Revolution and the Republic
Page 78
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.
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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.
Positivism, Science, and Philosophy
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.
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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