Revolution and the Republic

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by Jeremy Jennings


  163 Ibid. 91.

  164 Ibid. 99–106.

  Positivism, Science, and Philosophy

  367

  ‘Catholic dogma’, he wrote, ‘places at its centre the greatest being that we are

  capable of conceiving . . . the being of beings. . . . Positivist dogma puts at the centre

  the greatest being capable of being known but known “positively”, that is to say,

  without recourse to any theological or metaphysical process.’ That great being was

  humanity.165 The beneficial consequences that would flow from this new religion

  were, for Maurras, beyond doubt. From the moment of its inception, the positivist

  religion would impose ‘a spontaneous respect for tradition’ and ‘the sentiment of

  the superiority of obedience and submission to that of rebellion’.166

  It should be clear that Maurras’s Comteanism drew little from such central

  positivist concepts as the law of the three stages and that, unlike many of Comte’s

  admirers, he felt little embarrassment about the religious eccentricities of Comte’s

  later years. Indeed, in marked contrast to Emile Littré, he seems to have thought

  that Comte’s infatuation with Madame de Vaux only served to enliven and to

  enrich his philosophy.167 The more substantive point is that Maurras worked this

  reading of Comte into the broader historical and political framework that came to

  underpin his arguments for a restoration of the French monarchy.

  A clue to how this was done can be found in their mutual antipathy towards

  Protestantism. There were many facets to this argument but, at bottom, both

  Comte and Maurras were inclined to see a strong connection between the Protes-

  tant Reformation and the Revolution of 1789 and were encouraged to do so by

  their belief that the Protestant emphasis upon the individual conscience was

  fundamentally corrosive of all social bonds and social hierarchy.168 To that extent,

  the Revolution was deemed to have had its origins in Wittemberg and Geneva and,

  more distantly still, in Jerusalem rather than Rome. In Maurras’s case, this inter-

  pretation was strengthened by a particular vision of the French past as a vehicle for

  the transmission of what he termed the ‘classical spirit’.169 ‘Old France’, Maurras

  wrote, ‘professed traditional Catholicism which, combining Jewish visions, Chris-

  tian sentiment, and the discipline received from the Hellenic and Roman world,

  carries within it the natural order of humanity.’170 The ‘biblisme’ of Protestantism,

  Maurras averred, had overturned this ‘mental, moral, and aesthetic order’.171

  For Maurras, the recent history of France was one of decline from its high point

  in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries characterized by a monarchical state, a

  Catholic religion, and what he described as ‘an aesthetics of harmony’.172 After the

  introduction of Protestantism, the descent continued, perhaps inadvertently, as a

  consequence of the voyages of Voltaire and Montesquieu to England and their

  resulting corruption by the ‘Hebraic and Germanic spirit’.173 This had only served

  165 Ibid. 107.

  166 Ibid. 114.

  167 Ibid. 120–5.

  168 For Maurras it was an ‘objective truth’ that Protestantism had its roots in ‘individual anarchy’

  and that the summit of its achievement would be ‘the insurrection of citizens, the convulsion of society,

  and the anarchy of the State’: ‘La Politique Religieuse’, La Démocratie Religieuse: L’Œuvre de Charles

  Maurras (1921), ii. 225.

  169 See the note appended by Maurras to ‘Trois Idées Politiques: Chateaubriand, Michelet, Sainte-

  Beuve’, ibid. 269–70.

  170 Ibid. 246.

  171 ‘Préface de l’édition définitive’, ibid. 4.

  172 ‘Le Romantisme féminin’, ibid. 192.

  173 ‘Préface de l’édition définitive’, 5.

  368

  Positivism, Science, and Philosophy

  to open up the way for the ‘miserable Rousseau’. It is impossible to do justice to the

  venomous and vitriolic scorn heaped upon Rousseau by Maurras. ‘Nourished upon

  the heart of the Bible’, Rousseau was the arch-villain, the ‘half-man’ most responsi-

  ble for spreading the folly, savagery, and ignorance which ultimately was to

  overwhelm France at the end of the eighteenth century.174 Worse still, ‘the mortal

  principles’ brought forth by Rousseau’s arrogance and rage had not only instilled a

  spirit of revolt among France’s citizens and weakened the French state—Maurras’s

  contempt for the ‘principle of planetary fraternity’ knew no bounds175—but they

  had lived on into the nineteenth century, fuelling the self-indulgent emotional

  sentimentalism of an effeminate and anarchic Romanticism in thrall to the mis-

  guided and misplaced passion for personal sincerity.176 Chateaubriand—‘a shame-

  faced Protestant dressed up in the purple of Rome’, according to Maurras177—

  Lamennais, Michelet, and Victor Hugo, were among the culprits but, as a class, les

  lettrés, the professional men of letters, had ceased to defend either the national

  interest or the classical traditions of France.

  At the end of L’Avenir de l’Entelligence Maurras sought to call this increasing-

  ly ‘blind and irresolute’ class to order, rallying them to ‘the ship of counter-

  revolution’, but for our purposes the most salient feature of Maurras’s proposals

  for national renewal was his call for a necessary alliance between Atheists (by which

  he meant Positivists) and Catholics.178 In effect, he was speaking to those who, like

  himself, had been ‘born into the Catholic tradition’ but who had become ‘strangers

  to the Catholic faith’, those who felt ‘the rigorous need of the absence of God’ but

  also ‘the intellectual, moral, and political needs which are natural to all civilized

  men’.179 These, Maurras stipulated, were the needs for order in one’s thoughts, in

  one’s life, and in the society in which one lived. If others such as Le Play, Taine, and

  Sainte-Beuve, the latter being the very embodiment of ‘organizing empiricism’,180

  had provided sustenance to these needs, it was the founder of positivism who could

  best satisfy them. Nevertheless, there was one crucial step in Maurras’s argument

  that had yet to be taken. Maurras had little time for the wilder excesses of Comte’s

  hopes for a new and peaceful international order—indeed, he suggested that, had

  Comte lived to witness Italian and German unification, the rise of the British

  Empire, and France’s defeat in 1870, he would have abandoned these views—and

  he was therefore of the opinion that, for some considerable time to come, ‘the patrie

  will represent humankind for any given group of men’.181 For Maurras, it was one’s

  country and not humanity that was our primary reality and to the extent that it

  united the dead of past generations with those still living and those yet unborn it

  was an object of religious veneration.182

  174 ‘Préface de l’édition définitive’, 5–10. For a selection of Maurras’s writings on the French

  Revolution see Réflexions sur la Révolution de 1789 (1948).

  175 ‘Préface de l’édition définitive’, 21 bis.

  176 ‘Le Romantisme féminin’, 185–203. This argument was developed in Pierre Lasserre, Le

 
Romantisme français: Essai sur la Révolution dans les sentiments et dans les idées au XIXe siècle (1907).

  177 ‘Trois Idées Politiques’, 246.

  178 Ibid. 287–8.

  179 ‘Auguste Comte’, 95–6.

  180 ‘Trois Idées Politiques’, 255–63.

  181 ‘Auguste Comte’, 118.

  182 Ibid. 119.

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  369

  The monarchist Action Française came into existence in 1899. In the feverish

  atmosphere created by the Dreyfus Affair and then, in 1905, by the separation of

  Church and State, it flourished and prospered as one of the principal anti-

  republican movements of the day, conveying its message through an impressive

  combination of sophisticated intellectual argument, strident anti-Semitic propa-

  ganda, and street fighting. There is little evidence to suggest that any but a few

  of its members were sympathetic to Maurras’s calls for an alliance between Positiv-

  ism and Catholicism—although when the Institut d’Action Française was founded

  in 1906 it did establish a Chaire Auguste Comte—but this did little to dissuade

  Maurras from developing further the doctrine of ‘integral nationalism’ or from

  imagining that Comte—‘the builder anew of the cité and of the patrie, of authority

  and of hierarchy, the philosopher well-versed in the laws of social nature, the critic

  of modern forms of anarchy’,183 as Maurras described him in 1913—had an

  important role to play in fashioning this new doctrine. One aspect of this surfaced

  forcibly when Marc Sangnier, leader of the social Catholic movement associated

  with Le Sillon, was bold enough to suggest that, sooner or later, people would

  have to choose between ‘Monarchical Positivism’ and ‘Social Christianity’.184

  Maurras’s response was both to voice surprise and to counter that, ‘for diverse

  reasons, and ones that are not at all irreconcilable, they hold to the same historical

  and political truths that they have observed or discovered together’.185 ‘I am

  Roman: I am human’, he affirmed. These, in Maurras’s view, were ‘two identical

  propositions’.186 The ‘anarchist Christian called Marc Sangnier’ was simply brushed

  aside as an irrelevance.

  Where this was ultimately to lead Maurras was to the endorsement of a restored

  monarchy which, in his often repeated phrase, was to be ‘traditional, hereditary,

  antiparliamentary, and decentralized’.187 Maurras’s argument was that the parlia-

  mentary Republic was a weak, unstable, and corrupt regime. It was in the grip of

  those he described as ‘the four confederated Estates’—Jews, Protestants, Free-

  masons, and métèques—and thus was controlled by foreign and cosmopolitan

  interests. It was a prey to the forces of ‘anti-France’, the ‘pays légal’ of government

  being in fundamental contradiction with the ‘pays réel’ of those who did not live

  for politics. To reverse this decline, Maurras affirmed, a fundamental reform of

  the State was required and this was only possible through the restoration of the

  traditional Bourbon monarchy. The regime would be hereditary in the most

  obvious sense—the hazards of birth, Maurras argued, were far less of a lottery

  than elections188—and traditional because sovereignty would pass from ‘an inert

  mass of individuals’ back to the nation as ‘personified and symbolized’ in the king

  183 ‘L’“Action Française” et la Religion Catholique’, La Démocratie Religieuse, 504.

  184 See Sutton, Nationalism, Positivism and Catholicism, 77–8.

  185 ‘Le Dilemme de Marc Sangnier’, La Démocratie Religieuse, 35.

  186 Ibid. 26–7.

  187 This argument was most extensively set out in Maurras’s Enquête sur la Monarchie, an inquiry

  publ. in the columns of La Gazette de France in 1900–1: see Enquête sur la Monarchie: L’Œeuvre de

  Charles Maurras (1925), v. 1–463.

  188 ‘Discours préliminaire’, ibid., p. xcvi.

  370

  Positivism, Science, and Philosophy

  and his descendants.189 It would be anti-parliamentary because politicians and

  political parties only served to divide and make use of the French people, to

  diminish and enslave the country, and decentralized because the enervating admin-

  istration of the Jacobin and Bonapartist state would be removed and liberty restored

  to the intermediary bodies of the family, the commune, and the region as well as to

  professional and confessional associations.190

  To arrive at this position, Maurras was required to provide a new synthesis of

  counter-revolutionary doctrine, drawing upon insights from Maistre, Bonald, and

  Taine as well as from more recent writers such as Fustel de Coulanges, Édouard

  Drumont, and Maurice Barrès, but, in doing so, he continued to give Comte pride

  of place at the centre of his reflections. Repeating his claim that, although divided in

  matters relating to the sky, Positivism and Catholicism often agreed about matters

  relating to the earth, Maurras wrote that Comte ‘always considered Catholicism as a

  necessary ally of science against anarchy and barbarism’.191 The Church and

  Positivism, he continued, ‘tend to strengthen the family [and] tend to support

  political authorities as coming from God or as flowing from the best natural laws.

  The Church and Positivism are friends of tradition, of order, of the homeland and

  of civilization. In a word, the Church and Positivism have the same enemies in

  common. Moreover, there is not a French Positivist who forgets that, if the

  Capetians made France, the bishops and the clerics were the first people to

  cooperate with them.’192 It is hard to believe that when General Louis André,

  ardent republican and admirer of Emile Littré, unveiled a statue of Auguste Comte

  on the Place de la Sorbonne in 1902 these opinions were shared by many of those

  present from the Société positiviste. Nevertheless, Maurras’s views were far from

  being without a grain of truth.

  I I I

  ‘We would never have imagined’, Maurras was later to write, ‘giving the name of

  Renan to a Chair at the Institut d’Action Française because, for a very wide section

  of the public, Renan is synonymous with scandal and with insulting Catholics. It is

  not a matter of deciding whether he merits this reputation. It is simply a fact.’193

  For his part, Ernest Renan held a somewhat jaundiced view of Comte. ‘I felt quite

  irritated’, he commented, ‘at the idea of Auguste Comte being dignified with the

  title of great man for having expressed in bad French what all scientific minds had

  done for the past hundred years as clearly as he had done.’194

  What might Renan have done to scandalize so many Catholics? Renan was born

  in Brittany in 1823 and, as he recounted in his Souvenirs d’Enfance et de Jeunesse, his

  early years were deeply impregnated with the faith of the Catholic Church, and to

  189 ‘Discours préliminaire’, p. cxxx.

  190 ‘Dictateur et Roi’, ibid. 449–51.

  191 ‘Une Campagne Royaliste au “Figaro” 1901–1902’, 481.

  192 Ibid.

  193 ‘L’“Action Française” et la Religion Catholique’, 491–2.

  194 Renan, Œuvres complètes (1947–61), ii. 845.

  Positivism, Science, and Philosophy


  371

  such a point that he believed himself ‘destined to become a priest’. But this changed

  dramatically when, in 1838, he entered the seminary of Saint-Nicholas de Char-

  donnet in Paris to begin his training for holy orders. ‘This’, he wrote, ‘was the worst

  crisis of my life’,195 producing ‘a complete transformation’ in the manner in which

  he saw the world and a consequent ‘diminution’ of his Christianity.196 A further

  four years at the seminary of Saint-Sulpice, where he learnt Hebrew and familiar-

  ized himself with the new critical methodology of German biblical scholarship,

  left him with insufficient faith to become a ‘sincere priest’.197 ‘The close study that

  I made of the Bible’, he wrote, ‘whilst revealing historical and aesthetic treasures,

  also showed me that this book was no more exempt than any other old book from

  contradictions, mistakes and errors.’198 Henceforth, for Renan, ‘positive science’

  was to be the ‘only source of truth’.199

  In the years that followed, Renan went on to be one of the most important and

  famous scholars of his generation, becoming both professor of Hebrew at the

  Collège de France in 1862 and a member of the Académie Française in 1879.

  When he died in 1892 many of the great figures of the Republic turned out to

  mourn his passing. Yet his career was never far from controversy, not least because

  in the many books he published—for example, the seven-volume Histoire des

  origines du christianisme (1863–81) and the five-volume Histoire du peuple d’Israël

  (1887–93)200—he persisted in adopting a positivist standpoint and in denying all

  validity to the supernatural. This was nowhere more evident—and, indeed, no-

  where more controversial—than in his Vie de Jésus, first published in 1863.201 In

  quick succession it went through eleven editions, selling in enormous numbers and

  offending as many readers as it pleased.

  The search for the historical Jesus had been a controversial subject ever since the

  publication of David Friedrich Strauss’s Leben Jesu in 1835 (a work translated into

  French by Emile Littré in 1838) but Renan was arguably the first to attempt such a

  daring enterprise in France.202 For all its undoubted scholarship and its detailed

  examination of the composition and status of the Gospels,203 the book’s theme was

 

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