and ‘dogmatic incredulity’.89
This was no minor theme but one that Madame de Staël developed at
considerable length. The strength of German philosophy, she believed, flowed
from its willingness to reflect upon the nature of the soul and upon the source
of our moral faculties. This was completely lacking in France. Building upon
the sensationalist epistemology of John Locke, Madame de Staël argued, the
French writers of the eighteenth century from Condillac to Helvétius and
d’Holbach had developed an experimental metaphysics that had come to assume
that the entire development of our moral being derived directly from external
objects. If the first steps taken by Locke and Condillac had been innocent—
neither had appreciated the dangers attaching to their ideas with regard to our
conception of personal identity—the end result had been ‘the annihilation of
the Deity in the universe and of free will in men’.90 Within such a materialist
system, there could be no place for the immortality of the soul and the sentiment
of duty. ‘No sensation’, Madame de Staël observed, ‘reveals immortality in death
to us.’91 Nor could it find a place for profound meditation and exalted sentiment for,
by reducing all ideas to our sensations, it could at best provide ‘specious arguments’
for selfishness. The only morality that could follow from such a sensationalist
epistemology, in her view, was one of self-interest and self-love. Relations between
individuals could not but be based upon prudent calculation and could not rest upon
sympathy and generosity.92
The same, Madame de Staël argued, applied to public morals, where the
principles of justice, fidelity, and equity all too easily gave way before those of
advantage, national interest, and self-preservation. ‘When once it has been said that
morals ought to be sacrificed to the national interest’, she concluded, ‘we are very
liable to contract the sense of the word nation from day to day, and to make it
signify at first our supporters, then our friends, and then our family, which is only a
polite way of saying ourselves.’93 Although never mentioned by name, the target
here was as much the Idéologues as it was Napoleon Bonaparte. If the emperor had
reduced the French to abject servitude, Destutt de Tracy and his colleagues, as the
survivors of eighteenth-century materialism, were responsible for the deplorable
state of French morals. Notions of self-sacrifice, duty, and the general good had all
but vanished.
The explicitly political dimensions of these arguments were forcefully developed
by Germaine de Staël’s fellow Swiss Protestant, Benjamin Constant. This aspect of
Constant’s thought has been best explored in recent work by Helena Rosenblatt.94
Not only has she drawn our attention to the importance of Constant’s lifelong
89 Ibid. 113–17.
90 Ibid. 109.
91 Ibid. 110.
92 Ibid. 181–6.
93 Ibid. 194.
94 See Rosenblatt, Liberal Values. See also Giovanni Paoletti, Benjamin Constant et les Anciens:
Politique, religion, histoire (2006).
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fascination with religion and his enduring interest in the new Protestant theology
coming out of Germany at the time, but she has also suggested that Constant’s
contemporaries understood that his Protestantism was integral to his liberalism.95
Here we might briefly focus upon the preface to De la Religion, for it is arguably in
this text (published in 1824) that Constant most strongly challenged the worth of
self-interest as a guide to our actions.96 Casting his mind back over the last twenty
years Constant saw a depressing catalogue of what he described as human indiffer-
ence, servility, calculation, prudence, and ‘moral arithmetic’. The effect of this,
Constant continued, had been to drive men within themselves, for them to be
consumed by a narrow egoism, and thus for all of us to become isolated one from
another. In these circumstances liberty could no more be enjoyed than it could be
established or preserved.
In consequence Constant distinguished between two broad moral systems: one
where personal well-being was our goal and self-interest our guide; another, where
we were driven by a sense of self-abnegation and personal sacrifice.97 For Constant,
the second of these constituted the essence of what he regarded as an indestructible
and indefinable inner religious sentiment. Not only did this inform our capacity for
disinterested actions—thereby making us worthy of our freedom—but it also gave
us a glimpse of our capacity to attain to a level of human perfection. That Constant
believed in the reality of the latter as an unfolding and progressive movement of
humankind towards a condition of moral and intellectual maturity is beyond
dispute.98 Our progress towards that end could be impeded, and sometimes
temporarily reversed, but it could never be thwarted, not even by the most
barbarous of tyrants. By the same token, it demonstrated conclusively that, in a
modern society, commerce alone was not a sufficient guarantee of the existence of
liberty, and that liberty itself was grounded upon and was sustained by religious
sentiment.
The guiding threads of this argument were, first, that religion was not a fixed and
immutable thing (the power of the priesthood, Constant recognized, depended on
the immutability of doctrine) and, secondly, that religious sentiment was both
inherent to human beings and the most pure of our passions. Everything that was
noble and most beautiful in us derived from it. Through it we broke out of the
narrow circle of our interests and opened ourselves up to others in a spirit of
generosity and sympathy. Yet, as Constant repeatedly avowed, religion had been
distorted and denatured. ‘Man’, Constant wrote, ‘has been pursued into this last
refuge, this intimate sanctuary of his existence. In the hands of government,
religion has been transformed into a menacing institution.’99 It had been twisted
into an instrument of oppression and into a social institution designed to repress
the people. For Constant the conclusions to be drawn were clear. True religion
95 Rosenblatt, Liberal Values, 2.
96 Benjamin Constant, De la Religion (Arles, 1999), 25–34.
97 Ibid. 33.
98 See Benjamin Constant, ‘De la perfectibilité de l’espèce humaine’, in De la liberté chez les
Modernes (1980), 580–95 and ‘Du développement progressif des idées religieuses’, ibid. 523–42.
99 Constant, Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments (Indianapolis, 2003), 134.
Religion, Enlightenment, and Reaction
317
served no utilitarian ends. It was not ‘a supplement to the gallows or the wheel’.100
Whenever governments interfered in matters relating to religion it did harm, and it
should therefore leave it alone. There should be no state religion. Neither the spirit
of inquiry nor the proliferation of sects was antithetical to the flourishing of
religion. Indeed, they ensured that religion kept its vitality and did not descend
into ossified dogma. The preferred policy therefore was to be religious pluralism
/> and freedom of conscience.101
In the years that followed the writing and the publication of these texts, Constant
continued both to restate his defence of modern liberty and to restate the impor-
tance of our religious sentiments. He did so, for example, in a speech to the Athénée
royal in December 1825 entitled ‘La Tendance générale des esprits dans le dix-
neuvième siècle’102 and again in a long review of Charles Dunoyer’s L’Industrie et la
Morale considerées dans leur rapport avec la liberté.103 What is intriguing about
Constant’s latter text, however, is that it provided a glimpse of what he imagined
might be a new form of religious despotism. In a postscript, he turned his fire
against what he termed ‘an industrial papacy’ and which he clearly associated with
the new positivist doctrines of Saint-Simon and his disciples.104 In contrast to the
individualisme developed by Dunoyer,105 Constant argued, this ‘new sect’ saw all
diversity of thought and activity as an expression of anarchy. Terrified that not all
people thought the same (or the same as their leaders), they invoked a spiritual
authority designed to reconstitute a broken intellectual unity and harmony. Under
the guise of coordinating our thoughts and actions, they sought, in Constant’s
opinion, ‘to organize tyranny’ and to impose ‘a new yoke’, to bring an end to what
they saw as the spiritual disorganization of society. Constant’s response was to
suggest that this supposed ‘moral anarchy’ was nothing other than ‘the natural,
desirable, happy state of a society in which each person, according to his own
understanding, tastes, intellectual disposition, believes or examines, preserves or
improves, in a word, makes a free and independent use of his faculties’. Moreover,
Constant was in little doubt that it was towards this end that society was moving.
Nevertheless, in these few remarks on Saint-Simonianism and its quest to establish
a new theocracy, he had identified what would become a growing trend in
nineteenth-century France and the potential breeding ground for a new type of
despotism.106
100 Ibid. 141.
101 Ibid. 129–46. Similar views can be found in book 1 of De la Religion, 39–97, in the
Commentaire sur l’ouvrage de Filangieri (2004), 290–315, and in articles published by Constant in
such journals as Le Mercure, La Minerve, La Renommée and the Courrier Français: see Ephraim Harpaz
(ed.), Benjamin Constant: Recueil d’articles, 2 vols. (Geneva, 1972); Receuil d’articles 1825–1829
(1992); Receuil d’articles 1829–1830 (1992).
102 Revue Encyclopédique, 28 (1825), 661–74.
103 Ibid. 29 (1826), 416–35.
104 Ibid. 432–5.
105 See Charles Dunoyer, ‘Notice historique sur l’industrialisme’, Œuvres de Charles Dunoyer
(1870), ii. 173–99.
106 It was Constant’s fellow liberal, Élie Halévy, who insisted upon the connexion between Saint-
Simonianism and Bonapartist ‘Caesarism’: see Élie Halévy, L’Ère des tyrannies (1938), 213, 219.
318
Religion, Enlightenment, and Reaction
The years of the Restoration were difficult ones for French Protestants. Although
the Revolution and the Empire had left Catholicism in a parlous state—the Church
was short of both priests and money—it was re-established as the state religion and
Louis XVIII quickly displayed his intention to restore the unity of throne and altar.
The teaching of the Catholic religion in the primary school curriculum and a return
to an unadulterated Christian calendar were among the many gestures intended to
secure a revival of Catholic faith and to re-Christianize France. Catholic intransi-
gence only intensified further in the 1820s after the assassination of the Duc de
Berri and the ascent to the throne of the devout Charles X. In 1825 a new Law of
Sacrilege stipulated that the crime of blasphemy was punishable by death. Protes-
tants had good cause to be worried by these measures as renewed enthusiasm for
Catholicism was often accompanied by a reactionary politics which specifically
identified Protestantism as being among the nation’s ills. There were many calls to
put an end to religious liberty. Protestants responded to these pressures by launch-
ing such journals as the Archives du christianisme and the Revue protestante. They
likewise established various voluntary associations to defend Protestant values and
sought to create links with like-minded Catholics. It was, therefore, with some relief
that Protestants greeted the Revolution of 1830 and the calmer, less religiously
orthodox, atmosphere of the July Monarchy.107
No one gave better voice to the possibilities that this novel situation might offer
Protestantism than François Guizot. Remarkably, during the 1820s the historian of
representative government had found time to write a series of essays on such diverse
religious topics as the immortality of the soul and the meaning of faith and he
continued these interests into the 1830s and beyond.108 In 1838, now temporarily
free of ministerial responsibilities, he penned two texts that addressed the relation-
ship between religion and politics, both of extraordinary quality and insight and
both intent upon effecting a new religious settlement under the Orleanist monar-
chy of Louis-Philippe.
The first, De la Religion dans les Sociétés Modernes,109 developed the argument
that, as ‘there is an intimate connection between man’s earthly ideas and his
religious ideas, between his temporal desires and his eternal desires’,110 it was
necessary that there should exist an ‘entente and a harmony’ between politics and
religion. This was especially true of a society such as that of contemporary France
where the ‘docteurs populaires’ had told everyone that they had a right to be happy
and a right to everything they desired. ‘The more the social movement becomes
animated and widespread’, Guizot observed, ‘the less politics will suffice to guide a
troubled humanity.’111 Yet such an argument, Guizot acknowledged, faced two
107 For an account of the development of Catholic and Protestant opinion see the remarkable essay
by François Guizot, ‘Le Réveil Chrétien en France au XIXe siècle’, Méditations sur l’État Actuel de
la Religion Chrétienne (1866), ii. 1–200.
108 See Guizot, Méditations et Études Morales (1852), 87–210. Guizot’s later religious writings can
be found in the 3-vol. Méditations sur l’État Actuel de la Religion Chrétienne.
109 Guizot, Méditations et Études Morales, 25–52.
110 Ibid. 32.
111 Ibid.
Religion, Enlightenment, and Reaction
319
obstacles. First, there were ‘clever men’ who had seen religion as ‘a means of order
and of social control’ and who denied its ‘intrinsic value’ for the individual. Second,
‘great religious minds’ had regarded the world as ‘evil incarnate’, as a barrier to the
accomplishment of ‘our moral destiny’. Religious belief existed only in opposition
to human society. Both views, in Guizot’s estimation, were wrong and dangerous.
To the first, he responded that religious beliefs derived from what was ‘most
precious, most compelling and most noble
in man’ and that a politics which did
not recognize this would be ultimately ‘futile’. To the second, he replied that the
world was not a place of proscription and perdition where men lived in exile but
rather that it was in this world and through their social existence that men lived out
and advanced their ‘destiny’. It was, Guizot continued, to the glory of Christianity
that it had understood that, if the fundamental purpose of religion was ‘the
regeneration and salvation of souls’, then, by the same token, men should engage
with this world and seek to improve it. Of late, however, religion and society, in
Guizot’s view, had ceased to understand each other and to develop in parallel. The
‘ideas, sentiments, and interests’ that prevailed in the temporal world were in
disharmony with those relating to ‘eternal life’ and we were all the poorer and
the less secure as a consequence. The challenging task ahead, therefore, was ‘to draw
together the Christian spirit and the spirit of the century, the old religion and the
new society’.112
To that end, Guizot concluded his essay by drawing the reader’s attention to
efforts, both Catholic and Protestant, to effect reconciliation between these
two worlds and to do so in conditions of mutual respect and shared liberty.
‘The religious spirit’, he wrote, ‘has returned to the world to conquer it but not to
usurp it.’113 It was upon this premise that Guizot built the argument of his
second text, Du Catholicisme, du Protestantisme et de la Philosophie.114 ‘I am
convinced’, he began, ‘that, in the new society, in the France of the Charte,
Catholicism, Protestantism and philosophy can live in peace together, . . . not
only materially, but morally. . . . and voluntarily.’115 The greatest challenge to this
thesis, Guizot willingly accepted, came from the Catholic Church. The solution,
however, lay in the neutrality of the State in religious matters and in the
recognition of its ‘incompetence’ in matters of faith and dogma. The Church
had nothing to fear from the new civil authority and could preserve its claims to
infallibility in spiritual matters. All it had to do in return was to accept the central
principle of France’s constitutional regime, namely, that ‘all human power is
fallible and should be controlled and limited’.116 In simple terms, this meant that
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