It was only at this point of the argument, as Lamennais considered how such a
return might be attained, that he embraced the recognizably liberal causes with
which he was later associated. Upon this occasion, he did so for the straightforward
reason that, in his view, it was the Catholic Church and its members who were most
subject to oppression by the State. In the context of state regulation of Catholic
schools, for example, his view was that ‘never since the origin of the world has such
a terrible despotism been visited upon the human race’.237 The ultimate ambition
of the civil authorities, he stated, was ‘the abolition of Catholicism’. The Church
therefore should withdraw from the State and recover its independence, thereby to
prepare itself for the renewal of the social and spiritual order. ‘We cannot repeat
often enough’, Lamennais wrote, ‘that the most urgent duty of the clergy in the
present circumstances is to separate itself completely from an atheistic political
society.’238
The difficult question that remains is that of assessing the extent to which
Lamennais’s thinking evolved in a more conventionally liberal direction after the
Revolution of 1830. Lamennais’s famous, but short-lived, journal, L’Avenir, saw
itself as proclaiming a ‘true liberalism’ where ‘liberty must be equal for all or it is
235 ‘Des Progrès de la révolution et de la guerre contre l’Eglise’, Œuvres Complètes de F. de La
Mennais, 39.
236 Ibid. 46.
237 Ibid. 115.
238 Ibid. 188.
Religion, Enlightenment, and Reaction
339
secure for no one’.239 In its pages, the extension of the suffrage was defended in
terms of the need to implant the principle of election within the ‘bosom of the
masses’. Liberty of association was justified as a means of protection against
arbitrary power and of facilitating the articulation of public opinion. The centrali-
zation of state power was described as ‘a shameful leftover of imperial despotism’
that was contrary to both nature and liberty.240 The people did not exist to serve
those in power: rather power was there to serve the people.
Crucially, however, Lamennais now believed that the Church had nothing to
fear from the emergence of what he termed ‘a truly enlightened and generous
liberalism’.241 Christianity, he continued, found the world enslaved and its ‘political
mission’ therefore was to set it free. ‘Through its emancipatory power’, he pro-
claimed, the Church ‘will deliver man from the yoke of man; through the principle
of order which it embodies and through the charity of which it is the source, it
will lead men, free in Jesus Christ, to the unity of the family and to the unity of the
nation, in anticipation of the day which is approaching where it will constitute
the nations themselves into one single, great nation.’242 The role of the Church was
thus not simply to free men but to bring them together, and to do so not through
any political jurisdiction but through the power of love. Specifically Lamennais
here mentioned the ‘question of the poor’, recognizing that unless there was ‘a total
change in the industrial system’ there would be a ‘general uprising of the poor
against the rich’. In the new society of the future the priest would play a key role in
ministering to ‘the suffering part of humanity’.243
But those who collaborated in the writing of L’Avenir also saw themselves as
‘sincere Catholics’ and Lamennais did not hesitate to affirm that the doctrines of
the Holy See were the ‘pure expression of Christianity, to which the world owes
everything in terms of civilization and liberty’.244 ‘In order to be free’, he wrote, ‘it
is necessary first of all to love God; because if you love God you will do his will; and
the will of God is that of justice and charity, without which there can be no
liberty.’245 The ambition, in other words, remained the institution of liberty and
order as a necessary precondition for the return of society to spiritual health and
stability. What changed was not Lamennais’s understanding of liberty but his
assessment of how it might be attained in what he saw as the increasingly oppressive
and anti-Christian France of his day. Given that the theocratic argument demand-
ing the subordination of the civil authority to the Church appeared less and less
likely to carry the day, there was no alternative but to abandon the idea of a
Christian polity. The Mémoire, written for Pope Gregory XVI in 1832 and
intended to justify the position taken by L’Avenir, started from the premise that
239 Lamennais, ‘Articles publiés dans le journal L’Avenir’, Œuvres Complètes de F. de La Mennais,
x. 134.
240 ‘Des doctrines de L’Avenir’, ibid. 196–205
241 ‘Réponse à la lettre du Père Ventura’, ibid. 267.
242 ‘De l’Avenir de la société’, ibid. 337.
243 ‘’Ce que sera le catholicisme dans la société nouvelle’, ibid. 348–9.
244 ‘Des doctrines de L’Avenir’, ibid. 197.
245 ‘Paroles d’un croyant’, Œuvres Complètes de F. de La Mennais, xi. 83.
340
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under the Restoration the Church was both oppressed by government and hated
by the greater proportion of the population. In these circumstances, it argued, it
was necessary to recognize ‘in good faith’ that the Catholic religion was compatible
with the liberties of religion, education, and the press and that these ‘various
liberties’ could alone protect the Church from a similar ‘catastrophe’ to that
which had befallen Catholicism in England. Let us imagine, Lamennais asked,
that the press was enchained by censorship, who would suffer? Only Catholics, was
his answer.246
Lamennais presents us with a peculiar set of paradoxes that are not easily
resolved. No one could doubt the sincerity of his faith and, unlike Maistre, he
did not place the emphasis upon the utility and necessity of religion for the
maintenance of social and political order; but why, given his deep attachment to
the supremacy of the spiritual over the temporal order and his passionate defence of
the Ultramontane cause, did he embark upon the fateful course of action that led
him into irreconcilable conflict with the papacy? In his day, there were many who
were prepared to attribute it to pride and ambition (not least his admirer Henri-
Dominique Lacordaire as well as John Henry Newman in England). From what we
have seen, however, the answer might lie in Lamennais’s conviction that the
separation of Church and State, combined with a recognition of certain core
liberties, was the only means of saving the Church itself. On this view, the triumph
of monarchical despotism would go hand in hand with the servitude of the papacy.
Therefore, the future lay not in an alliance with kings but in the sustenance that
would be derived from the community of the faithful (as the Irish in particular had
shown). Love, humility, and the works of charity, and not Maistrean authority, was
the essence of Lamennais’s Catholicism.
As Lamennais was not able to prove his case to the satisfaction of his ecclesiastical<
br />
superiors, his first response was submission to papal authority, followed by a
gradual distancing from a faith he had so eloquently expressed in his Paroles d’un
croyant of 1833. Lamennais was never formally excommunicated but over the next
decade he steadily drifted away from the Church and, as he did so, the first serious
attempt to reconcile the Church to modern society came to an end. He then openly
embraced the ‘cause of the people’, arguing in such texts as Du Passé et de l’Avenir
du Peuple and De l’Esclavage moderne that this was a ‘holy cause’ and one where
the release of the poor from slavery and poverty was in line with God’s will. The
enslaved, he argued, consisted not merely of the propertyless proletariat but ‘of
the entire nation, with the exception of 200,000 members of the privileged classes
under whose domination bend ignominiously 33 million French people, the true
slaves of our day’.247 In 1848 he rallied to the Republic, founding another short-
lived journal, Le Peuple Constituent, and that same year was elected to parliament,
where he sat on the extreme left. With Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état of December
1851 he went into retirement, dying three years later in near obscurity.
246 ‘Paroles d’un croyant’, Œuvres Complètes de F. de La Mennais, xii. 36–87.
247 Lamennais, Du Passé et de l’Avenir du Peuple (1868), 141.
Religion, Enlightenment, and Reaction
341
The influence of the charismatic and lyrical Lamennais was truly extensive, his
seminary at La Chenaie in Brittany attracting many of the brightest Catholics of the
day and adding greatly to the vigour of the Catholic revival in the 1820s. L’Avenir,
in the words of Adrien Dansette, was ‘the birth certificate of Catholic liberalism’
and, if largely ignored by non-Catholics, secured a wide readership among young
priests in particular and the laity.248 Yet few, if any, of Lamennais’s inner circle of
firm supporters and disciples were prepared to follow him into the religious
wilderness. Without him, therefore, liberal Ultramontane Catholics such as Père
Lacordaire and Charles de Montalembert had to find and pursue a new course of
action.249 This they did largely through an extended campaign to secure religious
freedom, and especially to break the State’s monopoly of the education system.
Success (of a limited kind) was achieved with the passing of the loi Falloux in 1850
which allowed the Church to have its own secondary schools but subject to state
inspection and supervision. As political liberals, they sought to establish that there
was no opposition in principle between Catholicism and liberty.
Two texts serve to illustrate this frame of mind in mid-century. The first, by the
Abbé Félix Dupanloup, sometime Bishop of Orléans, was entitled De la Pacification
religieuse and was published in 1845, a moment when debate about educational
reform (and the Jesuits) was again at the top of the political agenda.250 Dupanloup,
a prelate of considerable intelligence and prominence, was no admirer of Lamennais
but he had the foresight to recognize that a new situation required a rethinking of
the old relationship between throne and altar. Much of Dupanloup’s text was
designed to refute the charge (articulated most forcefully at the time by Adolphe
Thiers) that the Church remained opposed to ‘the spirit of the Revolution’. He
repeatedly denounced such calumnies directed against the clergy, affirming unam-
biguously that the Church proclaimed ‘the generous spirit, the true spirit of the
French Revolution, while deploring with M. Thiers its excesses and errors’.251 The
Church, in other words, was neither the enemy of liberty nor of the nation. It
accepted the legitimacy of free institutions, liberty of conscience, political and civil
liberty, liberty of education and opinion, equality before the law, and fair distribu-
tion of taxation. ‘Liberty for all; peace as our goal; moderation, disinterestedness,
and perseverance as our means; war as a painful last resort’:252 this was the
programme that Dupanloup placed before his adversaries and, in doing so, he
simply asked that these same people should be prepared to observe the same
maxims and that they should not condemn the Church, in the name of ‘a supposed
liberty of conscience’, to a vile and contemptuous servitude. We demand justice,
248 Adrien Dansette, Religious History of Modern France (Edinburgh, 1961), i. 216.
249 See José Cabanis, Lacordaire et quelques autres: Politique et religion (1982) and Edouard
Lecanuet, Montalembert, 3 vols. (1902). See also Charles de Montalembert, Memoir of the Abbé
Lacordaire (London, 1863) and M. M. C. Calthorp, ‘Lacordaire and Montalembert’ (London, 1915).
250 Dupanloup, De la Pacification religieuse: Quelle est l’origine des querelles actuelles? Quelle en peut
être l’issue (1845).
251 Ibid. 264.
252 Ibid. 17–18.
342
Religion, Enlightenment, and Reaction
Dupanloup wrote, and ‘we call for it in our own way, with charity in our hearts,
with reason on our lips, and with the Gospel and the Charte in our hands’.253
The second text was written by one of Lamennais’s early close associates, Charles
de Montalembert, in September 1852, soon after the disintegration of the Second
Republic and as Louis Napoleon tightened his grip on power.254 Des Intérèts
catholiques au XIXe siècle began from the supposition that the nineteenth century
had seen a Europe-wide ‘Catholic renaissance’ and that this had been accompanied
by the fall of its principal rivals: Protestantism, philosophy, ‘Voltairean liberalism’,
and the forces of temporal power.255 In such circumstances of triumph, did this
mean that Catholics should ‘deny reason and sacrifice liberty’?256 Montalembert’s
answer was in the negative, for the reason that it was to liberty—‘sincere and
serious’ liberty—that the Church was indebted for its ‘wonderful and unexpected
success’.257 Indeed, Montalembert went further by arguing that, of all govern-
ments, it had been absolute government that had most exposed the Church to
danger. In short, religion needed liberty as much as liberty needed religion. The
worst and most intolerable of despotisms was that exercised with the sanction of
religion. In the present circumstances, therefore, it was ‘representative, constitu-
tional, and parliamentary government’ that was ‘the only possible expression of
political liberty’.258 Despite its failings, this was the regime, Montalembert af-
firmed, that best served the interests of Catholics. The cause of absolutism therefore
was a lost cause and liberty would not be stifled. ‘I feel bound to say’, he wrote, ‘that
the liberty which we have demanded during the last twenty years was not in any
way a trap set for our enemies, but an act of good faith and of courage, not a matter
of tactics but of principle.’259
Nevertheless, there were qualifications to Montalembert’s enthusiasm for liberty
and these were qualifications that revealed the political limitations of liberal
Catholicism more generally. For Montalembert, liberty was only a relative and
not an absolute good.260 He believed in what he described as
‘a well-regulated,
restrained, orderly, tempered, upright and moderate liberty’,261 a liberty that was not
hostile to authority or that served as a mask for revolution. The liberty he defended
did not embrace either democracy or universal suffrage, both of which, he believed,
destroyed liberty in the name of envy and equality. His was a liberty that was
antithetical to socialism.
In point of fact, the loi Falloux of 1850 was greeted as an unholy compromise
and great betrayal by many Catholics, not least by die-hard Ultramontanes who
persisted in their demands for complete Church freedom. Henceforth, the divide
between liberal and Ultramontane tendencies within the Church was only to
grow, the latter group in particular becoming ever more intransigent, obscuran-
tist, and legitimist in their views. Matters only worsened with the advent of
253 Dupanloup, De la Pacification religieuse: Quelle est l’origine des querelles actuelles? Quelle en peut
être l’issue (1845), 8.
254 Montalembert, Des Intérèts catholiques au XIXe siècle (1852).
255 Ibid. 71–5.
256 Ibid. 77.
257 Ibid. 83–4.
258 Ibid. 133.
259 Ibid. 235.
260 Ibid. 86.
261 Ibid. 85.
Religion, Enlightenment, and Reaction
343
the Second Empire, the Church hierarchy unhesitatingly falling in behind the
new regime and seeming to prosper as a result. Liberal Catholics did not give
up without a fight and in August 1863, at the Catholic Congress of Malines in
Belgium, Montalembert again returned to the fray, setting out a powerful
programme built around the maxim of ‘a free Church in a free State’.262 The
task ahead, Montalembert announced, was to reconcile Catholicism to democra-
cy and to the conditions prevailing in modern society. The extension of civil and
political liberties served the Church’s interests. Its enemies were the same as those
of liberal democracy: absolutism, centralization, and demagogy. The Church,
then, asked for no privileges, for no protection from a theocratic State, for no
revival of the old alliance between throne and altar. It simply asked for freedom,
and for freedom for everyone. Breaking with the long-established doctrine of the
Revolution and the Republic Page 72