preserving the government of a minority.
It was, therefore, with some difficulty that Carrel responded to Alexis de
Tocqueville’s proposition (outlined in De la Démocratie an Amérique) that the
future rested with the Anglo-Americans and the Russians, with its clear implication
that the French nation had entered a period of ‘decadence’. Carrel had for some
time been aware of what he described as ‘the ambition of the Russian colossus’ in
the Black Sea and he had always been an admirer of the American system of
government, but on this issue he was convinced that Tocqueville was mistaken. For
97 Extrait du Dossier d’un prévenu de complicité morale (1835).
98 Ibid. 59.
99 Œuvres politiques et littéraires, iii. 84.
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Universalism, the Nation, and Defeat
France, he wrote, ‘the present epoch is certainly dismal’ but this did not mean that
she had reached the ‘natural’ limits of her development or that these had been traced
by chance by ‘the finger of the victorious coalition upon the table of the Congress of
Vienna in 1815’ For those who had celebrated after Waterloo, he argued, this might
have seemed the case but, he continued, they had been disabused of this idea by the
July Revolution, an event of greater significance than ‘even the fall of Napoleon since
it had reconciled liberty and the tricolour flag’. Therefore, Carrel concluded with
undiminished fervour, ‘in ten years from now one will see the French nation . . .
prove again that she is the queen of modern nations. No, Europe will not be Cossack
and if it becomes republican, that is free, this will not be because of the American
Union: France is there: she has not abdicated her role.’100
Thus in Armand Carrel we have an example of a nationalist and of what in the
France of his day was regarded as a liberal. He saw the connection between
commerce and liberty. He believed in representative and responsible government
and in such eminently liberal causes as the independence of the judiciary and
freedom of the press; but all of this was inseparable from a desire to see France freed
from the ignominious position imposed upon her by the post-Napoleonic peace
settlement and a support for other nations oppressed by the monarchical European
order. Quickly, as he responded to what he saw as the failure of the Orleanist
regime to live up to the principles of the July Revolution, he distanced himself from
those like Guizot who sought to copy the English constitution, and turned his back
upon the philosophy of the juste milieu. Most importantly, he believed that the
Revolution had to be carried beyond the borders of France and that France was the
natural leader of oppressed nations across Europe. Military intervention in support
of popular insurrections in Poland and elsewhere amounted to an almost sacred
obligation. From 1831 onwards, therefore, as he realized that France was not to
pursue this warlike strategy, Carrel moved ever closer to what eventually became an
open endorsement of republicanism and with that came even an acknowledgement
of the wisdom of Robespierre.
I I I
Carrel was by no means alone in voicing these sentiments.101 A broad spectrum of
opinion, especially on the left, was united by its patriotism and by the belief that
revolution and war went hand in hand. 1830 was not to be merely a matter of
constitutional reform and of dynastic change but also an opportunity, as Philippe
Darriulat has written, ‘to re-establish national glory, to restore France to the rank
that the Revolution had given her amongst the nations and peoples of Europe’.102
The heroic military campaigns of the past were to be relived and consequently there
100 Œuvres politiques et littéraires, iv. 273–8.
101 See Philippe Darriulat, Les Patriotes: La Gauche républicaine et la nation 1830–1870 (2001),
13–52.
102 Ibid. 14.
Universalism, the Nation, and Defeat
221
was widespread support for the view that Belgium should be annexed and Poland
given succour.
Of the two it was undoubtedly the cause of Poland that aroused the greater
enthusiasm. This derived largely from the participation of Polish troops in Napo-
leon’s Imperial army and from a widespread hatred of a barbarous Russia and
its fearsome Cossacks. Only the legitimist press showed itself immune from
an eagerness to intervene militarily.103 However, it was Poland, far more than
Belgium, which came to highlight the divisions between those who wished to carry
the Revolution across Europe and those who were accused of wanting peace at
any price. To the chagrin of its opponents, the government, erring on the side of
prudence, felt able to offer only diplomatic intervention, a policy that induced a
crescendo of criticism with the fall of Warsaw to the Russian army and called forth
the charge that France had simply abandoned Poland to its fate.
Nowhere was this sense of outrage more intensely felt than among those who
gravitated around Felicité de Lamennais and his journal, L’Avenir. It was precisely the
tragic outcome of the Polish insurrection that was decisive in determining Lamen-
nais’s rupture with the Roman Catholic Church and no one—not even Carrel—did
more to voice their support of the Polish cause than the authors of L’Avenir.104
‘Sleep, my Poland’, wrote Lamennais after the fall of Warsaw in the autumn of 1831,
‘sleep in peace, in what people call your tomb but which I know to be your cradle’.105
However, as with Carrel, Lamennais’s preoccupation with those nations seeking to
rid themselves of their oppressors had much deeper roots than the Polish tragedy and
what he saw as the betrayal of its heroic people. Above all else, Lamennais was
concerned to regenerate Catholicism and thus, in a variety of very different guises, he
could be seen defending the claims of ultramontanism against the pretensions of
Gallicanism and the ecclesiastical prerogatives of the French crown.
It was not until 1829 that Lamennais’s work took a decidedly liberal turn and
then in Des Progrès de la révolution et de la guerre contre l’Eglise he came down clearly
in favour of liberty of the press, liberty of conscience, and liberty of education.106
Catholicism, he now claimed, offered ‘the union of order and liberty’. After the July
Revolution, and under the banner of Dieu et la liberté, to this Lamennais added calls
for the extension of the suffrage, liberty of association, and the abolition of ‘the
baneful system of centralization’.107 Lamennais also demanded the separation of
Church and State.108 The liberty of peoples, he argued, had as its necessary prior
condition the liberty of the Church.109 Beneath this lay something even more
fundamental. If, in theological terms, Lamennais’s liberal Catholicism found
103 See Michel Fridieff, ‘L’Opinion publique française devant l’insurrection polonaise de
1830–1831’, Revue internationale d’histoire politique et constitutionnelle, 2 (1952), 111–21, 205–14,
280–304.
104 Louis Le Guillou, ‘La Pologne et les mennasiens en 1830’, in Daniel Beauvois, Pologne:
L’Insurrection de 1830–1831, sa réception en Europe (Lille, 1982), 101–11
.
105 ‘A la Pologne’ in Œuvres Complètes de F. de La Mennais (1836–7), xi. 231–6. See also ‘Prise de
Varsovie’, ibid. x. 380–1.
106 Œuvres Complètes de F. de La Mennais, ix. 1–198.
107 ‘Des doctrines de l’Avenir’, ibid. x. 196–205.
108 ‘De la séparation de l’Église et de l’État’, ibid. 149–59.
109 ‘De la position de l’Église en France’, ibid. 223.
222
Universalism, the Nation, and Defeat
justification in the doctrine of sensus communis, in political terms it amounted to a
refusal to abandon ‘peoples to the arbitrary wills of kings’. The people did not exist
to serve those in power: rather power was there to serve the people. It was from this
that derived Lamennais’s profound admiration for the struggle for emancipation
enjoined by the Catholic communities of Belgium, Poland, and Ireland. Thus, for
Lamennais (as for Carrel), 1830 meant not just the end of the Bourbon monarchy
but also a challenge to the entire European order established by the Holy Alliance
and the opportunity for each nation to recover its rights. In part, this optimistic
assessment of the future rested upon a recognition of the moderation and unanimi-
ty of the French people in July 1830 but it also drew upon what was lauded as the
devotion and sacrifice of the oppressed Catholic nations of Europe. ‘I tell you’,
Lamennais wrote in June 1831, ‘Jesus Christ is there.’110
Only bitter disappointment was to follow. If Lamennais thought that the
Revolution of 1830 was inevitable, he also believed that it was to mark ‘the dawn
of a new era’. The new regime, in his view, had singularly failed to appreciate the
significance of these events and had failed to understand the demands for liberty
they entailed. A king had been substituted for a king, a dynasty for a dynasty. It was
nothing but a ‘palace revolution’, with all democratic aspirations quickly quashed
and forgotten. The same lack of radical intent and resolve applied to foreign policy,
where everything had been done to assure Europe’s monarchical regimes that the
July Revolution posed no threat to the established order. From this had followed
the disgraceful betrayal of Belgium and the abandonment of a ‘heroic and generous
Poland’. Dishonour abroad and a disregard for liberty at home was the result.111
Where Lamennais and his fellow writers of L’Avenir differed from Carrel and Le
National was that their disappointment extended to include dissatisfaction with the
response of the Catholic Church to the revolutions and uprisings of 1830. To their
dismay, the Church had sided with the temporal powers, be they Catholic or not,
and had abandoned ‘the cause of peoples’. It had thereby contributed to the victory
of the ‘princes’ over those forces that had stood for emancipation. Poland had been
allowed to succumb to the ‘evil spirit of the north’; in Italy, the Church had been
‘totally enslaved’; whilst in Ireland (described by Lamennais as ‘this noble land of
faith and liberty’)112 the people had been ordered to submit to British power. The
Church, in short, had distanced itself (perhaps fatally) from the people and from
their aspirations for national liberation.113
The response of the Church to these charges was swift and unforgiving. The
liberal Catholic programme in its entirety was condemned in the encyclical Mirari
vos in August 1832.114 Although never formally excommunicated, Lamennais
steadily drifted away from the Church, devoting the remainder of his days to the
cause of the people as a democrat, republican, and socialist.115 For its part, the
110 ‘De l’Avenir de la société’, ibid. 326.
111 ‘Du Système suivi par les ministres depuis la révolution de juillet’, ibid. 351–60.
112 ‘Ce que sera le catholicisme dans la société nouvelle’, ibid. 346.
113 ‘Préface’, ibid., pp. i–cxxii.
114 For Lamennais’s defence see ‘Affaires de Rome’, ibid., vol. xii.
115 See Lamennais, Du Passé et de l’Avenir du Peuple (1868).
Universalism, the Nation, and Defeat
223
Church maintained its attachment to the unity of throne and altar for some years
to come.
1830 and its immediate aftermath, therefore, constituted something of a high-
water mark in nationalist sentiment. A nation reborn and one freed from its
Bourbon past was to redraw the map of Europe and to lend succour to those
peoples who shared the universal aspiration to emancipation. In the process what
amounted to a theory of just war came to be articulated.116 Intervention in the
internal affairs of another country, on this view, was perfectly legitimate if its goal
was that of removing a tyrant or despotic regime and if it set an enslaved people
free. Coincidentally, a France reduced to abject humiliation would rise up from her
knees and take her rightful place as Europe’s leading nation.
The July Monarchy, however, pursued an altogether different course, preferring
stability to war, and, as far as possible, alliance with England. The latter was the
cornerstone of the policy pursued by Guizot as Minister of Foreign Affairs after the
departure of Adolphe Thiers in 1840. It survived a minor skirmish over Tahiti in
1844 and then was sorely tested by mutual intrigues over the marriage of the young
Isabella II, Queen of Spain. When Lord Palmerston returned to the Foreign Office
in 1846, whatever superficial entente there had been between the two countries was
quietly put to one side and Franco-British relations again went into decline.
Palmerston’s bellicose protestations about French policy in Spain not only served
to further discredit the by-now-tarnished regime headed by King Louis-Philippe
but also gave an added fillip to an already vigorous Anglophobia.
It was in these years of widespread resentment at the absence of a glorious foreign
policy that the most eloquent expression of a doctrine which combined an ardent
embrace of France as both a nation and as a vehicle of the hopes of humanity
received its fullest and most coherent exposition. Jules Michelet, in the words of
Paul Viallaneix, was ‘the secular Lamennais of Romanticism’.117 Sparked in his
youth and given intellectual force through his reading of the eighteenth-century
Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico, Michelet’s belief in the personality of
the French people and in the special destiny accorded to France was brought vividly
to life, as he himself explained, by the ‘three glorious’ days of July 1830. If Vico had
taught him that humanity made its own history,118 then the Revolution of 1830
had provided the ‘the first example of a revolution without heroes, without proper
names’. No one had prepared or led it, and afterwards all that was visible was the
‘unity’ of millions of people ready ‘to die for an idea’. Here, Michelet believed, was
proof of ‘the work of human liberty’.119
116 Karma Nabulsi, ‘“La Guerre Sainte”: Debates about Just War among Republicans in the
Nineteenth Century’, in Sudhir Hazareesingh (ed.), The Jacobin Legacy in Modern France (Oxford,
2002), 21–44.
117 See Paul Viallaneix, La Voie royale : Essai sur l’idée de peuple dans l’œuvre de Michele
t (1959);
Viallaneix, Michelet, les travaux et les jours 1798–1874 (1998); Eric Fauquet, Michelet ou la gloire du
professeur d’histoire (1990), and Paule Petitier, Jules Michelet, L’Homme histoire (2006).
118 See Jules Michelet, ‘Discours sur le système et la vie de Vico’ (1827), in Marcel Gauchet (ed.),
Philosophie des sciences historiques (2002), 225–60.
119 Jules Michelet, ‘Introduction à l’histoire universelle’ (1831), Œuvres complètes de Michelet
(1972), ii, 1828–1831, 254–5.
224
Universalism, the Nation, and Defeat
Seen through these Vichian lenses, history was a process by which humanity, by
dint of incessant struggle, escaped the world of fatality and of nature. Furthermore,
this process had attained its apogee in the history of France. A recurrent theme in
Michelet’s writings, this evocation of the exemplarity of the French experience was
most vividly expressed in a chapter entitled ‘Tableau de France’ hidden within his
lengthy account of the history of the middle ages.120 The special genius of France,
according to this interpretation, lay in her unity and diversity and in her capacity
for interaction and assimilation. ‘It is’, Michelet wrote, ‘a wonderful spectacle to
regard this vast and powerful organism, where the varied parts are so skilfully
related, contrasted, and connected, combining the strong with the weak, the
negative with the positive.’121 France, however, had to be seen as a whole and
when she was the impression was one of unity and of a single personality. Here
Michelet made uncritical reference to the long process of centralization and
unification begun under the monarchy, commenting that ‘in this way was formed
the general, universal spirit of the country’. With each day, he remarked, ‘the local
spirit’ was overcome and the influence of the ‘soil, of climate, of race’ gave way
before that of ‘social and political action’. History had prevailed over geography.
Men had escaped ‘the tyranny of material circumstances’. In this ‘marvellous
transformation’, Michelet continued, ‘spirit has triumphed over matter, the general
over the particular, the idea over the real’.122
Attention might be drawn to three important elements of this transformative
process. The first is the weight that Michelet attached to the French language. ‘The
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