(Lyons, 1821).
209 Ibid. 4–110.
210 Ibid. 138.
211 Ibid. 324.
212 Maistre, Du Pape, 12.
213 Ibid. 168.
214 Ibid. 157.
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It was this that the eighteenth century, ‘with its intense and blind pride’, had
failed to understand. Man, tainted by original sin, was ‘evil, horribly evil’. He was
‘insatiable for power’ and ‘infinite in his desires’. All men were born despots and left
to their own devices would sow chaos and anarchy round them. As such, evil existed
on the earth and acted constantly in it, producing endless suffering. And it was
because of this that God had granted to sovereigns ‘the supreme prerogative of
punishing crimes’. From this arose the ‘necessary existence’ of the executioner. This
‘inexplicable being’, Maistre wrote, was a species unto himself, a man who had put
all pleasant and honourable occupations to one side and had chosen to torture and to
put to death his fellow creatures. And yet, Maistre continued, ‘all grandeur, all
power, all subordination rests on the executioner: he is the horror and bond of
human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world and, at that
very moment, order gives way to chaos, thrones topple and society disappears.’215
It was consequently without hesitation that Maistre advanced the cause of
counter-revolution, arguing that the people themselves would be the principal
beneficiaries of a return to the old order. Monarchy, he proclaimed, was the most
ancient, the most universal, and the most natural form of government. Democracy,
by contrast, was an association of men without sovereignty and, as such, was
destined to perish. The idea of a whole people acting as sovereign and legislator
defied belief. A restored monarchy alone would return France to a condition of
order and tranquillity. The truth of the matter, however, was that, over time, even
Maistre himself came to see that a return to the ancien régime, for all its desirability,
was well-nigh impossible and that the change introduced into French society by the
Revolution was irreversible.
Ultramontane opinions such as those of Maistre were always in a minority, and
remained so under the Restoration. Gallican sentiments prevailed among both the
clergy and the laity, and the government, through the Ministry of Ecclesiastical
Affairs, continued to regulate the external aspects of religious life and practice. Yet
the return of the monarchy did not put an end to these disputes and Maistre proved
to be by no means alone in combining fideism and a rejection of eighteenth-century
rationalism with royalism and a reassertion of papal authority. Another such was
the passionate, tormented, and ill-fated Abbé Félicité de Lamennais.216
We catch a first glimpse of this stance in Lamennais’s text of 1809, Réflexions sur
l’état de l’Église en France,217 written when its author was still in his mid-twenties.
The blame for France’s descent into a state of irreligion was placed firmly at the
door of the Reformation and its descendants, the philosophes of the eighteenth
century. By destroying the foundations of social and political order they had
established anarchy as the principle of both Church and State. A belief in the
sovereignty of the people had been combined with the affirmation of the right of
215 Maistre, ‘Les Soirées de Saint-Petersbourg’, 471.
216 See Alec R. Vidler, Prophecy and Papacy: A Study of Lamennais, the Church and the Revolution
(London, 1954); Louis Le Guillou, Lamennais (Brussels, 1969); and Le Guillou, L’Évolution de la
pensée religieuse de Félicité de Lamennais (1966).
217 See Lamennais, ‘Réflexions sur l’état de l’Église en France pendant le dix-huitième siècle, et sur
sa situation actuelle’, Œuvres Complètes de F. de La Mennais (1836–7), vi. 1–115.
Religion, Enlightenment, and Reaction
335
private judgement in matters of belief. Pierre Bayle, the Jansensists, Voltaire,
Diderot and his fellow writers of the Encyclopédie, and finally Rousseau, were
attributed with the creation of ‘a monstrous chaos of incoherent ideas’. And so,
‘as error produces error and disorder leads to disorder’, the men of letters extended
their power over public opinion and the persecution of the Church began, leading
eventually to ‘the plan of destruction adopted by the legislators of 1789’. The end
point was reached in 1793 when ‘terror and death walked in silence from one end
of France to the other’. Then, Lamennais contended, ‘the designs and hopes of
philosophy’ were fully realized. In the name of liberty 25 million people were
reduced to ‘the most abject slavery’.218
In the second, concluding part of the text Lamennais outlined a set of proposals
for the reinvigoration of the Church. These were far-ranging, and included organi-
zational reform, the recruitment of more clergy, as well as the revitalization of
Christian teaching amongst the laity. The ambition was ‘to save religion, to save
civilization, to save France’. It was here that a new enemy was identified: indiffer-
ence. Described as ‘the miserable and baneful consequence of materialist doctrines’
which had taught us that only those things which we could see and touch were real,
it was a manifestation of the complete disappearance of ‘our moral sense’.219 Never,
Lamennais wrote, has man been subject to such wholesale degeneration. Here was
the powerful and polemical theme that Lamennais would develop in his most
brilliant work, the Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de la religion of 1817.
As Lamennais stated in this text: ‘A fundamental error in religion is also a
fundamental error in politics and vice versa’.220 Therefore, an error which de-
stroyed power in ‘religious society’ was equally destructive of power within ‘political
society’ and this was ‘proved incontrovertibly’ by the French Revolution. Pre-
revolutionary France, according to Lamennais, was a country ruled by an ‘ancient
race of kings’ and was possessed of both a perfect constitution and wise laws. It
flourished in peace with its neighbours and was admired as ‘the queen of civiliza-
tion’.221 This was destroyed once man proclaimed himself to be sovereign, by
virtue of which he rose up against God and against power, declaring himself to be
free and equal in his relationship towards both. In the name of liberty, the
constitution, the laws, and all political and religious institutions were overturned.
In the name of equality, all hierarchy, along with all political and religious distinc-
tions, was abolished. Not since the act of deicide committed by the Jews had such
an enormous crime been perpetrated, Lamennais contended. When Louis XVI
mounted upon the scaffold, it was not a simple mortal who had succumbed to the
rage of evil but ‘the living image of the Divinity’ and with it the principle of order.
Thus, ‘upon the ruins of the throne and the altar, upon the remains of the priest
and the sovereign, began the reign of force, the reign of hatred and of terror’.222
From this it was abundantly clear that Lamennais would not be reco
nciled to the
political and religious compromises associated with the Restoration. This was most
218 Ibid. 68.
219 Ibid. 79.
220 ‘Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de la religion’, ibid. i. 335.
221 Ibid. 330.
222 Ibid. 336.
336
Religion, Enlightenment, and Reaction
apparent in De la religion considérée dans ses rapports avec l’ordre politique et
civile, published in 1825.223 The text itself was a powerful and relentless critique
of Protestantism, the consequences of which were broadly taken to be the destruc-
tion of ‘European unity’ and the overturning of the system of ‘public law’ upon
which European civilization had rested.224 Beneath this lay an appreciation of the
destructive power of Protestantism when seen as the supreme expression of liberty
of conscience. ‘The religion of the century’, Lamennais wrote, ‘is the right of
everyone to do as they please; and this without limits or restrictions, and applied
as much to our duties as to our beliefs.’225 It represented the negation of all truth
and thus not only of divine law but of all morality and of society as a whole.
However, the text began with the familiar comparison between England and
France of the time. Given the impact of the Protestant religion upon English affairs
Lamennais saw nothing to admire (or emulate) in the sorry tale that had led to the
execution of Charles I. Yet Lamennais acknowledged that in France, unlike in
England, all trace of aristocracy had been eradicated, with the result that France was
‘an assemblage of thirty million individuals between whom the law recognized no
distinctions except those of wealth’.226 In political terms this meant that the two
chambers instituted under the Charte did not represent, as in England, the interests
of aristocratic and landed power but were rather part of what Lamennais described
as ‘a vast democracy’.
The consequences of this were dire in the extreme. Each form of government had
its own distinctive character and that of democracy was ‘perpetual mobility’.
Everything was subject to rapid and frightening change at the behest of passion
and opinion. Society was plunged into a state of ‘general instability’ and politics
became nothing more than intrigue and the pursuit of office. It might one day
come to the pass, Lamennais speculated, that the country would be handed over to
the ‘men of money’ and perhaps even ‘sold to a Jew’.
This was not all that was to be feared. The doctrine of the sovereignty of the
people contained within it the ‘principle of atheism’.227 Lamennais consequently
devoted the second chapter of De la religion to demonstrating not merely that the
French Revolution was the supreme political expression of Protestantism but also
that Catholicism could no longer be considered either the religion of the State or of
French society. Christianity, he continued, was now seen as something merely to be
administered by the State, and everything was being done to undermine the status
of the Church as an institution that was ‘one, universal, eternal, and holy’.228 Once
the infallibility of the pope was challenged, the infallibility of the Church could be
challenged, and when this occurred it followed that there would be no Christianity
and that the idea of religion itself would soon vanish. All that would remain was a
‘national Church’ with its ‘Gallican liberties’, liberties that, in Lamennais’s view,
were no more than a form of slavery.
It was in response to legislation of 1828 directed against religious congregations
that Lamennais called for the Catholic Church to enjoy the liberties promised by
223 See Œuvres Complètes de F. de La Mennais, vii.
224 Ibid. 255.
225 Ibid. 143.
226 Ibid. 9–10.
227 Ibid. 22.
228 Ibid. 129.
Religion, Enlightenment, and Reaction
337
the Charte to all other religions.229 Des Progrès de la révolution et de la guerre contre
l’Église began by stating that, in a society not possessing a common faith, govern-
ment would be dictatorial and arbitrary.230 The attraction of religion was that it
submitted all, without exception, to an ‘immutable law’ where men ‘in their minds
have the same thoughts, in their hearts the same love, in their consciences the same
duties’. There was no division between public and private morality. Things had
started to go wrong, therefore, when the relationship between religion and politics
broke down. Little by little, monarchs freed themselves from this jurisdiction, and
so, in establishing the separation between the temporal and the spiritual, Louis XIV
had made ‘despotism the fundamental law of the State’. Correspondingly, the
‘universal independence’ of individual reason became the grounds upon which
religious belief and morality were premised. Nothing was taken to be either
absolutely true or absolutely false, with the result that the world was ‘delivered
up to an infinite number of permanently changing opinions’.231
Lamennais drew particular attention to one aspect of this new social and political
order: individualism. It was but a reflection of the ‘sovereignty of individual reason’
in the spiritual sphere and of the ‘sovereignty of each man’ in the political sphere. It
destroyed the very idea of obedience and duty, destroyed the legitimacy of power
and of the law, with the result that ‘domination’ could have no other basis than
‘force’ and no other form but tyranny. Its ultimate consequence would be ‘the total
extinction of society and the death of the human race’.232
Having set his argument in this apocalyptic context, Lamennais next considered
two doctrines that, in his view, flowed from the separation of government from
Christianity: liberalism and Gallicanism.233 Both were ‘equally false, equally op-
posed to the fundamental laws of the social order’. The ‘most general principle’ of
‘dogmatic liberalism’, Lamennais contended, was the sovereignty and ‘absolute
independence’ of individual reason, a principle that excluded all ‘external authority’
and therefore excluded all notion of ‘divine and obligatory law’. Despite what
liberalism might proclaim, it would lead to ‘an inevitable slavery’. In response
Lamennais provided his own definition of both liberalism and liberty. By liberty, he
argued, was meant the ‘legitimacy of power’ and its accord with ‘immutable justice’.
Thus, in demanding liberty a properly conceived liberalism would demand ‘order’,
and it would demand ‘what no one had the right to refuse to men, what God
himself had commanded them to want and to love’.234 By way of proof Lamennais
instanced the plight of the poor in Protestant countries. Without the benefits of a
‘true Christianity’ they were easily made subject to ‘arbitrary power’. England, ‘the
classic land of liberty’, had reduced a substantial portion of its population to the
virtual slavery of ‘industrial tyranny’.
229 On the history of liberal Catholicism, a movement which can be dated from Lamennais’s
reaction to the ordinances of 1828, the classic text remains Georges We
ill, Histoire du Catholicisme
libéral en France 1828–1908 (1909).
230 ‘Des Progrès de la révolution et de la guerre contre l’Église’, Œuvres Complètes de F. de La
Mennais, ix. 1–198.
231 Ibid. 1–7.
232 Ibid. 19.
233 Ibid. 20–57.
234 Ibid. 25.
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Religion, Enlightenment, and Reaction
Similar arguments were deployed against Gallicanism. The so-called liberties of
the French Church were a cloak that hid the potential for ‘despotism without any
limits’. Here was a doctrine which accepted the basic premise that all power derived
from God, only then to disregard it in an effort to demonstrate that kings were
subject to no ecclesiastical authority in the temporal realm. From this, in Lamen-
nais’s opinion, Gallicanism drew two woeful conclusions. First, a government
could be deemed legitimate if it was constituted according to ‘the political laws
of the country’ and irrespective of whether it was ‘tyrannical, heretical, a persecutor,
or impious’. Next, whilst the sovereign as a person had the same duties towards
others as everyone else, as sovereign the only rule which applied in the treatment of
his subjects and other rulers was that of self-interest. Acting according to the laws of
justice was an irrelevance.
Lamennais’s conclusion therefore was that, in their different ways, both liberal-
ism and Gallicanism destroyed ‘the idea of power and of obedience’. ‘Their
common vice’, he claimed, was to establish ‘a deep, inevitable, and permanent
slavery’, where power operated arbitrarily and without limits.235 If liberalism
refused to recognize divine law, Gallicanism freed the sovereign from any obligation
to obey it. Thus, there could be no repose for society if it were to remain under the
influence of these ‘two erroneous systems’. Rather, only Christianity could offer
‘the union of order and liberty’, because it alone conformed to the eternal laws of
justice and possessed the capacity to constrain ‘rebel wills to submit to this law’. At
one and the same time Christianity would establish power upon ‘a divine founda-
tion’ and ‘protect peoples from the arbitrary power of kings’.236 The salvation of
the world, therefore, depended upon a return to ‘true Christianity’.
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