physicians, and not priests or misguided moralists, would be the superintendents of
our behaviour and beliefs. In line with their conclusions and advice, legislators and
governments would take the leading role in shaping and improving human conduct
and manners and in this way the conflicting interests of the individuals who made
up society would be brought into harmony. The State, and not the Church, would
be our moral educator and there would be no need to have recourse to divine
inspiration or sanction.
In summary, the Idéologues placed their full weight behind attempts to discredit
Christian metaphysics and used the considerable institutional power at their
disposal to propagate a secular moral science and ethics. If this was true of their
activities within the Institut, it was similarly so of the most important journal in
which they published, the Décade philosophique.64 Whilst the articles it published
displayed a limited sympathy towards Protestantism and Jansenism, Catholicism
was characterized as being intrinsically intolerant and obscurantist. Its pages were
never anything less than intransigently anticlerical. Moreover, the journal held
Christianity as a whole responsible for preventing the advance of the human spirit
by filling people’s heads with irrational fears and absurd beliefs. Humanity had to
be cured of this malady.
Yet the abiding preoccupation of the Idéologues was to stabilize the Republic and
to bring the revolutionary turmoil of the 1790s to a close. Their philosophy
reflected their disillusionment. To that end, idéologie was arguably designed to
replace what they saw as a discredited Church and thus to replicate the stabilizing
function of religion. As the late Robert Wokler argued,65 idéologie exuded a distrust
of politics and placed what faith it had in the development of a new social science to
cure the ills of the nation. Order would be secured through the inculcation of a
morality of prudent and tempered self-interest, implanted in the minds of the
people via a set of moralizing public institutions. Social hygiene was to be the
maxim.
This, like so much else at the time, proved to be a chimera. If the members of the
Idéologue circle offered their services to Napoleon Bonaparte, he made clear his
64 See Joanna Kitchin, Un journal ‘philosophique’: La Décade (1794–1807) (1965), 139–77, and
Marc Regaldo, Un milieu intellectuel: La Décade philosophique (1794–1807), 5 vols. (1976). Kitchin
refers to La Décade as the ‘organ of the Idéologues’: Un journal ‘philosophique’, p. vii. McManners,
French Revolution, 135, refers to La Décade as ‘their mouth-piece’.
65 ‘Ideology and the origins of social science’, in Mark Goldie and Robert Wokler (eds.), The
Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge, 2006), 688–709.
Religion, Enlightenment, and Reaction
311
opinion of the Classe des Sciences morales et politiques by closing it down in
January 1803, the First Consul quickly concluding that they were a disruptive and
unwelcome presence. Although no believer, he readily perceived that the Church
was a far more efficient institution of social control than a coterie of ‘twelve or
fifteen obscure metaphysicians’.66 As Napoleon told the assembled clergy of Milan
in June 1800: ‘No society can exist without morality. But there is no good morality
without religion. Religion alone therefore can give the State firm and lasting
support.’67 The Concordat of 1801 and the presence of Pope Pius VII at his
coronation as emperor served Napoleon’s purpose admirably and certainly far better
than any Idéologue-inspired Council of Public Instruction might have done. When
this strategy faltered, he persuaded the Church to canonize a St Napoleon and
conveniently arranged for the celebration to coincide with the Feast of the Assump-
tion, thereby obliging the faithful to worship the Virgin Mary and the emperor at one
and the same time.68 Nevertheless, the preoccupation with developing and establish-
ing a secular, non-theistic morality endured throughout the nineteenth century.
So too did the perceived need to moralize the people in a post-revolutionary society.
The curious thing is that the arguments advanced by believers and non-believers
often sounded strangely alike.
I I
One group that might have been expected to welcome the Revolution were French
Protestants. Calvinists in the south and Lutherans in Alsace, they comprised about
700,000 adherents in total. Although the harsh persecutions of the reigns of Louis
XIV and XV had largely subsided—the last Protestants were freed from the galley
ships of Toulon in 1775—they continued to suffer legal disabilities until the
promulgation of the Edict of Non-Catholics in 1788. Moreover, if doctrinal debate
mattered little to the vast majority of Protestant believers—most of whom lived in
small, isolated rural communities—at an elite level there was undoubtedly a
coincidence of interest allying Protestant pleas for toleration and the concerns of
the philosophes.
Protestants (along with Jews) were therefore amongst the first beneficiaries of the
Revolution’s reforms, all legal distinctions between Protestants and Catholics being
abolished before the end of 1789. Two Protestants, the pastor Rabaut de Saint-
Étienne and the future leader of the Feuillants, Antoine-Pierre Barnave,69 achieved
early prominence in Parisian politics and others came to the fore at a provincial
level. Many Protestants welcomed the inauguration of the Republic in 1792 but, to
66 This was the derogatory phrase used to describe the Idéologues in an article publ. in the Journal de
Paris. The article was inspired by Napoleon.
67 Quoted in Bernard Reardon, Liberalism and Tradition: Aspects of Catholic Thought in Nineteenth-
Century France (Cambridge, 1975), 2.
68 See Sudhir Hazareesingh, The Saint Napoleon: Celebrations of Sovereignty in Nineteenth-Century
France (Cambridge, Mass., 2004).
69 Both were executed in 1793.
312
Religion, Enlightenment, and Reaction
the extent that they supported the Girondins and the federalist cause, they quickly
fell foul of Jacobin repression (one of the victims being the father of François
Guizot). Nor could they entirely escape the excesses of the campaign of de-
Christianization: recently opened Protestant temples were forced to close and
pastors, often under threat of imprisonment, were obliged to abandon their
ministry. Nevertheless, despite the considerable damage inflicted upon the Protes-
tant community, the Republic displayed less fervour in eradicating Protestantism
than it did in attempting to destroy the very last remnants of Catholicism. In
acknowledgement of this fact, Catholics were subsequently to extract their (some-
times bloody) revenge. After 1795, a much-weakened Protestant congregation
sought to reconstitute the fabric of its religious life as best it could, and with
varying levels of success. Protestants benefited from the separation of Church and
State instituted by the Directory and they continued to enjoy the right of religious
observance even after Napoleon had signed the Concordat with the pap
acy. The
restored monarchy of Louis XVIII and Charles X likewise did not take away this
right. The July Monarchy proved especially sympathetic towards Protestants.70
One Protestant who had risen to prominence under the ancien régime was
Jacques Necker, Louis XVI’s finance minister.71 Out of power between 1784 and
1788, he had spent much of his time musing over the decline of morality in French
society and, by way of response, published De l’importance de la morale et des
opinions religieuses at the very moment when preparations began for the summon-
ing of the Estates-General.72 In the words of George Armstrong Kelly, it was ‘an
extremely long and windy work’ but also one of ‘remarkable interest’.73 Two
themes are prominent. The first was Necker’s unambiguous recognition of the
social utility of religion and that the general influence of religious morality was on
the decline. Moreover, he doubted that the ‘cold lessons’ of political philosophy
would serve as an adequate replacement. ‘We are delivering ourselves up to an
illusion’, he wrote, ‘if we hope to establish morality upon the connection between
individual interest and the public interest, and if we imagine that the authority of
social laws can do without the support of religion.’74 A ‘political catechism’ would
have little purchase upon the behaviour of the people. Good laws alone, in other
words, were not sufficient. The second theme had a more distinctively Protestant
flavour. Religious opinions and sentiments, in Necker’s view, enlarged and deep-
ened our moral inclinations. They freed us from the tyranny of our passions and
distanced us from our immediate, temporal interests. Religion instilled us with
‘benevolent virtues’, and, above all, with the virtue of charity. There was, Necker
believed, nothing good, beautiful, or dignified about a condition of irreligion. The
70 See Burdette C. Poland, French Protestantism and the French Revolution: A Study of Church and
State, Thought and Religion, 1685–1815 (Princeton, NJ, 1957).
71 See Henri Grange, Les Idées de Necker (1974), 53–9, 514–614.
72 Necker, De l’importance de la morale et des opinions religieuses (1788).
73 Armstrong Kelly, The Humane Comedy: Constant, Tocqueville, and French Liberalism
(Cambridge, 1992), 95.
74 Necker, De l’importance, 21.
Religion, Enlightenment, and Reaction
313
behaviour of a ‘virtuous atheist’, he maintained, merely reflected ‘the indirect
influence of religious opinions’.75
All the evidence suggests that Necker’s own experiences in the Revolution did
little to change these convictions. In 1800 he published his three-volume Cours de
morale religieuse.76 The topics addressed ranged from divine providence and the
immortality of the soul to conjugal duty and the general principles of morality.
Nothing, he there reaffirmed, was more important to nations than the alliance
between morality and religion. And the best of religions was one that was ‘simple,
reasonable, and pure’ and free of ‘fanatical intolerance’ and superstition. Only such
a religion, ‘majestic in its simplicity’, would provide us with the ‘wisdom’ and
‘dignity’ required to make proper use of our liberty. Religion fostered the spirit of
moderation.
We could speculate at some length about the influence such Calvinist piety had
upon Necker’s daughter, Germaine de Staël. By all accounts she received a solid
religious education from her parents and one which, if light on dogma, emphasized
the reasonableness of Christianity.77 Like her father, she came to believe in the
social benefits of religion. Indeed, she developed this argument further by suggest-
ing that nowhere was this more so than in a republic. Writing in Des Circonstances
actuelles qui peuvent terminer la Révolution,78 she bewailed the ‘demoralization’ of
France under the Republic—everyone, she stated, was motivated by self-interest
and the love of money—and asserted that only a morality supported by religion
could provide a ‘complete code’ covering all our actions as well as ‘a code which
unites men by way of a kind of covenant of souls, the indispensable preliminary to
any social contract’. Religion alone, she argued, could endow us with a sense of
personal dignity, an awareness of the perfectibility of the human spirit, and a love of
virtue. In the same text, Madame de Staël completely dismissed the idea that
religion was only necessary for the ignorant masses. ‘Nothing’, she wrote, ‘seems
more to be detested than this assertion.’79
Similarly, she never tired of announcing the merits of Protestantism over
Catholicism. ‘The Reformation’, she wrote in De la Littérature considérée dans ses
rapports avec les institutions sociales, ‘is the period of history that most effectively
served the perfectibility of the human species. The Protestant religion contains
within itself no active germ of superstition and gives to virtue every support that can
be gained from sensible opinions. In those countries where the Protestant religion is
professed, it does nothing to prevent philosophical research and efficaciously
maintains the purity of morals.’80 Luther, she was later to write, recalled religion
to the land of thought.81 Just as importantly, Madame de Staël realized that the
75 Ibid. 78.
76 Necker, Cours de morale religieuse, 3 vols. (Geneva, 1800). See esp. vol. i, pp. i–xliv.
77 See Rosenblatt, Liberal Values, 34–5.
78 Written in 1798, this text was publ. posthumously.
79 Germaine de Staël, Des Circonstances actuelles qui peuvent terminer la Révolution (1906), 212–29.
80 Staël-Holstein, De la Littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (1800),
i. 311.
81 Germaine de Staël, De l’Allemagne (1968), ii. 245.
314
Religion, Enlightenment, and Reaction
advocates of revolution had made the mistake of believing that only an atheist could
love liberty and that aristocratic privilege and the absolute power of the throne were
integral to religious belief. It was Christianity, she countered, that had ‘brought
liberty to this earth, justice to the oppressed, respect for the unfortunate, and finally
equality before God, of which equality before the law is only an imperfect
reflection’.82 If, as she willingly conceded, the light of reason was necessary to
free us from our prejudices, then, by the same token, it was ‘in the soul that the
principles of liberty are grounded’.83
Yet Madame de Staël’s religious sensibilities were nothing if not complex. Her
original Calvinism had overlaid upon it elements of Rousseauian deism and, after
the turn of the century, Kantianism84 and, later still, aesthetic mysticism. ‘Religious
emotions, more than all others together,’ she wrote, ‘awaken in us the feeling of the
infinite.’85 The universe, she was also to write, resembled a poem rather than a
machine. It is not, therefore, without some justification that Madame de Staël has
been seen as one of the founders of European Romanticism. However, it was these
religious views—those of a ‘good Calvinist’, as she once described herself 86—that
&n
bsp; not only underpinned her criticisms of the political fanaticism of the Terror, but
also informed her censure of the Republic and her disparagement of Bonaparte. She
had only disdain for Napoleon’s attempt to reinstate the dominant position of the
Catholic Church.
Germaine de Staël’s most sustained engagement with matters relating to religion
is found in what was arguably her most important work, De l’Allemagne. The text
was begun in exile in Weimar in 1808, where she had been reading Schiller and
Fichte and conversing at length with such friends as Auguste von Schlegel. Through
this she became persuaded that Germany was the very antithesis of France, that the
genius and erudition of the Germans was the very opposite of the superficiality and
mediocrity of the French. Their literature and philosophy were untouched by the
spirit of materialism and concerned themselves with the most hidden mysteries of
our being. ‘The German moralists’, she wrote, ‘have raised up sentiment and
enthusiasm from the contempt of a tyrannical reason.’87 To that extent, it struck
her that the Germanic nations were ‘naturally religious’ and ‘metaphysical’. More-
over, theirs was a religion of inner conviction rather than fanaticism, of contempla-
tion and meditation rather than dogmatism. The Catholic religion in Germany, she
conceded, was more tolerant than in any other country.88 By way of contrast, she
made perfectly explicit her criticism of the French philosophy of the eighteenth
century. If ‘the new German philosophy’ respected religion and affirmed the moral
dignity of man, the French variety rested upon a ‘scoffing scepticism’ that was, in
82 Germaine de Staël, Considérations sur la Révolution française (1983), 604.
83 Ibid. 605.
84 An important influence was Charles de Villers. In 1804 he had publ. Essai sur l’esprit et l’influence
de la Réformation de Luther.
85 Staël, De l’Allemagne, ii. 238.
86 Staël, Des Circonstances, 220.
87 Staël, De l’Allemagne, ii. 200.
88 Ibid. 255.
Religion, Enlightenment, and Reaction
315
her opinion, ‘destructive of every belief of the heart’. It was, she remarked more
than once, a ‘degrading doctrine’ based upon a mixture of ‘frivolity’ of the mind
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