Acton’s life and work (and nonwork) included numerous lectures, essays, and reviews on historical subjects, but he never wrote a book. It was significant, too, that while he authored unforgettable aphorisms (for example, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”), which have attained the authority of cliché, he is not famous for his theories of history. One of the most vigorous and relentless Seekers, he remained vividly aware of the burden and the promise of his Western inheritance. There was no more strenuous, nor more frustrated effort to reconcile the ancient doctrines of Christianity with the modern doctrines of liberalism. And, although Acton saw the rise of liberty as the grand theme of human history, he was a divided soul, a Seeker who would not abandon either path of his quest.
Born into an age that was dissolving the certitudes of Christianity, Acton still dared not abandon them. His life, he once said, was “the story of a man who started in life believing himself a sincere Catholic and a sincere Liberal; who therefore renounced everything in Catholicism which was not compatible with Liberty and everything in Politics not compatible with Catholicism.” He was the perfect embodiment of the Seeker—too Catholic to renounce the wisdom of the past and too searching not to follow the inquiring spirit of his age. But he never retreated into the comforting dogmas of either past or present. There was never a more devoted acolyte of ideas, nor a more scrupulous attender to “the little fact that makes the difference.” As he once said of his mentor Döllinger, “He knew too much to write.” Always discouraged by the imperfection of the material, he always delayed his unifying work by the promise of new facts and new ideas still to come.
Acton’s life and inheritance were designed to make his mind a battleground. Born into a cosmopolitan, aristocratic family, he inherited his Catholicism. His family had been converted to Catholicism in the eighteenth century and they saw that his education was supervised by leading Catholics. Schooled at the English Catholic school of Oscott, which had been a center of the Catholic Revival, near Oxford, which was the center of the Anglo-Catholic Oxford Movement, he was refused admission by three Cambridge colleges that did not welcome Catholics. In 1850 he was sent to Munich, then noted for its Catholic scholarship. There he was privately tutored by Professor Johann Ignaz von Döllinger (1799-1890), an independent-minded priest and historian, whose disciple he remained for thirty years.
From Döllinger, Acton inherited the idea of “developmental” Christianity. To reconcile history and theology, Christianity was conceived not as a set of dogmas but as a historical growth. But for Catholics in Acton’s generation the conflict between dogma and the seeking spirit—between orthodoxy and liberty—was not to be so easily dismissed. As editor of the liberal Catholic monthly The Rambler, Acton tried to apply the developmental idea, but soon met papal opposition and had to discontinue publication (1864).
The issue was posed more dramatically and more deliberately than Acton had imagined when the imperious Pope Pius IX (1792-1878; pope, 1846-78) called the first Vatican Council (1869-70) to confront the conflict between traditional doctrine and the rising currents of liberalism. His would be the longest pontificate in history, and one of the most contentious. Though dominated by the papal bureaucracy, it was only after heated opposition that the Vatican Council promulgated the dogma of papal infallibility. “The bishops entered the council shepherds,” the historian William Lecky observed from Rome, “they came out of it sheep.” When Döllinger protested and refused to accept the dogma, he was excommunicated. Acton himself persuaded the prime minister Gladstone to protest the new dogma, and published his own attack on infallibility. But when Archbishop Manning supported the doctrine and confronted Acton, he reconsidered, and so was not excommunicated.
It is no wonder that Acton’s great work, his history of liberty, remained a “Madonna of the Future”—never finished, and never really begun. For he remained a passionate, always unfulfilled Seeker. His need for personal faith he satisfied in Catholic Christianity, but for the whole human experience he found no dogma adequate. His idea of liberty was a way of describing the endless quest. Faith in liberty as the human destiny made every event a chapter of the larger history he never wrote. All his lectures and essays became part of that story.
Believing in the right to unbelief, he saw liberal faith as a bulwark against persecution, while religion was not. Though he detested persecution, yet he was unwilling to abandon his Catholic faith. Instead, he used his agile mind and historical detail to defend his personal faith while condemning Catholic acts of persecution throughout history. Acton’s inward conflicts have been sensitively described by Gertrude Himmelfarb, who recounts the dynamics of his compromise. With a tortured historical argument, he elaborated in his essays his distinction between the Catholic and the Protestant theories of persecution—in which the Protestant theory came off much the worse. “The principle on which the Protestants oppressed the Catholics was new. . . . Catholic intolerance is handed down from an age when unity subsisted, and when its preservation, being essential to that of society, became a necessity of State as well as a result of circumstances. Protestant intolerance, on the contrary, was the peculiar fruit of a dogmatic system in contradiction with the facts and principles on which the intolerance actually existing among Catholics was founded. Spanish intolerance has been infinitely more sanguinary than Swedish; but in Spain, independently of the interests of religion, there were strong political and social reasons to justify persecution without seeking any theory to prop it up. . . .”
Catholic persecution, he argued, was no more than the enforcement of public morality, while Protestant persecution was the pure inhibition of freedom of religious thought, illustrated by the case of Servetus, whom Calvin had burned at the stake: “Servetus was not a party leader. He had no followers who threatened to upset the peace and unity of the Church. His doctrine was speculative, without power or attraction for the masses, like Lutheranism; and without consequences subversive of morality, or affecting in any direct way the existence of society, like Anabaptism.” Thus, as Himmelfarb observes, while Catholic persecution was more bloody as the instrument of prevailing morality, Acton argued that “the Protestant persecution was more soul-corrupting.”
Obsessed by the need to find coherence, order, and unity in all human history, Acton imagined that unity might be found in a history of liberty. Yet all he could achieve was a bouquet of brilliant insights into epochal movements and revolutions. He offered these in his Lectures on the French Revolution, his Lectures on Modern History, his “Inaugural Lecture on the Study of History,” and miscellaneous essays. His insights were diffuse, atomistic, and inconsistent.
Acton was hostile to the American abolitionists, who championed “an abstract idea” even at the cost of disrupting society. The American abolitionists, he argued, were the real enemies of the Constitution. They appealed to an abstraction and the passing whim of the majority against established institutions. “The influence of these habits of abstract reasoning, to which we owe the revolution in Europe, is to make all things questions of principle and of abstract law . . . and the consequence is that a false and arbitrary political system produces an arbitrary code of ethics, and the theory of abolition is as erroneous as the theory of freedom.”
So Acton saw uncontrolled democracy, too, like absolute monarchy, as the enemy of liberty. “The true democratic principle, that none shall have power over the people, is taken to mean that none shall be able to restrain or to elude its power. . . . The true democratic principle, that every man’s free will shall be as unfettered as possible, is taken to mean that the free will of the collective people shall be fettered in nothing.” But there was a higher law, which was not the mere will of the majority. This was the faith of “the Stoics who emancipated mankind from its subjugation to despotic rule, and whose enlightened and elevated views of life bridged the chasm that separates the ancient from the Christian state, and led the way to freedom. Their test of good government is its conformity to princip
les that can be traced to a higher legislator. That which we must obey, that to which we are bound to reduce all civil authorities, and to sacrifice every earthly interest, is that immutable law which is perfect and eternal as God Himself, which proceeds from His nature, and reigns over heaven and earth and over all the nations.”
The historian’s function, Acton insisted in his Inaugural Lecture as Regius Professor, is “to keep in view and to command the movement of ideas, which are not the effect but the cause of public events.” Yet Acton’s own history was a tale of concrete human experience, of human weakness and human hopes, which he noted:
Use of history—no surprises. He [the historian] has seen all this before. He knows what constant and invariable forces will resist the truth and the Higher Purpose. What weakness, division, excess, will damage the better cause. The splendid plausibility of error, the dazzling attractiveness of sin. And by what adjustment to inferior motives good causes succeed. . . . History is not a web woven with innocent hands. Among all the causes which degrade and demoralize men, power is the most constant and the most active.
Although Acton would be popularly known for his aphorisms about power and its perils, he saw an antidote to power. The dynamic in history—a tireless struggle against the power of original sin—came from communal seeking for the modern mode of progress. Acton gave it the name of revolution.
“Liberalism,” Acton insisted, “wishes for what ought to be, irrespective of what is,” and is “essentially revolutionary. . . . Facts must yield to ideas. Peaceably and patiently if possible. Violently if not.” “The supreme conquests of society are won more often by violence than by lenient arts. . . . If the world owes religious liberty to the Dutch Revolution, constitutional government to the English, federal republicanism to the American, political equality to the French and its successors, what is to become of us, docile and attentive students of the absorbing Past? The triumph of the Revolutionist annuls the historian.”
Yet the historian must remember that “the modern ages did not proceed from the medieval by normal succession” but “Unheralded, it founded a new order of things under a law of innovation.” Modern history was born in revolution, in the revolutions of Columbus, Machiavelli, Erasmus, Luther, and Copernicus—each of whom “broke the chain of authority and tradition.” So the long continuity of history, for Acton, was a process of permanent revolution. This was his name for progress, and justified his optimism for humanity despite the evils of the self-serving power of individuals.
But how justify the existence of evil under a beneficent God? Acton, faced with Job’s problem, was seeking his own solution. Which he found ingeniously, not in the omnipotence of God but in his own sacred theme of liberty. “Liberty is so holy a thing,” Acton observed, “that God was forced to permit Evil, that it might exist.”
So, after all, still not achieving his own great work, Acton brought together the best historians of his day to collaborate on the Cambridge Modern History. Advancing beyond “conventional history,” they would not be confined in the history of nations, but would chronicle the grand leading ideas that unified humankind:
By Universal History I understand that which is distinct from the combined history of all countries, which is not a rope of sand, but a continuous development, and is not a burden to the memory, but an illumination of the soul. It moves in a succession to which the nations are subsidiary. Their story will be told, not for their own sake, but in reference and subordination to a higher series, according to the time and the degree in which they contribute to the common fortunes of mankind.
It was significant that, while Acton left a rich miscellaneous legacy of his own essays, lectures, and ideas, his monument of scholarship was the collaboration of other historians of his age, seeking in a work of surprising objectivity.
Despite Acton’s optimism about the long-term future of humankind, he raised the alarm against ideas and institutions of his time that menaced the liberty that was the proper human destiny. The most serious was the racism recently advanced by the French Orientalist Joseph Gobineau. Acton attacked racism as “one of the many schemes to deny free will, responsibility, and guilt, and to supplant moral by physical forces.” “Nationality,” newly flourishing in Europe in Acton’s day, was a similar diversion of the great current of human liberty. “The progress of civilization depends on transcending Nationality. . . . Influences which are accidental yield to those which are rational. . . . The nations aim at power, and the world at freedom.” And the State (as in Bismarck’s Prussia)—the modern fellow conspirator of Nationalism—was “a vast abstraction above all other things” (invented, he said, by Machiavelli), which oppressed all its subjects and consumed their lives.
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Malraux’s Charms of Anti-Destiny
Marx had sought his clues to destiny in the industrial Manchester of his friend Friedrich Engels, in the plight of the oppressed surrounding him in Western Europe, and in the arcane science of economics. André Malraux (1901-1976) set out to find his meaning for history in the artwork of the buried past halfway around the world in Indochina. Yet he would risk his life in revolutionary movements foreshadowed by Marx’s science, and would write enduring sagas of the adventure of revolution in his time. Malraux saw human fulfillment in the kinship of past and present everywhere and in individual acts of heroism, in war or art. “Art,” he insisted, “is an anti-destiny,” the fulfillment of man’s unique and universal spirit. Obsessed by the passion and drama of history in his time, he found elegant refuge in his Voices of Silence, in the legacy of artists of all times and places.
Malraux was born in 1901 to a wealthy family in Paris. His father’s heroes were the pioneers of technology—de Lesseps, Eiffel, Citroen, Blériot. He attended the lycée but never completed the program, and grew up in Paris where he worked for rare-book dealers. He read widely and especially admired Dumas. His father was a tank officer in World War I, which André considered “very romantic.” The boy André glimpsed the carnage of battle in trains returning with heavy casualties. Never attending university, he acquired an amazing grasp of world art, history, and literature on his own. At eighteen his first publication, The Origins of Cubist Poetry, gave a clue to his lifelong interest in the surprising and the marginal. Stimulated by the effervescent community of Paris intellectuals, the impressionable Malraux explored mystical experiences, sought out works of erotica and exotica for publishers, and acquired a taste for Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche, which he never lost.
When he was twenty-one, Malraux enlisted his new bride, Clara Goldschmidt, on an expedition to Indochina in search of the ancient Khmer ruins about which he had read in an archaeological review. In the jungle he hoped to find the abandoned ruins of a temple that might rival the famous Angkor Wat. He had already given his own explanation of the special value of individual works recovered from the past—in his theory of confrontation, which he would develop thirty years later in his Voices of Silence. “The Greek genius,” he had written, “is better understood by opposing one Greek statue to an Egyptian or Asian statue than by getting to know a hundred Greek statues.” He secured a letter from the Minister of Colonies for French Indochina authorizing him to explore the site of the Khmer temples, his only obligation being to give an account on his return.
After a month’s sea voyage from Marseilles, André and Clara briefly savored the exotic life of Saigon and of Hanoi, administrative capital of French Indochina. A riverboat took them to Siem Reap, the port for Angkor Wat, where they equipped themselves with tropical helmets, drinking water, and a local guide. After a two-day trek into the jungle with four bullock carts of supplies they found a neglected trail that led to the ruins mentioned in the archaeological review. In The Royal Way, Malraux would describe their finds—“bas reliefs of the best period, marked by Indian influence . . . but very beautiful.” Still embedded in the walls were huge blocks of the treasured sculptures, which Malraux and his crew spent two days and several broken saws hacking loose. They estimated
that the blocks would bring $100,000 on delivery in New York. The pieces they had cut out formed four blocks of bas-relief of dancing goddesses and men seated in lotus position. Their thousand pounds of treasure was loaded on a river steamer to a forwarding agent in Saigon. When the boat tied up at Phnom Penh, André and Clara stayed on board. They were awakened before midnight and placed under arrest.
The ruins that André and his crew had exploited had been among the “discovered and undiscovered” sites protected by the governor general’s regulations and recent Paris decrees. During the six months before their trial, “the Angkor Wat robbers” became a cause célèbre in Paris and New York. Clara feigned suicide, was stricken by a tropical fever, and began a hunger strike. Despite uncertainty whether these Banteai Srey ruins had really been legally classified and protected as historical monuments, the judge convicted Malraux, sentencing him to three years in prison and five years’ banishment from residence in Indochina. After months of pressure, petitions from eminent Europeans, and lengthy appeals, Malraux’s sentence was reduced and he never had to go to prison. Malraux still wanted to appeal again, because, he said, he wanted his statues. But they were not to be his. In 1925 the statues were replaced in the temple wall, where they stayed until the whole area was leveled in a North Vietnamese-Khmer Rouge attack in 1970.
On his twenty-third birthday Malraux sailed for Marseilles. For him, seeking was never a purely aesthetic experience. Finding his very own way to every idea, he drew some surprising conclusions from his archaeological misadventure. “My revolutionary commitment,” he would later explain, “was in reaction to colonialism. Until then I had never taken sides and Indochina was the touchstone to my becoming aware of—let’s simplify ‘social justice.’ I became involved when I realized that for the peoples of Southeast Asia only a revolutionary movement would bring them a liberal status.” After a brief stay in Paris to finance his next Indochina adventure, Malraux and Clara returned to Saigon in 1925. There they founded a “free” anticolonialist newspaper, L’Indochine. This put Malraux in touch with the left wing of the Kuomintang, the Nationalist Party in China. Meanwhile an enterprising Paris publisher had given him an advance and a contract for three novels.
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