjective, ethical conscience and on emotion, a
neo-Platonic emphasis on the transcendental and symbolic signifi-
cance of all earthly phenomena: " Alles Vergdngliche ist nur ein
Gleichniss" as Goethe says in Faust — this line could almost stand as
the device of the whole ideological movement of post-Napoleonic
Germany.
Overwhelmed by German ideas, or rather by the new German
emphasis, the European mind paid little attention to a philosophical
movement which was hardly less intense, and which came from a
different corner of Europe. This was the philosophical renaissance
occurring in Spain, in the same context of a national awakening
born out of resistance to Napoleon. Europe hardly noticed Spain
in the nineteenth century. Power shifted to the East and to the
North, as a result of the Napoleonic Wars. Almost every well-
informed person considered in 181 5, and in the years following,
that the chief political factor of the present and the future was
Russia, counter-balanced by Russia's only potential rival, England.
The country producing new intellectual impulses was thought to
be the Germany which emerged from the Battle of Leipzig, while
France continued to dominate European civilisation by her
language, and like a barometer registered the variations in pressure
of the highly disturbed political, social and cultural atmosphere of
the time.
The life-work of Donoso Cortes constitutes a spiritual link of
considerable relevance between Spain, France and Germany. Born
in 1809 in a convent of the Estramadura, where his mother was
confined during the flight of the family from the French invaders,
Juan Maria Donoso Cortes achieved a most brilliant literary,
political and diplomatic career. As a child he was recognised to be
an infant prodigy ; at the age of twenty, he was a Lecturer at the
University of Salamanca, where regulations had had to be waived
in order that he might take his degree before the required age.
Before he was thirty, he was elected by his native province to the
Congress of Deputies, where he soon was called to a junior Cabinet
post. Later on he held an important diplomatic post in Paris at the
time of Louis Philippe and Guizot and was raised to the peerage
with the title of Marquis of Valdegamas; in 1849 ne was Ambas-
sador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to Prussia. He
JUAN DONOSO CORTES I59
was again posted to Paris as Ambassador during the Presidency of
Louis Napoleon and the beginning of the Second Empire. He died
in Paris when, as we have seen, he was only forty-four.
Yet these external events of a short and brilliant career are but a
feeble indication of the background to the pages which follow.
More important in Donoso's life than his political career was his
decision to renounce it early, for as he says in one of his letters to
Louis Veuillot, he became convinced that prayers were more
efficacious in good causes than anything politics had to offer.
As a young man, Donoso was a Catholic Liberal, attached to the
service of Queen Isabella, as were all the Liberals — Moderados —
during the years, of the dynastic crisis, when Don Carlos rallied the
party of the strict legitimists — Apostolicos — to the cause of the Salic
Monarchy. His early writings, comprising a treatise on The Law of
the Nations, an Essay on Diplomacy, a History of the Eastern Question,
literary and political chronicles and comments on Spanish, French
and world events of the 1830's and 1840's, do not show him yet in
the light in which he stood after the European Revolution of
1848-49 — a prophetic voice announcing with deep, mystical
insight " the doom of the Kingdom of Philosophy " and the coming
of the Kingdom of God amidst Revolutions of cosmic proportions
and all the signs foretold in the Apocalypse. It was in Prussia —
which under Frederick the Great had been the favourite country
of foreign " philosophers" and again in 18 13, the country of a
German philosophy, the principal tenet of which is individual
judgement, that spiritual and ethical inheritance of Protestantism
— that Donoso became convinced of the impending " final dissolu-
tion of modern civilisation," the impending catastrophe which
would overwhelm Europe, for some unrevealed, but certainly
glorious, purpose of Providence.
In the history of post -revolutionary Christian thought and
philosophy, Donoso represents a landmark of the greatest relevance,
which few contemporary observers sensed, although their number
is less important than their quality. Louis Veuillot, a close personal
friend during his Paris years, was one of them; Barbey d'Aurevilly
did not hesitate to place him beside Joseph de Maistre and Bonald
as one of the " Lay Fathers of the Church "; Schelling, head of the
German philosophers since the death of Hegel, greeted in him a
new and unexpected luminary of the century ; old Metternich did
not hesitate to declare that " After Donoso Cortes, one has to put
down one's pen, for nothing more and nothing better can be said
on the historical transition we are witnessing."
Donoso Cortes says the final word on the Parliamentary Liberal-
ism of the early part of the century — this political reflection, he says,
of the Deist philosophy. He is, if not the first, certainly the most
important Christian voice to comment on the deeper (and not
merely political) Revolution through which Europe was, and still
l60 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
is, passing. The pantheist negation of God and authority has only
one social expression. Communism — Donoso was the first to be
fully aware of this — and when the belief in Divine privilege vanishes,
the actual consequence of privilege, political and personal liberty,
will also vanish. His Essay on Catholicism ( 1 85 1 ) , a masterly comment
on the European Revolution of 1848-49, was perhaps the first, and
at any rate for some time to come, the most elaborate and profound
Catholic analysis of revolutionary Socialism and Communism.
Time has also justified Donoso's vision of Russia and Germany as
the two future centres of good and evil for Europe, as those quarters
from which more deadly revolutions than the French one may come.
Prophecy has seldom been more conscious than in the speech on
" Dictatorship " which Donoso delivered in Madrid in the Spanish
Congress of Deputies on January 4, 1 849, and which appeared in
full soon afterwards in L'Univers and also as a brochure. We re-
publish it here, omitting a few contemporary allusions which have
now — especially outside Spain — lost their importance. Donoso's
powerful and frightening image of a coming tyranny, on a scale
yet unknown in the annals of mankind, which would come upon
them in days not too far removed from their own, is the counterpart
of the classic prophecy on the horrors of subversion to be found much
later as an image of the future in Dostoievsky's The Possessed. Even
without the Ensayo, it would raise Donoso from the level of the
merely political theorists of his generation to that of the visionaries
who saw spiritual doom in the age of material progress, such as
Kierkegaard or Dostoievsky. Because of his Catholic vision, he uses
better arguments concerning Authority and Faith and is a more
systematic and more rational defender of spiritual truth than the
other prophets of the modern Apocalypse.
1. THE CHURCH, THE STATE, AND REVOLUTION1
Gentlemen,
The long speech which Sefior Cortina made yesterday,
and to which I am going to reply by considering it from a cer-
tain angle, in spite of the vast implications it contains, forms
but an epilogue : an epilogue to the errors of the Progressive
party, which in their turn form but another epilogue: the
epilogue to the errors which were invented three centuries ago
and which rend in varying degrees every human society today.
At the beginning of his speech, Sefior Cortina confessed, with
1 Donoso Cortes' speech on Dictatorship to the Spanish Parliament, January 4,
1849 (Obras Completas, Tomo II, p. 187; Biblioteca de Autores Christianos, Madrid,
1946).
JUAN DONOSO CORTES l6l
that good faith which distinguishes him and which enhances
his talent to such a degree, that it has even occasionally hap-
pened that he wondered whether his principles might not be
false and his ideas disastrous, when he saw them always in
opposition but never in power. I will tell the honourable gentle-
man : if he reflects but a little, his doubts will become a cer-
tainty. His ideas are not in power, and are in the Opposition,
precisely because they are the ideas of an opposition rather
than of a government. They are barren ideas, Gentlemen,
disastrous ideas which we must fight until they are laid to rest
in their natural tomb, here beneath this dome, at the foot of
the tribune.
Loyal to the traditions of the party which he leads and
represents ; loyal, I repeat, to the traditions of this party since
the Revolution of February, Senor Cortina included three
things in his speech which I shall term inevitable. The first
is praise of his party, praise based on a recital of its past merits;
the second is the dissertation on its present grievances; the
third, the programme, or a statement, of the services it could
render in the future.
Gentlemen of the majority, I come here to defend your
principles ; but do not expect the slightest praise from me : you
are the victors, nothing is so becoming to the victor's brow as a
crown of modesty.
Do not expect me either to speak of your grievances : your
business is not to avenge personal insults, but those which
traitors to their Queen and country have cast on society and
the Throne. I shall not draw up an inventory of all the services
you have rendered. What would be the object ? To tell the
nation about them ? The nation does not forget.
It has not escaped your memory, Gentlemen, that Senor
Cortina divided his speech into two parts. The Honourable
Member dealt with the foreign policy of the Government and
designated the events which have taken place in Paris, London
and Rome as of great importance in the foreign policy of Spain.
I, too, shall touch upon these questions.
The Honourable speaker then approached the question of
domestic policy; and domestic policy, according to Senor
Cortina, can be divided into a question of principles and a
question of facts, a question of method and of application. By
the voices of the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and the
Home Secretary, who discharged their task with their accus-
tomed eloquence, the Cabinet replied to the question of facts
l62 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
and of policy, as was fitting, considering that they have all the
relevant data for this. The question of principle has been barely
touched upon ; I shall confine myself to dealing with that one
question, and if the House gives me leave, I shall go into funda-
mentals.
What principle inspires Senor Cortina ? This principle, if I
have analysed his speech correctly. In home affairs, the form
of the law; everything by the law, everything for the law,
always the form of the law; the form of the law in every circum-
stance, the form of the law on every occasion. But I, who
believe that laws are made for societies and not societies for the
laws, I say: Society, everything through society for society;
society always, society in every circumstance and on every
occasion.
When the form of the law is sufficient to save society, the
form of the law is best; when it is not, let us have dictatorship.
This formidable word, Gentlemen — less formidable than the
word Revolution, the most formidable of all — this formidable
word has been pronounced by a man here, known to us all, and
who assuredly is not of the stuff of which dictators are made.
I myself understand them instinctively, but not in order to
imitate them. I find two things impossible: to condemn
dictatorship and to exercise it. Incapable, I recognise in all
frankness, of governing with a lofty nobility, I could not in
conscience accept the responsibility of government. I could not
do so without setting one half of myself at war with the other
half, my instincts with my faculty of reason, my reason with my
instincts.
So, Gentlemen, all those who know me can bear witness :
nobody, within or without these precincts, can say that they
have rubbed shoulders with me along the crowded path of
ambition. On the contrary, I shall always be found, and have
always been found, in the modest path of the good citizen;
and when my days are accomplished, I shall go down to my
tomb without feeling remorse at having failed to defend society
when it was barbarously attacked, or without feeling the bitter,
and for me unbearable, sorrow of having done evil to any man.
I say, Gentlemen, that dictatorship, in certain circumstances,
in given circumstances, such as those in which we find our-
selves, for example, is a legitimate form of government, as good
and as profitable as any other, a rational system of government,
which can be defended in theory as well as in practice. Let us
examine in what the life of society really consists.
JUAN DONOSO CORTES 163
The life of society, like human life, is composed of action and
reaction, of the ebb and flow of certain forces which attack,
and others which resist.
Such is the life of society and the life of man. Now the
attacking forces, which we call disease in the human body, and
by another name in the body politic, although in essence it is
the same thing, appear in two forms. In one form they are
spread here and there over society and are only seen in indivi-
duals; in the other, in the state of advanced disease, they take
a more concentrated form and are seen in political associations.
Very well, then, I say that the forces which resist, only present
in the human body and in the body politic in order to repulse
the attacking forces, must necessarily be in proportion to the
actual strength of the latter. When the attacking forces are
disseminated, the forces which resist must likewise be dissemi-
nated; they permeate the Government, the authorities, the
Courts of Law, in a word, the whole body politic ; but should
the attacking forces be concentrated in political associations,
then necessarily, without anyone being able to prevent it, with-
out anyone having the right to prevent it, the forces which
resist are concentrated into the hands of one man. This is the
theory of dictatorship, clear, luminous and indestructible.
This theory, which is a truth in the rational order, is a con-
stant factor in the historical order. Quote me one society which
has never known a dictatorship, just one. See, on the contrary,
what happened in democratic Athens, what happened in
aristocratic Rome. In Athens, this sovereign authority was in
the hands of the people and was called ostracism; in Rome, it
was in the hands of the Senate, who delegated it to a prominent
citizen bearing the rank of Consul, and that was called dictator-
ship, as it is in our own country. Look at modern societies;
look at France amidst all her vicissitudes. I will not speak of the
First Republic, which was a dictatorship of gigantic propor-
tions, unbounded, full of blood and horror. I speak of a later
time. In the Charter of the Restoration, dictatorship had taken
refuge, or if you prefer it, had sought refuge, in Article 14; in
the Charter of 1830, it was to be found in the Preamble. And
where is it to be found in the present Republic ? Do not let us
talk of it: What is it, except a dictatorship disguised as a
Republic ?
Sefior Galvez Cagnero quoted here, somewhat inappositely,
the English Constitution. As it happens, Gentlemen, the
English Constitution is the only one in the world (so wise are
164 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
the English!) where dictatorship is not an exception in law,
but is part of the common law. The matter is quite clear. In
all circumstances, and at every period, Parliament possesses,
when it likes, dictatorial powers, for in the exercise of its power
it only recognises the one limit which bounds all human
authority — that of prudence. It can do anything, and that is
exactly what constitutes dictatorial powers ; it can do anything
except change a woman into a man, or a man into a woman,
say its jurists. It has the power to suspend habeas corpus, to
outlaw by a bill of attainder; it can change the constitution ; it
can even change the dynasty, and not only the dynasty but
even the religion of the people; it has the right to oppress con-
sciences; in a word it is all-powerful. Who has ever seen,
Gentlemen, a more monstrous dictatorship ?
I have proved that dictatorship is a truth in the theoretical
order and a fact in the historical order. Now I am going further:
if I may say so without impropriety, dictatorship could be said
to be a fact also in the divine order.
God has given the government of human societies into the
hands of men, up to a certain point, and has reserved exclu-
sively for Himself the government of the Universe. God governs
the Universe, if I can so put it, and if I can use Parliamentary
language for such an august subject — God governs the Universe
constitutionally. Yes, Gentlemen. It is as clear as daylight and
proved by evidence. The Universe is governed by certain
precise and indispensable laws, which are called secondary
causes. What are these laws, except laws analogous to those
we call fundamental in human society ?
Now, Gentlemen, if God is the Legislator of the physical
world, as certain men are legislators, although in a different
way, of human societies, does God always govern according to
the same laws which He has imposed upon Himself in His
eternal wisdom and to which He has subjected us ? No, Gentle-
men, for He sometimes manifests His sovereignty directly,
clearly and explicitly by breaking those laws which He has
imposed upon Himself and deflecting the natural course of
events. Now, when God acts in this way, could we not say, if
human language can be applied to divine things, that He acts
dictatorially ?
That proves, Gentlemen, how great is the folly of a party
which imagines that it can govern with less means of doing so
than God, and refuses to use the means of dictatorship, which
is sometimes necessary. That being so, the problem, reduced
JUAN DONOSO CORTES 165
to its real terms, does not consist in knowing whether dictator-
ship is justified or not, or whether in certain cases it is a good
thing, but whether such circumstances are present, or have
been present in Spain. This is the most important point and the
one on which I shall concentrate my attention exclusively. In
order to do so, and in this I shall but follow those speakers who
have preceded me in the tribune, I shall have to glance briefly
first at Europe and then at our own country.
The February Revolution, Gentlemen, like Death, came
unexpectedly. God had condemned the French Monarchy. In
vain had this institution undergone profound transformation,
in an attempt to adapt itself to circumstances and the times;
it was of no avail; it was irrevocably condemned, its fall was
inevitable. The monarchy of the Divine Right of Kings came
to an end with Louis XVI on the scaffold; the monarchy of
glory came to an end with Napoleon on an island ; hereditary
monarchy came to an end with Charles X in exile; and with
Louis Philippe came to an end the last of all possible monarchies,
the monarchy of prudence. What a melancholy and pitiful
sight does an institution so venerable, ancient and glorious
present, when it cannot be preserved by divine right, legiti-
macy, prudence or glory !
When the startling news of this great Revolution reached
Spain, we were all plunged into consternation; we were all
terrified. Nothing could compare with our consternation and
our terror, unless it was the consternation and terror felt by the
defeated monarchy. Yet that is not all ; a greater consternation
and a greater terror existed than that felt by the vanquished
monarchy — in the victorious Republic. Even today, ten months
after their triumph, ask them how they won, why and with what
forces they conquered, and they will be unable to tell you.
Why ? Because it was not the Republic which conquered : the
Republic was only the instrument of victory in the hands of a
higher power.
This power, once its work was begun, destroyed the monarchy
with such a tiny thing as this Republic; do you doubt, Gentle-
men, that if it was necessary, and in its own interest, it could
not overthrow the Republic in its turn with the shadow of an
empire or a monarchy ? The cause and the effects of this
revolution have been the subject of wide comment in all the
Parliaments in Europe, and particularly in the Spanish Parlia-
ment, and I have marvelled at the deplorable frivolity with
which the deep-seated causes which bring about such upheavals
l66 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
have been treated, here as elsewhere. Here as elsewhere, revo-
lutions are always attributed to the mistakes of governments ;
men forget that universal, unforeseen and simultaneous catas-
trophes are always providential; for such, Gentlemen, are the
characteristics which distinguish the works of God from the
works of man.
When revolutions betray these symptoms, be sure that they
come from Heaven and that they come as a result of our
mistakes and for the punishment of us all. Shall I tell you the
truth, Gentlemen, the whole truth concerning the causes of the
last French revolution ? The truth, then, is that the day came
last February of the great reckoning with Providence for all
classes of society, and that on that dread day all classes were
found to be bankrupt. I go further: the Republic itself, on
the day of its victory, confessed that it was bankrupt. The
Republic has said that it was going to establish in the world the
reign of liberty, equality and fraternity, three dogmas which
were born, not in the Republic, but on Calvary. What, Gentle-
men, has it accomplished since then ? In the name of liberty,
it has made necessary, proclaimed and accepted dictatorship.
In the name of equality, in the name of the republicans of
yesterday and tomorrow, of men who were born republican, it
has invented a curious sort of artistocratic democracy bearing
ridiculous coats of arms. Finally, in the name of fraternity, it
has restored the fraternity of pagan antiquity, of Eteochus and
Polynices : and brother cut the throat of brother in the streets
of Paris, in the bloodiest battle the centuries have ever seen
within the walls of a city. I give the lie to this Republic which
calls itself the Republic of the three truths : it is the Republic
of the three blasphemies, the Republic of the three lies.
Let us now touch on the causes of this Revolution. The
progressive party always finds the same causes for everything.
Senor Cortina told us yesterday that revolutions occur because
of certain illegalities and because the instincts of the people
make them rise in a uniform and spontaneous way against
tyrants. Senor Ordax Avecilla told us previously : If you want
to avoid revolution, give the hungry bread. Here, in all its
subtlety, is the progressive theory : the causes of revolution lie,
on the one hand in poverty, and on the other in tyranny. This
theory, Gentlemen, is contrary, absolutely contrary, to his-
torical fact. I challenge anybody to quote me one example of
a revolution which has been started and brought to a conclu-
sion by men who were either slaves or hungry. Revolutions
JUAN DONOSO CORTES 167
are a disease of rich peoples, of free peoples. Slaves formed the
greater part of the human race in antiquity : tell me one revo-
lution these slaves ever made.
All that they could do was to foment a few slave wars: but
deep-seated revolutions were always the work of wealthy aristo-
cracies. No, Gentlemen, the germ of revolution is not to be
found in slavery or in poverty ; the germ of revolution lies in
the desires of the mob, which are over-excited by leaders who
exploit them for their own advantage. Tou will be like the rich —
such is the formula of Socialist revolutions against the middle
classes. Tou will be like the nobles — such is the formula gf the
revolutions made by the middle classes against the aristocracy.
Tou will be like Kings is the formula of revolutions made by the
aristocracy against Kings. Finally, Gentlemen, Tou will be like
gods — such was the formula of the first revolt of the first man
against God. From Adam, the first rebel, to Proudhon, the
last blasphemer, such has been the formula of every revolution.
... I have always believed, Gentlemen, that in govern-
ments and peoples, as well as in individual cases, blindness is a
sign of perdition. I believe that God always begins by making
those He wishes to destroy blind, that He confuses their minds
so that they do not see the abyss which stretches beneath their
feet. Applying these ideas to the general policy pursued for
some years by England and France, I can say here that I have
long foretold great misfortunes and catastrophes.
It is a historical fact, recognised and incontrovertible, that the
providential mission of France is to be the instrument of
Providence for the propagation of new ideas, whether they be
political, religious or social. In modern times, three great ideas
have taken possession of Europe: the Catholic idea, the
philosophical idea and the revolutionary idea. Now in these
three periods, France was always made man in order to propa-
gate these ideas. Charlemagne was France made man to
propagate the Catholic idea; Voltaire was France made man
to propagate the philosophical idea; Napoleon was France
made man to propagate the revolutionary idea.
Similarly I believe the providential mission of England is to
maintain a just moral equilibrium in the world by serving as a
counterbalance to France. England is like the ebb and France
the flow of the sea. Imagine for one moment the flow without
the ebb and the seas would pour over all the continents;
imagine the ebb without the flow, and the seas would disappear
from the earth. Imagine France without England and you
l68 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
would see the world shaken only by convulsions; every day a
new constitution and every hour a new form of government
would appear. Imagine England without France and the
world would vegetate indefinitely under the charter of John
Lackland, that unchanging type of every British constitution.
What is the significance then of the co -existence of these two
powerful nations ? It means progress within the bounds of
stability, and stability quickened by progress.
For some years then, Gentlemen — I call contemporary history
and your own memories to witness — these two great nations
have lost all recollection of their traditions, all consciousness of
their providential mission. France, instead of spreading new
ideas in the world, has everywhere preached the status quo — the
status quo in France, in Spain, in Italy, in the East. And England,
instead of preaching stability, has everywhere preached revolt :
in Spain, in Portugal, in France, in Italy and in Greece. What
has been the result ? The inevitable result has been that each
of the two nations, playing a role which was never hers, has
played it very badly. France has tried to transform herself
from devil to preacher and England has tried to transform her-
self from preacher to devil.
Such, Gentlemen, is contemporary history; but to confine
myself to England, for it is with her alone that I wish to deal
at present, God forbid that the disasters she has invited by her
mistakes should ever overwhelm her, as He has overwhelmed
France ! No mistake is of such magnitude as the one England
has made by supporting revolutionary parties everywhere.
Unhappy country ! does she not realise that when danger comes,
these parties, with a surer instinct than her own, will turn
against her ? Has it not already happened ? And it had to
happen, Gentlemen; for all the revolutionaries in the world
know that when revolution becomes serious, when the clouds
pile up, when the horizon grows dark and the waves grow
higher, the vessel of Revolution has no other pilot than France.
This then has been the policy of England, or rather of her
Government and her agents during the last few years. I have
said, and I repeat, that I do not want to go into this question ;
grave considerations dissuade me. Consideration for the public
good, first of all, for I solemnly declare : I desire the closest
and the most complete union between the Spanish and the
English nation. . . .
When he dealt with this question, Sefior Cortina, if I may
say so frankly, suffered from a kind of vertigo : he forgot who
JUAN DONOSO CORTES l6g
he is, where he was and who we are. Although he spoke in
Parliament, he imagined himself to be a lawyer; speaking to
Members, he thought he was speaking to judges; addressing
a Consultative Assembly, he imagined he was addressing a
Court of Law; dealing with an important political and
national subject, he acted as though he were pleading a case;
a case there certainly is at stake, but two nations are the
interested parties. Now, Gentlemen, was it right of Sefior
Cortina to constitute himself counsel for the prosecution
against the Spanish nation ? Is that by any chance, Gentle-
men, what we call patriotism ? Is that the way to be a true
patriot ? No indeed. Do you know what patriotism really is ?
It means, Gentlemen, loving, hating, feeling as our country
loves, hates and feels.
Gentlemen, neither the state of home affairs, which was so
serious, nor that of foreign affairs which were so involved and
so full of peril, can soften the Opposition of the honourable
Members seated here. What about liberty? they say. What, is
liberty not to be prized above everything else ? Should we not
respect individual liberty and has it not been sacrificed ?
— Liberty, Gentlemen! Do those who pronounce this sacred
word understand the principle they proclaim and the name
they pronounce ? Do they realise the times in which we live ?
Have the reverberations of the recent disasters not yet reached
our ears, Gentlemen ? Do you not know that Liberty is dead
now ? Have you not followed its tragic passion in your mind's
eye, as I have ? Have you not seen it persecuted, mocked,
treacherously struck down by all the demagogues in the world ?
Have you not seen its long-drawn-out agony in the Swiss
mountains, on the banks of the Seine, beside the Rhine and the
Danube and alongside the Tiber ? Have you not seen it mount
to its Calvary on the Quirinal ?
This word makes us shudder, Gentlemen (but we ought not
to hesitate to pronounce such words when they express the
truth, and the truth I am determined to speak) : liberty is dead.
It will not rise again, Gentlemen, on the third day, nor yet in
the third year, nor perhaps in three centuries' time! You are
alarmed at the tyranny we endure. You are alarmed by small
things: you will see far worse things. And now, Gentlemen,
I ask you to engrave my words in your memory, for what I am
going to tell you, the events which I am going to predict are
bound, in a future which cannot now be far distant from us,
to come to pass.
170 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
The cause of all your errors, Gentlemen, lies in your ignorance
of the direction which civilisation and the world are taking.
You believe that civilisation and the world are advancing,
when civilisation and the world are regressing. The world is
taking great strides towards the constitution of the most
gigantic and destructive despotism which men have ever known.
That is the trend of our world and civilisation. I do not need to
be a prophet to predict these things; it is enough to consider
the fearful picture of human events from the only true view-
point, from the heights of Catholic philosophy.
There are only two possible forms of control : one internal
and the other external; religious control and political control.
They are of such a nature that when the religious barometer
rises, the barometer of control falls and likewise, when the
religious barometer falls, the political barometer, that is
political control and tyranny, rises. That is a law of humanity,
a law of history. If you want proof, Gentlemen, look at the
state of the world, look at the state of society in the ages before
the Cross; tell me what happened when there was no internal
or religious control. Society in those days only comprised
tyrants and slaves. Give me the name of a single people at this
period which possessed no slaves and knew no tyrant. It is an
incontrovertible and evident fact, which has never been ques-
tioned. Liberty, real liberty, the liberty of all and for all, only
came into the world with the Saviour of the world ; that again
is an incontrovertible fact, recognised even by the Socialists.
Yes, the Socialists admit it; they call Jesus divine, they go
further, they say they continue the work of Jesus. Gracious
Heaven! Continue His work! Those men of blood and
vengeance continue the work of Him Who only lived to do
good, Who only opened His lips to bless, Who only worked
miracles to deliver sinners from their sins and the dead from
death; Who in the space of three years accomplished the
greatest revolution the world has ever witnessed and that
without shedding any blood but His own.
Follow me carefully, I beg you; I am going to present you
with the most marvellous parallel which history can offer us.
You have seen that in antiquity, when religious control was at
its lowest point, for it was non-existent, political control rose
to the point of tyranny. Very well then, with Jesus Christ,
where religious control is born, political control disappears.
This is so true, that when Jesus Christ founded a society with
His disciples, that society was the only one which has ever
JUAN DONOSO CORTES 171
existed without a government. Between Jesus Christ and His
disciples there was no other government than the love of the
Master for His disciples and the love of the disciples for their
Master. You see then, that when the internal control was com-
plete, liberty was absolute.
Let us pursue the parallel. Now come the apostolic times,
which I shall stretch, for the purposes of my plan, from the
time of the Apostles, properly speaking, to the period when
Christianity mounted the Capitol in the reign of Constantine
the Great. At this time, Gentlemen, the Christian religion,
that is, the internal, religious control, was at its zenith; but
in spite of that, as always happens in human societies, a germ
began to develop, a mere germ of protection and religious
liberty. So, Gentlemen, observe the parallel : with this begin-
ning of a fall in the religious barometer there corresponds the
beginning of a rise in the political barometer. There is still no
government yet, for government is not yet necessary; but it is
already necessary to have the germ of government. In point of
fact, in the Christian society of the time, there were no real
magistrates, but there were adjudicators and arbitrators who
form the germ of government. There was really nothing more
than that; the Christians of apostolic times engaged in no law-
suits and never appealed to the Courts: their disputes were
settled by the arbitrators. Notice, Gentlemen, how the scope
of government is enlarged with the growth of corruption.
Then came feudal times. Religion was still at its zenith
during this period, but was vitiated up to a point by human
passions. What happened in the political sphere ? A real and
effective government was already essential; but the weakest
kind was good enough. As a result, feudal monarchy was
established, the weakest of all kinds of monarchy.
Still pursuing our parallel, we come to the sixteenth century.
Then, with the great Lutheran Reformation, with this great
scandal which was at the same time political, social and reli-
gious, with this act of the intellectual and moral emancipation
of the peoples, we see simultaneously the growth of the following
institutions. In the first place, and immediately, the feudal
monarchies became absolute. You believe, Gentlemen, that a
monarchy and a government cannot go beyond absolutism.
However, the barometer of political control had to rise even
higher, because the religious barometer continued to fall: and
the political barometer did in fact rise higher. What did they
create then ? Standing armies. Do you know what standing
172 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
armies are ? To answer that question, it is enough to know
what a soldier is: a soldier is a slave in uniform. So you see
once again, when religious control falls, political control rises,
it rises as high as absolutism and even higher. It was not
enough for governments to be absolute; they asked for and
obtained the privilege of having a million arms at the service of
their absolutism.
That is not all: the political barometer had to continue to
rise because the religious barometer kept falling; it rose still
higher. What new institution was created then ? The govern-
ments said: We have a million arms and it is not enough; we
need something more, we need a million eyes : and they created
the police. That was not the last word in progress : the political
barometer and political control had to rise to a higher pitch
still, because in spite of everything, the religious barometer
kept falling; so they rose higher. It was not enough for the
governments to have a million arms and a million eyes; they
wanted to have a million ears: and so they created adminis-
trative centralisation, by means of which all claims and com-
plaints finally reached the government.
Well, Gentlemen, that was not enough; the religious baro-
meter continued to fall and so the political barometer had to
rise higher. And it rose. Governments said: A million arms,
a million eyes and a million ears are not sufficient to control
people, we need something more ; we must have the privilege of
being simultaneously present in every corner of our empire.
This privilege also they obtained: the telegraph was invented.
Such, Gentlemen, was the state of Europe and the world
when the first rumblings of the most recent revolution intimated
to us all that there is still not enough despotism on the earth,
since the religious barometer remains below zero. And now
the choice between two things lies before us.
I have promised to speak today with complete frankness and
I shall keep my word. . . .
In a word, this is the choice we have to make: either a
religious reaction will set in, or it will not. If there is a religious
reaction, you will soon see that as the religious barometer rises,
the political barometer will begin to fall, naturally, spon-
taneously, without the slightest effort on the part of peoples,
governments, or men, until the tranquil day comes when the
peoples of the world are free. But if, on the contrary, and this
is a serious matter (it is not customary to call the attention of
Consultative Assemblies to questions of this nature; but the
JUAN DONOSO CORTES 1 73
gravity of events today is my excuse and I think I have your
indulgence in this matter) ; I say again, Gentlemen, that if the
religious barometer continues to fall, no man can see whither
we are going. I cannot see, Gentlemen, and I cannot contem-
plate the future without terror. Consider the analogies I have
put before you and weigh this question in your minds ; if no
government was necessary when religious control was
at its zenith, and now that religious control is non-
existent, what form of government is going to be strong
enough to quell a revolt ? Are not all despotisms equally
powerless ?
Have I not put my finger into the wound, Gentlemen ? Yes,
I have, and this is the problem which faces Spain, Europe,
humanity and the world.
Notice one thing, Gentlemen. In the ancient world, tyranny
was fierce and merciless; yet this tyranny was materially
limited, since all States were small and formal relations between
States were impossible from every point of view; consequently
tyranny on the grand scale was impossible in antiquity, with
one exception: Rome. But today, how greatly are things
changed! The way is prepared for some gigantic and colossal
tyrant, universal and immense; everything points to it.
Observe that already moral and material resistance is at an
end : all minds are divided, all patriotism is dead. Tell me now
whether I am right or wrong to be preoccupied with the coming
fate of the world ; tell me whether, in dealing with this question,
I am not touching upon the real problem.
One thing, and one alone, can avert the catastrophe: we
shall not avert it by granting more liberty, more guarantees
and new constitutions; we shall avert it if all of us, according
to our strength, do our utmost to stimulate a salutary reaction
— a religious reaction. Now is this possible, Gentlemen? Yes.
But is it likely ? I answer in deepest sorrow : I do not think it
is likely. I have seen and known many men who returned to
their faith after having separated themselves from it; unfor-
tunately, I have never known any nation which returned to
the Faith after once it was lost.
If any hope had remained in me, the recent events in
Rome would have dispelled it. And now I am going to
say a few words on the same subject on which Sefior Cortina
spoke.
No words can adequately describe what has happened in
Rome. What word would you use, Gentlemen? — Deplorable?
174 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
All the events I have discussed are also deplorable. What
has happened in Rome is worse than that. Would
you use the word horrible ? It surpasses even horror,
Gentlemen.
There was — there no longer is — on the throne in Rome the
most eminent, just and the most evangelical man on earth.
What has Rome done to this just and evangelical man ? What
has this town, where once reigned heroes, Caesars, and
Pontiffs, done ? It has exchanged the throne of the Pontiffs for
the throne of demagogues. Rebellious to God, it has fallen into
the idolatry of the dagger. That is what it has done. The
dagger, Gentlemen ; the demagogic dagger, stained with blood,
is today the idol of Rome. That is the idol which overthrew
Pius IX. That is the idol which the Caribbean hordes are
parading in the streets! Caribbeans ? No: Caribbeans are
fierce, but they are not ungrateful.
I have determined to speak frankly, Gentlemen. I say now
that either the King of Rome must return to Rome, or, with all
respect to Senor Cortina, no stone will remain standing in
Rome.
The Catholic world cannot, and will not, consent to the
virtual destruction of Christianity by a single town which has
been delivered over to frenzy and madness. Civilised Europe
cannot, and will not, consent to the ruin of the edifice of Euro-
pean civilisation, just because its cupola has been laid low. The
world cannot, and will not, consent to the accession to the
throne of a strange new dynasty, the dynasty of crime, in the
Holy City. And let nobody say, Gentlemen, as Senor Cortina
says and as the Members who sit on the left say in their news-
papers and speeches, that two questions are at stake, one tem-
poral and the other spiritual, and that the matter under dispute
concerned the temporal Prince and his people; and that the
Pontiff is still alive. Two words, two words only, will explain
everything.
There can be no possible doubt that spiritual power is the
principal attribute of the Pope : temporal power is accessory
to it; and this accessory is essential. The Catholic world has
the right to expect that the infallible mouthpiece of its dogmas
should be free and independent; and the Catholic world can
only be certain that its spiritual head is independent and free
when this head is a Sovereign; only a Sovereign is dependent
upon nobody. Consequently, Gentlemen, the question of
sovereignty, which is universally a political question, is
JUAN DONOSO CORTES 1 75
furthermore a religious question in Rome ; the people, who can
be sovereign everywhere else, cannot be sovereign in Rome;
Constituent Assemblies, which can exist in every other country,
cannot exist in Rome; in Rome there can be no other consti-
tuent power except the power already constituted there. Rome,
Gentlemen, and the Papal States do not belong to Rome; they
do not even belong to the Pope; they belong to the Catholic
world. The Catholic world has recognised that they are an
attribute of the Pope, so that he may be free and independent,
and the Pope himself cannot divest himself of this sovereignty
and this independence.
I will stop, Gentlemen, for the House must be tired and I
am very tired too. I tell you frankly, I cannot go on any
longer, because I am not well and it is a wonder that I have
been able to speak at all; however, I have said most of what I
wanted to say.
I have dealt with the three external problems touched upon
by Sefior Cortina and now I conclude with the internal prob-
lem. Ever since the beginning of the world until today, men
have discussed the question as to which is the better course, in
order that revolutions and upheavals may be averted — to grant
concessions, or to offer resistance ; but what had always been a
problem from the year of Ci ation to the year of grace 1848 is
no longer one today, it has been resolved ; and if I felt strong
enough, I would prove it to you by passing under review all the
events which have occurred from last February up to today. I
will limit myself to recalling two. In France — my first example
— the monarchy offered no resistance and was conquered by the
Republic, which scarcely had the vitality to set itself in motion:
and the Republic, which scarcely had the vitality to set itself
in motion, conquered Socialism, because Socialism offered no
resistance.
In Rome — my second example — what happened ? Was not
your model there ? Tell me, if you had been artists and wanted
to paint the model of a king, would you not have chosen the
features of Pius IX ? Pius IX tried to be magnificent and
generous, like his Divine Master; he found outlaws, gave them
his hand and returned them to their country; he found refor-
mers, and granted them the reforms for which they asked; he
found Liberals and granted them liberty: each word of his
conferred some benefit. And now, Gentlemen, answer me this.
Do the present ignominies he now suffers not equal in number
the benefits he conferred, or do they not rather surpass them ?
176 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
Faced with this result, Gentlemen, is not the problem of a
course of concession resolved ?
If it were a question here of choosing between liberty and
dictatorship, we should all be agreed. Which man, in fact,
possessing liberty, would prostrate himself before a dictator-
ship ? But that is not the problem. It is a fact that liberty
does not exist in Europe : the constitutional governments which
represented it in these last few years are today, in nearly every
country, no more than structures lacking any solid foundation,
bare bones deprived of life. Cast your minds back, Gentlemen,
to Imperial Rome. Here in this Rome all the institutions of
the Republic still survived: all-powerful dictators, inviolate
tribunes, senatorial families, eminent consuls: all these people
still existed; only one thing was lacking and only one thing
was superfluous : what was superfluous was a man ; what was
lacking was the Republic.
Such, Gentlemen, is the state of nearly all the constitutional
governments in Europe; and quite unconsciously Sefior
Cortina proved it to us the other day. Did he not say, and
rightly so, that he prefers the example of history, rather than
that of theory ? I call history to witness. What, Mr. Speaker,
are these governments with their legal majorities, which are
always conquered by turbulent minorities; with their respon-
sible ministers, who have nothing to be responsible for; with
their inviolable kings, who are always violated ? Thus, as I
have said, Gentlemen, the choice does not lie between liberty
and dictatorship; if that were so, I would vote for liberty, just
as all of us here would do. The problem, and my conclusion,
are as follows: we have to choose between the dictatorship of
insurrection and the dictatorship of government ; of these two
alternatives I choose dictatorship on the part of the government,
as being less onerous and less shameful.
We must choose between a dictatorship which comes from
below or one which comes from above : I choose the one which
comes from above, because it emanates from purer and more
serene regions. Our choice must finally lie between the dicta-
torship of the dagger and that of the sword: I choose the
dictatorship of the sword, because it is more noble. As we vote,
Gentlemen, we shall divide on this question and in so doing
we shall be true to ourselves. You, Gentlemen {the Opposition),
will, as always, follow the most popular course and we {the
Government supporters) will, as always, vote for what is most
salutary.
JUAN DONOSO CORTES 177
2. SOCIALISM1
The most consistent of modern Socialists appears to me to be
Robert Owen. An open and cynical rebel, he breaks with all
religions which are depositaries of religious and moral dogmas,
rejects the idea of duty by his denial of collective responsibility
(which constitutes the dogma of solidarity) and of individual
responsibility, which rests on the dogma of the free-will of man.
Then, having denied free-will, Robert Owen denies sin and
the transmission of sin. So far, no one can doubt that these
deductions are logical and consistent; but the contradiction and
the extravagances begin when Owen, having denied sin and
free-will, makes a distinction between moral good and evil, as
if there could be any good or evil where free-will is non-existent
and as if evil and sin were not synonymous. Furthermore, he
differentiates between good and evil, while denying the penalty
which is the necessary consequence of evil.
Man, according to Robert Owen, acts in consequence of
certain deep-rooted convictions. These convictions come to
him in part from his peculiar heredity and in part from his
environment ; and as he is the author of neither his heredity
nor his environment, it follows that both have a fatal and an
inevitable effect upon him.
All this is logical and consistent, but it is completely illogical,
contradictory and absurd to postulate good and evil, when
human liberty is denied. Absurdity reaches grotesque propor-
tions when our author attempts to found a society and a
government in conjunction with men who are irresponsible:
the idea of government and the idea of society have no meaning
apart from the idea of human liberty; denial of the one
follows from the denial of the others and if you deny or affirm
them all, you deny or affirm one and the same thing. I do not
know whether the annals of mankind show a more striking proof
of blindness, inconsistency and madness than that which Owen
gives, when, not satisfied with the extravagance of affirming the
existence of society and government, after having denied individ-
ual responsibility and liberty, he goes still further and falls into
the inconceivable extravagance of recommending benevolence,
justice and charity to those who, being neither responsible
nor free, can neither love, nor be just, nor be benevolent.
1 Donoso Cortes, Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism and Socialism. Wm. B. Kelly.
1874. Translation by Rev. William NTDonald, Rector of the Irish College,
Salamanca, revised. Pp. 279 et seq.
178 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
. . . This shameful contradiction in terms which is the
essence of Socialism is so palpable that it will be easy to set it
in relief, even on those points on which all these sectarians
appear to be united in agreement. If one single negation is
common to them all, it is assuredly the denial of the solidarity
of the family and of the nobility. All revolutionary and
socialistic masters of doctrine are unanimous in their rejection
of this communion of glories and misfortunes, of merits and
demerits in generation after generation, which mankind has
recognised as a fact throughout the ages.
Now these same revolutionaries and Socialists affirm quite
unconsciously by their practice the very thing they deny in
theory in other people. When the French Revolution in its
frenzy and blood -lust had trampled all the national glories
underfoot; when, intoxicated with its triumphs, it believed final
victory certain, a mysterious aristocratic pride of race took hold
of it, which was in direct contradiction to all its dogmas. Then
we saw the most famous of the revolutionaries, as proudly as
any feudal baron of old, behave with great circumspection, so
that the privilege of entering their family was only accorded
with reserve and at the cost of many scruples. My readers will
remember that famous question put by the doctors of the new
law to those who presented themselves as candidates — " What
crime have you committed ? " Who could not but sympathise
with the unfortunate man who had committed no crime, for
never would the gates of the Capitol, where sat the demi-gods
of the Revolution, terrible in their majesty, be opened to him.
Mankind had instituted the aristocracy of virtue, the revolution
instituted the aristocracy of crime.
. . . Examine all the revolutionary schools one by one and
you will see that they all vie with each other in an effort to
constitute themselves into a family and to claim a noble
descent: Saint-Simon the aristocrat is the ancestor of one
group ; the illustrious Fourier of another, and Babeuf the pat-
riot of a third group. In each one you will find a common
leader, a common patrimony, a common glory, a common
mission; each group is distinct from the other, then breaks
away from the others to form a splinter group, all the members
of which are linked together by a narrow solidarity and seek
out of the depths of the past some famous name as a rallying
cry. Some have chosen Plato, the glorious personification of
the wisdom of the ancients; others, and they are numerous,
carrying their mad ambition to the heights of blasphemy, do
JUAN DONOSO CORTES 1 79
not fear to profane the sacred name of the Redeemer ! Poor
and abandoned, they would perhaps have forgotten Him;
humble they would have scorned Him; but in their insolent
pride they do not forget that poor, wretched, and humble as
He was, He was a King and that royal blood flowed in His
veins. As for M. Proudhon, that perfect type of Socialist pride,
which in its turn is the prototype of human pride — carried away
by his vanity, he goes as far back as he can to the remotest ages,
in an attempt to seek his ancestry in those times which bordered
upon Creation, when the Mosaic institutions flourished amongst
the Hebrews. As a matter of fact, his lineage and his name are
still more ancient and illustrious than he thinks; to discover
their origin, we must go back still further, to times beyond the
pale of history, to beings who in perfection and dignity are
incomparably higher than men. At present, suffice it to say
that the Socialist schools of thought tend inevitably towards
contradiction and absurdity; that each one of their principles
contradicts those which precede or follow; and that their con-
duct is a complete condemnation of their theories, as their
theories are a radical condemnation of their conduct.
. . . The fundamental negation of Socialism is the negation
of sin, that grand affirmation which is, as it were, the focal
point of the Catholic affirmation. This denial logically implies
a whole series of further negations, some of them relating to the
Divine Person, others to the human person, others still to man
in society.
The most fundamental of them all is this : that the Socialists
not only deny the fact of sin, but the possibility of sinning;
from this double negation follows the negation of human
liberty, which is meaningless if we ignore the power given to
mankind to choose between good and evil and to fall from the
state of innocence into a state of sin.
The denial of free-will leads to a disclaimer of human respon-
sibility; the responsibility of man being denied, penalties for
sin are also denied, from which follows on the one hand the
negation of divine government, and on the other, the negation
of human governments. Therefore, as far as the question of
government is concerned, the negation of sin ends in nihilism.
To deny the responsibility of the individual in the domestic,
political and human spheres is to deny the solidarity of the
individual in the family and in the State; it is to deny unity
in the species, in the State, in the family and in man himself,
since there is such complete identity between the principles of
l80 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
solidarity and unity that one thing cannot be conceived in
isolation without reference to the principle of solidarity and
vice-versa. Therefore, as regards the question of unity, the
negation of sin ends in nihilism.
Unity being denied absolutely, the following negations are
implied — that of humanity, of the family, of society and
of man. The fact is that nothing exists at all except on condi-
tion of being " one," so that the existence of the family, of
society and of humanity can only be postulated on condition
that domestic, political and human unity is affirmed. If these
unities are denied, the negation of these three things must
follow; to affirm that they exist, and to deny unity between
them, is a contradiction in terms. Each of these things is neces-
sarily " one," or it cannot exist at all; therefore if they are not
" one " they do not exist; their very name is absurd, for it is a
name which does not describe or designate anything.
The negation of individualism also follows from the negation
of the principle of unity, although by a different process. Only
individual man can, up to a certain point, exist without being
"one" and without having any solidarity with his fellows:
what is denied in this case, if his unity and solidarity with man-
kind is denied, is that he is always the same person at different
moments of his life. If there is no bond of union between the
past and the present and between the present and the future,
it follows that man exists only in the present moment. But in
this hypothesis, it is clear that his existence is more phenomenal
than real. If I do not live in the past, because it is past, and
because there is no unity between the present and the past; if
I do not live in the future, because the future does not exist and
because when it will exist it will not be future ; if I only live
in the present and the present does not exist, because when I
am about to affirm that it exists, it has already passed, my
existence is manifestly more theoretical than practical; for in
reality, if I do not exist at all times, I do not exist at any time.
I conceive time only in the union of its three forms and I cannot
conceive it when I separate them. What is the past, unless it
is something which no longer is ? What is the future, unless it
is something which does not yet exist ? Who can halt the present
long enough to affirm that it is here, once it has escaped from
the future, and before it relapses into the past ? To affirm the
existence of man, denying the unity of time, amounts to giving
man the speculative existence of a mathematical point. There-
fore the negation of sin ends in nihilism, as regards both the
JUAN DONOSO CORTES l8l
existence of individual man, of the family, of the body politic
and of humanity. Therefore, in every sphere, all Socialist doc-
trines, or to be accurate, all rationalist doctrines must end
inevitably in nihilism. Nothing is more natural and logical
than that those who separate themselves from God should end
in nothing, since there is nothing outside God.
Having established this much, I have the right to accuse
present-day Socialism of being timid and contradictory. To
deny the Christian God in order to affirm another god; to
deny humanity from one point of view in order to affirm it from
another; to deny society in certain of its forms in order to
affirm it in different forms ; to deny the family on one hand and
to affirm it on the other ; to deny man in one of his aspects in
order to affirm him in other and contradictory ones — is not all
this to enter upon the path of conflicting actions, the conse-
quence of timidity and irresolution ?
. . . Present-day Socialism is a kind of semi-Catholicism and
nothing more. In the work of the most advanced of its doctors,
there is a greater number of Catholic affirmations than
Socialist negations; with the result that we have a Catholicism
which is absurd and a Socialism which is contradictory. If we
affirm the existence of God, we fall into the hands of the God
of the Catholics ; if we affirm the existence of humanity, we
must accept the humanity one and indivisible of the Christian
dogma; if we affirm the existence of society, we must come
sooner or later to the Catholic teaching on social institutions;
if we affirm the existence of the family, we are bound to affirm
everything which Catholicism lays down and Socialism denies
on the subject; in a word, that every affirmation concerning
man, whatever it may be, is finally resolved into an affirmation
of Adam, the man of Genesis. Catholicism can be compared to
those huge cylinders through which the whole must pass, if a
part has done so. Unless it changes its course, Socialism with all
its pontiffs and doctors will pass through this cylinder, without
leaving any trace.
. . . Catholicism is not a thesis, consequently it cannot be
combated by an antithesis; it is a synthesis which embraces
all things, contains all things and explains all things, which
cannot be — I will not say conquered — but even combated,
except by a synthesis of the same kind, which like it should
embrace, contain and explain all things. All human theses and
antitheses find their place in the Catholic synthesis : it attracts
and resolves all things into itself by the invincible force of an
l82 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
incommunicable virtue. Those who imagine that they live
outside Catholicism really live within its orbit, because it is as
it were their intellectual climate. The Socialists have met the
same fate as the others : in spite of the gigantic efforts they
have made to separate themselves from Catholicism, they have
done no more than to become bad Catholics.
VIII. JAIME BALMES
1810- 1848
In Jaime Balmes, whom Donoso considered to be the master of
his mind, we miss the poetic note and the prophetic vision. He was,
above all, a theologian. His mind was of a more scholastic forma-
tion, and he lived to see only the beginning of those events in
Europe which raised Donoso's thought to its highest level. Though
less striking as a literary personality, and less of an original thinker
than Donoso, the importance of Balmes in the history of apologetics
cannot be, and indeed never has been, overlooked.
It had been usual, ever since Montesquieu's day, to postulate the
social good in the political theory of Europe, and to relegate
theological truth, not only to a secondary plane, but to deny that
dogma had any justification at all. Montesquieu and his successors
still recognised Christian morality as the best foundation for society.
Yet he protested at the same time that a definite system of Christian
dogma was not necessary to produce that moral good which society
derives from Christian beliefs. According to him, that religion is
best which fully meets the circumstances and requirements of the
time and the place: Catholicism is best for Monarchies, Protes-
tantism for Republics and even Islam for the East, although in his
view Islam is less promising as a religion when we consider " our
welfare in this world and the next " (Esprit des Lois).
The historical schools of the early nineteenth century — Guizot,
Michelet and Quinet in France, and especially Macaulay in
England — went much further, and saw the Protestant Reformation
as a step forward on the road of the inevitable and salutary progress,
a phase in the " emancipation " of mankind. Macaulay identified
material progress with Protestantism and thought that such progress
was incompatible with Catholic civilisation.
During the three decades following the Napoleonic Wars, two
political influences were at work in Spain, the country which had
played such a tremendous part in frustrating Napoleon's plan to
dominate and conquer Europe. Both Britain and France attempted
to make the Peninsula an outpost and an extension of their own
power: Britain almost in the spirit which we know from George
Borrow's Bible in Spain, and France in the spirit of Guizot, who was
not only the foremost ideological influence in the reign of Louis
Philippe, but for some years was also a leading statesman, especially
183
184 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
at the moment of the treaty of 1846,1 which seemed to establish
French influence in Spain for some time to come, to the dissatisfac-
tion of Palmerston. The Spanish supporters of the British and
French influence in Spain hoped to bring material prosperity to
Spain and to " emancipate " the " backward " Spanish masses
through Liberal institutions.
Balmes wrote his Protestantism as a reply to these widespread argu-
ments, which were found in the 1840's in the Spanish Press and
Parliament. He went part of the way with Bossuet, who in his
History of Variations showed that every " variation " from the unity
of dogma is bound to lead, sooner or later, to the vague and hardly
Christian doctrine of the " Unitarians " of Socinius, and he wrote
his monumental book to establish the necessity of a precise and
authoritative dogma.
Balmes accepts discussion with his opponents, on ground of their
own choosing, not in the field of dogmatic truth, but in that of
history and culture, which they consider to be of primary impor-
tance. He proves with historical arguments that Luther's break
with the Church was, far from being an act of progress and eman-
cipation, a great retrogressive step. Denying as it does any other
basis for theological truth except individual judgement and personal
interpretation of a text, Protestantism rules out spiritual authority.
This way leads either to anarchy or to despotism, to an undue
buttressing of the secular and temporal authority, which Luther
called to his aid when some of his followers attempted to push his
doctrine to its extreme, although logical, consequences. Deprived
of the consecration which the Church conferred on temporal power,
and limited to temporal purposes by the very nature of its own legi-
timacy, Protestantism had to find some other grounds for the justi-
fication of the authority of the law and for social order. Thus we
find Calvin justifying the inheritance of wealth through the doctrine
of Grace, and Luther proclaiming Adam, and not Christ, to be the
father of the temporal order, which therefore is bound to remain
under the stain of original sin, and the despotic excesses of which
— as Hobbes, developing Luther's argument later on in a more
systematic way, explains — are bound to be the punishment for
original sin.
Anarchy or despotism is the Protestant alternative to the Catholic
synthesis of Authority and Liberty. Balmes is naturally ready to
recognise that a great deal of the Catholic inheritance survived the
Reformation of the sixteenth century, and extenuated Protestant
practice, just as he is ready to admit that the Catholic political
order often fell short of the ideal. But with his critical analysis of
Protestantism as the religious origin of spiritual anarchy and tem-
poral tyranny, he brought a new and immensely important element
1 This treaty arranged the marriage of the Due de Montpensier, youngest son
of Louis Philippe, to the Infanta sister of Queen Isabel II.
JAIME BALMES 185
into the historical and political controversy of the time. It is enough
to recall the sociological school of the German Liberal Protestant
scholars, such as Max Weber and Ernst Troeltzsch, in the first two
decades of the present century to show that Balmes' analysis of
Luther and Protestantism fell on fertile soil in Luther's own country,
Germany.
Almost everybody who has tried to analyse seriously the causes
which led Germany to the virulent crisis of the First World War and
to the diabolical rule of Hider has seen the origin of the German
tendency to anarchy and despotism in Luther's attitude to temporal
authority — more often than not in unconscious imitation of Balmes.
Balmes is the teacher of the Church on Order and Liberty, a
master in the controversy against political and social Protestantism,
as Bossuet was the master in the controversy against theological
Protestantism. Thus he stands — with Donoso Cone's — at the
threshold of the new, glorious and historical role which fell once
again in the post-revolutionary age to the Christian and national
genius of Spain.
FAITH AND LIBERTY1
The supposed incompatibility of unity in faith with political
liberty is an invention of the irreligious philosophy of the last
century. Whichever political opinions we adopt, it is extremely
important for us to be on our guard against such a doctrine.
We must not forget that the Catholic religion stands high above
all forms of government — she does not reject from her bosom
either the citizen of the United States, or the inhabitants of
Russia, but embraces all men with equal tenderness, com-
manding all men to obey the legitimate governments of their
respective countries. She considers them all to be children of
the same Father, participators in the same Redemption, heirs
to the same glory. It is very important to bear in mind that
irreligion allies itself to liberty, or to despotism, according to
its own interests; it applauds unstintingly when an infuriated
populace burns churches, and massacres the priests at the altar,
but it is always ready to flatter monarchs, to give an exaggerated
importance to their power whenever they win the favour of
this power by despoiling the clergy, subverting discipline and
insulting the Pope. It cares little what instruments it employs,
provided it accomplishes its work: it is Royalist when it is in
1 Taken from European Civilisation, Protestantism and Catholicity, John Murphy & Co.,
Baltimore, 1868. Translated by Messrs. Hanford and Kershaw {revised).
l86 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
a position to influence the minds of kings and expel the Jesuits
from France, from Spain and from Portugal, and to pursue
them to the four corners of the earth without giving them any
respite or peace; it is Liberal when it shows itself inside
popular Assemblies, which exact sacrilegious oaths from the
clergy and send into exile, or execute, those priests who remain
faithful to their duty.
The man who cannot see the strict truth of my argument
must have forgotten history and paid little attention to very
recent events. When religion and morality are present, all
forms of government are good ; without them, none can be
good. An absolute monarch, imbued with religious ideas, sur-
rounded by counsellors whose doctrines are sound and reigning
over a people who share the same doctrines, can make his sub-
jects happy and is bound to do so, as far as circumstances of
time and place permit. A wicked monarch, or one surrounded
by wicked advisers, will do harm according to the extent of his
power; he is even more to be dreaded than revolution itself,
because he has better opportunities for laying his plans and
carrying them out more rapidly, he is faced with fewer
obstacles, can assume a semblance of legality and can claim to
serve the public interest, so that he has a far greater chance
of success and of achieving permanent results. Revolutions
have undoubtedly done great injury to the Church; but per-
secuting monarchs have done her as great injury. A whim of
Henry VIII established Protestantism in England; the
cupidity of certain other princes produced a like result in the
nations of the North ; and in our own days, a decree of the
Autocrat of Russia drives millions of souls into schism. It
follows that an absolute monarchy is not desirable unless it is a
religious one; for irreligion, which is immoral by nature,
naturally tends to injustice and consequently to tyranny. If
irreligion is seated on an absolute throne, or if it takes possession
of the mind of the occupant of that throne, its powers are
unlimited ; and for my part, I know nothing more horrible than
the omnipotence of wickedness.
In recent times, European democracy has been lamentably
conspicuous for its attacks upon religion; a state of affairs
which, far from furthering the cause of democracy, has injured
it considerably. We can indeed form an idea of a government
which is more or less free, when society is virtuous, moral and
religious ; but not when these prerequisites are lacking. In the
latter case, the only possible form of government is despotism,
JAIME BALMES 187
the rule of force, for force alone can govern men who are without
conscience and without God. If we compare the American and
the French Revolutions carefully, we find that one of the prin-
cipal differences between them is that the American Revolution
was essentially democratic and the French was essentially
impious. In the manifestoes which inaugurated the former revo-
lution, the name of God and of Providence appears everywhere;
the men engaged in the perilous enterprise of shaking off the
yoke of Great Britain, far from uttering blasphemies against the
Almighty, invoke His assistance, convinced that the cause of
independence was also the cause of reason and justice. The
French began by deifying the leaders of irreligion, over-
throwing altars, watering churches, streets and scaffolds with
the blood of priests — the only revolutionary sign recognised by
the people is Atheism hand in hand with liberty. This folly
has borne its fruits — it spread its fatal contagion in other
countries which have recently experienced revolutions — the
new order of things has been inaugurated with sacrilegious
crimes; and the proclamation of the rights of man was
preceded by the profanation of the churches of Him from whom
all rights come.
Modern demagogues, it is true, have only imitated their
predecessors the Protestants, the Hussites and the Albigenses;
with this difference, however, that in our day irreligion has
manifested itself openly, side by side with its companion the
democracy of blood and baseness; while the democracy of
former times was allied with sectarian fanaticism. The dis-
solving doctrines of Protestantism rendered a stronger power
necessary, precipitated the overthrow of ancient liberties and
obliged authority to hold itself continually on the alert, and
to be ready to strike. When the influence of Catholicism had
been weakened, the void had to be filled by a system of espion-
age and compulsion. Do not forget this, you who make war
on religion in the name of liberty; do not forget that like causes
produce like effects. Where no moral influence exists, its
absence must be supplied by physical force: if you deprive
people of the sweet yoke of religion, you leave governments no
other resource than the vigilance of the police and the force of
bayonets. Think of these things and make your choice. Before
the advent of Protestantism, European civilisation, under the
aegis of the Catholic religion, was evidently tending towards
that general harmony, the absence of which has rendered an
excessive use of force necessary. Unity of faith disappeared,
l88 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
leaving the way open to an unrestrained liberty of opinion and
religious discord : the influence of the clergy was destroyed in
some countries and weakened in others: thus an equilibrium
between the different classes no longer existed and the class
which was destined by nature to fulfil the role of mediator was
deprived of any influence. By curtailing the power of the
Popes, both people and governments were loosed from that
gentle curb which restrained without oppressing, and corrected
without degrading; kings and peoples were set at variance one
with the other, without any body of men possessed of authority
being able to mediate between them in case of conflict; govern-
ments lacking a single judge who, as the friend of both parties
and with no personal interest in the quarrel, could have settled
their differences impartially, began to rely upon standing
armies, and the people began to rely on insurrection.
It is no use alleging that in Catholic countries a political
phenomenon was seen familiar to the one we see in Protestant
nations; for I maintain that amongst Catholics themselves,
events did not follow the course which they would naturally
have followed if the fatal Reformation had not intervened. In
order to reach its full fruition, European civilisation required
that unity from which it had sprung; it could not establish
harmony between the diverse elements which it sheltered
within its bosom by any other means. Its homogeneity was lost
immediately the unity of faith disappeared. From that hour,
no nation could organise itself adequately without taking into
account, not only its own internal needs, but also the principles
that prevailed in other countries, against the influence of which
it had to be on its guard. Do you imagine, for instance, that
the policy of the Spanish Government, constituted as it was the
protector of the Catholic religion against powerful Protestant
nations, was not powerfully influenced by the peculiar and
very dangerous position of the country ?
I think I have shown that the Church has never opposed the
legitimate development of any form of government ; that she
has taken them all under her protection and consequently that
to assert that she is the enemy of popular institutions is a
calumny. I have likewise placed it beyond doubt that the sects
hostile to the Catholic Church, by their encouragement of a
democracy which is either irreligious, or blinded by fanaticism,
have, in fact, far from helping on the establishment of just and
rational liberty, left the people no alternative between un-
bridled licentiousness and unrestrained despotism. The lesson
JAIME BALMES 189
with which history thus furnishes us is confirmed by experience
and the future will but corroborate the truth of this lesson. The
more religious and moral men are, the more they deserve
liberty; for they need less external restraints in that case,
having a most powerful one in their own consciences. An
irreligious and immoral people stand in need of authority of
some sort, to keep them in order, otherwise they will constantly
abuse their rights and so will deserve to lose them. St Augustine
understood these truths perfectly and explains in a brief and
beautiful way the conditions which are necessary for all forms
of government. The holy Doctor shows that popular forms of
government are good where the people are moral and con-
scientious; where they are corrupt, they require either an
oligarchy or an autocratic monarchy.
I have no doubt that an interesting passage in dialogue form
that we find in his first book on Free Will, Chapter vi, will be
read with pleasure.
Augustine: You would not maintain, for instance, that men
or people are so constituted by nature as to be absolutely
eternal, subject neither to destruction nor change ?
Evodius: Who can doubt that they are changeable and sub-
ject to the influence of time ?
Augustine: If the people are serious and temperate; and if
moreover they have such a concern for the public good that
each one would prefer the public interest to his own, is it
not true that it would be advisable to decree that such a nation should
choose its own authorities to administer their affairs ?
Evodius: Certainly.
Augustine: But imagine that these people become so corrupt
that the citizens prefer their own good to the public good; supposing
they sell their votes, that corrupted by ambitious men they entrust the
government of the State to men as criminal and as corrupt as them-
selves; is it not true that in such a case if there should be a
man of integrity amongst them, who possesses sufficient
power for the purpose, he would do well to take away from
these people their power of conferring honours, and concen-
trate it in the hands of a small number of upright men, or
even in the hands of one man ?
Evodius: Undoubtedly.
Augustine: Yet since these laws appear very contradictory,
the one granting the right of conferring honours and the
190 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
other depriving them of that right; since moreover they can-
not both be in force at once, are we to affirm that one of these
laws is unjust, or that it should not have been made ?
Evodius: By no means.
The whole question is contained here in a few words: Can
monarchy, aristocracy and democracy all be legitimate and
proper ? Yes. By what considerations are we to be guided when
we wish to decide which of these forms is legitimate and proper
in any given case ? By considering existing rights and the con-
dition of the people to whom such a form is to be applied. Can
a form of government, once good, become bad ? Certainly it
may; for all human things are subject to change. These reflec-
tions, as solid as they are simple, will prevent all excessive
enthusiasm in favour of any particular form of government.
This is not a question of theory only, but one of prudence. Now
prudence does not decide before having considered the subject
carefully and weighed all the circumstances. But there is one
predominant idea in the doctrine of St Augustine : the idea,
which I have already indicated, that great virtue and dis-
interestedness are required under free government. Those who
hope to build political liberty on the ruins of religious belief
would do well to meditate on the words of this illustrious Doctor
of the Church.
How do you think people could exercise extensive rights, if
you prevent them from doing so by perverting their ideas and
corrupting their morals ?
You say that under representative forms of government,
reason and justice are secured by means of elections; and yet
you strive to banish this reason and justice from the bosom of
that society in which you talk of securing them. You sow the
wind and reap the whirlwind; instead of models of wisdom and
prudence, you offer the people scandalous scenes. Do not say
that we are condemning the age and that it progresses in spite
of us: we reject nothing that is good, but perversity and cor-
ruption we must condemn. The age is making progress, it is
true. But neither you, nor we, know which direction it is taking.
Catholics know only one thing on this subject and that is that
good social conditions cannot be formed out of bad men. They
know that immoral men are bad, and that where there is no
religion, morality cannot take root. Firm in our faith, we shall
leave you to try, if you so desire, a thousand forms of govern-
ment. Apply your palliatives to your own social patient;
JAIME BALMES igi
impose it upon him with deceitful words. His frequent convul-
sions, his continued restlessness, are sufficient evidence of your
lack of skill. It proves that you have not succeeded so well in
securing his confidence. If ever you do secure it, if ever he fell
asleep in your arms, " All flesh will then have corrupted its
way " and we may fear that God will have resolved to sweep
man from the face of the earth.
IX. LOUIS VEUILLOT
1813- 1878
The following pages, which comprise the Foreword to Louis
Veuillot's The Freethinkers, published amidst the upheavals of the
Revolution of 1848, tell us almost all there is to know about the
author and about the part played by him in his time. Veuillot
appears here at his best.
The Freethinkers is a monumental image of a period, and is a land-
mark in the history of post -Revolutionary apologetics, just as the
year which saw its publication was a landmark in the post-
Revolutionary history of France and of Europe. What La Bruyere's
Characters was for the seventeenth century, Veuillot's Freethinkers
might deserve to be for the nineteenth century. The first is a
grandiose satirical panorama of human weaknesses in an age of
social and national splendour; the second a polemical and satirical
dissection of human stupidity disguised as intellectual pride, in an
age of social crisis and national decadence. And La Bruyere may
be said to have outlined the principal theme of The Freethinkers in
the final chapter of his Characters, when he describes the Esprits
Forts :
" Do strong minds realise that this name is bestowed upon them
ironically ? What greater weakness is there, than for a man to be
uncertain as to the principle which guides his existence, his life, his
senses and his attainments, and to what it all leads! What greater
discouragement can there be for a man, than to doubt whether his
soul is not as much matter as a stone or a reptile, or whether it is
not as easily corrupted as these vile things of clay ? Do we not show
more strength and greatness by accepting in our minds the idea of
a Being, superior to all other beings, Who has made them all, and
to Whom all must return; of a Being Who is sovereignly perfect
and pure, Who has neither beginning nor end, in Whose image our
souls are created, and if I may so express it, a part of which is, as it
were, spiritual and immortal ?
" The docile mind and the weak mind are both impressionable;
the one receives good impressions, the other bad ones; in other
words, the first is convinced and faithful, while the second is obsti-
nate and corrupted. Hence the docile mind accepts the true religion,
and the weak mind does not accept any religion, or else accepts a
false one: now the strong mind has no religion, or else invents one
for itself; therefore the strong mind is really the weak one."
192
LOUIS VEUILLOT 193
These " strong minds," just numerous enough to be noticed in
the century of Louis XIV, invaded the French scene a hundred
years later, and became the masters. After the great Revolution and
the Napoleonic epic, Victor Hugo and the Romantics brought
down to the level of the profane crowds the majestic mysteries of the
language of Pascal and Bossuet, and by an often cheap and vulgar
melodrama, the precursor of the cinema, and by their easy rhetoric,
precursor of the Press and modern propaganda, they became the
symbol of an age which it is the lasting merit of Veuillot to expose
and reject.
Veuillot was a man of the people, son of a poor, working-class
family, grandson and great -great-grandson of peasants. This gave
him the right to reject with indignation and horror the sugary
spiritual poison which was offered as food for the " people " by
those who claimed to be the people's friends. Veuillot was a son
of the poor. He had an incontestable right therefore to reject the
unwanted advocates of the people who schemed to detach the poor
from the protection of Christ the King, to withdraw from the poor
their right to persevere in their allegiance to Christ and His Vicar
on earth. There is hardly a writer more at war with the authorities
of his time than was Louis Veuillot. Hardly ever has a writer said
worse things about authorities than this untiring defender of
Authority, not of course because constitutional monarchs, royal
ministers, Parliaments, academies and universities, and last, but
not least, bishops of the Church, were autocratic in his eyes, but
because they did not always have the courage of their authority,
and courted popular favour by bribing the anti-Christian forces
and pseudo -ideas of the age with cowardly concessions.
Balzac knew the Holy Ghost mainly under His aspect of Prudence.
Veuillot derived from Him mainly the virtue of Fortitude. Both are
one-sided, of course, just as Bonald, who saw God mainly as the
author of Law and Order, and Joseph de Maistre, who saw Him
mainly as Providence in action, moving History through events
which seem a chaos to uninformed human eyes, were one-sided
before them. Yet fully enlightened wisdom on the workings of
God — which is not yet full knowledge — is the privilege of the
Church, guardian of God's name among men. Her lay defenders
have done enough for the salvation of their time, and possibly
enough for their own salvation, if they proclaimed loudly enough
the inseparability of any particular human virtue or understanding
from the Creator of all fortitude and all knowledge.
Joseph de Maistre — and especially Bonald — are still near to the
Cartesian method. They are still trained in Descartes' school; in
their meditations on the State and its upheavals, on nations and
their destinies, their chief concern is to find a law and a rule, and
in the great Revolution they mainly see aberration and deviation
from Truth and from Law. Veuillot, at first sight merely a chronicler
194 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
who found his subjects for meditation in the futile and ephemeral
events of the town, inaugurates a different and a new approach.
Bonald and de Maistre fight false ideas, errors and aberrations; for
Veuillot, the principles and forces of evil appear in their personal
incarnations, in their human forms. Veuillot is the chronicler of a
society at a period of crisis.
Bonald and de Maistre saw the nations in error and tried to
restore the Law. Veuillot knows — for he lived to see it — that
restorations do not help much, and when they were tried, proved to
be ephemeral. Society itself is in dissolution, the people themselves
are cast out — perhaps for centuries — into the desert, where they
will have no kings, no prophets and no sacrifices, as Nehemias said
of the Jews ; the fall of Crowns, once given to crown the glory of
Christian nations, was but a beginning. Veuillot sees his time as the
beginning of the Rejection. In this prophetic vision, which is no
more Cartesian, in this vision which is formed and inspired by the
Old Testament and the Apocalypse alone, and not by any method of
reasoning derived from Descartes or Leibnitz, Veuillot was con-
firmed by a great Christian visionary, who began as a philosopher
and a political thinker, but who was changed into a mystic and
prophet by the first European Revolution — by Donoso Cortes. From
a simple chronicler of Parisian characters and events, Veuillot
reaches the much higher sphere of the Absolute, after the Revolu-
tion of 1848 and the years spent in Donoso's company, until the
death of this latter in 1853.
Perhaps he never fully reached this sphere. We do not need to
defend Veuillot against, the opponents of his day. Most of them
were the enemies of the Church and of Christ, or, worse still, they
were those modern Pharisees who, like the sweet-tongued and
benevolent Renan, were prepared to recognise a moralist and a
poet in the Lord and Redeemer. But he had Catholic opponents
too: not only politicians like Falloux, Berryer or Montalembert,
but Liberal and slightly Gallican bishops, Mgr. Sibour or Mgr.
Dupanloup, who would have preferred VUnivers to be an organ of
day-to-day politics in the interest of the Church in France, and
complained that Veuillot spoilt chances of Parliamentary compro-
mise on practical matters such as legislation for the schools. Veuillot
considered himself to be the Pope's soldier, and the direct personal
approach which Pius IX always readily granted him was some-
times the object of complaint or objection by the French hierarchy.
We do not need to defend Veuillot from Victor Hugo's biting
rhymes in Les Chdtiments, which made him out to be the defender of
all tyrannies because he was prepared to accept the protection of
any legal order against revolutionary terror and disorder. Victor
Hugo was perhaps the only temperament and the only master of
style who could treat Veuillot with a polemical talent worthy of his
own, but as Veuillot answered Hugo with a series of replies which
LOUIS VEUILLOT I95
he collected into a whole volume — which has the merit of re-
vindicating the best of Victor Hugo for Christian inspiration and
makes good fun of the rest — we may consider this debate as closed.
We can dismiss as much below the level of literary debate such
opponents of Louis Veuillot who thought fit to assert that he was
personally employed by Pius IX to spy upon the bishops who were
opposed to the Bull of Infallibility!
Nevertheless, we must try to find an explanation of the disappoint-
ment Veuillot caused to men like Barbey d'Aurevilly, Ernest Hello,
and Leon Bloy; for it was Veuillot's fate to disappoint those whom
he inspired and for whom he was in a certain sense a precursor and
a master. He wrote from day to day for some forty-five years, of
which he asked posterity to discount the first fifteen. Before being
overwhelmed by the Soirees de St Petersbourg, and " before being
moved by Joseph de Maistre to seek his peace in the Church through
confession to a Jesuit," Veuillot was, as he says, a " condottiere of
the pen " at the service of the Liberalism of Louis-Philippe and
Guizot. He asks us to consider all that he wrote in his early years
for other reasons than the glory of God and the truth of the Church
as unwritten. In fairness to him we may do so, although he probably
judged himself more severely than we may do. Even before his
irrevocable engagement in the cause of the Church, Veuillot was
not an enemy of God's cause, any more than was King Louis-
Philippe, or the Protestant statesman and historian Guizot. But a
life of daily polemics in the turbulent, revolutionary street life of
Paris did not allow him to show God in His glory, consoling the
solitude of sad hearts. A good soldier in all battles for God's honour,
he was not — like Leon Bloy — a poet of God's glory.
As we said in the Introduction the history of apologetics is a history
of answers; it begins with the Redeemer's own answer to the Rabbis
and Pharisees, whose reasonings on the Scriptures He has for ever
defeated. In France, Pascal was a reply to Montaigne. The great
humanist's aphorisms on the relativity of everything human was
defeated by a greater humanist, who, through a more masterly
exposition of human relativities, concluded that Jesus Christ will
suffer agony to the end of the world; we must keep watch until then. Joseph
de Maistre was a reply to Voltaire; to Voltaire's paradoxical wit,
the Church riposted with a more brilliantly paradoxical wit. To
oppose Montesquieu's wise and stoic search for harmony and
equilibrium in human institutions, the Church found Bonald, a
greater teacher of harmony, order and perfect equilibrium.
Mazzini's and Proudhon's burning desire for justice and for the
" People " found its reply in Louis Veuillot.
Then, a little later, when the idol of " the People " was replaced
by the aesthetic idol of artistic perfection and inventive genius, the
Church found her reply in Barbey d'Aurevilly, Leon Bloy, Ernest
Hello and Charles Peguy, as it found her doctors of objective science,
I96 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
this other idol of the age, in Cardinal Newman and Lord Acton,
and as the eternal agony of Christ found its voice, amidst the pleasant
and shallow declamations of the aestheticism of a prosperous age,
in Kierkegaard and Dostoievsky. Opportet ut fiat scandala. Louis
Veuillot — this is his immense merit, while it is perhaps also his
limitation — was the Christian scandal for the strong minds of
popular " Enlightenment."
THE TRUE FREEDOM OF THOUGHT1
I understand by " free -thinkers," as they call themselves,
those men of letters (or people who imagine themselves to be
such) who, in their writings, their speeches and their daily
fives, cunningly endeavour to destroy revealed religion and its
divine system of morality in France. Professors, writers, legis-
lators, bankers, gentlemen of the Bar, industrialists and
business-men — they are ubiquitous, they have a hand in every-
thing, they are our masters; it is they who have placed us in
our present position, which they exploit and aggravate.
I have tried to paint their portrait in this book, not, I confess,
in admiration. A Catholic and a son of the people, I am doubly
their enemy, from the time when I began to think too, that is to
say from the time when, by the grace of God, my mind was
freed from the yoke which they had placed upon it for so long.
" Free-thinkers " sounds as unpleasant to my ears as "Jesuit "
does to theirs. But being a Catholic meant that I had to con-
form to certain obligations. It would have been wrong of me
to burlesque a single portrait. I have copied from life; yet if I
have not allowed myself to embellish anything, I have not
drawn a veil over much. If a character seems to be far-fetched,
he has been taken from an original which was even more
brazen. The way in which these gentlemen present us on their
side is a matter of common knowledge. The reader will judge
whether the Jesuit's pencil is nearer to the truth than the free-
thinker's paint-brush.
I began this book several years ago, laid it aside and picked
it up again many times, until finally I had it ready for the
printer, when the adventure of last February2 intervened, so
that publication was postponed. I publish it now without
altering anything; I only omit a few chapters whose argument
1 Foreword to Louis Veuillot's Libres Penseurs, Paris, Jacques et Cie, 1850.
3 The February Revolution of 1848, which replaced the Constitutional
Monarchy of Louis -Philippe with the Second Republic.
LOUIS VEUILLOT 197
was riddled by the bullets which overthrew Charter,1 Throne
and Parliament. If only it had enabled me to tear up the whole
book! The anger, the sorrow, and the fears which filled my
heart when I wrote it would have vanished. I should have lost
my misgivings over the terrible dangers I tried to foretell. But
these dangers are still present in our principles and the Revolu-
tion at most has only changed our laws.
... I expect to have one reproach levelled at me. Nearly
all the free-thinkers belong to that class of well-dressed people
of formal education which is known as bourgeois] and I have not
been able to deal with them without bespattering the bour-
geoisie with mud. I shall be told that this is not the time to stir
up criticism against the middle classes, when their very
existence is threatened.
Granted that their very existence is threatened. But when I
wrote my book they seemed to be flourishing; and I wanted
to give a warning that, on the contrary, they were running a
great risk.
Who spoilt everything for them ? Neither I nor my brethren.
Exceedingly badly treated by the Government, the Adminis-
tration, Literature, Philosophy, Legislation and bourgeois pre-
dominance; cavilled at, insulted, oppressed, imprisoned, fined,
we have rendered good for evil. We have never failed to raise
our voices to point out the dangers which we were incurring;
we have never asked for anything but justice and liberty;
nobody can quote a single word or action of ours that has been
seditious.
Others did not observe such self-restraint. Nevertheless, the
bourgeoisie, and only the bourgeoisie, is responsible for the danger
in which they stand. The plots which have finally overthrown
the middle classes were either hatched in their midst, or only
achieved anything because of their support; the bourgeoisie
loaded the muskets and sharpened the sword which struck
them down; they undermined the ground on which they stood,
so that now they have lost their grip and are breaking up. I
think I am doing the bourgeoisie a. particular service by trying
to make them understand these facts, which they seem deli-
berately to refuse to recognise, and which it is high time that
they should know. If they do not understand what I am trying
to say, I am confident that their enemies will understand me
even less. I speak a language which is not current in the red
1 The Charter granted by Louis XVIII, on his restoration in 1814 after
Napoleon's fall, which formed the constitutional basis of the new Monarchy.
I98 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
suburbs; I have not the smallest fear that any workman will
spend three francs on my book, in order to find arguments
which popular hatred no longer finds useful, alas, and those
which it would find in it are hardly suitable for its purpose. I
will add that few bourgeois have gone on as many patrols as I
have since February 26th, or mounted guard more often. I
served with the National Guard during the latest riots. I shall
go to the barricades as often as it is necessary. I think I have
done my duty; in any case, I could not do more. I shall go to
the barricades with an aching heart, to save the State from a
present and very real danger; not in the least to bear witness
that I think all is well, and will go well, within the State.
Thanks to the recent painful victories, something is still left
standing; the vessel has not foundered, there is a ray of hope, a
miracle may happen : God is so good ! I fight sorrowfully there-
fore against the misguided workers, because of all the misfor-
tunes which threatens them, the greatest and the most irre-
parable of all would be their own triumph. If the sacrifice of
my life could postpone by one day this fatal triumph, I would
gladly give it; but with my dying breath I should say to my
companions in the fight : Do not wrap my body in your flag !
I came amongst you with very different aspirations from yours.
It is your doctrines which have fermented these frightful
passions. You must take your share of the blame for this
impious warfare. v
Pray do not confuse me with those flatterers of the people,
those depraved men, who assert that intelligence and virtue are
only to be found in the ranks of those who are corrupt and
ignorant enough to follow them ! All my life I have fought the
ambition of these so-called democrats, devoid as it is of talent
and above all, of conscience; they represent in my eyes
bourgeois vice at its worst. Since I first began to study them, I
never remember discerning in them any noble or sincere
impulse; I have always found them to be violent, lying, deceit-
ful and insolent; the only argument they know how to use is
the Moloch of steel, the triangular axe, which they call liberty,
equality and fraternity.
But if I am not on the side of the revolutionaries and cut-
throats, neither do I belong to the ranks of polite sceptics, blas-
phemous men of letters and swindlers, whose folly and greed
have dug the abyss confronting us. There is one thing which
is as intolerable as the vile unscrupulousness of men who flatter
the populace: it is the imperturbable flow of words with which
LOUIS VEUILLOT I99
the multitude of advocates pleads the complete innocence of
the bourgeoisie, asking: " What crime have they committed ? "
Free-thinkers, and free-doers (a man cannot be one without
the other) — I accuse the free -thinking bourgeoisie of having hated
God and, as a logical and premeditated result, of having des-
pised Man. This is their crime, if they really want to know.
They propagated and imposed this crime — yes imposed it by
example, by cunning and by the laws they made — on a section
of the people; that is the danger which confronts them, and at
the same time, it is their retribution.
Men of letters, statesmen, learned gentlemen of the middle
classes, what is your achievement since you came to power ?
You found the Church to be superfluous in this world. Not
only did you steal its wealth, destroy its institutions and reject
its laws; but we have seen you tireless in preaching, teaching
and commanding a like scorn and a like revolt amongst the
poorer classes ; certainly they never wanted you to take away
their religion, for irreligion strips them bare and kills them.
You wrote books and newspapers; you supported black-
hearted pedants and obscene mountebanks, so that they could
help your laws to loosen the remaining hold which Catholicism
still had over the masses ; madmen that you were, you did not
realise that each victory they achieved was one more stone torn
from the frail bulwark of your treasure and your power. When
low murmurs coming from the hearts of the multitudes, like
gusts of wind, precursor of the storms already brewing in those
innermost depths, brought before your very eyes some fragment
of the new dogmas, which were still being propagated in whis-
pers, you burst out laughing and said: " It is madness." And
if somebody called out to you: " Take care! It is madness;
but you are dealing with barbarians and God alone can save
you ! " — then you paraded your police, your soldiers, your penal
codes, your subservient law courts and you answered: " What
is God ? "
There were several apostles of this gospel of revenge and
frenzy amongst you, wearing moreover your own livery. You
crowded round them, applauded them, cherished them. " He
is a poet, he is saying something new; he rants, but his anger
is amusing; he is a sophist, but he is eloquent! " — And you
loaded them with almost as many favours as you give to a
clever dancer.
You welcomed everything that these buffoons said, prophets
several degrees lower down the social scale than yourselves.
200 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
They indicted you, they called curses down upon you, they
even calumniated you. . . . But while they cursed you, they
cast insults at the eternal Christ ; that was enough, you recog-
nised your own kind. If a priest said the same things to you,
inspired by faith and the promptings of charity, you stoned
him. Combalot, servant of God, missionary of the people, who
spent his whole life preaching forgiveness, reconciliation and
hope; Combalot was fined and imprisoned because he gave a
true description of University teaching. Who condemned him ?
This same bourgeoisie, in the name of whom, and for the benefit
of whom, a newspaper proprietor paid Eugene Sue 100,000
francs a year to teach Communist doctrines.
Is all this true, or am I accusing people falsely ? Have the
" thinkers," from Voltaire to M. Sue1; the statesmen from
M. de Choiseul to M. de Thiers; the legislators and adminis-
trators from the last Judicial Courts and the last Provincial
Assemblies of Royal Absolutism, down to the last Chamber of
Deputies and the last Prefects of Departments of the Constitu-
tional Monarchy (I say nothing of the rest), been anything else
but bourgeois, or faithful supporters of the bourgeoisie ? Did they
not hate the Church, impede her action, misrepresent her doc-
trine and pour scepticism in full measure into the hearts of the
people ?
Well, they succeeded! The people — not the whole of the
people, through the grace of God, but an appreciable section
of them, the workmen, the townsfolk, those who read and dis-
cuss politics — this part of the people lost their faith. They are
only a minority. They would have liked to win over more, and
had hoped to do so; but nevertheless, there are still one and
a half million able-bodied men who have arrived at " free
thought " — in other words, who have ceased to believe in God.
The Church, deprived of her institutions and her liberty,
cannot teach them any more; deprived of her wealth, she
cannot succour them any more; dishonoured in their con-
sciences by the calumnies of the " philosophers," made ridicu-
lous in their minds by the gibes of Voltaire, she can no longer
bring them back within her fold. Hence all Christian links
have been broken; every Christian habit has been lost. The
people are outside the bosom of the Mother of all charity; they
have ceased to drink from her breasts, from which they used to
draw faith and hope. That is exactly what was wanted.
1 Eugene Sue, 1804-1857, fashionable French novelist of the time, of naturalistic
tendencies and style.
LOUIS VEUILLOT 201
Unfortunately, other, unforeseen phenomena have developed,
parallel with the successful issue of the bourgeois plot. The
people are suffering, they are becoming a nuisance and are
getting out of hand. Their lowly station, which they once
accepted as a dispensation of Providence, in return for allevia-
tions which this same Providence had designed for them, and
which were distributed by the Church, they no longer accept
with resignation, now that it is dependent upon inexorable
chance, which brings no attendant alleviations. They begin
to ask dreadful questions : they wonder if all men were born
equal or no, and why some men are rich and others poor. They
are told that they are sovereign, they point to their masters;
they are told that their condition is improving, they reply that
they are hungry; books full of fine reasoning and beautiful
statistics on the inevitable inequality of the human State are
cast at them, they do not bother to read them. They prefer to
listen to the insane doctrines which are ventilated in the darkest
recesses of their infinite poverty. Instead of the Gospel of God,
which used to be their consolation, and of which they have
been robbed, they accept other doctrines which drive them to
frenzy. Like a dog which has gone mad, because it was tied too
long to its leash, they threaten to destroy the material order,
to hurl themselves upon society and loot it. What an uproar
they make, more alarming than peals of thunder! What
strength there is in those bare arms, more relentless than a
hurricane ! All the brilliance, all the glory, all the authority of
the body politic is vanquished within an hour. These straws
which take flight in the wind and disappear — they are the King,
the Charter, Parliament, the Judiciary and the Army. The
victors stop short in their progress, themselves amazed at their
conquest. They had not realised there would be a battle : they
had merely been giving vent to their impatience.
Terror (a legitimate terror!) rises in the hearts of the mighty
of the earth; they ask: What, shall we do? What is going to hap-
pen to us ? With perspiring brows and white faces they hastily
construct a new government. They try a thousand different
means to push the people aside, those frightening actors who
had appeared prematurely on the stage ; but the people them-
selves are determined to play the role for which the bourgeoisie
had long trained them. In vain do the bourgeoisie try to throw them
off. With unrelenting rage, they lay siege to a bulwark which
they know is too weak to withstand them. In vain are promises,
decrees, millions of francs thrown out to them from within the
202 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
gates; they shout for the bourgeoisie and repulse the sops which
are offered them in panic and fear: What I am after is your life's
blood, they jeer. They are still with us, their eyes haggard, their
hearts full of hatred, their hands threatening fire and destruc-
tion, brooding over the bitter memories of their wrongs.
Their wrongs ! Have they suffered then so cruelly ? Some
there are who deny it. Well-written books and eloquent
speeches testify to perfection that the people are freer, more
respected, better paid, better fed, than at the time when they
had no grievances. Granted; but all the same, the people are
discontented.
The truth is that they are under a delusion, vile flatterers
have led them astray; the truth is that they have given them-
selves up to absurd dreams and a savage pride. . . . Alas,
who has brought them to this pass, and what remedy can you
suggest ?
My father died at the age of fifty. He was a simple workman,
without any education or pride. Countless obscure and cruel
misfortunes had marked his days, which were spent in toil;
amongst so many trials, only the joy he took in his virtues, un-
shakable though quite unconscious, brought him some slight
consolation. For the space of fifty years, nobody had paid any
attention to his soul; never, except in his last moments, had
his heart, ravaged by anxiety, rested in God. He had always
known masters who were ready to sell him water, salt and air,
to claim a tithe of the sweat of his brow, and to require the
lives of his sons in war; never had he known a protector who
could defend and succour him; never a guide who could
enlighten him, or pray with him, or teach him how to hope.
At bottom, what had society said to him ? What had all these
rights, which are written so pompously into charters, meant in
his case ? " Work hard, be obedient and honest; for if you
rebel, you will be killed; if you steal and are found out, you
will go to prison. But if you suffer, weep alone, we cannot help
you; if you have no bread to eat, go to the workhouse, or
starve; it is none of our business." That is what society had
said to him and nothing more; and whatever promises are
written into constitutions, it cannot do or say anything else.
It only provides bread for the poor in the workhouse; it can-
not offer consolation and self-respect anywhere. Heavens!
what good does it do to deceive ourselves and follow a will-o'-the-
wisp ? Every day I listen to the speeches deputies make, and I
have just followed most carefully the debate on the right to
LOUIS VEUILLOT 203
public assistance and to work; not a single legislator who does
lot look on the poorest citizen as his brother, I am sure; but
vhat lies at the end of all these homilies ? Nurses at the work-
louse and the bolted doors of the asylum of Bicetre !
So my father had worked, suffered and died. Standing at his
>pen grave, I conjured up in my mind's eye the long-drawn-out
rials of his life, every one of them, and I thought of all the joys
lis heart, which was truly created to love God, in spite of the
tate of servitude in which he lived, ought to have known: pure
md celestial joys, which cannot be told in words, and of which
le had been cruelly and criminally deprived by society. Then
rom the tomb of that poor workman there came to me as it
were a glimmer of truth from the grave, which made me under-
hand, and call down a curse . . . not on work, on poverty,
)r on suffering, but on the great social crime, the crime of
rreligion, which robs the disinherited of this world of the com-
Densations by which God has offset their lowly fate; I felt a
nalediction rise up from the depths of my grief.
Yes, it was at that precise moment that I began to under-
stand and judge this society, this civilisation, these so-called
wise men who had denied God, and by denying God had
"ejected the poor and took no further interest in their bodies
and their souls. I said to myself: This social structure is
niquitous, it will crumble and perish.
I was a Christian by that time: if I had not been, from
thenceforth I should have joined the various secret societies.
1 should have reasoned, like so many others to whom the light
xom on high has not been transmitted: Why should other
people be well-housed, well-clothed and well-fed, while we are
;overed with rags, huddled together in garrets, forced to work
n sunshine or in rain to earn scarcely enough to die on ? This
dangerous problem would have made my head reel ; for if God
^ives no answer to it, no man can do so. When I was a child
and one of my father's employers would come along and
roughly give him his orders, without bothering to remove his
lat, my heart would thump as I felt a frantic longing to humble
this insolent creature, to humiliate him and crush him. I
would say to myself: Who made him the master and my father
the slave ? My father, who is good, decent and strong, and who
never did harm to a soul; while this man is puny, evil, dis-
honest and leads a scandalous life! My father and this man
represented the whole of society in my eyes. Now if I had
204 CATHOLIC POLITICAL THOUGHT
remained as ignorant as working people usually do, does any-
body imagine that the Short Treatises of the Academy of Moral and
Political Science would have meant anything to me, and that I
would have accepted as inevitable that unequal division of the
world's goods of which I was fated to have such a small part ?
The logic of passion works differently. Either I would have
done my utmost to seize a larger portion or I should have
shouted with the crowd: Let us break up the lion's share, so
that at least there will be equality of poverty ! Perhaps I shan't
get any benefit out of it, but I can't lose anything by it either —
at least I shall have the satisfaction of taking my revenge and
I shan't be insulted any more.
There lies the wound in the people; it is in their soul; it is
a deep one, septic and fearful to behold. Constitutions will not
help much, guns not at all. Society is threatened with complete
ruin if it does not spit out the poison which it has been
imbibing for the last century, a poison which traitors and fools
are still offering it, even in these crucial days when everything
seems to be breaking up.
Let society lose no more time! Perhaps it only needs one
last dose, one last law against Christ and His Church, before it
is utterly destroyed.
I point out in my book, as well as I can in my weakness and
obscurity, some of the men who are trying to poison society,
in order to give the public a warning. They are the same today
as they were seven months ago: revolutionaries wearing the
Republican cap, just as once they wore the livery of the king.
Liberty, equality, fraternity! Vain words, even fatal ones,
now that they have acquired a political sense ; for politics have
changed them into three lies. Liberty really means justice;
equality is humility and fraternity is another word for charity.
We shall have liberty when we dispense justice; we shall accept
equality, when we have all bowed our heads to the level of the
Cross; we shall practise fraternity when we adore our Father
Who is in Heaven, and when we have asked Him to give us the
grace to love our brothers with the same love which He gives
to His children. Until that time there will be nothing in our
souls but selfishness, covetousness and pride; and the Repub-
lican device will only mean, as in the past, a bullet in our guns
or the blade of the guillotine in the hands of triumphant
factions.
I end with the words which the universal Church in her faith
sings on this very day (The Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross) :
LOUIS VEUILLOT 205
Dominus ostendit Moysi lignum: quod cum insisset in aquas, in dulcetu-
iinem versae sunt. This wood which the Lord shows to the leader
3f the people, and which, cast into the waters, makes them sweet
where once they were bitter, is a figure of the Cross. Only the
Cross can save the world.
1D17331
Due
COLLEGE LIBRARY
Date Due
Returned Due
Returned
APR 1 7 20
m
V I
-
Catholic political thought, 1 7 main
322.08M536cC2
3 lEba 03301* i*57A
'*
Open Library