Revolution and the Republic
Page 68
the Catholic Church had to acknowledge the legitimacy of freedom of conscience.
As for Protestantism, Guizot readily recognized that it was often seen as being on
the side of revolution, as being ‘incompatible with social order, religious peace, and
monarchy’. This was a mistake for, despite the fact that liberty of thought had
always been at the heart of Protestantism, ‘never has a religious society been more
disposed to show deference and respect towards the civil power’.117 Nor was it
112 Ibid. 38–9.
113 Ibid. 51.
114 Ibid. 53–86.
115 Ibid. 56.
116 Ibid. 66.
117 Ibid. 75.
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conceivable that France would be converted to Protestantism. Catholics and
Protestants, therefore, should rather fight together against their common enemies
of impiety and immorality and, in doing so, ‘revive religious life’. ‘Harmony in
liberty’, Guizot wrote, ‘is the Christian spirit; it is charity combined with fervour’.118
Accordingly, it was to the benefit of both religions and of society in general that the
State should accord equal protection to all creeds and forms of worship.
The same principles of mutual respect and toleration applied to philosophy.
Guizot’s argument here was that, if the philosophical enterprise itself remained
unchanged, it now better understood that philosophy alone was not sufficient to
secure the conditions in which society and morality could thrive. For all philoso-
phy’s victory over its old adversaries, it had ceased to be ‘utopian’ and saw that its
impiety and religious indifference were in need of correction. Consequently, he
continued, ‘philosophy is ready to become once again seriously and sincerely
religious’.119 In sum, Catholicism, Protestantism, and philosophy would come to
constitute a new spiritual alliance and from this the ‘spiritual order’ would recover
‘its activity and its brilliance’.
The connection between these opinions and Guizot’s better-known political
views was a tight one. Most obviously, in much the same way that Guizot wished to
see the political order of the new France characterized by a juste milieu, so too he
sought to encourage the emergence of spiritual consensus built around moderate,
non-dogmatic religious beliefs. The ambition was to harness our striving for the
eternal not only to enrich our souls but also to consolidate the principles and
practices of constitutional monarchy.
In the second of his essays, Guizot did not specify the philosophy that he had in
mind to contribute to this task. However, it was without doubt the Eclecticism
of Victor Cousin. Cousin was a truly remarkable presence in French intellectual
life, exercising immense influence over a whole ‘regiment’ of young disciples.120
In addition to holding a chair in philosophy at the Sorbonne (from the tender age
of 23), he became a member of the Institut de France and the Académie Française
as well a peer of France, sitting in the upper house of the French parliament.
More than this, under the July Monarchy it was Cousin who effectively con-
trolled the curriculum of the French university system and the nation’s lycées. It
was, for example, Cousin who in 1840 introduced the now-famous agrégation
in philosophy, a qualification he oversaw from his lofty position as director of the
École Normale Supérieure. It is only a slight exaggeration to suggest that his
thought represented the official philosophy of the July Monarchy.121
Eclecticism, as its name implies, drew upon a distinct conception of philosophi-
cal methodology. Through a study of the history of philosophy, it aimed to
combine what it regarded as ‘the true and essential elements’ of all philosophical
118 Guizot, Méditations et Études Morales, 83.
119 Ibid. 85.
120 See Goldstein, The Post-Revolutionary Self: Politics and the Psyche, 1750–1850 (Cambridge,
Mass., 2005); Armstrong Kelly, The Humane Comedy, 134–80; and Jules Simon, Victor Cousin
(London, 1888).
121 See Taine, Les Philosophes Français du XIXe siècle (1857), 299.
Religion, Enlightenment, and Reaction
321
knowledge. Through this, Cousin contended, it generated ‘the decomposition of all
systems by the fire and steel of criticism’ and ‘their reconstruction in a new system
which is the complete representation of consciousness in history’.122 In essence,
however, Eclecticism denoted a wholesale reaction against the sensationalist episte-
mology of the eighteenth century.123 Cousin arrived at this position by a somewhat
circuitous route—his early influences included the voluntarism of Maine de
Biran,124 the commonsense philosophy of Thomas Reid and the Scottish school,125
the classes of his first professor, the Doctrinaire Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard,126 and,
most important of all, the German philosophy of Kant, Hegel, and Schelling127—
but in doing so he moved decisively against the psychological model of the self
derived from Locke and Condillac and what remained of idéologie.128 The outcome
was not only to open up the possibility of new speculative and metaphysical
considerations but was also to let God back into philosophy, albeit a God that
was far from satisfying the requirements of Catholic orthodoxy. Cousin, as his
former pupil Jules Simon wrote, ‘admitted the infinite’.129 He also admitted the
eternal. So, to his own satisfaction at least, Cousin was able to reconcile the
demands of faith and of reason and, in so doing, to affirm the instinctive convic-
tions of religious belief. From what we know, he also managed to convince much of
his sizeable audience.
Eclecticism was forged in opposition to the theocratic logic of the Restoration
(Cousin was twice suspended from his teaching post at the Sorbonne during the
1820s) and, perhaps not unsurprisingly, it lost most of its critical edge once its
institutional hegemony had been established.130 The simplest (and crudest) char-
acterization of Eclecticism in power is that it provided a philosophy for the newly
dominant bourgeoisie. As Cousin himself observed at the close of one of his most
famous pieces of writing, the preface to the 1833 edition of his Fragmens philoso-
phiques, ‘My political faith is in entire accordance with my philosophical faith.’131
To be sure, the limited political pronouncements made by Cousin prior to and after
the 1848 Revolution made unambiguously clear his attachment to both the
principles of constitutional monarchy and those of the French Revolution.132
122 Cousin, Fragmens philosophiques (1833), p. liv.
123 See Philibert Damiron, Mémoires pour server à l’histoire de la philosophie au XVIIIe siècle, 2 vols.
(1858).
124 See Maine de Biran, ‘Comparison des trois points de vue de Th. Reid, Condillac et M. de Tracy
sur l’idée de l’existence ou le jugement d’extériorité’, in Stéphane Douailler, Roger-Pol Droit, and
Patrice Vermeren (eds.), Philosophie, France, XIXe siècle: Écrits et opuscules (1994), 29–35.
125 See Théodore Jouffroy, ‘De la philosophie et du sens commun’, ibid. 60–75.
126 See Royer-Collard, ‘Cours de troisième année
1813–1814’, ibid. 36–59.
127 Cousin visited Germany in 1817 and 1818 and then again in 1824.
128 See Cousin, Cours de la philosophie morale au dix-huitième siècle, professè à la Faculté des Lettres, en
1819 et 1820, 4 vols. (1837–42).
129 Simon, Victor Cousin, 59.
130 See Paul Bénichou, Le Sacre de l’écrivain 1750–1830: Essai sur l’avènement d’un pouvoir spirituel
laïque dans la France moderne (1996), 245–63.
131 Cousin, Fragmens philosophiques, p. lx.
132 Cousin, Cours de la philosophie morale au dix-huitième siècle, professè à la Faculté des Lettres, en
1819 et 1820, i. 325–47; Justice et charité (1848); and Des Principes de la Révolution française et du
Gouvernement représentatif (1864).
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‘In sum’, Cousin wrote, ‘the three great principles that for me represent the genius
of the French Revolution are national sovereignty, justice or the emancipation of
the individual, and civil charity or the gradual lessening of ignorance, poverty, and
vice.’133 However, for Cousin, this did not entail the establishment of a republic
but rather the need for a government that was stable, durable, and moderate. ‘The
Republic’, Cousin wrote, ‘is the sinister face of the Revolution.’134 ‘Pure democra-
cy’ gave power not to the ‘intelligent and enlightened’ part of the nation but to the
‘ignorant mass’. Constitutional monarchy, by contrast, was ‘the revolution
organized’ and, in Cousin’s opinion, the regime most appropriate to the France
and the Europe of the nineteenth century.
The more serious part of the charge against Eclecticism is that its proponents
self-consciously set out to fashion a philosophy with appeal to an educated minority
and one which (it goes without saying) defended the interests of property owners.
This is not without a grain of truth. Eclecticism saw property as a right, inherent in
our personality and not dependent upon work.135 It stipulated that one of our
fundamental duties was to respect the liberty of others. Moreover, in attributing an
educational function to the State—government, Cousin wrote, had an obligation
to develop and protect the ‘moral life’ of the individual136—it gave considerable
weight to the moral instruction of the poor and, in doing so, assumed that this
largely Christian education would inculcate a set of conservative values. The moral
law taught us not only to will what was good but also that universal happiness on
earth was a chimera.137
But seen exclusively in this light much of what amounted to the immense appeal
and attraction of Eclecticism to its original, mostly young, and often wildly
enthusiastic, audience escapes our understanding.138 What Cousin offered was a
creed that denied that philosophy led inevitably to scepticism and atheism. Rather,
it was ‘the view of the soul’.139 As such, Eclecticism distanced religion from sterile
dogma and ceremony and opened up the possibility of a renewal of our sense of ‘the
true, the beautiful, and the good’.140 It was this that Guizot, for long a colleague
and friend of Cousin, had fully appreciated and had set before his readers in 1838.
For Eclecticism’s opponents, its message was a very different and much less
inspiring one. The traditionalist school associated with legitimist Catholicism not
133 Cousin, Des Principes, pp. xxii–xxiii.
134 Ibid., p. xxxiii.
135 Cousin, Justice et charité, 27–35.
136 Ibid. 48.
137 Cousin, ‘De la loi morale et de la liberté’, Fragmens philosophiques, 209–16.
138 See Alan B. Spitzer, The French Generation of 1820 (Princeton, NJ, 1987), 71–96. Spitzer writes
that the whole point of Cousin’s lectures was to ‘provide the answer to the question of not only what to
believe but how to live’.
139 Cousin, ‘De la loi morale et de la liberté’, 210.
140 See Du Vrai, du Beau, et du Bien (1858). In the author’s preface to the 1853 edn., Cousin said of
Eclecticism that ‘it teaches the spirituality of the soul, the liberty and responsibility of human actions,
moral obligation, disinterested virtue, the dignity of justice, the beauty of charity; and beyond the
limits of the world it shows a God, author and model of humanity, who, after having evidently made
man for an excellent end, will not abandon him in the mysterious development of his destiny’: ibid.,
pp. vii–viii.
Religion, Enlightenment, and Reaction
323
only believed that Eclecticism wanted to dispense with the supernatural entirely but
also that its ultimate ambition was to supplant the Catholic Church. From this
counter-revolutionary position, Eclecticism looked like one more step towards a
secular world. The left, in search of spiritual regeneration through a rejuvenated
and purified Christianity,141 was similarly dismissive of a doctrine that offered little
to satisfy popular passions and little prospect of the appearance of a new Messiah.
The Christian socialist Pierre Leroux, for example, offered a detailed refutation of
Eclecticism, criticizing what he took to be its psychology, ontology, methodology,
and conception of philosophy.142 This ‘false’ and ‘Machiavellian’ philosophy, he
wrote, had shrouded society and government in ‘lethargy and a feeble torpor’.
It was a doctrine for those content with the present and who denied the possibility
of progress. ‘As for us’, Leroux concluded, ‘this present has nothing which pleases
us. Therefore let the dead bury the dead, as Jesus said, and let us, as Saint Paul
said, turn our thoughts towards the city of the future.’143 For his part, Hippolyte
Taine, writing in the 1850s when Cousin’s celebrity and power had all but
evaporated, attributed the success of Eclecticism to what had been a fashionable
desire to subordinate science to morality and a taste for abstract ideas. It amounted,
he wrote, to no more than ‘a pile of inaccurate sentences, unsatisfactory arguments,
and obvious ambiguities’. As a doctrine, he continued, it was powerless, forgotten,
and moribund.144 In these criticisms lay Eclecticism’s fate. It simply wilted under
the combined assault of revelation, utopianism, and science. The July Monarchy
fared little better.
I I I
Viewed from the vantage point of its close, the nineteenth century was one of
scientific progress and technological advance. Street lighting, electric tramways, the
department store, and the Paris Métro provided daily evidence of a society rushing
headlong towards modernity. Yet it was also a century of persistent and resurgent
religiosity. Eugen Weber, for example, records that in the mid-1870s, 35,387,703
of the 36,000,000 people in France were listed in the official census as Catholics.
There was still one priest for every 639 inhabitants. The rural masses continued to
venerate local saints and religious shrines in great numbers and did so in a world
that was ‘eager for miracles’.145 After a vision of the Virgin Mary appeared to a
141 See Edward Berenson, Populist Religion and Left-Wing Politics in France, 1830–1852 (Princeton,
NJ, 1984), 36–73, and ‘A New Religion of the Left: Christianity and Social Revolution in France,
>
1815–1848’, in François Furet and Mona Ozouf (eds.), The French Revolution and the Creation of
Modern Political Culture, iii. The Transformation of Political Culture 1789–1848 (Oxford, 1989),
543–60.
142 Pierre Leroux, Réfutation de l’Éclectisme ou se trouve exposée la vraie définition de la philosophie
(1839).
143 Ibid. 276.
144 Taine, Les Philosophes Français, 283–307.
145 Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernisation of Rural France 1870–1914
(London, 1976), 339.
324
Religion, Enlightenment, and Reaction
peasant girl, Bernadette Soubirous, at Lourdes in 1858, thousands upon thousands
of believers made the pilgrimage to the holy site every year (a journey made all the
easier by the existence of the railways and all the more accessible by adverts in the
popular press). Remarkable cures of the lame and infirm were regularly witnessed,
thus giving further vitality to Marian piety.146 The national search for renewal after
the military defeat of 1870 was accompanied by a widespread call among the
devout for the expiation of the nation’s sins and a renewal of France’s broken
covenant with the Church, a sentiment given lasting expression through the
construction of the Sacré-Cœur Basilica on the hillside of Montmartre above
Paris. Everything was done to ensure the Basilica’s completion before the Republic
commenced the celebrations of the centenary of the Revolution.147 Throughout
the entire century, the Church fought long and hard to restrict state control over
the education system, a battle it pursued not only from the pulpit but through the
parti catholique in parliament and the powerful Catholic press (most notably,
L’Univers, edited by Louis Veuillot, and the monthly journal, Le Correspondant).
Moreover, it was only in 1892—in his encyclical Au milieu des solicitudes—that
Pope Leo XIII urged French Catholics to rally to the Republic. Prior to this the
Church hierarchy had unhesitatingly and unfailingly sided with the causes of
political reaction and the enemies of liberalism. Popular anticlericalism developed
a language all of its own to characterize and stigmatize such anti-republican
behaviour.148
It was the publication of Chateaubriand’s Le Génie du Christianisme in 1802 that