Revolution and the Republic
Page 69
provided the first significant sign of Catholic revival.149 As he was later to comment
in his memoirs:
It was amid the remains of our temples that I published Le Génie du Christianisme.
The faithful felt themselves saved; there was then a need for a faith, a hunger for
religious consolation, which sprang from the denial of these consolations over many
years. . . . People were rushing into the house of God in the same way as they entered a
doctor’s at the outbreak of a contagious disease. The victims of our troubles (and how many
they were) sought salvation at the altar, like the shipwrecked clinging to a rock for safety.
‘The idea of God and the immortality of the soul’, he continued, ‘reclaimed their
dominion.’150 As a work of theology, the quality of Chateaubriand’s text may be
judged by his concluding argument. ‘Christianity is perfect; men are imperfect.
A perfect outcome cannot follow from an imperfect principle. Therefore Christian-
ity does not come from men. If it does not come from men, it can only come from
God. If it comes from God, men can only know it by revelation. Therefore
146 See Ruth Harris, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (London, 1999).
147 See Raymond A. Jones, ‘Monument as Ex-Voto, Monument as Historiography: The Basilica of
Sacré-Cœur’, French Historical Studies, 18 (1993), 482–502.
148 See Jacqueline Lalouette, La République anticléricale (2002), 301–412.
149 See James F. McMillan, ‘Catholic Christianity in France from Restoration to the Separation of
Church and State, 1815–1905’, in Sheridan Gilley and Brian Stanley (eds.), The Cambridge History of
Christianity, viii. World Christianities c.1815–c.1914 (Cambridge, 2006), 219.
150 Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1973), i. 527–9.
Religion, Enlightenment, and Reaction
325
Christianity is a revealed religion.’151 Arguments of a similar style and dubious
quality were used to sustain the accuracy of biblical chronology. These defects,
however, did little to diminish the rapture induced among its readers.
Subtitled ‘The Beauties of the Christian Religion’, Chateaubriand’s text started
from the premise that there was nothing beautiful, sweet, or great in the world that
was not also mysterious and from this it set out to prove that,
of all religions, the Christian religion is the most poetic, the most humane, the most
favourable to liberty and to the arts and literature . . . that there is nothing more divine
than its morality, nothing more attractive and splendid than its tenets, its doctrines and
its forms of worship; that it encourages genius, refines taste, develops the virtuous
passions, imparts vigour to thought, presents noble forms to the writer and perfect
models to the artist.152
The ambition, in other words, was to refute all those from Voltaire onwards who
had claimed incorrectly that Christianity was born out of barbarism and that it held
men in a condition of savagery, darkness, and slavery; and thus to show the
contribution of Christianity to everything that was most sublime, inspiring, and
valuable in Western civilization. This Chateaubriand achieved with both eloquence
and erudition. Having safely navigated around the mysteries and sacraments of
Christian doctrine, the text warmed to its task, exploring first ‘the Poetry of
Christianity’ and then ‘Fine Arts and Literature’. Sculpture, drama, sacred music,
painting, and the Gothic cathedrals were all deployed inter alia to provide what
amounted to a Christian apologetic as aesthetics. In similar vein, the concluding
section evoked the beauties of the liturgy and the emotional power of the church
bell and country cemetery. Chateaubriand, then, appealed not to the reason of his
readers but to their hearts, to their feelings, and to their deepest sensibilities.
Not everyone was convinced or swayed—least of all, the house journal of the
Idéologues, the Décade philosophique, where it was severely treated by Pierre-Louis
Ginguené as a text defending counter-revolution and superstition153—but its
influence among literary circles and the broader public spread far and wide and
did so for much of the first half of the nineteenth century. Above all, Chateaubriand
gave Catholics cause to be proud of their faith, restoring its credibility and prestige,
and in so doing he revealed the spiritual poverty and sterility of the atheism
bequeathed by the eighteenth century. The latter, he wrote, offered us only
suffering, death, the coffin, and nothingness.154
In Chateaubriand’s hands, Catholicism not only became attractive but almost
fashionable. His evocative and rich prose struck a chord with a France disillusioned
by the violence and chaos of the Revolution and a country grown sceptical of the
claims of reason. The mood had changed and, capturing the moment, Chateaubri-
and conjured up the romance of the past and the possibilities of a new age of
imagination and sentiment. The publication of Le Génie du Christianisme, Barbey
d’Aurevilly was to write in 1851, ‘had something of the supernatural and the astral
151 Chateaubriand, Le Génie du Christianisme (1966), ii. 256.
152 Ibid. i. 57.
153 See Kitchin, Un journal ‘philosophique’, 174–7.
154 Ibid. 214.
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about it’.155 Yet Chateaubriand’s poignant apology for Christianity was not the
only manifestation of a resurgent Catholicism present at the time. By its side was to
be found a darker and more apocalyptic expression of Catholic faith and one which,
in its total opposition to the Enlightenment and all its supposed ills, set itself
resolutely against the moral decay of post-revolutionary society.
Antoine Compagnon has described some of the essential features of this mental-
ity in a work appropriately entitled Les antimodernes.156 The discourse of antimo-
dernity, he argues, was counter-revolutionary, against the philosophes, pessimistic
about the possibilities of man and society, believed in one version or other of the
doctrine of original sin, embraced an aesthetics of the sublime, and, last but not
least, adopted a tone of vituperation and vengeance. The specific characteristics of
this frame of mind typical of the early nineteenth century have likewise been
sketched by Darrin McMahon.157 After 1800, McMahon records, the defenders
of the philosophes were subject to a ‘powerful new onslaught’ and this from authors
who had but recently been forced ‘to conduct their campaigns in exile, in hiding,
and in fear of revolutionary reprisals’.158 For these writers, Christianity was not
merely socially necessary and useful but also true. It was a repository of certainty in
a world of scepticism and doubt. Articles in such periodicals as the Journal des débats
and the Mercure argued against toleration and for the rigorous censorship of
religious opinion. In similar vein, anti-philosophe polemic praised the patriarchal
family and denounced divorce, believing that parricide went hand in hand with
regicide. History, on this view, showed the limits to human perfection and
demonstrated the need for strong social and political institutions to control the
wayward be
haviour of ordinary mortals. Prejudice, custom, and tradition were to
be valued, as were France’s ancient monarchy and institutions. Finally, the anti-
philosophes were in near-unanimous agreement that France had been at its greatest,
most polished, and most devout, under the reign of Louis XIV and that since then
the country had passed ‘into utter depravity’.159 The political agenda spawned by
such tirades against the present was clear enough. France, these ‘prophets of the
past’ believed,160 would not make a return to social harmony and order until such
time as religious orthodoxy had been re-established and the unity of throne and
altar had been restored.
It would be wrong to overstate the level of doctrinal unity that existed among this
diverse and, for the most part, little-known group of writers. Theological divisions
in particular were never far from the surface and it would be a mistake to think in
terms of an organized movement or party galvanized around an exclusive opposi-
tion to the siècle des lumières. Likewise, many of the strident criticisms of the
corrosive and contagious effects of the philosophic spirit that were articulated in
155 Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Les Prophètes du passé (1860), 110.
156 Compagnon, Les Antimodernes de Joseph de Maistre à Roland Barthes (2005).
157 Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the
Making of Modernity (Oxford, 2001), 122–52.
158 Ibid. 122–3.
159 Ibid. 147.
160 This is the title of the work by Barbey d’Aurevilly cited above.
Religion, Enlightenment, and Reaction
327
the wake of the Revolution were in circulation (sometimes albeit in embryonic
form) before 1789. However, the Revolution itself, holding aloft the very possibi-
lity of the annihilation of the Catholic religion, served to radicalize these earlier
pronouncements and to give them greater urgency and force. To that extent, the
Revolution appeared to validate the dire warnings of disaster that the defenders
of the Church had made repeatedly under the ancien régime. After the Revolu-
tion, therefore, with the worst fears of anti-philosophe opinion realized, the battle
was truly enjoined. In the previous chapter we saw one example of this bitter
enmity: the philosophes stood accused of leading a revolutionary conspiracy to
destroy both Christianity and the monarchy. Philosophie and the philosophes were
now to be subjected to relentless and destructive criticism before the jury of public
opinion that they themselves had worked to create. Central to this was an attempted
refutation of everything that the Enlightenment was taken to stand for.
We have already had reason to examine the ideas of Joseph de Maistre. He has
featured as an opponent of the doctrine of rights, as an acerbic critic of Rousseau
and of social contract theory, and as an advocate of the satanic quality of the
Revolution. Now he is to figure as the staunch defender of religion, papal authority,
and the public executioner.161 Maistre, we might recall, was firmly of the opinion
that it was the philosophers of the Enlightenment who had produced the revolu-
tionary monster that had devastated France and Europe. In addition to this, he had
a series of substantive objections to the philosophisme of his eighteenth-century
enemy.162 These objections informed all his mature writings and took three
primary forms. First, Maistre rejected what he took to be the Enlightenment’s
theory of knowledge. In particular, he rejected the view that there were no such
things as innate ideas. Next, he dismissed the paradigmatic status accorded to
natural science. Finally, he denounced (and ridiculed) the Enlightenment’s enthu-
siasm for a priori and abstract reasoning. Taken together, they amounted to one
overall criticism: the Enlightenment displayed a misplaced pride and trust in the
power of man’s unaided intellect. ‘Philosophy’, Maistre countered, ‘is nothing but
human reason acting alone, and human reason reduced to its own resources is
nothing but a brute whose power is restricted to destroying.’163 It amounted, he
wrote in May 1809, to an ‘insurrection against God’.164 Elsewhere, in the later Les
Soirées de Saint-Petersbourg, he spoke of philosophy as ‘theophobia’ and as ‘a system
of practical atheism’.165 In his view, we were witnessing a fight to the death
between Christianity and the cult of philosophy.
161 See Jesse Goldhammer, ‘Joseph de Maistre and the Politics of Conservative Regeneration’, The
Headless Republic: Sacrificial Violence in Modern French Thought (Ithaca, NY, and London, 2005),
71–111.
162 When Maistre spoke of philosophisme rather than philosophie, he was intentionally designating a
form of false philosophy that relied upon the misuse of reason. The term was very current in the latter
half of the 18th cent.
163 De la Souveraineté du peuple (1992), 132–3.
164 ‘Essai sur le Principe générateur des constitutions politiques et des autres institutions humaines’,
in Pierre Glaudes (ed.), Joseph de Maistre: Œuvres (2007), 399.
165 ‘Les Soirées de Saint-Petersbourg ou Entretiens sur le gouvernement temporal de la Providence’,
ibid. 59.
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Maistre did not read Locke’s Essay on the Human Understanding until 1806.166
Having read it, he quickly concluded that ‘contempt for Locke is the beginning of
wisdom’.167 His philosophy was as false as it was dangerous. Maistre’s argument
against Locke and Lockean epistemology may be briefly summarized as follows.168
Locke was a superficial and mediocre thinker. He was ‘incapacity demonstrated’.
His work was frequently characterized by ‘grossness’ of expression, as, for example,
when he described the memory as a box where ideas were stored until needed or the
human intellect as a dark room with several windows to let in the light.169 Most of
all, what Locke said was either straightforwardly banal or plain wrong. This,
Maistre maintained, was true of Locke’s central proposition: that all our ideas
came from either the senses or from reflection. ‘Torturing the truth’, Maistre
argued, Locke was forced to accept that ‘general ideas’ were ‘inventions or CREA-
TURES of the human mind’, for ‘according to the doctrine of this great philoso-
pher, man makes general ideas with simple ideas, just as he makes boats with
planks’.170 The fallacy in Locke’s argument was all too evident. Every idea, Maistre
argued, that did not originate either in the mind’s interaction with external objects
or the consideration of itself by the mind must derive from the substance of the
mind. From this, Maistre declared jubilantly, it followed that ‘there are ideas that
are innate and prior to all experience’.171 Consequently, Locke’s entire argument
stood exposed as ‘splendid nonsense’.
Maistre’s own references to innate ideas displayed a significant (and perhaps
understandable) element of uncertainty and hesitation. ‘Whether universal ideas
are innate in us, or whether we derive them from God, or whatever you like’,
Maistre argued defensively, ‘is not important.’172 What matt
ered was that we
recognized that Locke’s epistemology contained ‘the gravest and vilest of errors’.
To deny the existence of innate ideas was not only to deny the spiritual essence of
man but also to deny the very possibility of morality. Man, Maistre insisted, carried
within him certain common moral opinions or eternal verities. ‘I ought to do it’ was,
Maistre contended, an ‘innate idea whose nature is independent of every error of
application’. If this assumption were not accepted, he concluded, it would be
impossible to conceive of ‘the unity of the human species’.173
Having thus dismissed Locke’s theory of knowledge and pointed out its dangers
when placed in the hands of its ‘venomous’ French adherents, Maistre was next in a
position to challenge what he saw as the false and mistaken conception of science so
dear to the eighteenth century. Upon this occasion his ire was directed against yet
another illustrious exemplar of English empiricism: Francis Bacon. The Examen de
la Philosophie de Bacon ou l’on traite différentes questions de la philosophie rationnelle
was written between 1814 and 1816 (although not published until 1836) and
followed the publication of Bacon’s complete works in French at the turn of the
166 See Richard A. Lebrun, ‘Maistrian Epistemology’, in Lebrun (ed.), Maistre Studies (Lanham,
Md., 1988), 209. See also E. D. Watt, ‘“Locked In”: De Maistre’s Critique of French Lockeanism’,
Journal of the History of Ideas, 32 (1971), 129–32.
167 Maistre, ‘Les Soirées de Saint-Petersbourg’, 640.
168 Ibid. 601–48.
169 Ibid. 612.
170 Ibid. 623.
171 Ibid. 624.
172 Ibid. 511.
173 Ibid. 626–7.
Religion, Enlightenment, and Reaction
329
century. It amounted to a 700-page, two-volume refutation and dismissal of
everything Bacon ever wrote or said.174 His philosophy, Maistre stated, was ‘a
continuous aberration’. Bacon ‘was mistaken about logic, about metaphysics, about
physics, about natural history, about astronomy, about mathematics, about chem-
istry, about medicine and, finally, about everything relating to the vast area of
natural philosophy on which he dared to speak’.175 Specifically, Maistre denied that