Part 6

[5] Sources: Thiers, _Histoire du Consulat_; Lanfrey, _Histoire de Napoléon I_.; Mignet, _Histoire de la Révolution_, ii.; De Pradt, _Histoire des quatre concordats_; Portalis, _Discours et rapports sur le concordat_; Lorenz von Stein, _Geschichte der socialen Bewegung in Frankreich_, i.; Taine, _Le régime moderne_, i.

III

THE PRINCIPLE OF AUTHORITY

Bonaparte, intending as he did to deal the Republic a death-blow, struck at its heart. He recognised that it would never be possible thoroughly to suppress civil liberty unless he first suppressed the endeavour after spiritual liberty which had become ever more strenuous during the course of the Revolution. The Concordat prepared the way for the recovery by ecclesiasticism of all its old power.

It appeared to contemporaries as if all the tremendous exertions which had been made might now be regarded as made in vain. When we call to mind what had been done we cannot but be filled with astonishment. The movement towards emancipation which had begun in the days of the Renaissance with warm enthusiasm for Greek and Roman antiquity, which next, in England, through the genius of Newton, had acquired as its mainstay a new conception of the universe, and, gradually taking possession of natural science, had brought forth a new philosophy as its offspring and freemasonry as its witness--this same movement had, like a flying spark, been carried, through Voltaire's mind, to France. And here a marvellous thing happened. Only a few decades after Corneille had written _Polyeucte_ and Racine _Athalie_, a few years after Bossuet had preached absolute obedience and Pascal written in letters of fire his creed of absolute paradox, a handful of men, most of them exiled or in disgrace, succeeded, under perfectly autocratic rule, in winning over to their opinions first the ablest men of the day, then the upper classes, then princes and princesses who were soon to be kings and empresses, and finally the middle classes. Thus the new truth, which was born in low estate, but was revered even in its cradle by mighty kings--by Frederick of Prussia, Joseph of Austria, and Catherine of Russia--became the great power among the rising generation, numbering among its adherents even abbés and priests.

Human reason had risen and freed itself with athletic strength. Everything that existed had to justify its existence. Where men heretofore had prayed for a miracle they now investigated into causes. Where they had believed in a miracle they discovered a law. Never before in the history of the world had there been such doubt, such labour, such inquiry, such illumination. The new philosophers had not the weapons of authority at their command, but only those of satire, and it was with satire and mockery that they at first attacked. They annihilated with laughter. On Voltaire's refined scorn followed Rousseau's virulent wrath. Never before had there been such undermining or such declaiming. Human reason, which in every domain had for centuries been compelled to drudge like a serf, which had been intoxicated with legends and lulled to sleep with psalms and set phrases, had been roused as if by the crow of a cock and had leaped up wide awake. Was all that the heroes of reason had thought out, and its martyrs suffered for, now to be swept aside as useless? Were the enthusiasms that had made so many of the noblest hearts beat high, and inspired them with courage on the battlefield and the scaffold, now all to be squeezed together like the genius in the fairy tale, and shut up for good in an iron strong-box sealed with the seal of an Emperor and a Pope?

For the time being the emancipatory movement was checked. It began once more to be inexpedient not to profess faith in revealed religion, and after the fall of Napoleon it was even dangerous. In religious matters those in power never carry on the controversy by opposing reasons with reasons. The proofs of the gainsayers were not answered by proofs, but by the stopping of commons. The majority of the men without private means who had prepared themselves for government appointments, and could not overcome their irresistible desire to have a three-course dinner every day, were entirely reliable supporters of the re-establishment of the church. No one over twenty-five years of age will be surprised by the number of supporters orthodoxy gained from the moment when it advanced from being an absurdity to being a means of subsistence.

To such converts add the great party of the timorous, all those who lived in fear of the Red Republic, and in whose eyes religion was, first and foremost, a safeguard against it. It was among these that the army of the principle of authority obtained most recruits. From a religious body the church suddenly turned into a political party.

A change in outward conditions is always prepared for by a change in opinions, and the outward change even more certainly produces opinions which correspond to the new conditions. The feelings and thoughts which prepared for the Concordat were, after its conclusion, at perfect liberty to express themselves; they called forth others of the same nature; and with the expression of these feelings and thoughts in literature began an intellectual movement which has its point of departure in the Concordat and translates that document into the language of literature. It is the course of this intellectual movement which we are to follow. If we omitted to do so, there would be a sensible hiatus in that psychology of the first half of our century which it is the object of these studies to elaborate. Granted that the subject is not a paying one, that it is neither rich nor attractive, it is nevertheless, from our point of view, a very important one.

From which class of society did the literary movement emanate? If it could by any possibility have emanated from the peasantry, there might have been something simple-hearted and touching about it; if from the ranks of the hardly tried, suffering priesthood, it would perhaps have attracted attention by its fervour; if it had been the production of the party who, following the example of their ruler, attached themselves to the church from worldly motives, it would have been marked by the absence of any inspiring idea. But none of these supposed cases is the actual one. These three groups formed the public for the new literature, were its sounding-board and echo; not one of them was intellectually fertile. The new Catholic school of literature was destitute of the qualities of simplicity and fervour. But it was not without an inspiring idea. With conviction and determination it vindicates the idea which the Revolution had utterly repudiated and discredited, namely, the principle of authority. Its tendency is rather political than religious. Its leaders do not desire so much to rescue souls as to rescue tradition; they crave for religion as a panacea for lawlessness; the persistency of their appeal to authority is due to their bankruptcy in everything except outward authority.

The movement begins at widely separated, disconnected points; none of its originators are at first acquainted with each other. During the Revolution Chateaubriand, for instance, is wandering about in America, De Maistre in Switzerland; Bonald plans his first work at Heidelberg. As soon as the intellectual reaction begins, most of the emigrants return home, and the principle of authority is championed in literature both by foreign, independent writers like De Maistre, and by men like Chateaubriand and Bonald, whom Bonaparte's assumption of power recalls to France. These latter attach themselves for the time being to Bonaparte, in his capacity of restorer of the church; but soon, either during his reign or after his fall, they espouse, with far greater warmth, far more strength of conviction, the cause of the Bourbons, to which their own fundamental principle draws them with all the force of consistency. Napoleon's plan of gaining the support of the church and depriving the Bourbons of the sympathy of the clergy by means of the Concordat failed, as it was naturally predestined to do. Soon there was open war between him and the Pope; and soon the literary movement, the origin of which is contemporaneous with the Concordat, declares itself openly on the side of royalty with its supposed rightful claims.

The originators of the movement naturally feel drawn to each other; they make one another's acquaintance, and soon found a kind of school. They have several important characteristics in common, characteristics which are also to be found even in the latest disciples of the school, men like Lamennais, De Vigny, Lamartine, and Hugo. They are all without exception of noble birth and bound by personal ties to the old royal families. De Maistre was the King of Sardinia's ambassador in Russia. Bonald served in his youth in Louis XV.'s regiment of Musketeers, and during that King's last days went regularly to his bedside to get the parole for the day--he had had smallpox, and consequently ran no risk of infection. The first time his duty brought him into the apartment of the new King, Louis XVI., Marie Antoinette honoured the young Musketeer with a friendly look and a few gracious words. That last glance of a dying King, who bequeathed to his successor a ruined monarchy, and that first look of a young, beautiful, and hopeful Queen were never effaced from Bonald's memory. They became the guiding stars of his life. As to Chateaubriand, directly he heard of the judicial murder of the Duke of Enghien he sent in his resignation as Secretary of Legation under Napoleon's government, and from that moment until 1824 acted the part of a faithful servant of the Bourbons. It was a rôle which he entered into so seriously, and which circumstances rendered so compulsory, that he played it to perfection. As regards the next generation, Lamartine has told us, in the preface to his _Meditations_ and in his _Reminiscences_ how, as a young officer in the Guards, he galloped by the side of Louis XVIII.'s carriage when that monarch moved from Paris to St. Germain. De Vigny was from his childhood an enthusiastic Royalist; in the days of the Empire his father gave him the Cross of St. Louis to kiss; his ideas of feudal fealty made him an officer of the King; his pride led him to stand to his colours even when all the hopes he had conceived of the Legitimist monarchy were disappointed and superseded by an unexpressed feeling of contempt; after the Revolution of 1830 he became the unprejudiced, but reserved and laconic Conservative whose acquaintance we make in his later works.[1] Victor Hugo has himself sufficiently explained to his readers how powerful was the influence exercised upon him as a young author by the recollection of the Royalist surroundings of his childhood, and especially by the teaching of his mother, the enthusiastically loyal Breton bourgeois.

The theoretic leaders of this school are not great geniuses. They are strong, despotic characters, who love power because they require obedience, and authority because they desire submission; or they are proud and vain members of the aristocracy of intellect, who would rather bow the knee to a paradox than follow with the crowd of writers who have done homage to reason; or (but this only seldom) they are romanticists, who are moved to tears by the thought of the faith which they no longer possess, but which they make desperate efforts to acquire. They are fighters like De Maistre and Lamennais--men made of the stuff of pontiffs and inquisitors, or they are obstinacy personified, like Bonald and Chateaubriand, who speak as they do more from obstinacy than persuasion. "Moi, catholique entêté," says Chateaubriand of himself. That is the correct word--obstinate, not fervent.

Their power over their contemporaries lay in their talent. For talent is such a magician that it can sustain any cause for a considerable time. Chateaubriand was the colourist of the school; De Maistre, with his strength of character, his wit, and his astounding theories, its leader; Bonald, with his rules for everything, its schoolmaster. The best of the young, aspiring poets of the day began their career under its influence, and though it did not retain its hold on them long, it gained by their means a popularity which, added to the authority possessed by its thinkers, was sufficient to make its cause seem for a short time victorious, more especially as the restoration of the Bourbons realised its political ideals.

In the course of a few years, however, all its best men, with music playing and colours flying, went over to the enemy's camp. The school was dissolved by its own essential unnaturalness. The principle which held it together, that principle of tradition and authority which had presented the appearance of an impregnable fortress, turned out to be undermined, hollow, concealing under its very foundations an unsuspected explosive. Men discovered that they had taken up their position on the top of a powder magazine, and hastened to leave it before it blew up.

Sylvain Maréchal writes in a book published in 1800 (_Pour et contre la Bible_): "A very decided religious reaction distinguishes this first year of the nineteenth century." It distinguishes the first twenty, and in countries of slow development and those inclined to be stationary, at least seventy.

The literary reaction against the spirit of the eighteenth century does not begin as a definitely religious reaction. We have seen that in the group of works which I have designated the "Emigrant Literature" it "has not yet become submission to authority, but is the natural and justifiable defence of feeling, soul, passion, and poetry against frigid intellectuality, exact calculation, and a literature stifled by rules and dead traditions." Of the first step in this reactionary movement I wrote: "The first move is only to take Rousseau's weapons and direct them against his antagonist, Voltaire."[2] Men are no longer contented with Voltaire's cold deism; they oppose to it Rousseau's copious and vague sentimentality. They follow in Rousseau's footsteps, build on the foundation of his emotionalism and imagination. A glance at the successive phases of the Revolution has shown us that this movement is, as it were, presaged in the midst of the great upheaval by Robespierre's attempt to place Rousseau as an obstacle in the way of the annihilation of all the sentiment which had been so closely associated with the tradition and authority of the church, and which threatened to disappear with the church. In its origin the great religious reaction was, as we have seen, only the revulsion, the revolt, of feeling against reason; what begot it was the perfectly vague craving to feel and to give expression to feeling. The history of the movement is the history of the lamentable manner in which this craving was gradually misdirected.

The first step in the reaction was the election of Rousseau to lead the revolt, the second was a revolt against Rousseau. Let us open almost any work by Bonald, De Maistre, or Lamennais, and we find that its point of departure is an eager attempt to refute Rousseau, or, rather, to satirise and crush him. During the first stage of the reaction _the principle of sentiment_ was opposed to the dominion of reason; during the second, _the principle of authority_ is championed against all former principles, that of sentiment included. The transition from the one stage to the other is marked by the endeavour to vindicate and reinstate authority by means of an appeal to sentiment. This is aimed at in Ballanche's _Du Sentiment considéré dans la Littérature et dans les Arts_ (1801), and is also the main aim of Chateaubriand's _Génie du Christianisme_ (1802).

Rousseau is now regarded as the most dangerous advocate of the ideas of the eighteenth century. A short account of the charges brought against him will show what there was of truth in them, what of falsehood.

First, the political attack. A fact which the nineteenth century has repeatedly insisted on, and which must not be forgotten, is that the eighteenth century was devoid of any proper understanding and appreciation of history. One of its most famous representatives, D'Alembert, went so far as to wish that the remembrance of all past times could be blotted out. The naïve belief of Rousseau and his century that isolated thought, unconnected with history or reality, is capable of changing the whole existing order of things, was now universally contested. The preceding generation had believed that all would be well when they had a written constitution which abolished what they considered abuses and established what they regarded as right. They had looked upon this piece of paper, or, to use their phraseology, these tables of the law, as the real constitution. In confutation of this idea, Joseph de Maistre propounds his theory: "Man cannot make a constitution, and a lawful constitution cannot be written." He is both unmistakably right and extraordinarily wrong.

He has a prescience of the great truth, which may be regarded as acknowledged in the politics of to-day, that the true constitution of a country is the actual existing distribution of power, a distribution which is not changed although dilettante politicians alter it upon a sheet of paper. In De Maistre's judgment the powers that be have right on their side. Any rebellion seems to him a crime; but, keenly alive to realities, he has no faith in a written constitution as a preventive. Writing on the subject of a preventive of lawlessness, he says: "It may be custom, or conscience, or a papal tiara, or a dagger, but it is always a something." The written constitution alone is to him nothing real.

His great mistake is to be found in the reason on which he bases his aversion to this written constitution. He is of opinion that what is written, what is foreseen and determined by human wisdom, is to be regarded as an infringement on the province of divine providence. "It is impertinence towards God not to have confidence in the unforeseen future; every government which is founded upon settled laws is founded upon a usurpation of the prerogative of the divine law-giver." The real working constitution he regards, on the contrary, as being of a divine nature, for, from his orthodox standpoint, he maintains that it is God who makes the nations what they are. To the sovereignty of the people he, like Bonald and Lamennais, opposes the sovereignty of God, thus finally anchoring in theocracy.

Rousseau's political theories were undoubtedly most imperfect, and it was easy to perceive the dangers that lay concealed in them. His principle, that no one is bound to obey laws to which he has not given his consent, not only strikes at the authority which is power, but also at the authority which is simply a form of reason, and thus makes all government impossible. His second principle, that sovereignty is an attribute of the people, may, if the word "people" be unwisely apprehended, lead to tyranny of the majority and make all liberty impossible. His third great principle, that all men are equal, may lead to universal levelling instead of to justice. Here are enough points of attack for a criticism undertaken from the modern standpoint. Hegel in his day attempted such a criticism. He propounded a new interpretation of the sovereignty of the people, defining it as really meaning the sovereignty of the state. Heiberg, who was given to carrying the Hegelian theories to extremes, presents us (in his essay "On Authority") with Hegel's idea in the astounding and reactionary proposition that "it is a matter of no consequence whether or not the interests of the citizens are furthered by the development of the state, since it is not the state which exists for the sake of the citizens, but the citizens who exist for the sake of the state."[3] Though we of the present day have a distinct antipathy to such propositions, we nevertheless give to these protests against Rousseau's theories the attention which we consider due to any development of modern thought. But the protests of De Maistre's day were neither based on thought nor on reason, but purely and simply on belief in authority; and the opposition is, moreover, dishonourable in its methods; the attack is always directed against some isolated proposition, which, if we read it with the desire to understand it, is comprehensible, but which it is easy to reduce to an absurdity, because of the audacious manner in which it is expressed.

Bonald, for instance, scoffs at Rousseau for saying: "A people has always the right to change its laws, even the best of them; for if it chooses to do itself an injury, who has the right to prevent it?" The proposition is a rash one, but it does not in reality justify the retrogressive step; it only denies the right of outsiders to make it an excuse for interfering; and the reader is unpleasantly affected when he discovers that the reason why Bonald is so exasperated by these words is that he considers the law-giving power to be the prerogative of God, not of the people.

Rousseau's social theories were also violently attacked. It is not difficult to understand how Rousseau, with the society of his own day before his eyes, should arrive at the conclusion that it would be quite possible to do without a society at all; but this mistaken idea, in combination with the fanciful one of a lost, happy, natural condition, led him to formulate such a proposition as: "Man is born good, and society corrupts him," and to give utterance to the comic paradox, which reappears in all the polemical works of the Restoration period, pierced with refutations as a pin-cushion is with pins: "The man who thinks is a degenerate animal." Such utterances lent themselves to attack. In the ardour of his impeachment of society, Rousseau permits himself to say: "Society is not a consequence of the nature of man. Everything that has not its origin in the nature of things has disadvantages, and civil society has most of all." "Society!" cries Bonald, not without eloquence; "as if society consisted of the walls of our houses or the ramparts of our towns! as if there were not, wherever a human being is born, a father, a mother, a child, a language, heaven, earth, God, and society!" The doctrine he instils into his contemporaries is that the earliest society was a family, and that in the family authority is not elective, but a result of the nature of things. To the doctrine that society is the result of a voluntary agreement, of a contract, he opposes his doctrine that society is enforced (_obligée_), is the production of a power--whether it be the power of persuasion or of arms. To the theory that power, that authority, originally received the law from the people he opposes his theory that there can be no people before there is a power. To the revolutionary principle that society is _fraternity and equality_ he opposes the principle of patriarchal absolutism, that society is _paternity and dependence_. Power belongs to God, and is communicated by Him. Here again the argument of historical actuality proves extraordinarily convincing, and the author seizes the opportunity to deduce, as it were surreptitiously, the doctrine of the one and only lawful sovereignty, sovereignty by the grace of God, from our respect for history and reality.