Part 26

And so they became priests. Why and how they did it we can learn from the novels which describe the life of the period, such as Beyle's _Rouge et Noire_. This was undoubtedly the priests' golden age. On the 7th of June 1814, three days after the publication of the Charter, the notorious law was passed which prescribed compulsory observation of Sundays and holy-days. Frenchmen were to be Catholics under penalty of fine. Even the adherents of other creeds were obliged to decorate their houses on the occasion of processions of the Holy Sacrament. On the 7th of August 1814 the order of the Jesuits was solemnly re-established. The education of the country was placed in the hands of the clergy. As much of its power as possible was taken from the University, if for no other reason than because numbers of the students had taken part in the defence of Paris against the foreign troops, _i.e._ the allies of the monarchy.

At this time there begins within the Catholic Church itself a short process of fermentation (to which Joseph de Maistre's and Lamennais' feud with Gallicanism belongs), which in the course of a score of years produces the hitherto unknown phenomenon of perfect unity among Catholics. Catholicism and submission to Rome become one and the same thing. And another, kindred phenomenon, quite as unheard of, is witnessed in our century. Religious unity spreads even beyond the bounds of the Roman Catholic Church. The Protestant Church holds out its hand to the Catholic, which in days gone by it had abominated as the Babylonian whore. Glancing at the later religious development of the century, we find that in our days the difference between orthodox Protestantism and Catholicism is only an apparent difference, only the difference between faith in the infallibility of the Bible and faith in the infallibility of the Pope. The Protestants reject the reason of the eighteenth and the scientific criticism of the nineteenth century; they go back to the creeds of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and do not consider even these orthodox enough; Luther is too advanced for them. Schleiermacher is regarded as a free-thinker by orthodox Germany; Bossuet's attitude is reprobated by French Catholics. He is considered a heretic, in as far as he asserted the independence of the French church. We remember that Joseph de Maistre disapproved of him. Even Montalembert, in his book on the interests of Catholicism in the nineteenth century, mentions him in a condemnatory tone. But the movement does not stop here. The contributors to the Catholic newspapers and periodicals take to writing historical articles which constitute a regular crusade against the great pagan geniuses who founded the civilisation of Europe, such as Pindar, Plato, Virgil. In Danish literature we have an equivalent in Grundtvig's earliest historical pronouncements.[3] Hence Montalembert, in the work just referred to, is able to declare triumphantly: "Lying history, parodied history, declamatory history, as written by Voltaire, Dulaure, and Schiller, the men who educated our fathers, would hardly be put up with to-day, even in a feuilleton." A glance through Lamennais' letters is sufficient to persuade us that one great cause of the Revolution of July was the behaviour of the clerical party. The Jesuits acted as the storming force of fanaticism. Missionaries, whose fervent faith was due to their gross ignorance, were sent to all parts of the country. They sometimes converted whole regiments at a time, and these were then led by their officers in a body to the altar.

The worship of the Virgin developed in a way it had never done before. Belief in Mary underwent the same change that belief in Christ had done in ancient days, only more quickly. She was gradually transformed from a human into a divine being.

Let us for a moment follow the course of the religious reaction beyond the period under consideration, and we shall see that this movement has progressed with giant steps. The dogma of Mary's immaculate conception, from which, in the twelfth century, the Middle Ages shrank, has been finally accepted and sanctioned. Mary imperceptibly supplants Christ and becomes the deity of France, as she already was of Italy and Spain. In one of the manuals used in the education of Catholic priests[4] we read: "The blessed Virgin is to be honoured as the spouse of God the Father, because with her and in her he begot our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ; in her we honour all the divine and adorable perfections with which God has endowed her by communicating to her in abundant measure his fertility, his wisdom, his holiness, and his divine fulness of life." In a work on the immaculate conception written by Archbishop Malou, Mary is represented as being at one and the same time the daughter of God, the spouse of God, and the mother of God; so involved are his explanations of the relationships of the Trinity that one of the conclusions we arrive at is that she is the daughter of her own son. In a book by the Abbé Guillon, _Le Mois de Marie_, she is represented as a kind of chief divinity, to whom consequently it is safest of all to pray. "To be the mother of God means to have a kind of power over God, to retain, if it is permissible to use the expression, a kind of _authority_ over him." Authority thus culminates in the Madonna.

The Mariolaters, in the manner of the schoolmen of the Middle Ages, set about collecting proofs of the immaculate conception from the writings of the Fathers. One ecclesiastic, Passaglia by name, collected 8000. Archbishop Malou declared himself able to produce not fewer than 800,000 proofs of it. One's head begins to swim. On Mariolatry followed, about the middle of the century, the recrudescence of the worship of relics; for the relics which had stopped working miracles at the time of the Revolution, began to work them again for the generation educated by the Jesuits. In 1844 Bishop Arnoldi of Treves began to exhibit the coat of our Saviour, a seamless linen garment which is mentioned in a falsified clause introduced (as is convincingly demonstrated by two German historians, J. Gildemeister and H. von Sybel) between 1106 and 1124 into a proclamation of Pope Sylvester (327) as having been given by the Empress Helena to the Cathedral of Treves. It is affirmed to be the garment mentioned in the 19th chapter of the Gospel of St. John as worn by Jesus before his crucifixion. But besides the sacred coat at Treves, there are some twenty more in other parts of the world, all claiming to be equally genuine. The one in Galatia is much older than the one at Treves. The genuineness of several of them is attested by papal briefs. In 1843 Gregory XVI. ratified the genuineness of the coat at Argenteuil; but Leo X. had already, in 1514, acknowledged the claim of the Treves coat, and its champions would not bow to the new decree; the consequence was that pilgrimages were made to both. Görres, in his _Historisch-politische Blätter_, rejoices at the success of the great pilgrimage to the sacred coat of Treves.

The religious reaction reaches its climax in the famous Encyclical of Pius IX., which pronounces free thought to be the delirium of liberty, anathematises civil marriage, separation of church and state, liberty of religion, liberty of the press, liberty of speech, and the erroneous idea that the church ought to make its peace with progress, liberalism, and modern civilisation. But even more severely consistent than the Encyclical are the apologies for it, the German Bishop Kettler's _Die falsche und die wahre Freiheit_ and the French Bishop Dupanloup's _La convention du 15 Septembre et l'Encyclique du 8 Décembre_, which explain and justify the Pope's determined stand against "the insolent repudiation of all the great truths which form the foundation of human society." Let no one, however, imagine that these pamphlets are either very sensational in tone or very full of glaring absurdities. Both in manner and matter they have a strong resemblance to moderate articles in a Danish Liberal newspaper.

To such results did the Neo-Catholic movement lead. But it is to be noted that these results belong entirely to the domain of political history, and in no way concern literature. _Every movement continues to affect the course of general history long after it has ceased influencing the history of literature_. It affects the latter as long as it has, not only monarchs, nobles, and bishops, but men of distinguished intellect and talent in its service. After 1830 this is no longer the case with the religious reaction in France. The difference between the reaction in 1820 and the reaction with which exhausted and unhappy France was visited after the defeats and the Commune of 1870-71, is that the former vigorous crusade against light had almost every Frenchman of intellect and talent in its service, in its army, whilst the latter could not boast of a single supporter with any literary pretensions.

We have now to see how that first reaction came to an end. It was, in the first place, attacked from without. The daily press began to declaim against the spirit of antagonism to enlightenment; Béranger sang his songs on the subject; one enterprising publisher, Touquet by name, brought out between the years 1817 and 1824 thirty-one thousand copies of the works of Voltaire (1,598,000 vols.) and twenty-four thousand five hundred copies of the works of Rousseau. He was punished and the sale of his books was prohibited; but this aroused such exasperation that the _Globe_ prophesied a general apostasy from Catholicism, whereupon the country was again inundated with the Touquet editions.

The government next wreaked its vengeance on a master of language, the rustic simplicity of whose satiric pamphlets proved an effective offensive weapon.

Paul Louis Courier, born in Paris in 1773, was one of the cleverest writers of the age. From his father, a rich bourgeois who in his youth had narrowly escaped being murdered because he had had an amour with a lady of rank, he inherited a burning hatred of the indolent and haughty aristocracy. At the age of twenty he entered an artillery regiment and served in the campaigns of the Revolution, but they only gave him a loathing of war. From his earliest youth literature had had a strong attraction for him, especially ancient literature, which he studied as a philologist. In 1795 he left his regiment, which was then besieging Mainz, without permission, and occupied himself with translating Latin authors. In 1798 we find him again in the army, in Italy; presently he is studying in Paris; then he returns to Italy in command of a squadron of artillery. He keeps quiet during the Empire, and after its fall lives the life of an agriculturist and Hellenist on his farm in Touraine.

It was the persecution by the victorious clerical party of every countryman, however insignificant, in whom they detected an enemy, which induced Paul Louis Courier to appear before the public as an author. In 1816 he wrote a _Petition to the Two Chambers_, employing for the first time that plain, shrewd rustic style which, with the purest Greek models in view, he was so successful in acquiring. In simple, clear, always moderate language he tells of the injuries inflicted by clerically disposed provincial tyrants upon unfortunate peasants guilty of not having taken off their hats to a priest or of having "spoken ill of the government." He confesses that there is probably a good foundation for the accusations, since in his part of the country the priests are not popular, and very few people know what the _government_ is. Then he shows how imprisonment for six months without a proper trial, and misery, sickness, and death brought upon the children and other relatives of the prisoners, are the punishment for perfectly trifling offences. Forty gendarmes are sent to a village directly it falls under the suspicion of "Bonapartism"; the suspected persons are taken naked from their beds and fettered like criminals. "They are carried off; their relations, their children would have followed them, if it had been permitted by authority. _Authority_, Messieurs! that is the great word in France.... Everywhere we see inscribed: _Not reasons, authority_. It is true that this authority is not the authority of the councils or of the fathers of the church, much less of the law; but it is the authority of the gendarmes, and that is as good as any other."

Courier did not write books, or even what we generally call pamphlets. He produced his effect with tracts of a few pages. In these, with apparent naïve downrightness, in reality with consummate satiric art, he kept up an agitation against the rule of the hereditary monarchy until his assassination in 1825.

A gem of satiric humour is his _Pétition pour les villageois que l'on empêche de danser_. Its occasion was the prohibition by hypocritical magistrates and priests of dancing in the village market-places. He unveils the hypocrisy which lies at the root of the new holy-day regulations, and the harm which they do. He is perfectly aware of the fact that these holy-days were originally ordained for the good of the serfs and bondmen--but there are no serfs and bondmen in France now. Once their taxes are paid, the peasants now work for themselves, and to _compel_ them to be idle is ridiculous; it is worse even than the old imposts; those at least benefited the courtiers, but idleness benefits no one. He describes the hot-headed young village priests, who fulminate against dancing and all other pleasures, and compares them with the aged curé of Véretz, who is beloved by his flock for his gentle goodness, but who is hated and persecuted by the authorities because of his having sworn allegiance to the constitution at the time of the Revolution. In a later tract Courier tells of the assassination of this good old man. He writes of everything without resentment, simply ejaculating with a sigh that comes from the heart: "Thy will, O Lord, be done!" He cannot, however, resist adding: "Who could have predicted this in the days of Austerlitz?"

He grants that the rural population is much more settled and much happier now than it was before the Revolution, but he maintains that it is also much less religious. "The curé of Azai, who wished last Easter to have his canopy carried by four male communicants, could not find four such in the village. The peasant is so happy in possession of the land of which he has so lately become owner (the confiscated lands of the nobility and the church) that he is entirely absorbed in its cultivation, and forgets religion and everything else." Courier allows that Lamennais is right in reproaching the people with indifference in the matter of religion. "We do not belong to the number of the lukewarm whom the Lord, as Holy Scripture tells us, spews out of his mouth; we are worse; we are cold."

Nowhere do we find more graphic descriptions than in Courier's writings of the state of society throughout France during the latter years of Louis XVIII's reign.

He was again and again imprisoned for his pamphlets; but he did not allow this to intimidate him. In his _Réponse aux anonymes qui ont écrit des lettres_ he writes: "It is not my cleverness, but my stupidity which has landed me in prison. I have put faith in the Charter (_la Charte_); I confess it to my shame.... If it had not been for the Charter I should never have dreamt of talking to the public of the things that occupy my thoughts. Robespierre, Barras, and the great Napoleon had taught me for twenty years to hold my tongue.... But then came the Charter, and people said to me: 'Speak, you are a free man; write away, print; the liberty of the press is secured along with every other liberty. What are you afraid of?' ... So I said, with my hat in my hand: 'Will you graciously grant us leave to dance in our market-place on Sunday?'.... 'Gendarmes--off with him to the lock-up. The longest possible term of imprisonment, a fine besides,' &c, &c."

In another letter he writes with perfect calmness, and yet with biting severity, of the consequences of the celibacy of the priesthood. One of the priests who had inveighed most fiercely against the harmless peasant dances is discovered to be a seducer and murderer. Some years back he had murdered a woman who had been his mistress. In this case his fellow-priests attempted to throw the blame of the murder on her husband. Since then he has murdered and cut in pieces a young girl whom he had seduced. His superiors have sent him, unpunished, across the frontier, so that he is now an honoured preacher of the Gospel in Savoy. Courier shows what crimes, born of superstition and covetousness, are committed in districts where the inhabitants are so orthodox that nothing would induce them to eat meat on Friday; he says: "This is the true faith--honest, childlike, without suspicion of hypocrisy," and adds laconically: "They say that morality is founded upon this."

The little satire entitled _Pièce diplomatique_ he was obliged to publish privately. It is a letter supposed to be written by King Louis to his cousin, Ferdinand of Spain, in 1823, after the war undertaken by France to restore that depraved Bourbon to his throne had been brought to a successful conclusion. In it Courier satirises Louis's attitude to the constitution. His cousin will not hear of a constitution, but Louis maintains that, far from being burdensome, it is agreeable and advantageous to the king.

Extremely witty is the pamphlet _Simple Discours_, in which Courier ventured to express his disapprobation of the proposal made by the court party to raise a national subscription for the purpose of purchasing the property and castle of Chambord for the heir to the throne. The delicate little Duke of Bordeaux, afterwards Comte de Chambord, was born so long after his father's death that his birth was regarded as a miracle. Lamartine, Victor Hugo, and De Musset all sang of this wonderful event, Lamartine and Hugo comparing the child to Joash. The proposal to raise the national subscription was, thus, made at a time when an enthusiastic feeling prevailed in loyalist circles; but Courier, true to his principles, opposed it from his peasant standpoint.

Soon all the historians, with the exception of Michaud, began to write in a spirit ominous of danger to the restored monarchy. In 1823 Thiers published the first part of his history, which produced much the same effect as Béranger's songs.

The government of France had always been in the habit of supporting literature. All the rulers of France had done so, with the exception of Napoleon, and the Bourbons were expected to follow the example of their ancestors. But they gave sparingly, in spite of the enthusiastic welcome and homage which they received from both poets and prose writers. On the few disaffected authors they revenged themselves to the best of their ability; to punish Béranger, his rival, Désaugiers, was made a court favourite; Delavigne was punished with the loss of his post as librarian.

But more dangerous than the attacks from without were the germs of dissolution which appeared within the school of authority itself. The authors, both prose writers and poets, who formed the Immanuelist or Legitimist group, felt their principles wavering.

We have already seen that Lamennais was on the verge of defection. And his plight was the plight of all the others; the germs of the new were stirring within them in spite of their sincere desire to defend the old.

This is particularly observable in the case of Alfred de Vigny, who belongs to a generation a little younger than Lamartine, a little older than Victor Hugo. His family, as we have seen, was royalist. His father, who had been an officer and a brilliant courtier in the days of Louis XV., lost all his property at the time of the Revolution. After the fall of the Empire, Alfred, then sixteen, was equipped at his father's expense and enrolled in the gendarme corps of the guards. When the Hundred Days came, he attended the king on the first stages of his flight; when they were over, he was made a lieutenant in the royal foot-guards. But the time of active service was past, and nothing remained but the tedium of garrison life; the young man sought compensation in unremitted intellectual activity.

In his boyhood everything had been done to keep his thoughts from turning to Napoleon and all that concerned him. Hence almost before his schooldays were over he donned the white cockade and entered the guard of the Bourbons. But the ungrateful Bourbons, ungrateful because they believed that people owed everything to them, kept him waiting nine years for promotion, when he became captain by seniority.

When he began to write, his books gave dissatisfaction at the stupid court; though their whole tendency was royalist, they were regarded as seditious. He was accused of liberalism because he exalted Richelieu at the expense of Louis XIII. His father's early inculcations of devotion to the house of Bourbon proved of no avail; he now began to see what that devotion really was--"superstition, political superstition, a groundless, childish old belief in the fealty incumbent on men of noble birth, a kind of vassalage."[5]

Chivalry might, and did, induce him to preserve the outward appearance of a royalist; he would, for instance, have defended the monarchy during the Revolution of July if his services as an old officer had been required; but at heart he was no longer a monarchist--though this by no means implied that he was a democrat. "The world," he writes in his diary, "is vacillating between two absurdities, monarchy by the grace of God and the sovereignty of the people."

In the matter of religious faith he fell away even earlier. In spite of all the angels and archangels, principalities and powers of his youthful poems, he was suited for anything rather than a champion of the faith. By nature he was melancholy and sceptical, so melancholy that no ray of hope or momentary happiness seems ever to have penetrated into his heart, so sceptical in regard to the creed which he confessed with his lips that he nourished a kind of personal animosity to the idea of God and of the immortality of the soul.

As early as 1824 we find him giving expression (in his diary) to his conception of life in the following parable: "I see a crowd of men, women, and children, all sound asleep. They awake in a prison. They become reconciled to their prison and make little gardens in its yard. By degrees they begin to notice that one after the other of them is taken away, never to return. They neither know why they are in prison nor where they are taken to afterwards, and they know that they will never know it. Nevertheless, some among them tell the others what becomes of them after their period of imprisonment--tell without knowing. Are they not mad? It is plain that the lord of the prison, the governor, could, if such had been his will, have let us know the charge on which we have been arrested and all the particulars of our case. Since he has not done it, and never will do it, let us be content to thank him for the more or less comfortable quarters he has given us...."

There is much contempt in this for the theologians, with their pretensions to knowledge, and much acrimony beneath the gratitude to "the lord of the prison." He adds in the same tone: "How good God is, what an adorable jailer, to sow so many flowers in our prison yard!... How explain this wonderful, consoling pity, which makes our punishment so mild? For no one has ever doubted that we are punished--we only do not know for what."