The Anxious Triumph

by Donald Sassoon

  In Latin America the great divide was not socialism versus capitalism or liberalism, but secular liberalism versus the Church. There were no Catholic parties of note, though, obviously, Catholicism was (and is) a very strong force. In Ecuador, President García Moreno (1861–5, 1869–75) took a decisive stand against liberalism and attempted to set up a Christian state – in fact, under his authoritarian rule, remarkable social progress was made, particularly in education and road building (expropriating landlords where necessary).24 In Brazil, Argentina, Chile and, above all, Mexico, anticlerical secularism emerged politically triumphant, while the masses remained deeply Catholic.25

  While in Latin America both Catholics and liberals were in favour of the Republic, this was not so in France. Jules Ferry (who was both Education Minister and Prime Minister in the 1880s), in a letter in 1872, declared that the Republic has only one enemy: the clergy.26 Léon Gambetta (also Prime Minister in the 1880s) agreed, declaring, in May 1876, that a patriotic Catholic was a ‘rare thing’.27 He had a point since, at the time, Catholics were staunchly monarchist and against the Third Republic. Church rhetoric was just as strident. The anticlerical paper Le Républicain de la Loire et de la Haute Loire in July 1876 reported that the curé of Estadens (Haute-Garonne) had declared from his pulpit: ‘If the Republic triumphs churches will be destroyed, priests guillotined, a terrible civil war will break out.’28

  There were in fact three ways of being on the right in late nineteenth-century France. The first consisted in being a true reactionary and longing for a return to the monarchy of pre-1789, the old-fashioned France of rural deference, family values, and Catholicism. This ideology (not always in conjunction with monarchism) was still held to decades later by writers such as Charles Maurras and Maurice Barrés, and had many supporters in Vichy France, above all its leader, Marshal Pétain.29 The second way of being right-wing was to be a Bona-partist, which meant to be in favour of ‘a strong man’, if only they could find one. Their ideas survive to this day. The third way of being right-wing in late nineteenth-century France was to be a supporter of the Orléans Dynasty, that is, a liberal democratic monarchy tinted with Catholicism. Eventually, the commitment to the monarchy, even a democratic and constitutional one, was abandoned and the modern form of conservatism found a later incarnation in General de Gaulle.

  Actual capitalists in France took very little interest in this controversy since it was not clear which side they should be on. Catholicism might have been the favoured choice, out of habit and a desire to keep everyone, especially the workers, in their place. But as the Republic was consolidated, capitalists switched to the republican side, partly because it was winning and partly because it had become abundantly clear that republicans were more interested in priest-bashing than in interfering with capitalism. Republican ideology, to the extent there was one, meant being generically in favour of reason, science, positivism, and progress, and that meant industry.30 This was appealing to some industrialists, flattered to be told that their money-making activities were on the side of history, but others such as Schneider, the leading steel magnate (see Chapter 15), found solace in the doctrine of social Catholicism advocated by thinkers like Albert de Mun, the leading Catholic politician in France, for it confirmed the paternalistic model they had adopted in their own establishment.

  Of course, Catholics were not a monolithic bloc. The more intransigent among them followed the commands of Pius IX’s 1864 encyclical Quanta Cura, which condemned the idea of liberty of conscience. Its annex, the Syllabus Errorum, castigated liberalism, modern civilization, and progress, and regarded socialism as a ‘pest’.31 This was not quite new. Pope Gregory XVI had already condemned liberalism with his Mirari Vos in 1832, as well as French Catholic ‘liberals’ such as Félicité Robert de Lamennais, one of the earliest champions of social Catholicism.

  Theologians and Catholic intellectuals of the intransigent tendency (known in France, pejoratively, as Ultramontanisme) rejected individualism, rationalism, and the secular state, insisting on the absolute primacy of papal power. Catholic popularizers of this tendency, such as the journalist Eugène Veuillot, author of Çà et là (1860), rejoiced that France, lacking the mineral wealth of England, had been spared the abominations of industry. England, ‘until it returns to Catholicism’, will remain ‘a depraved nation’ with ‘Men and women working naked on top of each other; children growing up in the depth of caves without ever hearing the word of God, surfacing occasionally only to get drunk with their parents.’32 Equally reactionary was the now forgotten Antoine de Saint-Bonnet (1815–80), then an anti-Semite (see Chapter 12) and regarded highly as a thinker. Saint-Bonnet condemned capitalism because it was based on the exploitation of man by man, socialism because it was the heir to liberalism and Protestantism, and the Republic because it ‘will be the ruin of the people and of the whole of humanity’. He condemned democracy and defended aristocratic rule (he was an aristocrat himself); the people, he complained, ruined by industry and banks, no longer dream of Heaven and seek instead earthly riches; they produce more just to consume more instead of loving each other.33

  Intransigent Catholicism was not so distant from social Catholicism – its ‘progressive’ counterpart. Both shared an exaltation of tradition, a rejection of the present, a nostalgia for the rural world, a defence of the family, a hatred of the centralist state, a discontent with a society constantly on the move, a distaste for socialism and anarchism, and all the other ‘ills’ that followed the French Revolution. Albert de Mun, a traditional reactionary, opposed to universal suffrage, and an anti-Dreyfusard, was clearly on the ‘left’ on the ‘social question’, namely the question of the condition of the working class. In February 1885, in a speech at the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium, where he had considerable influence, he urged his followers:

  let us go to the workers, understand them, love them. Let us go to find out what causes their suffering and what they want … In their isolation they are looking for friends who would help them rather than exploit them.34

  The hardship caused by industrialization had been castigated by leading members of the Catholic clergy throughout the world, who often made common cause with the exploited workers: from Cardinal Bonald, the Archbishop of Lyon, to Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler, the Bishop of Mainz, author of Die Arbeiterfrage und das Christenthum (The Workers’ Question and Christianity, 1864), clearly influenced by the socialist leader Ferdinand Lassalle; Cardinal Henry Edward Manning, Archbishop of Westminster (whose funeral, in 1892, was followed by trade union banners); Gaspar Decurtins, a leader of the Swiss Parti Catholique-Conservateur (today’s Christian Democratic Party), organizer of one of the first international congresses for the protection of workers in Zurich in 1897 (a precursor of the ILO); and Cardinal James Gibbons, Archbishop of Baltimore (1877–1921), who wrote that it was ‘the right of the laboring classes to protect themselves’ and it was everyone’s duty to help them to find a ‘remedy against avarice, oppression and corruption’.35

  By the end of the 1880s, French social Catholicism began to diverge from the intransigents and to accept democracy and republicanism.36 This ralliement to the Republic was promoted by Pope Leo XIII. The Pope started cautiously, with the encyclical Libertas (1888), where he declared that it was a calumny to say that the Church ‘is the foe of individual and public liberty’.37 It was followed by one of the most important encyclicals in the history of the papacy, Rerum Novarum, ‘New Things’ (15 May 1891). Leo XIII, unlike his obtuse predecessor, Pius IX, realized that industrialization and the concomitant massive exodus from the countryside was a historic revolution whereby hitherto docile peasants and rural workers would find in cities and factories, far from the watchful eye of the priest, a novel kind of class solidarity, and where they would be exposed to rival messianic creeds, such as anarchism and socialism, promising Heaven on Earth and not for the afterlife. Pope Leo XIII had embraced change. The Catholic Church, with 2,000 years of experience of survival, having sided
with the reactionaries for most of the nineteenth century, was finally accepting modernity. The enemies had not changed. They were those the Pope had denounced in 1878 in his Quod apostolici muneris (‘Of Our apostolic office’): ‘men who, under various and almost barbarous names, are called socialists, communists, or nihilists, and who, spread over all the world, and bound together by the closest ties in a wicked confederacy’ seek the overthrow of society.38 What changed was the strategy.

  In Rerum Novarum, significantly subtitled ‘On the conditions of the workers’ (de conditione opificum), Leo XIII advocated saving ‘unfortunate working people from the cruelty of men of greed, who use human beings as mere instruments for money-making’. He insisted that wages and working conditions should not be left to the good intentions of the employers but should be negotiated, possibly with the mediation or intervention of the state. The aim was, of course, to maintain social peace, avoiding the ‘mistaken notion’ that ‘class is naturally hostile to class’, above all to make sure that the socialists do not exploit ‘the poor man’s envy of the rich’. And since a few rich men ‘have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the labouring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself’, the authorities should intervene whenever working conditions are unjust, or ‘repugnant’ to the dignity of workers as ‘human beings’. ‘Wages’, continued the Pope, should be high enough ‘to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner’. And if ‘through necessity or fear of a worse evil the workman accept harder conditions because an employer or contractor will afford him no better’, then workers’ unions are ‘greatly to be desired’.39

  This was the signal many Catholics had wanted: they could now compete with liberals and socialists in advocating social reforms, form new trade unions to wean workers away from those under socialist influence, and build organizations and civic associations dealing with urban problems. Intelligent conservatives realized the significance of this move at once. Ruggiero Bonghi, former Italian Minister of Education, in the journal Nuova Antologia immediately welcomed Rerum Novarum, remarking that ‘Atheism has more and more influence among the working classes. The common people, those of the towns, but not yet those in the countryside, are the most reluctant to follow any kind of religious or spiritual authority.’ They see God as the ally of capital and of the rich, he added, and, consequently, want to abolish God.40

  French bishops welcomed the encyclical, aware of what Alphonse Martin Larue, Bishop of Langres, called ‘the new conditions of industrial life’.41 Finally, they could dispel what another French bishop, the Bishop of Bayonne, quaintly called in his pastoral letter announcing the encyclical, the malentendu (misunderstanding) between the ‘peuple ouvrier’, the working people, and the Church.42 Socialists ignored the encyclical, especially in France, where labour activists were not very Catholic.43 Leo XIII had thought principally of France when he wrote Rerum Novarum, and followed it with another encyclical specifically directed at the French, giving it a French title: Au milieu des sollicitudes (20 February 1892). In it he denounced even more forcefully the excesses of capitalism and the love of money.44 But Au milieu des sollicitudes had also a specifically political objective: the Pope wanted to prevent the birth in France of the kind of monarchist Catholic party that Albert de Mun wanted to create, a party that would fight for social legislation ‘in the name of Jesus Christ’.45 The Pope, obviously a clever man, believed that this would unnecessarily inflame anticlerical republicans. Better to form a not overtly Catholic party that would espouse generic religious principles, attract Catholics, make its peace with the republic, and forget about the monarchy.

  The advantage of being Pope is that, on the whole, good Catholics obey you, and Albert de Mun obeyed: there would be no specifically Catholic party in France. Leo XIII met him halfway. In the middle of the crisis caused by the Dreyfus Affair and the wave of anticlericalism that would lead to the separation of Church and State in France in 1905, he encouraged Albert de Mun to form a pro-Catholic party, as long as it was open to all ‘honest people’, as long as it was not formally Catholic, and as long as it was pro-Republic. It was the birth of Action libérale populaire, in 1901, soon to become the main opposition party. In 1903 de Mun explained to his followers that a Catholic party could only be the ‘core’ (noyau) of a wider party; it cannot be, on its own, a political party, it would not have sufficient electoral appeal and this is why, he added, the Pope was quite right to order him not to form one.46

  One of the most important influences on French social Christians such as de Mun was Frédéric Le Play, a conservative thinker who belonged to the right-wing tradition of French authoritarianism. On social matters, however, Le Play was a reformist and even an early ecologist (as many conservatives were at the time) who denounced the destruction of forests for profit and gain.47 He was an engineer turned sociologist and an admirer of the positivism of Auguste Comte. In his La réforme sociale en France déduite de l’observation comparée des peuples européens (1864), he denounced the dismal conditions of the working class and the rapid accumulation of wealth, which, he thought, made men lazy and prey to lust, selfishness, and so on. He held the view that work, after religion, property, and family, was what could best elevate humanity towards an ordre moral. For the aim of work was not wealth but virtue.48 The virtues required by entrepreneurs were order and love of justice.49 A religious sense of solicitude towards one’s sub-ordinates was one of the distinctive virtues of the truly superior classes. In other words those like Le Play who were often, and not wrongly, characterized as being nostalgic about the Ancien Régime, were in fact trying to achieve a new synthesis: no longer an uncritical admiration for the old order, but a desire to show the lower classes that their interests would best be served by those who espoused traditional religious values. This was all the more important given the remarkable degree of indifference towards their welfare exhibited by the liberal ideology of the politically dominant republican groups.

  The disdain for liberalism by socially concerned Christians was almost universal. In Italy, Catholics followed the French pattern: both traditionalists and the socially concerned were united by a vague hostility towards the new industrial society. Carlo Maria Curci, one of the founders of the Jesuit journal Civiltà cattolica, found positive elements in socialism, declaring that it was not possible to find happiness just by accumulating goods.50 Curci was astute enough to realize that there was no question of returning to a time before unification when the Pope ruled over central Italy. It was useless, Curci warned Catholics, to fight against the ideas of democracy and nationalism that had ‘taken possession of the world’.51 But in politics it does not always pay to be too prescient, and Curci was too left-wing too soon and was expelled from the Jesuits. Romolo Murri, a priest and an inspirer of Italian Christian Democracy, unsuccessfully urged the ecclesiastical authorities to create a Catholic party hostile to capitalism to block the further growth of socialism in Italy. ‘The industrial proletariat,’ wrote Murri, ‘wanted to have a soul, a class consciousness. It remembered the miseries it suffered, the paltry wages it received …’ Now, he went on, it is no longer on its knees, and appears ‘terribile, feroce’. ‘This new class consciousness’, continued Murri in the biblical style fashionable among Catholics at the time, though ‘savage’ and ‘brutal’, could be used by true Christians. The Church had waited too long and let the socialists have an early start in the struggle for the minds and hearts of the proletariat.52 This was far too radical for the Church. Murri was suspended from the priesthood ‘a divinis’ in 1907. Impenitent, he was elected to Parliament in 1909 for the Lega Democratica Nazionale, a (Catholic) organization not approved by the Pope. He was immediately excommunicated.

  This itinerary was not unusual. In Poland, Izydor Kajetan Wysłouch (1869–1937) had started out as a socially concerned Catholic intellectual. As he became increasingly active, he became more radical, began to attack the Church for its immobility, and was eventually excommunicated.53

  Christian ho
stility against economic liberalism was just as strong in non-Catholic countries, including Britain, where many religious people were more vociferous against the liberalism of the so-called Manchester School than against socialism (which, anyway, was not a force in Victorian England). Charles Kingsley, chaplain to the Queen and celebrated novelist (Westward Ho!, 1855, and The Water Babies, 1863, about chimney sweeps), in a letter to his friend Thomas Hughes, a Christian socialist (author of the famous book Tom Brown’s School Days, 1857), had urged the recognition of trade unions as early as 1852. Kingsley told Hughes that:

  the real battle of the time is – if England is to be saved from anarchy and unbelief, and utter exhaustion caused by the competitive enslavement of the masses – not Radical or Whig against Peelite or Tory … but the Church, the gentleman, and the workman, against the shopkeepers and the Manchester School.

  He thought the task of ‘true Conservatism’ was ‘to reconcile the workmen with the real aristocracy’.54

  Kingsley was prejudiced against Jews, Catholics, Irish, blacks, and Americans, but he reserved his severest verdict for ‘Manchester liberals’:

  from whom Heaven defend us; for of all narrow, conceited, hypocritical, and anarchic and atheistic schemes of the universe, the Manchester one is exactly the worst. I have no language to express my contempt for it … To pretend to be the workers’ friend by keeping down the price of bread, when all they want is to keep down wages, and increase profits, and in the meantime to widen the gulf between the working man and all that is time-honoured, refined, and chivalrous in English society … that is … the game of the Manchester School.55

  Such denunciations, fairly typical at the time, did not bring about the formation of a religiously based anti-capitalist party in Britain: both the Conservatives and the Liberals offered a home, for most of the nineteenth century, to those who were hostile to unfettered capitalism, either from a pre-capitalist position (the Conservatives) or in favour of a reform of capitalism (the Liberals). Later in the twentieth century the Conservatives became the main pro-capitalist party, the Liberals dwindled, while the Labour Party absorbed and virtually monopolized anti-capitalist feelings. In reality quite a few socialist-inclined thinkers would probably have been equally at home in a social Christian party nostalgic for a pre-industrial age: John Ruskin (a troubled agnostic); Frederick Denison Maurice, a founder of British Christian Socialism and of the Working Men’s College (1854); Keir Hardie (evangelical, founder of the Labour Party); Ramsay Macdonald (Church of Scotland and Labour’s first Prime Minister in 1924); George Lansbury (a devoted Anglican and leader of the Labour Party, 1932–5); as well as atheists such as Robert Blatchford, whose best-selling Merrie England (1893) identified socialism with rural life, and William Morris, described by Friedrich Engels as an ‘emotional socialist’, and whose News from Nowhere (1890), depicted an idyllic agrarian socialist England with no industry.56 Much of what Morris wrote on politics could have been written by a Christian socialist, or indeed, by an anti-industrial Christian: