This is why Louis XVI, in trying to undertake reforms before 1789, and in seeking to protect the Roman Catholic Church, the monarchy, and the common good during the Revolution, could never find the correct words to explain his policies and actions. Yes, it is true that his own indecisive personality and intellectual limitations played a major role in compromising him. Nevertheless, he, like his Catholic compatriots in general, also simply did not have the “words of the Word” to aid him in finding his voice. Lacking these, and resorting, in his confusion, to the language of the friends of “nature as is”, he was all the more easily depicted by the Georges Dantons (1759-1794), Jean-Paul Marats (1743-1793), Jacques Héberts (1757-1794), Maximilian Robespierres (1758-1794), and Louis-Antoine St. Justs (1767-1794) of the Revolution as an insincere hypocrite. And this, in the universe described by Rousseau, qualified him as being a non-human Enemy of the People, for whom law and legal procedures were as of little application as they would be for a cockroach. Jansenists, judges in the law courts, and all “moderates” who did not grasp the full logic of the revolutionary argument were to find that the same charges of hypocrisy and the same attendant lack of personal consideration were to be used to destroy them as well. They had well served their purpose as vanguards in the next stage of construction of the death camp of modernity, but their day in the sun was obviously finished

as soon as experts in a more violent and thoroughgoing willfulness arrived on the political, social, and mythmaking scene.³²

Radical Enlightenment influence in the French Revolution, especially dominant after 1792, took both deist and atheist form. It thus reflected Rousseau’s belief in the immortal soul, favored by Robespierre through his Cult of the Supreme Being, as well as the violent anticlerical and anti-religious feeling carried into frightful action by the sansculotte gangs of men like Hébert. But more than anything else, it took the genocide of the Vendée and the insight of a number of its spokesmen to begin to turn the condition of Catholic “wordlessness” around. Here, among the victims, one finds the Seeds of the Word at work again, along with words suitable for attacking the purveyors of sophist power games. For even if the self-sacrificing Catholic insurgents against the Republic did not yet know all that they needed to know for the defense and advancement of the Faith, they did grasp and express one major point essential to building the intellectual bridge back to sanity: they knew that the revolutionary
“good story” of an age of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and Progress was a fraud; that this tall tale was nothing other than a cover for enslavement to the will of a minority supporting brutal and truly obscurantist goals; and that it was as destructive to the well being of those “sincere” naturalists who honestly believed in its lies as it was for defenders of the peace that passeth all understanding---the Pax Christi. Let us hear the words of the Abbé Étienne-Alexandre Bernier (1762-1806) on this subject:³³

Heaven has declared for the holiest and most just of causes. {Ours is} the sacred sign of the cross of Jesus Christ. We know the true wish of France, it is our own, namely to recover and preserve forever our holy apostolic and Roman Catholic religion. It is to have a King who will serve as father within and protector without…

Patriots, our enemies, you accuse us of overturning our patrie by rebellion but it is you, who, subverting all the principles of the religious and political order, were the first to proclaim that insurrection is the most sacred of duties. You have introduced atheism in the place of religion, anarchy in the place of laws, men who are tyrants in place of the King who was our father. You reproach us with religious fanaticism, you whose pretensions to liberty have led to the most extreme penalties.

That this Revolution, given its depredations, was a danger to the historical work of the Word Incarnate now became undeniably manifest to many Catholics. But what about the one brought about by the Moderate Enlightenment, with its “godly” façade; the Enlightenment as practiced in Britain and the new United States of America? Did this not come off well in the midst of the radical revolutionary fury? Were not its supporters persecuted inside France alongside Catholics? Had not England provided a welcome refuge for fleeing bishops, priests, monks, and nuns? Were these not actually provided places of worship? Was it not the case that at the very moment that religion was being destroyed in revolutionary Europe, the Catholic Church’s right to organize her flock, and this without a trace of either monarchical or republican regalism, was being taken for granted in the New World? Had not those Catholics who had opted for encouraging the ideas and the methodology of the Whigs thus been proven correct in their approach?

Anyone attempting to answer these questions with the benefit of hindsight has to respond to them with a simultaneous “yes” and “no”. Yes, Catholics had gained help from countries that were home to the Moderate Enlightenment. But we shall see that in so far as the problems of the Radical Revolution were recognized without an appreciation of those more subtly prepared by its Whig compatriot, the path of the Word in history would still have a painfully bumpy route to follow. For radicalism followed in the footsteps of the moderates active in England and the United States as daytime follows night—only much more slowly.³⁴

The Implosion of the Grand Coalition

A despondent Catholic of the 1790’s could well have been forgiven for entertaining fears that proponents of deceptive but pleasant sounding words concerning man, society, nature, and progress had inflicted a decisive defeat upon the supporters of the cause of the substantive, corrective, transforming Word in history. The religious structure of the Eldest Daughter of the Church lay in ruins, and those responsible for the damage were violently expanding their destructive enterprise into other countries as well. These states were ripe for more deadly attacks on religion, given that Catholicism in all European lands had already been deeply wounded in the half century before the Revolution erupted. The tragic enslavement—even self-enslavement—to meaningless words guaranteed by rejection of the full message of the Word Incarnate is poignantly illustrated by J.J. Norwich’s account of the situation in Venice in 1797:³⁵

It was Sunday, 4 June—Whit Sunday, a day which in former years the Venetians had been accustomed to celebrate with all the pomp and parade appropriate to one of the great feasts of the Church. But this year, 1797, was different. Shocked and stunned to find their city occupied by foreign troops for the first time in its thousand years of history, the people were in no mood for rejoicing. Nevertheless, General Louis Baraguey d’Hilliers, the French commander, had decided that some form of celebration would be desirable, if only to give a much-needed boost to local morale. He had discussed the form it should take with the leaders of the Provisional Municipality, in whom, under his own watchful eye, the supreme political power of the new Republic was now entrusted; and plans had been accordingly drawn up for a Festa Nazionale, at which the citizens were to be given their first full-scale public opportunity to salute their ‘Democracy’ and the resonant revolutionary principles that inspired it.

Those who, prompted more by curiosity than by enthusiasm, made their way to the Piazza that Sunday morning had grown accustomed to the ‘Tree of Liberty’—that huge wooden pole, surmounted by the symbolic scarlet Phrygian cap which bore more than a passing resemblance to the ducal corno—rising incongruously from its centre. This they now found to have been supplemented by three large tribunes, ranged along the north, south and west sides. The western one, which was intended for the sixty members of the Municipality, carried the inscription LIBERTY IS PRESERVED BY OBEDIENCE TO THE LAW; the other two, destined for the French and other less distinguished Italian authorities, respectively proclaimed that DAWNING LIBERTY IS PROTECTED BY FORCE OF ARMS and ESTABISHED LIBERTY LEADS TO UNIVERSAL PEACE. The Piazzetta was similarly bedecked, with a banner in praise of Bonaparte stretched between the two columns by the Molo, one of which was draped in black in memory of those brave Frenchmen who had perished victims of the Venetian aristocracy….

After Baraguey d’Hilliers and the Municipality had taken their places, the bands began to play—there were four of them, disposed at intervals around the Piazza, comprising a total of well over 300 musicians—and the procession began. First came a group of Italian soldiers, followed by two small children carrying lighted torches and another banner with the words GROW UP, HOPE OF THE FATHERLAND. Behind them marched a betrothed couple (DEMOCRATIC FECUNDITY) and finally an aged pair staggering under the weight of agricultural implements, bearing words ‘referring to their advanced age, at which time liberty was instituted’.

The procession over, the President of the Municipality advanced to the Tree of Liberty, where, after a brief ceremony in the Basilica, he proceeded to the most dramatic business of the day: the symbolic burning of a corno and other emblems of ducal dignity (all obligingly provided for the purpose by Lodovico Manin {the last doge} himself) and a copy of the Golden Book {of Venetian aristocrats}. He and his fellow-municipalisti, together with the General and the senior members of his staff, then led off the dancing round the Liberty Tree, while the guns fired repeated salutes, the church bells rang and the bands played La Carmagnole. The celebrations ended with a gala performance of opera at the Fenice Theatre, completed less than five years before.

This was the level to which Venice had sunk within a month of the Republic’s end—the level of tasteless allegory and those empty, flatulent slogans so beloved of totalitarian governments of today: a demoralization so complete as to allow her citizens, many of whom had been crying ‘Viva San Marco!’ beneath the windows of the Great Council as it met for the last time, to stand by and applaud while all their proud past was symbolically consigned to the flames. Not long afterwards one Giacomo Gallini, head of the stone-masons’guild, signed a contract to remove or efface every winged lion in the city, as had already been done by the French, with horrible thoroughness, throughout the terra firma. We can be thankful that he proved less conscientious: though he accepted his pay—982 ducats—relatively few lions were touched. But the fact that such an action was even contemplated is indication enough of the mentality of French and Venetians alike through that nightmare summer.

So profound was the destruction of the remnants of a Catholic order by 1799 that Pope Pius VI died on the way to captivity in France, and the chances of a demoralized College of Cardinals electing a successor seemed to be quite slim indeed. To the joy of the most radical members of the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo, the “unnatural” Christian beast, the “obvious” enemy of the individual and society at large, appeared to be at death’s door. And yet, far from dying, the resuscitation of the Bride of Christ had already begun. Far from ending, the war of words against the Word was simply entering into another one of its many stages, and this for two distinct reasons. For the purposes of the present work it is best to begin our discussion of Catholic revival and the transformation of the age-old conflict of “nature as is” with the corrective and transforming mission of the Word in history with reference to the implosion inside the revolutionary coalition that ended its momentary, but highly destructive, unity.³⁶

Such an internal disturbance always threatened the GCSQ, but even more so now that Enlightenment naturalism was the primary driving force behind it. For this form of naturalism was truly a many-edged sword. We have seen that it was ultimately based upon an individual willfulness allowing men to seize the definition of “nature” and then run with it down as many pathways as their fantasy, their desire, and their rhetoric could discover. The most politically powerful among these definitions of nature by the time of the French Revolution were threefold: two of them rooted in intellectual concerns and the third simply in raw, unadorned, parochial self-interest.

Although both of the intellectually rooted definitions of nature were more openly willing to break with the past and use governmental authority to destroy it than Enlightenment-minded forces in Britain, one of these shared many of the concerns for “natural laws”, combined with a defense of certain individual “natural rights”, common to English Whigs. Its counterpart sought the realization of a Rousseau-inspired vision of a “natural” democratic society. Both these proponents of a more nature-friendly order of things had created a distinguished historical pedigree for themselves. Both argued that failure to follow the guidelines that they outlined would lead to a disastrous war against the very character of man and the universe. And both also insisted that Catholicism had provoked just such disastrous warfare in the past by not unquestioningly accepting their definitions of “nature as is”—hence, the need to use the tools placed in their hands by the Revolution to undermine its continuing evil religious influence, whether in more subtle or more violent fashion.

A third “felt” and wholly non-intellectual “definition” of nature as the dictate of raw, deeply-sensed self-interest was represented by two politically and socially important forces in French society, only one of which needs to be mentioned at the moment: the bourgeoisie. The genesis of this bourgeois impact was somewhat complex. On the one hand, it seems as though its development was perfectly logical, given any number of factors, including, most importantly, anger over the loss of bourgeois influence following the nobility’s efforts to recoup its position after the death of Louis XIV, as well as the fear of being stuck footing the bill for that perceived national bankruptcy that was the proximate cause for the calling of the Estates General. On the other hand, everything that we know about the Revolution tells us that the bourgeoisie was literally handed the ability to define nature on its own terms on a golden platter, through the arguments of thinkers and polemicists, many of them clerics and aristocrats, who wished to stir it up and manipulate it for their own specific purposes. And, of course, the bourgeoisie as a class was one thing; the human individuals composing it quite another. Some of its members were politically engaged and eager to pursue class interests while others were not. Some bourgeois even became vigorous opponents of the whole revolutionary enterprise.

Politically active members of the bourgeoisie—not necessarily merchants, but lawyers and other professionals—had the money and the time to serve as the representatives of the “common people” as a whole in the Estates General. Still, the average bourgeois, even if he might wish to defend his own self-interest, did not possess the rhetoric of the sort required by Isocrates to justify satisfaction of his material desires. All manner of religious and customary influences over his behavior weakened his ability to formulate a coherent selfish program. Courtiers and other supporters of the monarchy, frustrated by the obstacles put in the path of reform by the clergy and the nobility, sought to give him the arguments that he needed to concentrate his thoughts and awaken his class consciousness. They warned him of a plot on the part of the privileged classes to avoid their responsibilities during the present crisis and place the whole burden in the lap of the Third Estate alone. But it was the men of the Enlightenment, who argued that the bourgeoisie’s natural, productive function gave it the right to ride roughshod over an unproductive—and therefore unnatural—clergy and nobility, who really provided the solid “good story” and “appropriate explanation of deeply felt desire” that its future relevance as a class required. It was they who made the bourgeois moneymen look like the virtuous, down-to-earth Figaro humbling the parasitic and despotic Count Almaviva in Pierre Beaumarchais’ (1734-1799) wildly popular pre-revolutionary play.³⁷

Whatever the genesis of the bourgeois impact on the unfolding of the Revolution, the consequences for its class interests were real. They included freedom from guild restrictions, prohibition of workingmen’s organizations, access to cheap purchase of Church goods, and limitation of the vote and service in future legislatures to men of property. But the bourgeoisie had to pay a price for the good story concerning its exalted role as proper representative of the productive nation. It paid it in the form of support for its rhetorical spokesmen and the thoroughgoing Enlightenment attack on the heritage of France that they launched; an assault that went far beyond anything that “practical men” would have ever dreamed up on their own. Still, it was because both moderate and radical men of ideas, along with bourgeois “pragmatists”, were all in some way or another, consciously or unconsciously, attracted to either the vision of “nature as is” or the palpable rewards that promoting it would give them that they could cooperate in the work of destruction of the Church and the monarchy. And it was because the men of ideas needed the “brawn” of a social class, and that social class the justificatory “words” provided by the men of thought, that the revolutionary enterprise could move forward.

Unfortunately for all the parties concerned, a Grand Coalition of the Status Quo dominated by such differing forces could last only so long as it gave to each of them at least something that they desired. It certainly had to break down once the radicals recognized that, according to their definition of nature, their bourgeois allies were “unnatural” hypocrites, unwilling to conform to the obvious demands of a virtuous, fraternal, egalitarian society. If not this, it definitely had to collapse when the pragmatic men of property grasped two truths: that the radical supporters of Rousseau threatened the wealth that they had joined the Revolution to defend and increase; and that even the more moderate Coalition intellectuals had themselves worked to create the State machinery through which any determined and willful faction could launch a devastating, authoritative attack upon them.

A violent disintegration of this combustible alliance took place in the revolutionary months of Prairal and Thermidor of the Year Two of the new dispensation---the time known to the old European world as June through August of 1794. It was at that moment that the non-intellectual, bourgeois majority of the National Convention understood that building a democratic Republic of Virtue as conceived by supporters of Rousseau such as Maximilian Robespierre and Louis Antoine de St. Just would very shortly lead both to their condemnation as selfish counterrevolutionaries as well as to the confiscation of the individual private property that their “natural” Revolution was meant to protect. The revolutionary initiatives of men whom the bourgeois might easily label unnatural utopian visionaries had to diminish so that the individual property demands of “nature-friendly pragmatists” could increase. And, indeed, revolutionary pragmatists won the battle for defining the “obvious meaning of nature” by withdrawing their support from the Committee of Public Safety and backing up their rejection by a more successful appeal to force than their opponents could muster during the short but decisive scuffle that followed.³⁸

Alas, appeals to force would prove to be regularly necessary to them. For it was no easy matter to break the bond with the intellectuals who had played such a crucial role in giving the appropriate revolutionary explanations for the satisfaction of passion that had benefitted the cause of the materialist segment of the bourgeoisie. Although union with radical Enlightenment ideas meant succor for undesirable ideologues who created big government that could disturb the growth of personal property, abandonment of the nature-and-freedom-loving “cover” that the rhetoric of the utopians had at least temporarily provided for vulgar material enhancement invited the victory of counterrevolutionary ideas equally threatening to the self-interested bourgeois dominance of society. Hence, the decision to ally with the second non-intellectual force noted above; a force whose concerns were significant at the start of the Revolution and whose leadership became more directly involved in it by the 1790’s: the army. And the army in question was now that leviathan swollen in size by the vision of an entire “nation-in-arms”, as galvanized and manipulated by a hero of the sort that Isocrates would most certainly have appreciated; the army as guided by the genius of Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821).³⁹

Readers know by now that Enlightenment ideas and the influence of the men who supported them could never have become as significant as they did in the pre-revolutionary era had it not been for their seeming utility to rulers primarily concerned for the needs of the army. It was mainly for the sake of breaking down obstacles to more effectively building, maintaining, and regularly using a standing army that the various dynasties of Europe had secularized international life, fought against otherworldly religious influence and inefficient corporate diversity internally, and turned to Enlightenment naturalists for intellectual and administrative assistance in their endeavors. Moreover, the perceived bankruptcy leading to the call of the Estates General and the initial outbreak of the Revolution was of central consideration primarily because of its immediate impact on army survival.

Certainly, the army did significantly benefit from revolutionary changes. These gave the military the backing of a centralized State machine infinitely more powerful and suitable to maintaining its upkeep than the still somewhat religious and tradition bound French Monarchy ever could have provided. But, once again, it had gained these benefits in union with revolutionary men of ideas whose visions promised an unending internal disorder as disruptive to army goals as to bourgeois business. In short, the practical, non-ideological army technocrats, like the pragmatic bourgeoisie, wanted both the fruits that the Revolution had provided and the short-circuiting of the troublesome radical intellectual currents that had nevertheless done so much to justify them. Their common outlook therefore pressed them to form a “coalition within the coalition”; one that had the project, first and foremost, of expelling from the revolutionary alliance their burdensome leftist “friends”.

Napoleon, the army’s most anti-ideological general of real military genius, perfectly understood the concerns and dilemma of the men of property. As an outsider to French noble society, he also had prospered from the revolutionary dismantling of the existing order of things to satisfy his own personal goals. He, too, could not completely fulfill those particular ambitions under the kind of system that either the idealistic proponents of natural law and natural rights or the radical supporters of Rousseau wished to construct. Neither could he tolerate a counterrevolution bringing back an ancien régime that for various reasons would never allow an independent army leader to mould society to his supreme will.⁴⁰

Hence, that willful and materialist segment of the bourgeoisie that had “gone revolutionary” united with the willful leader of a willful army, gained control of France, and crushed the power of the equally willful men of more radical spirit who were placing obstacles in the path of the specific ambitions of the victors. “Nature”, inside France, would not mean what the supporters either of Rousseau or of the more progressive continental Whigs wished it to mean. Much of that which had been dismantled by the losing faction and had previously been condemned as counterrevolutionary by them could now be rebuilt—with the proviso, however, that the rehabilitated groups and institutions did not disturb any of the “acceptable” revolutionary changes that had benefited the victorious men of property and the army, acting in tandem.

Unfortunately, Napoleon and the army under his control viewed military power as something to be used primarily to their advantage as opposed to that of their internal bourgeois allies. This attitude produced imperialist wars without end. The expense that those conflicts entailed brought their own special dangers to the individual property holdings of the French bourgeoisie. Moreover, they led to the introduction of just that tablespoonful of “acceptable” revolutionary changes needed to secure the fruits of victories in conquered countries. This, inevitably, required the assistance of certain justificatory ideas and the recruitment of all the common rhetorical slogans of Nature, Reason, Freedom, and Progress. Unfortunately, mobilization of such slogans for external use brought with it the risk of a potential recrudescence of revolutionary utopianism inside France as well. Worst of all, Napoleon’s wars ultimately ended in the military defeat of 1814-1815 and the return to power of the dreaded counterrevolutionaries.

With the army crushed, the supporters of a pragmatic understanding of the natural life found that they lacked the material force that they needed for political domination. Still, reliance on the physical strength of the military alone had exposed the raw self-interestedness of these two allies within the revolutionary coalition in much too open a manner. Perhaps significantly more in the way of an intellectual cover was needed after all if the bourgeoisie were going to protect itself from the appearance of gross covetousness on the one hand and radical revolutionary progress or counterrevolutionary regression on the other. In fact, the exiled Napoleon also recognized the need to cover his past power grabbing with an “appropriate justification of desire” that made his personal willfulness and belligerence seem to serve the higher purpose of awakening national self-consciousness and creating a new and more enlightened European unity. He satisfied this need by writing his highly dubious but very influential Memoirs.⁴¹

And an intellectual cover was offered to the revolutionary bourgeoisie through its alliance with and funding of the broad political-intellectual movement that came to use the name “liberal” to define itself. Although the goal of liberalism was, like that of the moderate revolutionaries of earlier days, to protect natural laws and natural rights in general, bourgeois predominance within it meant that its heaviest emphasis was given to the exaltation of laws and rights promoting individual economic freedom and the vigorous defense of private property. After the experiences of the Terror, all liberals were eager to avoid the disorder and rank violence associated with radical Revolution. Bourgeois involvement with the movement guaranteed that this peaceful

orientation especially entailed working to avoid the storm that attempts to create a more egalitarian Republic of Virtue would unleash.⁴²

Liberalism also meant closer ties with the Whig Enlightenment, whose superiority was apparently confirmed by England’s victory over Napoleon, as well as by the immeasurable riches that her industrial development was providing to the bourgeois elite providing the investment stimulating and expanding it. Britain appeared to be a land where an oligarchy composed of men of property and the moderate ideas allowing just enough revolution to bring them into power could rest in peace. Its expanding principle of Lockean tolerance ensured that religion in its green and pleasant land was ever more “seen but not heard”. An absence of persecution convinced believers of the system’s continued godliness, while religion’s lack of practical influence contented the English supporters of “nature as is”. Britain’s legislature, chosen by an electorate that had definitely tipped to bourgeois advantage by the 1830’s, was increasingly friendly to a total individual economic freedom. Hence, it encouraged dreams of constructing a purely natural, materialist, freedom-loving society, while not openly offending the sensibilities of the seemingly hopelessly divided Christians or allowing liberty to mean something more unseemly than the propertied men of common sense wished it to mean.⁴³

Setting aside discussion of the pronounced internal dilemmas of English liberalism, let us introduce some other problems that it posed for the nineteenth century by noting the obvious fact that the Continent was not Britain. Different methods were required in different countries in Europe in order to achieve the same fundamental liberal goals. Opposition in one land might have to be fought through a centralized government and in another through decentralization. National ethnic unity breaking down existing empires could be useful in some places, while promotion of an international spirit would work in others. Particular political situations could dictate cooperation with open-minded and moderate counterrevolutionaries in one land, or a policy of “no enemies on the Left” where such a desire to compromise on the part of the victors of 1815 simply did not exist.

All these possibilities entailed risks, chief among them the fact that liberalism did still require reliance on an Enlightenment vision that might always assert its particular logic and seek to escape from the straitjacket in which the “pragmatic” bourgeoisie sought to restrain it. Liberalism could always lead to an emphasis upon other natural laws or individual natural rights than those appreciated by the men of property. Moreover, moderate liberal “fathers” were still capable of producing radical “sons” who might use the non-violent disguise provided by the movement to go about their more revolutionary activities. As these developments proceeded, the radical sons would regularly be tempted to jump the liberal ship and join together with men who had already deduced more disruptive conclusions from the same naturalist starting points and were busily at work using their theories to effect practical change. There were many such radicals everywhere, particularly those dedicated to the creation of unified, ethnic nation-states, undaunted by their temporary defeat at the hands of the wicked counterrevolutionaries.

Each and every one of the thoughtful, Enlightenment-inspired members of the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo were firmly united in their conviction that existence had to be understood on natural terms alone. Whether they sought to seize the meaning of life by looking inside themselves and examining their own “sincere” natural psyche or by focusing upon the “scientific” data coming from the natural world around them, all were convinced of two truths: that through their efforts they became the masters of them that know, and that acceptance of their knowledge would provide what every ancient sophist treasured above all else—success. Despite the more spiritual, soulful patina of the former, “inward” approach, both this and the “outward”, experiential, scientific path shared the same, willful, arrogant spirit of infallibility, along with the attendant certainty that the world’s consciousness had to be raised in obedience to their unquestionable dictates.

This untroubled certitude is well expressed by Professor Thomas Gradgrind of Hard Times (1854), Charles Dickens’ well-chosen representative of the nineteenth century liberal pragmatist version of the age-old spirit of willfulness. Gradgrind as educator considers himself bound to raise children to understand and obey laws of nature built upon obvious “facts” that no one under any circumstances can even question, much less disobey. Let us allow Dickens to introduce us to him and to his educational philosophy as he sets to work in a classroom filled with youthful prey:⁴⁴

‘Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!’…In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!’

The speaker, and the schoolmaster, and the third grown person present, all backed a little, and swept with their eyes the inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim.

Teaching the Facts about the laws of nature was ultimately rather easy for Professor Gradgrind. It did not involve anything more than imparting knowledge of a simple machine closed in upon and content with itself:⁴⁵

Thomas Gradgrind, sir. A man of realities. A man of facts and calculations. A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for anything over. Thomas Gradgrind, sir—peremptorily Thomas-- Thomas Gradgrind. With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to. It is a mere question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic.

Gradgrind’s instruction came at a price, however. His Magisterium required that whatever other non-mechanical Facts had shaped his students in the past be ruthlessly purged from their benighted souls:⁴⁶

Thomas Gradgrind now presented Thomas Gradgrind to the little pitchers before him, who were to be filled so full of facts. Indeed, as he eagerly sparkled at them from the cellarage before mentioned, he seemed a kind of cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts, and prepared to blow them clean out of the regions of childhood at one discharge. He seemed a galvanizing apparatus, too, charged with a grim mechanical substitute for the tender young imaginations that were to be stormed away.

An opening to the mechanical Facts bought at this price of a closing to knowledge of a different and perhaps broader quality could be utterly baffling to those multi-dimensional fools whom Gradgrind was dedicated to enlightening. Hence the circus girl Sissy’s confusion regarding how to respond to the Professor’s command to define a horse—an animal that to her was everything from mere beast to noble symbol. Hence, also, Gradgrind’s sense that her discomfit confirms the truth of his mechanical wisdom. He triumphantly appeals to one of the pupils he has already “remade” to definitively resolve the issue of ignorance and enlightenment:⁴⁷

‘Girl number twenty,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, squarely pointing with his square forefinger… ‘Let me see. What is your father?’ 


‘He belongs to the horse-riding, if you please, sir.’ 


Mr. Gradgrind frowned, and waved off the objectionable calling with his hand. 


‘We don’t want to know anything about that, here. You mustn’t tell us about that, here. Your father breaks horses, don’t he?’ 


’If you please, sir, when they can get any to break, they do break horses in the ring, sir.’ 


‘You mustn’t tell us about the ring, here. Very well, then. Describe your father as a horsebreaker. He doctors sick horses, I dare say?’ 


’Oh yes, sir.’ 


‘Very well, then. He is a veterinary surgeon, a farrier, and horsebreaker. Give me your definition of a horse.’ 


(Sissy Jupe thrown into the greatest alarm by this demand.)

‘Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!’ said Mr. Gradgrind, for the general behoof of all the little pitchers. ‘Girl number twenty possessed of no facts, in reference to one of the commonest of animals! Some boy’s definition of a horse. Bitzer, yours.’

Finally, in one quite extraordinary passage, Dickens offers a Platonic judgment on the final results of Professor Gradgrind’s Magisterium and the remaking of human beings that it involves. The extra, broader—and possibly higher—illumination that Sissy’s corrective and transforming vision might have brought to those buried in her modernist cave of a classroom, where only a little light involving simple mechanical Facts shone, cannot be permitted to penetrate. Thus, Bitzer, the student called upon to enlighten her, is seen to be not only in desperate need of further light himself, but also stripped of whatever visible defining features he probably once possessed. Gradgrind, the self-proclaimed Master of Them That Know, therefore reveals to us that he has no clue concerning real darkness or enlightenment at all; that it is the proponent of “nature as is” who is the ignorant loser, rather than the voyager taking the Great Platonic Detour:⁴⁸

The square finger, moving here and there, lighted suddenly on Bitzer, perhaps because he chanced to sit in the same ray of sunlight which, darting in at one of the bare windows of the intensely white-washed room, irradiated Sissy. For, the boys and girls sat on the face of the inclined plane in two compact bodies, divided up the centre by a narrow interval; and Sissy, being at the corner of a row on the sunny side, came in for the beginning of a sunbeam, of which Bitzer, being at the corner of a row on the other side, a few rows in advance, caught the end. But, whereas the girl was so dark-eyed and dark-haired, that she seemed to receive a deeper and more lustrous colour from the sun, when it shone upon her, the boy was so light-eyed and light-haired that the self-same rays appeared to draw out of him what little colour he ever possessed. His cold eyes would hardly have been eyes, but for the short ends of lashes which, by bringing them into immediate contrast with something paler than themselves, expressed their form. His short-cropped hair might have been a mere continuation of the sandy freckles on his forehead and face. His skin was so unwholesomely deficient in the natural tinge, that he looked as though, if he were cut, he would bleed white.

‘Bitzer,’ said Thomas Gradgrind. ‘Your definition of a horse.’

‘Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.’ Thus (and much more) Bitzer. 


‘Now girl number twenty,’ said Mr. Gradgrind. ‘You know what a horse is.’

Professor Thomas Gradgrind, as presented by Dickens, is one of the all too many arrogant ideologues emerging out of the eighteenth century Enlightenment. Once again, all truly committed Enlightenment thinkers insisted upon building their knowledge of the universe and man’s role within it upon “nature” and the “facts” of natural life. All were absolutely and arrogantly certain that they therefore possessed the sole rational, infallible path to understanding the universe and to assuring freedom, the liberation of human potential, and progress upon the earth. It was this certainty that required that program of revolutionary remaking of men and women, clearly described in the 1700’s in Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, the Emile, and the Social Contract.

Readers know that that program began with a declaration of natural man’s “obvious” imprisonment in an unnatural environment and his urgent need to return to a natural way of life. Souls who offered resistance to nature and nature’s laws had to be subjected to a consciousness-raising education awakening them to their true natural selves and the well being that they still so pathetically rejected. None of their continued calls for nuance or consideration of other, broader facts in making decisions regarding both nature’s rules as well as individual and social happiness could be rationally addressed. Reason, by definition, was on the side of the man of Enlightenment alone. Unnaturalness, and therefore irrationality and even non-humanness as a whole, were the lot of his opponents. The arguments of those in unquestioned need of being remade had to be either ignored or ridiculed. How could a truly rational man be expected to act otherwise?

When, as has happened all too often in the last few centuries, the revolutionary will to power that underlies the entire Enlightenment vision of intelligence triumphs, and a remaking of human beings is actually undertaken, the Gradgrinds succeed in giving the world the appearance of operating as they say it does. In the name of nature’s laws they cut off sources of light that draw from the whole of nature—not just the ideologue’s portion of it—essential facts to teach us. They make natural men as unnatural as they are capable of becoming. And since the Gradgrinds are the masters of the shriveled, unnatural world and individuals they create—namely, the ones who “succeed” within their system—they have yet another argument for rejecting further criticism of their vision, adopted straight from Isocrates’ handbook. Critics are depicted as envious losers in addition to being mentally deficient. As neat sophist approaches goes, this Enlightenment pedagogue’s program is probably unmatchable. Unfortunately for him, as well as for the rest of humanity, it is totally false.

Let us once again reiterate the fact that there could be no question for a Gradgrind or any other ideological revolutionary but that his vision was based upon absolutely infallible Facts, whether these emerged from observation of his sincere visceral feelings or experimental data. Still, we have seen that the militant columns of revolutionaries disagreed intensely on what these obvious Facts might be. One set of naturalist, progress-hungry, success-seekers insisted on rock-solid Facts that completely contradicted those of another. Moreover, the number of these varying groups of revolutionaries, working with a myriad of differing crystal-clear Facts, increased enormously as the nineteenth century proceded. Still, as in the previous century, this conflict of wills calling for the triumph of one set of absolute certainties over the others continued to take shape out of two basic approaches towards defining nature, both intensified due to current developments.

One of these, the belief that examination of nature yielded a guidance of life by crystal clear natural laws that could magically be simplified by finding a single mechanical key to the spiritus mundi, was aided mightily by the Industrial Revolution. The increasing omnipresence of machines and the much more highly structured way of life that they pressed men and women into living lent credibility to the hunt for such simple machine-like answers to the mysterious dance of life. Whether one saw these answers in laws of supply and demand, class struggle, or biological and racial clash, depended to a certain degree upon individual taste and choice. On the other hand, each of these intellectual answers attracted allies—often cumbersome allies—in the form of self-interested men, women, and states, ready to support one or the other all encompassing “law” depending upon which yielded them the greater chance of financial gain, of building better and more effective weaponry, or of gaining political mastery of Europe and the world.

Belief in nature as the realm of freedom and diversity also intensified in the nineteenth century due to that development of the Enlightenment that we call Romanticism.⁴⁹ Romanticism, a movement beginning in Germany and England in literature and poetry and then affecting every sphere of artistic and intellectual life in the western world, started as a reaction against those who saw the aesthetic model of Greece and Rome as a natural law that must guide all creative endeavor. Romantics rejected this vision of nature in favor of one that understood the universe to be immensely more diverse than that depicted by the naturalist of classical tastes. In effect, they could, in theory, consider any force that existed and exercised a power and an influence over individuals and peoples as something both natural and good. It is in this sense that Rousseau himself can be considered as an early proponent of the Romantic vision.

Many nineteenth century Romantics took their vision to an anarchistic conclusion, justifying the validity of each and every possible idea, artistic endeavor, and custom—all in the name of nature, freedom, and diversity. Some of those who did so felt that the fullness of expression thus released would lead to the creation of a more meaningful and ordered world. Others drew from their recognition of the endless diversity of nature the impossibility of reaching any definitive universal conclusions regarding truth, beauty, or goodness whatsoever. Among those arriving at what would by mid-century be called a nihilist position were men and women so horrified by the consequences of their thought that they stepped back thoroughly from them. Their questioning of the underlying dogmas of naturalism then pressed them to an exploration of the possible value of a corrective and transformative supernatural vision in gaining a proper understanding of the meaning of life. Movement from such salutary doubt to active promotion of the message of the Incarnate Word in history then proved to be a short and very swift step.

Most nineteenth century Romantic lovers of diversity never got as far as the nihilist position or a catholicizing reaction to it. Instead, they stopped at various way stations along the route to meaninglessness, and were happy to have broken free at least somewhat from the stranglehold of an appreciation of nature dominated solely by the Greco-Roman tradition. In political terms, the most significant expression of Romanticism was an anti-universalist democratic nationalism. Its development was fed not only by the passion for linguistic, poetic, and general literary diversity but also by the studies of men like Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803). Herder and his disciples argued vigorously for the need to come to terms with a given people and a given period in history by recognizing that each had a different kind of spirit shaping and motivating it: a Volksgeist and a Zeitgeist.⁵⁰

Such concepts have proven to be immensely helpful to the historian. They aid in driving home the importance of grasping the complexity of the environment in which men live and the mixture of influences that need to be considered in order to judge how and why individuals and peoples act as they do. This blocks the formation of hasty conclusions based upon one’s own presuppositions, themselves shaped unconsciously by the impact upon a man of his own land and his own time. In this one sense, Herder’s arguments can also be said to be innately friendly to Catholicism as well. For historians who seek first to understand the past before making a final judgment regarding its history manifest that opening to all of nature taught by the full message of the Incarnation that enables them to distinguish between a Seed of the Logos, a new or different step in the dance of life, and an outright evil.

Having said this, however, and admitted what I believe to be one significant example of the real value of certain aspects of the Romantic approach, both aesthetically and intellectually, let me hasten to add that the Volksgeist/Zeitgeist message had hugely negative consequences as well. Whether on its own or in conjunction with Kant’s “inward” hunt for certainty or political visions of the superiority of a democratic system of government, what it did was to allow for an “appropriate explanation” of the desires of a given people or a given time. This justified a people or an era doing anything that it wished to do and then altering its desires willfully without fear of being taken to task for error or contradictory flightiness by a critic. In fact, it made it impossible for any given people or era even to contemplate explaining its desires, since all outside “others” were, by their innate distinctions, incapable of understanding them anyway. Human dialogue was thereby rendered utterly pointless. Hence the chance to begin speaking of different national and historical interpretations of everything from morality to physics, with success in imposing one’s own will, not surprisingly, becoming the ultimate standard of truth. This is the logic of the development of life as presented by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). Starting with the principle of freedom as the supreme historical teaching, Hegel moves on to tell us that we recognize its successful march through time in the triumph of whatever it is that dominates a given age. A spiritual and intellectual freedom and the possession and exercise of physical strength end by becoming one and the same thing.

It was with reference to such concepts, generally presented in the envelope provided by Kantian intellectual or democratic political “baggage”, that the nationalist offshoot of Romanticism worked to shatter the ordered progress desired by nineteenth-century liberals. In the hands of German, Polish, and Italian thinkers—men like Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-1872)—romantic nationalism became a recipe for placing the construction of a unified, democratic, ethnic nation-state above all other considerations, moral or otherwise. What was morally good was what aided the creation of the Italian Nation. What was morally evil was what stood in the path of the formation of the Polish or German Nation. War, deportation, and, eventually, racial engineering and genocide were of no significance aside from the result achieved. How else could the sincere desires and freedom of a people be expected to triumph?⁵¹

Appropriate explanations of the justice of a myriad of potentially conflicting wills brought along with them a conflicting set of new tall tales as well. Catholicism, of course, was to be attacked by all of them. Nevertheless, each revolutionary faction was also ready happily to apply many of the lies told to thrash Rome to campaigns against its various competing “enlightened” opponents. In fact, liberals perhaps found themselves assaulted through these onslaughts more than anyone else on the Left. This was chiefly due to their perceived hypocrisy in refusing to admit the logical development of their basic Enlightenment principles. It was also due to the fact that they offered an all too obvious target, given the grotesque capitalist self-seeking their own cover story of “freedom-fighting” presented. In any case, it is very easy to see how all the myths regarding the conspiratorial evils of the Jesuits were gradually applied to everyone from capitalists to Jews, depending upon whose vision of “nature” and “progress” was being pressed—and often with many of the specific details of the fables utilized remaining totally unchanged.⁵²

Finally, and most importantly for my argument here, continental liberals—along with those radical competitors who played on their internal contradictions to seduce their “sons”—still had to deal with the continued strength of the correcting and transforming mission of the Catholicism that they mocked. This, in many places in Europe, had no competitors for the faith of believers, while the success of the British system required the establishment of that “free marketplace of religious ideas” to reduce Christianity to the political and social meaninglessness that already existed in England. Under continental circumstances, therefore, liberals debated whether or not a more radical call for an outright and militant separation of Church and State uncongenial to the English approach might provide the best pathway to ensuring Catholic impotence.

F. The Calling of the Ninth Crusade: Anti-Legitimist Birth Pains

But impotence was not in the program of the Catholicism that the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo was destined to confront in the nineteenth century. Popular historiography tends to speak of eight crusades. A recent book on the international armed force put together to defend the Papal States under Blessed Pius IX during the 1850’s and 1860’s refers to its cause as representing a Ninth Crusade. While not denying that specific cause a significant part in the same battle, I would call the Ninth Crusade the much broader conflict unleashed by all those battling for a Catholic Restoration in the period following the seemingly irresistible naturalist advance that began in 1750.⁵³

Centers of recruitment for the Ninth Crusade—German, Italian, and French, for the most part—were lay-clerical circles of believers, religious confraternities, orders restored after the devastation of the Revolution, university faculties, and groups gathering round those journals and newspapers that seemed to spring up everywhere in the course of the nineteenth century. Anyone wishing to get a flavor of their general spirit should examine the pages of Der Katholik, the Historisch-Politische Blätter, and Archiv für Katholisches Kirchenrecht in the German world; La Civiltà Cattolica in Italy; L’Univers-Le Monde in France; and the Dublin Review in the United Kingdom.

Calling this Ninth Crusade was not an easy matter, to say the least.

For one thing, its initial recruitment centers opened simultaneously with the growth of liberalism, with all of liberalism’s tendencies to variation depending upon local circumstances and with all of its potential openness to logical seduction by more radical elements. Varied conditions created a situation in France where the counterrevolutionary “legitimist” government of the restored Bourbon Family co-operated with liberals, who then, after the failed attempt by Charles X (1824-1830) to end this cooperation in 1830, took control of the kingdom as a whole. French liberals were doing quite fine on their own and therefore saw no need to cultivate union with more radical groups to advance their cause. Italy and Germany told a different story. Counterrevolutionary legitimist governments offered no opening to liberal participation in any of the numerous states composing these two large regions. Whatever their true feelings about other leftist forces might be, Italian and German liberals were lumped together with such “out groups” and therefore tempted to work together with them.

A number of militant Catholics crucial to the history of the Ninth Crusade inside and outside France were actually very much drawn to collaboration with this leftist anti-legitimist alliance. The attraction came from the fact that such militants, their consciousness raised by the troubles of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars (1789-1815), were deeply disturbed by the conviction of many of their fellow Catholics that the massive disruption of the years 1789-1815 was the sole cause of the Church’s lack of influence over political and social life. The corollary of such a conclusion was that fighting “the Revolution” required nothing other than defeating the “obvious” conspiracy that had promoted it and restoring the “legitimate counterrevolutionary authorities” of the pre-1789 era. And such a conclusion, the militants argued, was a terrible, self-deluding mistake.

For these soldiers of the Ninth Crusade came to see that their work was based upon learning, developing, and putting into practice themes and customs that had been buried by decades and even centuries of Protestant, naturalist, Jansenist, and simple parochial neglect. They understood that such a full revival alone could fight the Revolution and rescue Catholics from manipulation at the hands of the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo. Depending upon energy, taste, and imagination, this drive to revival of a deeper knowledge of the Faith and militant action based upon a Christian pragmatism led them back to the Fathers of the Church, to the medieval scholastics, and to a mystical, devotional, and liturgical life rich in lessons for the science of ecclesiology and both Catholic community and individual life together.

The more our crusaders advanced in knowledge, the more they realized that belief in the sufficiency of a counterrevolutionary, legitimist Restoration was yet another in the long line of “alternative good stories” that misguided defenders of the Faith had swallowed throughout the ages while ignoring what the real problem before them always was: the rediscovery of the entire corrective and transforming mission of the Word made flesh and the cultivation of the tools needed to fulfill it. For believers had not been permitted to speak and act as real Catholics already for decades before the revolutionary disruptions in France, often with the aid of the very governments that now called themselves counterrevolutionary. This silencing of the Catholic voice had not only prevented believers from living as faithful Christians. Worse, still, it had created an atmosphere in which it was difficult for Catholics to discover what the teachings of the Church that affected them as individuals and social beings actually were in the first place.

It was sad but not terribly surprising therefore that the most powerful of the contemporary culprits muzzling the Catholic voice were the self-proclaimed friends and protectors of Christendom: legitimist sacred monarchies. In 1815, these had formed a “Holy Alliance”, supposedly to fight the revolutionary demons of the Continent on behalf of Christianity itself. But this all too familiar sacred union controlled rather than protected Catholicism, subordinating spiritual corrective and transforming concerns to the “business as usual” demands of the legtimist understanding of “nature as is”. Its chains were most painful where Protestants or Orthodox were the legitimate sacred monarchs, as in Prussia and Russia. Nevertheless, they were also quite burdensome under Catholic rulers, whose political and social goals were frequently inspired by the very Enlightenment ideals fomenting that Revolution they supposedly detested.⁵⁴

Catholic activists in France were thus faced with a “most Christian” government that was the heir to a tradition of controls upon religion. Clerical political activity under such a “friendly” sacred monarchy had always led to an unseemly service of two masters, with the secular superior getting better attention than the spiritual and a consequent secularization of the Church’s own personnel. This tradition had been strengthened by the new Napoleonic Concordat, which, even while it “sold the pass” to the Ultramontanists by admitting papal authority to name an entirely new hierarchy, transformed bishops more than ever before into useful State functionaries. It was therefore potentially more beneficial for French liberals eager to rein in religious influence over society to encourage continuation of the “union of Church and State” and simply to gain control of the government machinery manipulating that union for its own benefit.

Hopes for a militant corrective, transforming Catholic action over the natural order were thus, in many respects, being stifled more effectively in Restoration Europe than ever before. The two most famous early representatives of the Ninth Crusade who raised their voices against this disastrous situation were the Savoyard, Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821), and the Abbé Félicité de Lamennais (1782-1854). Both emphasized the long-lived character of the assault of the enemies of Christ in a way that put that events of 1789 and beyond in a broader historical perspective, with de Maistre in particular identifying the Protestant Reformation’s seminal role in exchanging the guidance of the Word for mere words.⁵⁵

Here we must deplore the glaring fallacy of a system {that is, Protestantism} which has divided Europe with such unfortunate consequences. Its partisans say: ‘We believe only in the Word of God…’. What a misuse of words! We alone believe in the Word while our dear enemies stubbornly persist in believing only Scripture. As if God could or would alter the nature of His creation and impart to Scripture the life and efficacy it lacks! The Holy Scripture—now then, is it not a writing? Was it not formed with a pen and a little black fluid? Does it understand what to tell one man and what to hide from another? Did not Leibnitz and his maidservant read the same words there? Can this writing be more than the image of the Word? However venerable it thus becomes, when we interrogate it, must it not keep a divine silence? If it were attacked or slurred, could it defend itself in the Father’s absence? Praise be to the truth! If the immortal Word does not give life to Scripture, it will never become speech, that is to say, life. May the others invoke THE SILENT WORD as often as they please. We shall smile peacefully at this false god while ever awaiting with tender impatience the time when its disillusioned partisans will throw themselves into our arms, which have for nearly three centuries been ready to embrace them.

Both de Maistre and Lamennais became proponents of a more unified and militant Catholic endeavor to respond to this deeply rooted challenge. Nevertheless, the case of Lamennais illustrates that even this militancy could generate a permanent and tragic temptation for modern, activist defenders of the Faith. The path that he took—and suggested to future generations who would eagerly follow it—was one that helped to ensure enslavement to the “business as usual” demands of “nature as is” under the cover of a “good Catholic story” in many respects more seductive than any told to date.⁵⁶

Lamennais, the son of a Breton bourgeois family ennobled one year before the outbreak of the Revolution, was ordained a priest in 1816. The success the following year of the first volume of his Essay on Indifference in Matters of Religion (four volumes, 1817-1823) caused many to view him as a modern-day Church Father. His enthusiasm for a revitalization of the Papacy and the episcopacy, clerical and lay political and social action, an impregnation of the State, education, the economic order, music, and art with a religious sense, a mobilization of the press as a teaching tool, and an organization of Catholic energies on the international level quickly resonated throughout the European world.

The young priest’s charisma can be measured by the quality of the men drawn to the Congregation of St. Peter, which he assembled at his estate of La Chênaie to study methods for resuscitating a dormant Christendom. The Mennaisiens, as their opponents often contemptuously labeled them, included in their ranks a large number of those who were to play major roles in all fields, lay and clerical, for many decades to come. Among these were Charles de Montalembert (1810-1870), future leader of that “Catholic Party” which fought for freedom of education in the French Parliament during the July Monarchy (1830-1848); Charles de Coux (1787-1864), social thinker and professor of economics at the University of Louvain; Jean Baptiste Lacordaire (1802-1861), who was instrumental in reestablishing the Dominican Order in France; Prosper Guéranger (1805-1875), Benedictine founder and proponent of liturgical reform; Olympe Philippe Gerbet (1798-1864), the theologian of the movement and Bishop of Perpignan; Alexis-François Rio (1797-1874), author of De la poésie chrétienne (1836); and René Rohrbacher (1789-1856), the Church historian.

Yet despite the brilliant careers of such disciples, Lamennais’ own position within the Roman Catholic world was soon destroyed. His theories regarding Church-State relations—one of the keystones of his labors-- were rejected in Gregory XVI’s (1831-1846) encyclical letter Mirari vos (August 15, 1832). The same pontiff excommunicated him personally in the letter entitled Singulari nos (June 21, 1834). Lamennais died in 1854, still out of communion with the Church. What evil spirit, his admirers have wondered, could possibly have induced Rome symbolically to burn at the stake this male Joan of Arc, and precisely at the moment when he was pointing the way to a true liberation of the Catholic genius; to a seizing of the Catholic Moment to shape man and society?

Even a brief consideration of Lamennais’ ideas provides the answer. The problem lay in his “liberation” of a Catholicism that was actually a new and different Faith than that of his Breton forebears; in his support for a belief system that seemed, at first glance, to exalt the supernatural, but ended by tossing it into a naturalist house of contradictory horrors from which it could never escape. For this “modern Church Father” did not ultimately base his religion upon the Apostolic Faith. Instead, he refashioned that Faith in a manner that reflects both the form of Enlightenment naturalism espoused by Jean-Jacques Rousseau as well as the evolutionary concept of change called palingenesis.

Rousseau-like statements of one form or another make an appearance in the writings of practically every revolutionary thinker of the nineteenth century. One finds them in the novels of Victor Hugo and Stendhal, in the political proclamations of the leaders of liberal as well as democratic and nationalist movements, and in the manifestos of the representatives of varied forms of contemporary socialism. One is constantly told that the proponents of The Cause are “feeling” men who have sincerely got in touch with their true nature and thus possess a virtue, an infallible intelligence, and a spiritual excellence that only dead souls could fail to recognize. One regularly learns that their opponents are enemies of the People who cannot be judged by the same standard as the revolutionary hero. After all, they do not subscribe to his teaching and are not incorporated into his Mystical Body. Thus, for Hugo, the revolt of a small segment of the awakened People accepting the hero’s message is redemptive; the mass rebellion of the Catholic inhabitants of the Vendée is a vile riot. The massacres perpetrated by the former are Christ-like; a tap on the finger by the latter is the most wretched of crimes. Virtue lies all on one side, however animalistic its actions may be; animalism on the other, however rational and peaceful the behavior of its victimized supporters.

Lamennais served as one of Rousseau’s chief conduits into the Catholic world. His path to becoming a passionate, natural, virtuous, infallible, heroic, revolutionary Rousseauian Everyman was paved by acceptance of the principle of “traditionalism”. Traditionalism, in the nineteenth century, did not mean what it popularly signifies in our time, although we shall see at the conclusion of this work that it shared, in practice, some crucial points in common with its current namesake. In Lamennais’ day, the word “traditionalism” identified a philosophical-theological outlook disdaining the role of Reason both in grasping truth and teaching the Faith. Truth, for Lamennais and nineteenth century traditionalists as a whole, was learned by individuals as social beings, under the active guidance of the historical institutions at the very core of society’s “nature”. In effect, it was the wholehearted opening to the vital force of these institutions that created believing, energetic Catholic Peoples. Truths lying behind institutional vitality were passed down through the process of living in the society that they formed. The Revolution’s battle versus truth was effective not because of any rational struggle against ideas but due to its temporarily successful efforts to crush two crucial traditional institutions, the Church and the monarchy. For it was the unified active energies of both that had led Frenchmen to accept and live the Faith. If Church and monarchy were ravaged, spiritual life and knowledge of the truth were also destined to be lost. Individuals could not be expected to understand the doctrines of the Faith as independent thinking atoms.

But here Lamennais encountered a terrible paradox. The Church, restored to legal institutional life after the Revolution, was not acting as the vital social force that she must be in order to have the desired spiritual effect. She ran the awful risk of not really electrifying men’s social existence, and thus not passing down the message of Faith. It was necessary to shake Church structures out of their formalistic torpor and revive their will to give vital witness to the truth. This was ultimately the point of the Essay on Indifference, which was not a call for devotion to the intellectually elaborated doctrines of the Catholic Faith but, rather, a condemnation of half-hearted or lazy commitment preventing that “felt” witnessing to the truth that alone could be effective.

Committed, sincere witness could scarcely be offered if basic Church institutions were unable to live in accord with their own true “nature”. Thus, the Papacy, thoroughly emasculated by the Enlightenment and the Revolution, had to have its integral rights and powers fully recognized and revived. Similarly, the bishops of each and every nation had to be free to follow their proper path under papal guidance. Place the Papacy and national episcopacies back in touch with their supernaturally “natural” character, and the spontaneous energetic life that would flow through their arteries would end religious indifference. The result would be an electrified, creative civilization of believing social individuals.

Lamennais had seen in the traditional Bourbon Monarchy of the French Restoration the force most apt to work together with the Church as a live battery charging Christian society and Christian man. He was a fervent contributor to legitimist journals such as Le conservateur and Le drapeau blanc. Gradually, however, the young priest became convinced that the monarchy actually had either little interest in or ability to do what was necessary to electrify Catholic civilization. It had turned its back on its own historical nature and mission.

One strong segment of legitimist opinion, represented most vigorously by François de Reynaud, the comte de Montlosier (1755-1838), in his Mémoire à consulter sur un système religieux et politique tendant à renverser la religion, la société et le trône (1826), was vigorously hostile to the idea of a Church living a spontaneous, independent life alongside a believing Monarchy.⁵⁷ Even more upsetting to Lamennais was the French Church authorities’ apparent connivance in this betrayal. Legitimists, Lamennais began to think, sacrificed or redefined Church goals to suit their own unnatural and self-destructive ends. Catholics were culpable in trusting and even adulating these misguided secularist Pied Pipers. His reaction, in 1828, was to argue for a radical path to an ultimately restorative goal: a total end to a union of the deluded, abused Church with an unnaturally manipulative legitimist State, itself now in union with equally manipulative liberals. Separation alone could guarantee the former a chance to get back in touch with her real nature and do her work in a way that would enable the Faith to survive and thrive.

1830 saw a Catholic-Liberal union in Belgium triumphantly overthrow a legitimist Dutch monarch unwilling to cooperate with either of these two groups and therefore harmful to both their quite different interests. France also succumbed to revolutionary fever that fateful year, replacing the legitimist Charles X with a liberal king from the Orléanist branch of the Bourbon Family, Louis-Philippe (1830-1848). Lammenais seized what he considered to be a general providential moment to found an outspoken journal, L’Avenir (The Future), whose first issue appeared on October 16, 1830, under the motto “God and Liberty”. L’Avenir was designed to become the mouthpiece of an international coalition of vital Catholics, a Holy Alliance of Peoples. Through its work, believers themselves would achieve what the old union of self-interested legitimist State and deceived national Church could or would not accomplish. In other words, if hypocritical or emasculated monarchies and episcopacies refused to undertake the necessary labor of getting in touch with their true nature and reanimating Christian society, then sincere, unpretentious, committed, believing Peoples as a whole would themselves energetically propel Church and State in Catholic nations to do their duty. The corrective and transforming mission of Catholicism would begin anew, and, in fact, with a vigor that was hitherto unknown to history.

Opposition from powerful circles in France and elsewhere was nevertheless so strong that the embattled Lamennais felt the need for papal confirmation of his vision. He thus temporarily suspended publication of L’Avenir in November of 1831 and set off with Lacordaire and Montalembert on a Roman “pilgrimage of liberty” to gain the blessing of Pope Gregory XVI. But despite the support of the Theatine philosopher, Fr. Gioacchino Ventura (1792-1861), and even of several cardinals, Rome proved to be unfavorable to his message. One by one, the “pilgrims of liberty” read the handwriting on the wall and left, Lamennais the last of all. The axe began to fall shortly thereafter, with Mirari vos. Then, following two years of further controversy regarding L’Avenir, Mennaisien enthusiasm for the Polish rebellion against Tsarist Russia, and the publication of Lamennais’ controversial Paroles d’un croyant, came the aforementioned personal excommunication.

Our pilgrim of liberty was shocked. First, the French episcopacy had proven to be useless. Now the Papacy, the institution destined to benefit the most from an end to unnatural, legitimist State controls and episcopal collaborationism, had rejected the summons to vitality. The sincere, European-wide coalition of traditional-minded Catholic Peoples was thus left entirely to its own energies if Christianity were to survive and prosper. Lamennais called upon this Silent Catholic Majority to take up the task of teaching the Faith through the example of its vital living of its message---even if this should mean opposition to the pronouncements of its erstwhile papal leader, dethroned by his public display of “indifference”.

A counterrevolutionary defense of a supernatural Faith now seemed, ironically, to be based upon a concept very much resembling the naturalist revolutionary principle of popular sovereignty. Lamennais had little trouble admitting as much, as he had by this point come to believe that vitality itself was indeed a sure sign of the divine presence. Already in 1829, in Progress of the Revolution, he noted that the energetic fervor with which revolutionaries supported the doctrine of popular sovereignty demonstrated that there must be something solid and good behind it. Upheaval in 1830 merely confirmed him in this conviction. All that seemed to be lacking to the revolutionary vision was recognition that the truths taught by an energetic populace were not purely earthly ones. Vital Catholic Peoples possessed supernatural truths to which they had to testify, and would be able to give witness more effectively through further, democratic, revolutionary changes.

This brings us to the second influence on Lamennais, that of the concept of palingenesis. Formed from the Greek words “again” and “birth”, palingenesis encouraged the notion that a “Third Age of Humanity” was emerging in the nineteenth century out of traditional western forces that most revolutionaries thought erroneously to be dead. Palingenesis was appealing to all defenders of modern ideas who still possessed a spiritual sense and did not want to jettison the entire Christian baggage of European civilization. These included men like Claude Henri de Saint Simon (1760-1825), Charles Fourrier (1772-1837). Barthélemy Enfantin (1796-1864), Saint-Amand Bazard (1791-1832), and Auguste Comte (1798-1857). Such thinkers, horrified by destructive revolutionary violence, sought to illustrate how modernity could grow and develop, organically and peacefully, through the ages. They showed how one vital historical era was inevitably the prelude to the next; how the teachings of Jesus, the cult of the Virgin, a hierarchical priesthood, a liturgy, and many other elements of western civilization still played an energetic though transfigured role in modern life.

Lamennais shared this good palingenesist story. Contemporary Catholicism, as far as he was concerned, was deeply flawed. “How far”, he bitterly lamented, “we still are from that religion of devotion, of self-forgetfulness for the good of all; in sum, of that fraternity of which one speaks so much!”.⁵⁸ Nevertheless, historical Christianity had performed its basic task well. Its earlier vitality had prepared the way for a syncretist, universal religion that would electrify the Third Age of Humanity. If the familiar historic Faith were now dying, it was only because it was meant to be reborn in this new and better form.

Sincere, energetic, believing Catholic Peoples were to be the midwives of that birth. Following Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855), poet and religious philosopher, and his friends, Alexander Towianski (1795-1878) and Julius Slowacki (1809-1849), Lamennais believed that Catholic Poland was pointing the route to the future. For, as Mickiewicz demonstrated in his Book of the Nation and of the Polish Pilgrims (1834), the preface for which was written by Montalembert, the contemporary revival of the seemingly dead Polish people was making it into the Christ among nations. Poland was destined to carry forward and improve upon the redemptive mission of the Savior, uniting all peoples and religions into a new, common worship of the Almighty, transforming and perfecting a praiseworthy but superannuated Catholicism. Europe, according to Lamennais, faced a stark choice between hope and despair. It could either place its faith in the People and palingenesis, or it would be delivered over to nihilism. “There will be no more middle way between faith and nothingness”, he wrote to de Maistre with respect to the dilemma facing the world-in-birth; “Everything is extreme today. There is no dwelling place in between”.⁵⁹ A dramatic “good story” this truly was, but one troubled by many internal problems.

One of these was the fact that the choice for Faith was complicated by the horrible truth that the Catholic Peoples themselves seemed to lack the requisite energy to accept, live, and thereby teach the activist, palingenesist program. They, too, were resistant to the command to get in touch with their true nature, indifferent to performance of the tasks vital to their role, and even susceptible to the continued influence of the hypocritical, artificial ecclesiastical and political authorities around them. Still, there was a way out of this nightmare. If the Catholic Peoples remained unconscious, then an enlightened prophet, a Rousseauian Everyman, could express their infallible message while awaiting their awakening.

Lamennais was that man. He must himself speak for the “dumb” Catholic Peoples and work to raise their consciousness from its unnatural torpor. He must destroy those who would stand in the way of their maturation. Isocrates’ heroic leader had returned in his person. Hence, his openness to Giuseppe Mazzini’s (1809-1872) call to leadership of a regenerated, God-loving priesthood; a vanguard that would establish the new heaven and the new earth; a “Church of Precursors which I should like to see you found while waiting for the People to rise”.⁶⁰

Why do you only write books? Humanity awaits something more from you...Do not deceive yourself, Lamennais, we need action. The thought of God is action; it is only by action that it is incarnated in us...So long as you will be alone, you will only be a philosopher and a moralist in the eyes of the masses; it is as a priest that you must appear before it, a priest of the future, of the epoch which is beginning, of that new religious manifestation of which you have a presentiment, and which must inevitably end in that new heaven and new earth which Luther glimpsed three centuries ago without being able to attain it, since the time had not yet come.

We are now in a much better position to understand the depth of the error lying behind the project central to our “Joan of Arc’s” ecclesiastical condemnation: his call for a total separation of Church and State. Mennaisien separation, quite simply put, is a monstrous fraud, made possible by the convoluted reasoning of Rousseauian naturalism. That fraud has been remarkably successful, convincing the average thinking man that separation finally ensures the possibility for a liberated Church to operate according to her own spiritual nature in a free and properly focused State. Yet, under the cover of a public Church-State divorce, it actually ensures that these two institutions are more dangerously fused together than ever before in Christian History; that they are both placed under far more devastating secularist, demagogic control than at the most corrupt moments of traditional regimes professing their official union.

Unnatural fusion comes from the fact that in Lammenais’ revolutionary universe ultimate authority in both institutions lies in exactly the same hands: those of “the People’s Prophet”. This man—or party—understands that People’s true character and desires. He must do everything in his powers to arouse it to an awareness of what he understands it unconsciously longs to know, and he must destroy anyone standing in his path. The reason Lamennais does not have to worry about clashes between an independent Church and State on matters where their jurisdiction over creatures of body and soul intersect is that a collision, in his system, cannot possibly take place. How could there be any tension of authorities when all power is invested in the hands of the Everyman-Prophet, from whose judgments only the Rousseauian Enemy of the People might think of making appeal? And how could any such Enemy, non-human as he is, be permitted to point out the incredible swindle that was being perpetrated? Or how could he be treated seriously if he succeeded in having his animalistic voice heard? What Lamennais had illegitimately and surreptitiously linked together, no dehumanized supporter of a dignified public union might put asunder!

Vulgar, naturalist demagoguery triumphs in the Third Age of Humanity due to Church and State submission to an Everyman-Prophet/Party whose decisions are rooted in an arrogant willfulness disguised as both the height and limit of spirituality. Ultimately, it is only energetic passion and vital will that are kings in the land shaped by the new Christianity that they represent. Religion, republicanism, and socialism mean what the Prophet/Party want them to mean. When the victory of the Spirit is lauded by Lamennais and his disciples, one can be absolutely certain that this will surely entail, on the contrary, a total immersion in what every sane man recognizes to be either irrational willfulness or its ideological justification.

Quicksand lies everywhere in Lamennais’ Rousseauian Third Age of Humanity. One thing always dissolves into another within it. Spiritual truths are grounded in commitment to natural passion and will power. Innately energetic Catholic Peoples opposed to palingenesis are condemned for their manifest lethargy. Getting in touch with their true nature requires annihilation of what they themselves believe that nature to be. A single individual speaks infallibly and democratically for an entire hostile People armed with rational arguments and all too eager to crush his wishes. Contradiction after contradiction piles up. Whoever unmasks the deceptions somehow proves his own artifice and dissembling hypocrisy, voluntarily resigns from the human race, and justifies his future obliteration at the hands of the prophet of the humble and the weak. Marsilius of Padua had returned from the grave, and with a democratic, individualist, and rhetorical vengeance that only the intervening influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau could have made possible.

G. Marching Orders for the Soldiers of the Word (1830-1848)

When admirers of Lamennais condemn Gregory XVI for his supposed slavishness to legitimist secularism, what they are really criticizing is the pope’s efforts to enunciate a truly supernatural sense of Christian evangelization, its consequences, and the difficulties of promoting it effectively in a world of sinful men, both hypocritical and “sincere”. This involved encouraging a good deal of the same activism that the prophet himself had favored. For neither Lamennais’ vocal critique of the manipulation of religion by existing European states, nor his exploration of a variety of new religion-friendly studies, nor his openness to untraditional systems of government came under the attack of this “obscurantist” pontiff.⁶¹

Gregory XVI, the demonized scourge of the new Joan of Arc, himself dedicated the Papacy to a liberation of the Church from secular domination in Commissum Divinitas (17 May, 1835). He supported the famous German activist campaign protesting the Prussian government’s imprisonment of Archbishop Clemens August von Droste zu Vischering (1773-1845) of Cologne after that prelate tried to enforce canonical requirements regarding mixed marriages in his homeland. The same pontiff both recognized the Latin American republics that had revolted against the legitimate Spanish monarchy and also worked with the new liberal-Catholic Belgian Union. Moreover, Gregory never required Mennaisiens who had broken with their master to abandon the varied activist paths that he had marked out for them, politically controversial though these might be. Neither did he rein in Catholics, the recently revived members of the Society of Jesus prominent among them, who developed contacts with representatives of “modern” schools of philosophical, political and social thought. If a masculine Joan of Arc had been symbolically burned at the stake, many of the followers of his ideas concerning Catholic rediscovery of the fullness of the message of the Faith continued to thrive quite nicely.

A major reason why so many of the successors of Lamennais could carry out their work without trouble from Rome was the emphasis they placed upon his call for “freedom of association” rather than his demand for an immediate and total “separation of Church and State”. Almost all of these activists understood such a separation, given the joint spiritual-physical nature of the beings ruled over by each, to be a theoretical and practical impossibility. Freedom of association, however, would ensure a necessary Catholic influence upon society without impairing either the State’s just prerogatives or the Church’s own supernatural mission.⁶²

It would do so, on the one hand, by allowing the entirety of the Catholic laity to express those of its religious concerns that had social implications. The laity, being a large mass of men, was neither an integral part of the government nor directly moved by the more suspicious self-interested aims of its secular rulers. It was also, by definition, not the clergy, and this meant that action by mobilized lay pressure groups would keep the clerical estate’s hands clean of everything but the dogmatic and spiritual guidance that its apostolic mission justly demanded from it.

On the other hand, freedom of association for national episcopacies and other clerical groups would create initiatives stimulating better training on the part of bishops and priests. This in turn, would ensure still more solid teaching and spiritual guidance for the laity. Should both clerical and lay associations freely come into operation, true Catholic doctrine would have a chance to make a real impact on society in a proper fashion. At the very least, lay activists who were tempted to engage in dubious battles with the government for tainted, self-interested, secular reasons would not compromise the prestige and mission of the supernatural Teaching Church as such, and the age old plague of secular minded clerical politicians would finally be eradicated.

Institutions like Lamennais’ Congregation of St. Peter and the Belgian Catholic Union of the 1820’s were examples of what proponents of freedom of association wanted to form. Countless other clerical and lay societies were added over time, ranging from the communities of Dom Prosper Guéranger to Pauline Jaricot’s (1799-1862) Society for the Propagation of the Faith, and Frédéric Ozanam’s (1813-1853) Conferences of St. Vincent de Paul. Catholic Action’s potential political clout was soon obvious. France witnessed it, first and foremost, in the form of a determined resistance to regulations hindering the establishment of new religious congregations and their use as teachers in a school system opened to Catholic guidance.

Catholic activists in Italian and German states that applied tight governmental controls analogous to those in France were very keen supporters of the freedom of association principle. This was partly because of the fact that there was no union of the Roman Church with Protestant states, and partly because controls in all of them, the Catholic ones included, were choking liberals as well as radicals, thereby making the demand for “freedom” a much more general one.

In fact, Germany’s role in encouraging the free formation of associations dedicated to “Catholic Action” was in many respects even more seminal than that of France. It began with the creation of various lay-clerical “circles”, such as that of Princess Adele Amalie Gallitsyn (1748-1806) in Münster already in the 1770’s, and others in Bonn, Landshut, Mainz, Munich and Vienna by the next century. German Catholics actively transformed instances of counterrevolutionary governmental repression into major causes célèbres. The most famous of these, stirred by the publication of Joseph Görres’ Athanasius (1838) and Karl Ernst Jarcke’s numerous articles in the Historisch-politische Blätter, underlined the significance of that imprisonment of Archbishop Clemens August von Droste zu Vischering (1773-1845) of Cologne already noted above.⁶³

Such unfamiliar political outspokenness, in Italy as well as Germany, led to embittered legitimist demands for a return to humble acceptance of the religious policies of the sacred monarchies. But calls to order of this kind merely strengthened activists’ determination to lay bare the fraud of a supposed regalist respect for the Faith. Alliance with such states, they argued, could do the cause of Catholic influence over society no discernible good. Perhaps the model of Belgium should be followed everywhere? Perhaps friendship with groups promising the creation of free, responsive institutions might succeed in breaking the chains on a salutary Catholic Action?

When Pope Pius IX, in 1846, appeared to make that principle his own, allowing freedom for all manner of groups and ideas in the Eternal City, an era of revolutionary-Catholic cooperation in Germany, Italy, and France looked as though it were on the verge of arriving. It was this spirit that gave the initial stages of the 1848 revolutions in those countries the character of an agape, a so-called “springtime of peoples” where representatives of the Enlightenment and the traditional Faith could march in step together. The call for “freedom” was then expanded upon to involve the principle of separation as well, with the goal of a “free Church” operating happily in independence of a “free State”. How could a “free Church”, with free Catholic associations of all kinds forming everywhere, not be allowed to shape a “free State” responsive to the will of a believing population?

Certainly the movement to promote the formation of properly motivated Catholic associations, lay and clerical, did gain further steam in those nations adopting liberal or democratic political institutions in the latter nineteenth century. A glance at the situation in Germany during and after the Revolution of March of 1848 is instructive in this regard. The so-called March Days brought with them the establishment in Mainz of the Pius Association for Religious Freedom, named after the new Roman Pontiff. Five months later, there were several hundred branches of this Piusverein. Their first general meeting took place in Mainz on October 1^st, at which time a universal German Catholic Association was created. This then held seventeen Catholic Conferences in the years between 1850 and 1870, giving birth to many more subsidiary organizations, including charitable ones modeled on Ozanam’s Conferences of St. Vincent de Paul, Adolf Kolping’s (1813-1865) workingmens’ aid association, an aesthetic institute promoting the mystical-artistic ideas of the Nazarenes (who felt that they needed to be saints in order to paint well), the Görres Society, dedicated to scholarly and educational activity, and committees for the Defense of the Papal States and the founding of a Catholic University.⁶⁴

The clergy also took advantage of revolutionary chain rattling to liberate their teaching mission from rigid State control. Groundbreaking episcopal conferences were held at Würzburg from October 22-November 16, 1848 and in Vienna by the spring of 1849. Both the Austrian Concordat of 1855 and the 1867 regularization of the meetings of the German bishops at Fulda and Freising testified to an ever-growing recognition of the need for an episcopal independence and cooperation guaranteeing effective Catholic teaching regarding political as well as other more spiritual matters. The vision of the proponents of freedom of association seemed as though it might actually be coming true. But, then again, first appearances are not always correct ones, as our next chapter will make abundantly clear. For much more correction and transformation in Christ of an unruly fallen world would prove to be necessary before substantial progress could be made against the potent modern pillars of support for “nature as is”.

Chapter 9

The Ninth Crusade: Retrenchment and Renewed Assault

A. Revolutionary Word Games

Catholic activists of the first half of the nineteenth century were deeply encouraged by the example of Blessed Pius IX and nurtured the same pilgrim spirit that seemed to motivate him in their attempts to confront the modern world. They were extremely eager to use the Revolutions of 1848 to work together with anyone seeking the creation of a more just political and social system. Given their unpleasant experiences with the Right, they were especially ready to join with those men of the Left who had been prevented from taking part in public affairs by either the counterrevolutionary governments of Italy and the German world or the liberal regime represented by the French July Monarchy.

But Ninth Crusader good will was based on one crucial premise. It was founded upon the belief that liberals, democrats, nationalists, and all the other leftist revolutionary groups that had emerged through logical developments of the same underlying naturalist concepts might actually permit the words “freedom”, “freedom of association”, and “a free Church in a free State” to mean what these Catholic activists thought that they meant. Alas, and to their shock, it swiftly became clear that no friends of “nature as is” were going to allow such a thing to happen. Revolutionary interpretations of what these important terms signified were in theory and in practice just too different from that of servants of the Word Incarnate to be of any benefit to the latter.⁶³

In fact, crises in the liberal governments of France and Belgium in the 1830’s and 1840’s had already clearly indicated the reality of this word definition problem. The Revolutions of 1848 merely made the innate difficulties more obvious still. Militants of the Word began to realize that liberals, democrats, nationalists, and socialists all defined the term “freedom” in such a way as to ensure the victory of their particular faction. They realized too that their repeated expressions of devotion to liberty served simply as a hypocritical cover for their use of the machinery of the State to continue to repress any and all true Catholic action. Nineteenth century leftists therefore proved to be just as much false friends as most nineteenth century rightist legitimists. The Liberty Club had a sign on its door saying “no Catholics need apply”. Any “freedom” that they were willing to grant to believers to defend their “rights” turned out to have an Enlightenment-shaped foundation involving certain conditions which were impossible for the faithful both to accept and to fulfill.

As events transpired, the more radical among the revolutionary forces lost out almost everywhere in the years between 1848 and 1852. Liberals, along with those nationalists who were prepared to jettison their democratic connections, alone made further gains. These two groups, acting in tandem, found ways of working together with legitimists in the Kingdoms of Sardinia and Prussia who were eager to use both of them for the strengthening of their ruling dynasties. French Liberals concerned primarily with economic questions eventually insinuated themselves into an alliance with yet another Bonaparte, Louis Napoleon (1808-1873), first as President of the Second Republic (1848-1852) and as the Emperor Napoleon III (1852-1870) thereafter. Catholic “freedom of association” and “a free Church in a free State” were then interpreted in these lands to signify precisely whatever the peculiar configuration of their governments wished them to mean.

Acceptance of their interpretations brought with it a demand for Catholic submission to one of two possible scenarios. The Church could agree to a “judgment of Solomon” that allowed a believer’s spirit no right to impact upon his body and the world around him, since the physical environment was obliged to function according to purely “natural” material concerns alone. Barring this, she could accept a redefinition of the word “spirit” that identified the voice of God as speaking in history through the pronouncements of either of the two different types of States in question.

Under these circumstances, an energetic “free Church” that was in the process of rediscovering the meaning of the Incarnation and dared to make known its views on the connection of spirit and matter had to come under severe assault. She had to be scourged as a hypocritical enemy of liberty, progress, and even a proper understanding of God as well. For freedom could never be given to the obvious enemies of freedom. Ninth Crusaders who were proponents of such errors could be allowed no rights. Only a Church and Catholic activists who behaved properly, in accord with the principles of the liberals and their various allies, could be considered truly worthy of liberty and its justifiable employment:⁶⁴

A sad condition of the times is this: in civilized Europe, where in the nineteenth century an alleged freedom of conscience is highly extolled, and particularly in those European countries in which this liberty is most solemnly proclaimed, not merely the clergy, but all Catholic peoples, in the name of that same liberty, are reduced to the harsh alternative of choosing between the observance of the law like apostates or the holy disobedience of martyrs.

B. The Christ of the Barricades

Most of the post-1848 liberal-influenced governments would have preferred obtaining voluntary Catholic compliance with their measures rather than arousing a resistance requiring a severe repression that could, in turn, engender a powerful religious backlash. One way in which they hoped that they might perhaps obtain even an enthusiastic Catholic compliance was by emphasizing the new revolutionary threat posed by democratic socialism. The rhetorical arguments used by liberals in discussing that threat in the years after 1848 produced an almost unchangeable “good story” that has been successfully told to many Catholics in countries ranging from mid-nineteenth century France to twenty first century America. Such a record of success makes examination of the genesis and main features of this anti-socialist tale a valuable undertaking. But doing so first requires a look at that demonized Socialist Movement in and of itself.

“Socialism” in the period leading down to 1848 was much more vague a concept than it became in the 1890’s under the influence of the Second International. Half a century earlier, it literally meant anything from a simple desire to have a guaranteed job, to the vision of a dramatic transformation of human life through a voluntary cooperative reorganization of politics and society, to the first expressions both of anarchism and materialist Marxism. If anything, it was its more romantic, cooperative manifestations that dominated the earlier years of the 1800’s, when many visionaries prophesied the swift arrival of a socio-political order that would be jointly democratic and socialist in character; an “age of gold under the sign of universal fraternity through social justice”.⁶⁵

Socialists of this romantic-democratic character could and did make an appeal for the support of Catholic palingenesists like Lamennais. Why would they not do so? Was it not perfectly reasonable for them to claim that socialism shared with Catholicism a concern for the common good and the well being of the poorest of the poor? And was it not the case that there was a seemingly irresistible energy accompanying the birth and development of the Socialist Movement, demonstrating to men like Lamennais that it must somehow be favored by the Holy Spirit; that Christ, were he alive at this moment in time, would inevitably militate in its ranks alongside its poverty-stricken and persecuted supporters? In short, was it not true that a democratic socialist republic was just another name for a Christian commonwealth in the new form required by the nineteenth century? How could anyone deny, in consequence, that contemporary Catholics with a pilgrim spirit had a religious duty to join socialists—and Christ—on the barricades in any current revolutionary upheaval?⁶⁶

Lamennais and many other Catholic palingenesists took that socialist appeal seriously, responding favorably to it. Nevertheless, most believers, along with other Europeans, only became aware of the existence and possible strength of a Socialist Movement due to the Parisian uprising in 1848 called the June Days. This rebellion was brought on by the sudden closing of the so-called National Workshops created by the new, revolutionary, democratic French government to provide jobs for the many unemployed laborers of Paris who were suffering the effects of the latest European-wide industrial depression. Seizing control of the large working class district of the city, outraged workers eventually mobilized tens of thousands of disillusioned and desperate “socialists” to man the city barricades. The rebels were only suppressed by the Second Republic through a deployment of regular army troops and with that great bloodshed that led the defeated “socialists” to adopt a Red flag as the future symbol of their now much more embittered movement.

C. The Christ of the Party of Order

French liberals welcomed that suppression and, in a sense, the very uprising that allowed it, with overwhelming joy. They themselves had been the chief targets of the 1848 revolution, which had ended with the granting of the democratic vote that they had dreaded since 1794 as an opening to renewed attacks on individual private property. The June Days not only confirmed their fears but also gave them a wonderful means of playing upon the terror of all property owners in order to regain at least some of their very recently lost influence. What all morally upright and far-sighted men should now do, they argued, was to create a unified, anti-socialist Party of Order. And Catholics, who knew that the individual’s title to property was a God-given right, were called upon to do their doctrinal and moral duty and join this party, perhaps enlisting in its ranks even before everyone else. In other words, the liberal bourgeoisie was arguing that if Christ were alive in 1848, He, too, would enthusiastically join the Party of Order.

There was, however, one catch. Catholics entering the property-friendly coalition were summoned to accept the liberal contention that socialism was the only “real” leftist danger. This made a certain sense from their standpoint. Liberals had never seen the need for following the logic of their naturalist Enlightenment principles to its more consistent radical conclusions. They had only wanted a “little” revolution to achieve their economic freedom, and now recognized that the very word “revolution” was perhaps nasty in and of itself. In fact, having been “mugged” by the democrats and the socialists in 1848, many of them did not even like the name “liberal” any longer, considering it redolent of old Jacobin memories. What they felt they really should be called was “conservative”. Better still, they might even be identified as “counterrevolutionary”. In fact, liberalism could perhaps be recognized as the only truly “common sense” filled counterrevolutionary movement—a political vision awakened both to “the real danger” posed by “obvious” revolutionaries, as well as the beneficence of the good, solid, “traditional” ideas of the Enlightenment and the “nice bits” of the “principles of 1789” emerging from them.⁶⁷

D. The Christ of Liberal Catholicism

It was only some very few nineteenth century Catholics, mostly intellectuals, writers, and activists influenced by palingenesist arguments, who had responded to the demand of socialists to see Christ manning their revolutionary barricades. Many more ordinary believers were aroused by the disturbances of the June Days to see Him in the Party of Order. Shocked by certain open critiques of property that accompanied and followed the Paris uprising, this latter group of Catholics did not investigate its deeper causes and its really quite variegated “socialist” complaints, many of them actually much more traditionally-minded in their concern for family and home than anything the liberals had to say. Instead, it lunged for the liberal, conservative, and supposedly counterrevolutionary capitalist bait with enthusiasm, joining, fervently, in the common crusade against the new and “really revolutionary” evil. Those who did so, obligingly condemned fellow-believers who refused to jettison the broader philosophical and historical battle with Enlightenment liberalism along with Catholics who had proven to be radical enough to set up their tents in the socialist camp. Both were chastised as shameless, and probably godless, rabble-rousers.

Many other French Catholics were frightened primarily by the demagoguery they feared might characterize the democratic system created by the Second Republic. These believers were happier with what they judged to be the more prudent machinery for expressing rational popular will provided by that English-like liberal constitutionalism that had taken root in France under the July Monarchy of Louis Philippe. Some of their number did, indeed, accept the anti-socialist arguments of the Party of Order. Others did not. Whatever their attitude with respect to the conservative liberals, however, this segment of the believing population, with the Comte de Montalembert and the editors and contributors to the journal called Le Correspondant at its head, formed the faction that soon became known to the world as Liberal Catholics.⁶⁸

Montalembert had abandoned Lamennais after Mirari vos. We have seen that he continued to pursue many of the goals of the Ninth Crusade that the excommunicated prophet had helped to stimulate. In doing so, he had become the parliamentary head of the Catholic Party during the reign of Louis Philippe. Montalembert was especially active politically as a champion of Catholic rights to set up their own schools and send their children to them. But after the regime changes in 1848 and 1852, especially from the time of his book, On the Interests of Catholics in the Nineteenth Century (1852), his arguments took on more and more of a palingenesist character. Hence, although he and those who agreed with him admitted that the Faith once was definitely anti-liberal in spirit, they claimed that it now was God’s will that it be reconciled with its former enemy.

Once again, therefore, Christ was given a definite favorite in the political arena. This was not simply liberalism in its role as defender of economic freedom, which the Second Empire of Napoleon III, to the delight of the bourgeoisie, actively promoted. Montalembert detested the revival of Bonapartist despotism as much as he did the possible dangers of demagogic democracy. Instead, he seemed to have believed that if Christ were alive in the 1850’s, He would most certainly militate in the ranks of those who wanted a liberal constitutional government. He used a slightly less radical way of making exactly that same point at the congress of Catholic activists that took place in 1863 at Malines, in Belgium, where he stressed the absolute necessity, “under modern conditions”, of the acceptance of liberal definitions of such tendentious terms as “freedom” and “separation of Church and State”.

Montalembert addressed that congress on the importance of abandoning any and all reliance on privileges and State protection in the defense of Catholicism. He admitted that coercion had played a necessary role in the past, but insisted that its historical success in establishing Christian order and creating mature, adult, Christian men dictated the need to put it aside in modern times. Catholics, he concluded, must realize that liberal freedom of expression had now become the refuge of the weak and the helpless against the strong and the wicked. Religious liberty and the separation of Church and State now actually provided a superior basis for sound Catholic action than that offered by civil protection in the past. A proto-liberal freedom of conscience, he argued, was already the underlying cause of France’s glory in the arts in the seventeenth century. In contemporary France, it was responsible for the positive attitudes manifested towards Catholicism during the Revolution of 1848. Retention of non-liberal systems and practices in the nineteenth century, Montalembert insisted, would merely promote further revolution.⁶⁹

Hence, cooperation with liberalism, was the Church’s—and, in fact, the counterrevolution’s—greatest shield against violent change. The sole hope of counterrevolution, in other words, was reliance on the defense offered by one of the moderate pillars of the Revolution itself. Critics listening to his fervent expression of prophetic certainty at Malines wondered whether Montalembert allowed anyone to question his interpretation of the current situation, and whether they, as Catholics, had the right to try to correct and transform in Christ aspects of liberal constitutionalism “as is”. We shall soon see that they discovered this to be impossible. Liberal constitutionalism had to be accepted in and of itself. The pilgrim spirit came to a definitive end once a modern constitution guaranteeing liberal freedoms had become the basic law of a given land.

A spirit of openness to the conservative liberal mentality was also noticeable in certain Catholic circles elsewhere in Europe, particularly in Italy and the German countries, not to speak, of course, of Britain. This friendship for “the principles of 1789”—once again, only the acceptably “nice bits”—was often expressed in these lands in calls not simply for a parliamentary system or for economic freedom but also for a “modern liberty” even in Catholic philosophical, theological, and historical work. It is sufficient to mention men such as Ignaz von Döllinger (1799-1890), the great German Church historian, and his English admirer, Lord John Acton (1834-1902), to illustrate this broader liberal position.

Döllinger’s speech on “The Past and Present of Theology” at the Congress of Munich in September of 1863 was a declaration of war upon authoritative ecclesiastical controls on Catholic scholarly research and publication. It was issued in the name of a liberal desire for freedom of expression paralleling similar demands for liberty in the economic realm. Döllinger implied that there had to be a revolution in the Church’s Magisterium in order to aid the general progress of mankind. Hence, he argued that the teaching authority had to bend its “dogmatism” to suit the conclusions of “free” theological research—most especially if this research were undertaken by enlightened Germans, innately more industrious than leisure-loving Romans who closed their libraries much too early in the day to his tastes. Döllinger’s address also represented a vigorous reaction both to Ninth Crusade support for an enhancement of the powers of the Papacy as well as its rehabilitation of speculative, systematic theology. We shall have reason to discuss these crusading themes and his criticisms in much greater detail below.⁷⁰

Liberal Catholicism was not destined to remain united, in the same way that liberalism pure and simple was bound to division. Whether Catholic or secular in origin, liberals tended to veer down varied pathways depending upon either personal “choice” regarding which modern conditions seemed more pressing in their demands for accommodation on the part of believers or deeper meditation on the logical consequences of the movement’s basic principle of individual “freedom”. Thus, those liberal Catholics most insistent upon the primary importance of personal economic freedom and fearful of the demagoguery of democracy became conservative liberals, often dropping the “liberal” part of that appellation altogether, like their secular counterparts. Others, more concerned with the spread of liberty to the mass of the population than with a fear of its general abuse, became liberal democrats. From that point onwards, they were capable of embracing the teachings either of democratic nationalism or democratic socialism. Although these varied outcroppings of liberal Catholics could then bitterly quarrel with one another, they did remain united in one common loathing for their opponents inside the Roman Church. And these opponents seemed definitively to have gained the upper hand against them during the reign of Pope Pius IX.

E. The Intransigent Vision

It is the intellectuals and educated activists among the opponents of the liberal Catholics who are of most interest to the present argument. Disciples of this anti-liberal school of thought and action have produced few historians familiar to English-speaking audiences. Hence, they have generally had their portrait painted by supporters of liberal Catholicism who are hostile to their basic perspective. The likeness that such liberals have rendered is not a happy one. Spokesmen for this position have been censured for their lack of Christian charity, a want of discernment, and an attempt to fossilize the Catholic mentality that leaves it lifeless in the midst of a vigorous modernity. Perhaps the most constantly reiterated theme has been their espousal of a blind, unintelligent, “intransigence”, making civilized, rational discourse with them an absolute impossibility. Intransigents have been labeled “vile”, “impertinent”, “ignorant”, “police informers”, “a fistful of pedants”, “absolutist opponents of every principle of progress and liberty”, and, in effect, proto-fascists.⁷¹ Anyone whose understanding of the intransigents has been derived from the judgment of their critics alone must conclude that the best that might be said of such inquisitorial mountebanks and villains is that they represented another form of shallow reaction to revolutionary developments and that they were dedicated to a narrow, self-interested defense of dying privileges. As one enemy depicted them: ⁷²

…with an intransigence sometimes trembling with fanaticism {they proclaimed}their bloc condemnations of the modern world, which they saw as radically vitiated by liberal ideology, and presented as the sole view compatible with orthodoxy their political and religious conceptions of privileges in the womb of an officially Catholic State not subject to the pressure of public opinion.

Let me hasten to admit that there is no doubt that there certainly were enemies of the liberal Catholics who aptly fit this description of them. Nevertheless, the leaders and writers whom Montalembert, Döllinger, and their friends most castigated as “intransigents” did not deserve such a caricature of their viewpoint. What they actually offered was a powerful intellectual and rhetorical expression of many of the lessons learned by the Ninth Crusaders since the days of the French Revolution in consequence of their rediscovery of the full message of the Word in history. In their arguments, one finds a coherent discussion of the whole vision of acceptance, correction, and transformation in Christ of all of the teachings of God’s Creation, the disaster of abandoning this effort in order to satisfy the “business as usual” demands of “nature as is”, a devastating critique of the “alternative good story” that the members of the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo told about their willful goals, and precisely that kind of pilgrim opening to modern steps in the dance of life that liberal Catholics erroneously claimed that intransigents unthinkingly rejected. An examination of but two of the most important among many similar intransigent sources is sufficient to get a flavor of the entire movement.

One of these was the Roman periodical, La Civiltà Cattolica. This Jesuit journal, founded in 1850, received papal funding, enjoyed easy access to the Vatican, and was frequently granted the public blessing and commendation of the Holy See. It intentionally dedicated itself from its first issue to the systematic development of Catholic political and social theory, a mission that it fulfilled by providing reflective essays, satirical articles, novelettes, news commentary, book reviews, and verse on every variety of contemporary issue. This gave it a coherence that enables it to be studied as one piece---precisely as the work of a particular school of thought. Moreover, Civiltà writers were influential, if not directly responsible for the inspiration of papal documents ranging from the Syllabus of Errors (1864) to Rerum novarum (1891), all of them central to the growth of what would be referred to as Catholic Social Doctrine. In fact, it understood development of this doctrine to be the pilgrim wave of the future: ⁷³

It will come, there is no doubt about it. A day will come in which social and juridical theory will shine forth with that certitude with which morality shines forth in the Church today, defined in precepts and canons. But before this hoped-for progress can be realized, long studies must be pursued on the nature of society; studies in which the human intellect…prepares the material for the infallible voice of the Church: that Church which leaves research and discussion to its learned ones before proclaiming {as in councils} that ‘it seems good to the Holy Spirit and to us’ {to proclaim a Catholic dogma}….

Such unity, persistence, and influence were to a large degree due to the clarity of the Civiltà’s first Jesuit editors, including, most importantly, Padre Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio (1792-1861). Brother to one of the first leaders of the Risorgimento (the Italian unification movement), Taparelli was a follower of St. Ignatius admired for his open mind even by the Society’s most bitter opponents. His work on the natural law, the Saggio teoretico di dritto naturale (1840-1843), and his critique of European liberalism in the Esame critico degli ordini rappresentativi alla moderna, exercised an undying influence on all of the Civiltà’s authors. Taparelli’s memory was promoted by neo-Thomists throughout Europe, Leo XIII among them, as a result of his leading role in the re-introduction of Aquinas’ writings into Italian seminaries after the long period of disfavor following the Reform Catholic attacks of the previous century. His reputation enjoyed further enhancement in the 1920’s after the republication of his main works by the Civiltà and the homage of Pope Pius XI, who had translated some of his writings into German while head of the Ambrosian Library in Milan.

A second and more “popular” source crucial to understanding both the substance as well as the rhetorical efficacy of this movement was the French writer, Louis Veuillot (1813-1883). Born of a cooper’s family, Veuillot advanced from apprenticeship as a solicitor’s clerk in Paris to a career in the border region between journalism and serious literature. There was never any doubt in his mind as to who the chief influence on his thought might be: one of the first of the Ninth Crusaders. “When I was born”, he explained, “Joseph de Maistre blew the trumpet and I heard it”. De Maistre was an unsurpassable, indeed, even an unapproachable genius. “It is necessary to place him apart”, Veuillot concluded, “among the great men, almost among the prophets…”.⁷⁴

His early journalistic work, which began in 1831 and was aided by his initial support for the liberal July Monarchy, changed drastically in the late 1830’s with a journey to Rome and public profession of a renewed Catholic Faith. Veuillot’s active life was thenceforward composed of two interrelated threads. One of these centered round an immense amount of literary activity, including novels, devotional works, and satirical social commentary. Perhaps most significant in this realm were his attack on the polished skepticism of the day in Libres Penseurs (1846) and a depiction of Catholic and modern Europe in Parfums de Rome (1861) and Odeurs de Paris (1866).

A second thread tied in with the journal l’Univers and the Catholic political and social action that it encouraged. L’Univers was founded in the early 1830’s, although Veuillot’s appearance on its pages and his ascension to its editorial direction dates from the period 1839-1843. Aided by his brother and several trusted colleagues, he made l’Univers a key instrument in the defense of the interests of the Church. L’Univers did for the Committee for the Defense of Religious Freedom, the nucleus of the “Catholic Party” founded in 1845, the extra-parliamentary propaganda complementing Montalembert’s work inside the French legislature. Enduring numerous vicissitudes after breaking with its early support of the Second Empire, l’Univers ran afoul of Napoleon III’s pro-Risorgimento Italian policy and was suppressed on January 29^th, 1860. Veuillot was permitted no part in Le Monde, a temporary successor journal, but regained his former position when government policy allowed for a resurrection of l’Univers in April of 1867. He continued his work until illness silenced him in 1878-1879. Veuillot’s services to the Catholic cause were rewarded by his burial in the national expiatory church of Sacre Coeur in 1883. Pope St. Pius X called him the model Catholic layman.⁷⁵

Clearly, the same spirit of the Ninth Crusade that had inspired Lamennais, the liberal Catholics, and many of the supporters of the Christ of the barricades nurtured this intransigent school as well. Five particular themes emerging from the common background that all these activists initially shared stand out in the regular marching orders intransigent leaders gave to their troops. Underlying all five was an insistence upon the impossibility of understanding anything regarding the universe, society, and the individual without reference both to nature’s destiny “in Christ” as well as the supernatural life surging through it now, as a consequence of the Word Incarnate in history. In the final analysis, these intransigents insisted, all of life, supernatural and natural, was aimed at one common, Christ-centered purpose:⁷⁶

God…has established one sole order composed of two parts: nature exalted by grace, and grace vivifying nature. He has not confused these two orders, but He has coordinated them. One force alone is the model and one thing alone the motive principle and ultimate end of divine creation: Christ…All the rest is subordinated to Him. The goal of human existence is to form the Mystical Body of this Christ, of this Head of the elect, of this Eternal Priest, of this King of the immortal Kingdom, and the society of those who will eternally glorify Him.

At the heart of this theme of fruitful natural-supernatural interaction was also an ecclesiology based upon the doctrine of the Church as Christ continued in time. Although the intransigents as a whole did not necessarily fully realize it, readers of the present work know that that doctrine, and all of its consequences for the human person, was a favorite theme of the Church Fathers. A number of early nineteenth century thinkers had freshly cultivated this ancient patristic vision, especially Johann Adam Möhler (1796-1838) of the University of Tübingen. Giovanni Perrone (1794-1876), professor at the Gregorian in Rome from 1824-1863, made Möhler’s works known to many of his influential students: Carlo Passaglia (1812-1887), Clemens Schrader (1820-1875), and Johannes Baptist Franzelin (1816-1886). Perrone was also a channel of Möhler’s ecclesiology to the Jesuit editors of La Civiltà Cattolica: Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio, Matteo Liberatore, and Carlo Maria Curci (1809-1891). And these men were intimates of Louis Veuillot, who, even if he did not necessarily drink from the same theological well, wrote as though he had done so.

In any case, for intransigent Ninth Crusaders, as for the Fathers, the Church was Christ in action on earth today. She therefore possessed a spiritual significance far surpassing her already impressive natural structure and undeniably influential historical role. Discussion of the Church in this context enabled nineteenth century intransigent thinkers to place the functions of pope, bishop, and priest in a different light than a purely juridical treatment of their responsibilities would allow; to stress their character as “other-Christs” laboring in the contemporary world. Intransigents underlined the same theme in explaining every other “fleshly” aspect of the Church’s activity, from the most sacramental to the most mundane. A correct understanding of the Church as Christ-continued, Matteo Liberatore (1810-1892) wrote in the Civiltà, would so transform one’s appreciation of her character that “the very carriages of the cardinals would change their appearance in your eyes”.⁷⁷ The following passages offer but a brief selection from innumerable statements over many decades stressing the same basic point:⁷⁸

Christ, then lives in the Church as the principle of the life of this Church, and as a principle so joined that it yields an image of the Hypostatic Union, producing, accordingly, a human-divine life, in imitation of the life that Christ Himself led on the earth, notwithstanding the continued existence of the human elements in their entirety.

{The Incarnation} is a miracle repeated in a manner equally ineffable, although diverse, in the great body of the Church, divinized by the life that Jesus Christ lives in her, and still left with all the human characteristics, because composed of men. And thus, things are also true of her that seem contradictory, but are only opposites.

In this way, it can be understood that Christ is united with His Church not like any other founder with respect to a society of men…but in the way the head is joined together with the body in a man, and thus blended as the vital principle with a living thing.

A second patristic theme intimately connected with the doctrine of the interaction of nature and the supernatural, guided by a Church that was Christ continued in time, was that of a spirituality emphasizing the personal ascent of Mount Tabor to which every human person was invited; the concept of individual divinization in Christ. This, again, was a beloved topic of the editors of the Civiltà, who persistently argued that membership in a Church that was actually Christ meant participation in the life of the God-Man and, through Him, access to every possible perfection: individual and social, natural and supernatural. Veuillot stressed the same argument, claiming that it proved that Catholicism was the sole new and truly radically force that had entered an otherwise static human history, effecting qualitative individual and social changes allowing definitive escape from the Rut Triumphant.

In fact, so strong were La Civiltà Cattolica’s and Veuillot’s statements in this regard that many of their opponents misinterpreted them, bringing down upon them the charge of “idolatry”. For these intransigents insisted that individual believers, through membership in a Church that was really Christ continued in time, could win a prize that “a person could scarcely conjecture in the abstract” and must be considered as potential “gods”. Laity, priests, and the pope could, as individuals, become Christ Himself, “the living image of the Nazarene”. “The more fully a man lives the life of the Incarnate Word”, they claimed, “the more deeply he penetrates into its unity and perfects himself”. He who progresses in “Divine Life” attains to “a perfection that surpasses all that is innate in him”, and becomes “a participant in Christ”, becomes “in a sense, initiated into His substance”.⁷⁹

Intransigent encouragement of a spirituality of divinization intensified their awareness of the profound damage that had been done by supporters of Reform Catholicism in general and Jansenists in particular in seeking to bring religion down to the level of a “common sense” expression of “nature as is”.⁸⁰ Their disdain for such a naturalist enterprise was fought, on one level, through encouragement for the anti-Jansenist moral theology of Alphonsus Liguori (1696-1787), the founder of the Redemptorists, which vigorously underlined the importance of persistent, Word-driven, corrective and transformative labor. Brunone Lanteri (1759-1830), the inspiration behind the lay-clerical Italian brotherhoods called the amicizie cattoliche, Cardinal Thomas Marie Gousset (1792-1866), Archbishop of Rheims, in his Justification de la théologie du bienheureux A.M. de Liguori of 1832, in France, and the Redemptorists everywhere all waged active combat for the victory of Liguorian thought. Its triumphant march was accompanied by a revivification and expansion of a variety of devotions providing flesh and blood manifestations of spiritual concepts successfully suppressed by Jansenist and Reformed Catholics of the previous era and forgotten even by most of their early nineteenth century opponents.

Nothing illustrated the hopes for the divinization of nature through incorporation into the life of a Divine Person better than the cult of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. This devotion, dear to the Jesuits, and therefore hated by the Jansenists perhaps more than any other, enjoyed an enormous rebirth in popularity wherever the intransigents gained influence. One can follow its recovery, from strength to strength, in the fortunes of the Apostolate of Prayer, begun in 1844, in the pages of The Sacred Heart Messenger (1861), in the ceremony of the consecration of the world to the Sacred Heart in 1875, and in Leo XIII’s encyclical letter, Annum Sacrum, of May 25, 1899. Intransigents similarly encouraged a very un-Reformed Catholic devotion to the saints, with the exaltation of Marian practices heading the list. The cults of the Sacred Heart of Mary, of Mary as Mediatrix, of the Miraculous Medal, of Our Lady of La Salette (1846) and of Lourdes (1858), along with Leo XIII’s fifteen encyclicals on the Rosary and the publication of the previously ignored works of Louis Grignion de Montfort (1673-1716), all testify to the extreme importance Marian devotion attained in the course of the century, much of it due to their stimulus. Finally, the practice of going on pilgrimage to traditional holy places, a major Jansenist and Reformed Catholic bugbear, was fervently revived. Restoration of the pilgrimage to revere the Holy Coat of Trier in 1844, which attracted hundreds of thousands of participants, and the use of the very modern tool of the railroad to reach pilgrimage sites, especially impressed contemporaries as unexpected but unquestionable signs of changing times.

Perhaps most important and anti-Jansenist of all was intransigent interest in the Eucharist as the prime means of correcting and transforming natural man in Christ. A Eucharistic emphasis led to the call for an earlier introduction to and more frequent reception of the Sacrament of Holy Communion. La très sainte communion of Gaston de Ségur (1820-1881) was one of the many significant works encouraging such practices. Intransigent supporters were also active proponents of public Eucharistic adoration, which spread everywhere with papal approval in the years after 1850. Eucharistic Congresses, involving processions, adoration, and theological conferences, also began in the 1870’s through the work of Marie Tamisier (1834-1910), Gaston de Ségur, and others. These gradually became international affairs, the Eucharistic Congress of Jerusalem in 1893 foreshadowing the worldwide importance they would attain in the 1900’s.

Intransigent dedication to the Eucharist inevitably led the movement to support the liturgical revival emerging from an admittedly quite wide variety of different segments of the nineteenth century Catholic movement. Conviction of the powerful role that the liturgy was meant to play in the life of the whole Christian community and in that of each of its individual members became a major theme for Benedictine spirituality, as the work of Dom Guéranger and his Année Liturgique (1841) indicate. A liturgical movement grew from its original center in Solesmes (1838) to the associated abbeys of Beuron (1862), in Germany, under Marius Wolter (1825-1890), and Maredsous (1872), in Belgium, with its great liturgist, Gerard van Caloen (1853-1932). It was at Maredsous that the first influential Missel des fidèles was published in 1871, fourteen years after the last papal condemnation of such a translation of the Mass into the vernacular and twenty-six before this prohibition was quietly dropped in 1897. Eucharistic and liturgical revival were then given powerful pontifical support through St. Pius X’s endorsement of early and frequent reception of the Sacrament by a laity which knew, prayed, and sang the Mass together.

A third intransigent theme building upon the earlier work of the Ninth Crusade was a pronounced Ultramontanism, an emphasis upon the role of the Papacy in every aspect of Church life, and a concomitant movement towards the administrative centralization this entailed.⁸¹ Ironically, and despite its clear aim of transforming bishops into drone-like agents of government policy, we have seen that the Concordat of 1801 unwittingly assisted this enhancement of papal power. Through his agreement with Pope Pius VII, Napoleon acknowledged that the Holy See could retire and replace the entire existing French hierarchy. An eagerness to establish a substantive Roman authority was then expressed by Joseph de Maistre, Félicité de Lamennais, and the Mennaisiens in general. Their Neo-Ultramontanism was fed by theological considerations, admiration for the sufferings of Pius VI and Pius VII at the hands of the republican and Napoleonic regimes, concern for efficacious action in a world of ever more centralized, revolutionary, anti-Catholic political and social forces, and, as we have already indicated, deep frustration with the inadequacies of local ecclesiastical authorities. Rome was characteristically slow in signing on to the pro-papal program, cautiously encouraging aspects of it under Gregory XVI, but really only fully embracing it during the reign of Pius IX. Vatican Council demonstrated its victorious progress through the nineteenth century most dramatically, both with its proclamation of the doctrine of Papal Infallibility as well as by pointing the way to an extensive editing of canon law in a neo-Ultramontanist sense, completed only during the First World War, in 1917.

Concern for a rediscovery of the whole of a Tradition that had been obscured by Jansenism and Reform Catholicism also fed a fourth intransigent project, a revival of interest in speculative theology.⁸² We have seen that far from being merely neglected in Catholic circles, the teaching of past speculative systems had often positively been prohibited during the course of the previous century. This gave to Catholic theological and philosophical instruction a merely reactive character. Rather than being provided a point of view that digested centuries of work by extraordinarily great minds and through which they might confront new considerations presented to them in the future, students were offered disconnected and purely apologetic arguments to answer the anti-Catholic points made by contemporary thinkers exactly as they emerged. This, in effect, left the initiative to whatever modern school of thought might be “in” during any given academic year, with discussion of it abandoned if it lost in popularity the next.

A return to the teaching of the scholastics had been advocated since the first half of the century, when men like Taparelli d’Azeglio became convinced that only a grounding in systematic, speculative Catholic thought would provide the believing student with a means accurately to sift through and judge the errors of the modern anti-religious intellect along with any of the valid points that the Jesuit himself believed contemporary thinkers did indeed often make. This work was especially necessary in modern times, Taparelli argued, since the attack on God had inevitably brought an assault on the Socratic Tradition that Christians had enthusiastically embraced and employed, making Reason a target of mindless willfulness alongside Faith.

Similar concerns motivated a number of Ninth Crusaders who are not generally considered part of the intransigent movement, including Bishop Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler (1811-1877) of Mainz, who was certain that modern social problems could be efficiently addressed in an acceptable Catholic manner if tackled logically with the kind of intellectual rigor that the scholastics had championed. Germany thus became a major center for reviving scholastic studies together with Italy. Neo-scholastics such as Joseph Kleutgen (1811-1883), author of Die Theologie/Philosophie der Vorzeit Verteidigt, were extremely active at First Vatican Council and would continue to exercise an ever-greater influence into the second half of the twentieth century—thereby arousing the wrath of men like Döllinger, who attacked their work as outdated and therefore dangerously obscurantist.

Although the neo-scholastic renaissance involved study of many of the different thinkers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, including St. Bonaventure and Dun Scotus, most of those engaged in it became convinced of the superiority of the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas and of the commentaries on his work produced in the sixteenth century by Cardinal Cajetan. Leo XIII, through his encyclical letter Aeterni Patris of August 4th, 1879 and his patronage of the Leonine edition of the works of the Angelic Doctor (1882), gave to Thomistic studies pride of place in the Catholic world. Journal after journal, and Catholic center after Catholic center, including the great Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, began to dedicate themselves to intellectual work in this tradition, with the Accademia romana di San Tommaso, established 1880, providing the model for much of their labor.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly for the present argument, the intransigents engaged in the Ninth Crusade were charged with a sense of mission demanding immediate action. Like Innocent III in the age of the new ascent of Mt. Tabor, they believed that Christ must become king of society at large and of individuals personally, that this sovereignty alone could ensure the fulfillment of nature’s temporal promise and supernatural mission, and that refusal to accept the corrective and transforming action of the Word in history could only result in both historical and eternal disaster for man.

Yes, it was true that “the Incarnate Word did not teach reading and writing”, and that it is “a profanation to say that the mission of the Son of God was a mission…of social benefit”.⁸³ And, no, material wealth and physical power would not necessarily be the greatest under Christ’s scepter. Nevertheless, the sight that came from Christ and in Christ, designed primarily to aid the eternal salvation of individual human persons, had enormous direct and indirect temporal consequences, placing all aspects of nature in their proper hierarchy of values as it did, and providing the benefits that came along with such a true sense of order. A civilization guided by a vision rooted in the Word would gain the power, the wealth, and the overall natural brilliance most suitable for fulfilling man’s final end. It would thus be led “to the height of greatness” in the proper sense, and “the legitimate consequences, not only for the individual but also for society, for happiness both individual and social, will be for us the highest that can be enjoyed on this earth”.⁸⁴ Civilization in its most complete, harmonious mode, capable of extending itself to all cultures without violating their essences, bringing diversity from unity, was born “on Calvary at the foot of the cross”. Christ thus caused “social improvements which it would have been insane to presume possible under the heathens”, “varied to infinity in its imposing entirety”.⁸⁵

Intransigents deemed nothing to be superfluous in this movement of all of nature, through men, in Christ, toward Divine Light, because nothing could ever be superfluous to God. When each aspect of nature played its proper role, the subordinate submitting to its superior, the superior sacrificing itself, like the Lamb, for its subordinate, then the whole of the universe manifested its desire for restoration in God. But there could be no completion of this movement here on earth, and even if there could be, for a moment, the possibility of sin would always leave it open for corruption once again to take hold. In fact, the more effectively that nature was corrected and transformed in Christ, the better it understood the fragility of its situation; the better it grasped the tremendous gift that constant supernatural assistance for the purpose of keeping its machinery in working order and divinizing its stewards really was.

Ninth Crusaders began systematically presenting such arguments against the opposing positions of the supporters of “nature as is” in works like the Mennaisien Olympe Philippe Gerbet’s (1798-1864) Considérations sur le dogme générateur de la foi catholique (1829) and the very influential writings of the Spaniard, Juan Donoso Cortes (1809-1853). The sense of urgency and drama felt by all the intransigents who repeated and expanded upon their teaching is well depicted in one major article of La Civiltà Cattolica: O dio re colla libertà, o l’uomo re colla forza—“Either God as King with Liberty, or Man as King Through Force”. Catholics had to correct and transform the world in Christ, or society and the individual would steadily degenerate in the hands of men, all of whom claimed that they were working for Reason, Freedom, and Progress. Many of these members of the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo, tragically, actually believed in the truth of what they were saying. And this was why, in addition to being an especially dramatic era, the nineteenth century was also a schizophrenic age. It could not utter one word about the world that was not contradicted by the natural order that it claimed so passionately to love.⁸⁶

Hence, the intransigent call to a joint defensive-offensive action that would build upon all the poignant experiences of the 1830’s and 1840’s to promote the message of the Word in history more effectively in the decades to come. Given that worldly activity was the sphere of the laity, the practical labor of conducting the work of correcting and transforming the world in Christ generally had to be its responsibility. “To give, to pardon, to make God known and loved—that is the total role of our priests; they do not look for, do not accept any other”, Veuillot argued. “Our role, the layman’s role, is different; we are in the world, we play politics, and we would like to know who will prevent us?”⁸⁷ The call to arms of the laity was thus very much a nineteenth century mobilization, with the original proponents of the Ninth Crusade having been the initial recruiting sergeants and the intransigents and their papal ally their enthusiastic heirs.

“Divinized” individuals were seen to be the chief agents of passing the rest of the world through the purgative process offered by the Church. As one enemy of the Civiltà ironically—but correctly—commented: “in a theocracy, it is God Who dominates; in the system of the Jesuits, it is man considered as God who dominates”.⁸⁸ There would be a true perfection of the world only when it was “transfigured vitally through individuals”, “by means of the individual operation of each member of the faithful”, “no longer by the finger of God, but {indirectly} by that of man, divinized by grace”.⁸⁹

Crucial to the awakened layman’s activities, the editor of l’Univers insisted, was the development of a Catholic Press. Catholic journalism was a phenomenon “born of the needs of the Church in modern society”.⁹⁰ Its practitioners were said to be contemporary knights battling for right in nineteenth-century garb. Veuillot was thus prepared to defend the existence of the Press not only against the attacks of the secular enemy but, on numerous occasions, against bishops who disapproved of the semi-autonomous lay role that publishing entailed.

Nonetheless, as La Civiltà Cattolica insisted, the Press was only one crucially valuable tool in a wider movement of Catholic Action spreading knowledge of real truths about the natural world and putting the corrective and transforming message of the Word in history into practice. France and Germany were leading the way in this regard. French and German Catholics “multiply without ceasing writings and institutions of charity”. Moreover, they made ample use of the press and of political and social associations to promote them. One could not pick up an issue of a journal “that does not render us an account either of new publications written for the enlightenment of those in error, or of institutions most active in the aid of every kind of need”.⁹¹ In short, the pilgrim spirit was alive and thriving.

F. The Attack on Revolutionary “Nature as Is”

This brings us to the intransigent refusal to accept the conciliatory attitude to modern socio-political developments either of the Party of Order or of the liberal Catholics, or of the supporters of the Christ of the Barricades. It should be clear by now that this refusal had nothing to do with establishing some recent date—1789 in particular—as the year beyond which no further changes dealing with temporal life were held to be acceptable. Neither did it involve some unthinking denial of a given technological accomplishment like the railroad or of a specific system of government such as a constitutional monarchy or a democratic republic.

Instead, rejection of the demand that Christ accommodate Himself to the modern world had everything to do with what was considered to be the corrupting influence of what the intransigents called “the Revolution”. What the “Revolution”, and the whole of the “modern spirit” behind it signified for them was a desire to barricade man and society in “nature as is”. And this meant a willful rejection of all of the perfections offered to civilization and the individual human person through submission to the corrective and transforming message of the Word in history. Nothing more tragic or self-deceptive could be conceived by Ninth Crusaders, many of whom felt that they, too, had once been seduced by the naturalist vision and had happily escaped from its clutches only by meditating upon what had really happened in 1848.

From the intransigent standpoint, the Revolution signified that entire retreat from the effort to ascend Mount Tabor that had gained ever-greater momentum from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries onward. The Revolution meant Marsilius of Padua; Nominalist willfulness; all those erroneous, parochial, tunnel-vision tendencies covering themselves with the mantle of the Founding Vision that had finally been incarnated effectively in Christendom for the first time through the work of Luther and the consequences of the doctrine of total depravity. From the days of the Reformation onwards these tendencies had coalesced into a “principle of independence” from a correction and transformation deemed inaccessible to man. This principle was developed still further by the Enlightenment, both Radical and Moderate, with its call to return to the embrace of Mother Nature and its rejection of the value of any supernatural assistance to man even if this were still believed to be available to him.

In the nineteenth century, the effects of the Revolution were spread and intensified by an army of liberals, democrats, nationalists, socialists, and cultural atomists and nihilists. The final key to understanding the Revolution was, therefore, grasping its desire to see the universe not with the corrective and transforming assistance of the Word but through the eyes of the “free and independent man” operating with information from “nature as is” alone. Anyone trying to deal with human life in this manner—the manner of Isocrates—declared an insane war on God’s Creation that first destroyed Faith and then moved on to devastate all of nature’s keys to Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. This mad struggle against everything that could deal with fallen nature’s problems had as its consequence the enslavement of society at large and all of its individual members to the strongest, most self-deluding, parochial, and violent contemporary will that could impose its wishes upon them. And that triumphant “will” was itself left bereft of any means of thinking or believing itself out of its ultimately self-destructive delirium.

Before moving on, it is important to note that intransigents like Taparelli did not believe that the growth of the Revolution was something that could be grasped purely on the intellectual level. History was not the product of ideas alone. If anything, it was the product of ideas that were worked on—and worked over--by men. Man’s motivations could be logical and illogical, good and bad, consciously known and unconscious, varied in the extreme. Even when some ideas were indeed logically developed in history, the manner in which they were packaged and the hopes with which they were invested along the way could often be very odd and illogical indeed.⁹²

Taparelli understood that history was filled with examples of people seizing upon some new idea while retaining older beliefs and ways of behavior that contradicted that concept fundamentally. Indeed, older ideas and the consequences drawn from traditional beliefs and ways of behavior very often exercised their fullest influence in their most developed form precisely when their sun had begun to set or their greatest challenge had emerged. Thus, a society struck by a new idea could not be said to be the product of that innovative concept alone, or even, sometimes, at all. Neither was it possible to say that the creators of this new idea necessarily expected, desired, and caused all of its future consequences. After all, they themselves were formed much more by already existing concepts, life styles, and expectations. Yes, the logic of the new idea would run its course, but mixed together with older perceptions and desires that could well blind the very people responsible for its launch to its future rational development.

This, to take but one example, was precisely what had happened with Protestantism. Its “new idea” appeared in European society amidst the ever-fuller development of older Catholic beliefs and ways of behavior. Events of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries therefore reflected Catholic as well as Protestant influence, even if it was the new approach of the heretic and his “enlightened” heir that made the great splash in people’s minds. A Luther or a Calvin—and a Locke or a Voltaire---could not automatically be assumed to have foreseen or willed or caused the precise future development of the Revolution in all its characteristics. In many realms, they, too, continued to speak and act based on residual Catholic influences over them and in residual Catholic language.

Ironically, these men also often taught and lived under the presumption that Catholic ideas continued to shape others—however much, in principle, they might condemn such an influence. Consciously or unconsciously, the type of man they figured into their calculations was formed by medieval Catholic Europe. They could not predict how their calculations would be affected when men were formed by their own revolutionary ideas and structures. The logic of the new idea promoted by the Protestant Reformation, and then by the Enlightenment, proceeded apace; but it did so in an illogical alliance with remnants of Catholic convictions, perceptions, expectations, and desires that it could not really support but presumed would nevertheless somehow continue.

One could not, therefore, overemphasize the confusion in human minds brought about by the presence of Catholic remnants in a revolutionary environment. Revolutionaries who claimed to want to achieve truly revolutionary goals were held back by Catholic habits that they might not even recognize as such. Those among them who retained Catholic desires might attribute the good deriving from Catholic ways of behavior to the revolutionary ideals that actually destroyed them. Catholic words might be given revolutionary meanings while Catholics were seduced by the revolutionary co-option of their language to work toward goals destructive to the message of the Word in history. They might come to attribute the good Catholic desires they wished to fulfill to revolutionary ideas and then adopt revolutionary modes of behavior that rendered them impossible of fulfillment. The permutations on the confusion were potentially endless. Generations might have to pass before less involved observers could separate the two influences. By then, of course, the mass of the population might be so trapped in the danse macabre their union had engendered as to be utterly indifferent to the whole question of understanding their proper respective roles in the first place.

The Revolution, therefore, was a complexity. It was at once both logical and non-rational. If one ignored its intellectual side, he failed to see its true direction. If one ignored its non-rational character, he failed to understand the confusion by means of which it had successfully proceeded. One of the great merits of the Civiltà, and of Taparelli d’Azeglio in particular, was that of pointing out both factors clearly—the one, theological and philosophical; the other, historical, sociological, and psychological—so that students might grasp the disaster blocking the progress of mankind. But, alas, complexity is one of the last things that most of our contemporaries, worn down by the daily routine of the modern danse macabre, are capable of grasping.

It was precisely because they believed themselves to be deeply concerned for social order, individual freedom, and the complete fulfillment of human potential on the one hand, while aware of the complexity of historical and sociological developments on the other, that intransigent Ninth Crusaders enthusiastically defended what was perhaps the most famous official statement of their position: Blessed Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors of 1864. The eighty propositions of this document ended by enunciating the impossibility of a reconciliation of the Roman Pontiff with “liberalism, progress, and modern civilization”. Once again, rejection of such reconciliation did not mean a refusal to build a train track or a desire to excommunicate Catholics participating in constitutional governmental activities. It meant rejection of a definition of nature, Reason, and freedom that encouraged an ever-increasingly self-destructive war against Creation.⁹³

Starting with the words “I am free” and their new-found spirit of independence, men began to believe in the infallibility of whatever seemed natural to them, and then to call “nature” everything that is sickness and weakness; to want sickness and weakness to be encouraged instead of healed; to suppose that encouraging weakness makes men healthier and happy; to conclude, finally, that human nature {conceived of as sickness and weakness} possesses the means to render man and society blissful on earth, and this without faith, grace, authority, or supernatural community…since “nature” gives us the feeling that it must be so.

The truth is that the universe is the work of an infinite wisdom whose nature no man can change, although he may be free to deny it. The nature that man denies in thought and doctrine he also then denies in practice. A man’s struggling with nature is an insane war against God, wherein the mortal cannot hope to triumph, but, rather, is certain to be defeated. To concede, therefore, to all men the freedom to wage this war, to blindfold their eyes so that they may not see their sores, their defeats; to concede the freedom of error to oppress the truth, may well be the momentary delirium of blinded intellects and the suicide of frenetic societies; but it can never be the durable basis of civilization, never the hoped-for foundation of a new society.

It meant the dissolution of social order and the consignment of the community into the hands of mindless force;⁹⁴

Let us say it then frankly: all social unity must collapse and be routed as soon as the Protestant principle is introduced and reigns therein. And the reasons all reduce to one. Admitting the Lutheran principle, it is impossible to have any true idea of right. Protestants may well be able, owing to logical incoherence or by accident, to admit some principle of right in their society. But this will be the effect of a habit, of an accident, of a lack of reasoning, of natural honesty in their inclinations, or of some other similarly fortuitous conditions affecting this or that individual. But the nature of the Protestant principle, that nature which sooner or later finally produces its inevitable effects, renders absolutely impossible the idea of right, and, in consequence, of social unity.

…No, there is no more unity for this destructive demon. The mind was liberated, through freethinking, from the yoke of a God who speaks to man; through individual criticism, from the yoke of reason; through Popular Sovereignty, from that of any authority; through the right to suicide, from the yoke of all fear. Any society—the communion of the soul with God in the Church, of the people with their prince in the polis, of a wife with her husband in the family, of the body with the soul in the individual—is devastated any time social bonds are measured against the impulse of a passion, against a “right”, against a desire for pleasure. Each society is devastated in its primary governing entity. It is thrown into the hands of a crazed man whose will is arbitrary. This is the ultimate consequence of the Protestant principle of independence.

…Force. Let us say it straightforwardly. Let us repeat it with daring. Force is the only social instrument left to the Protestant who wishes to be logical. And since the sole means of salvation becomes a right in society, the right in Protestant society is force.

It meant a “freedom” that was nothing other than a license for the strong to oppress the weak:⁹⁵

And the truth is that this freedom, as any other unlimited liberty not circumscribed by anything, is nothing other than the privilege agreed upon for the strong to assassinate the weak. In this case, the freedom of the strong party is offended, since he is given the arbitrary ability to abuse his faculty, and the freedom of the weak party is offended, as he remains the undefended victim of that abuse.

If only the true lovers of freedom had a little judgment! How they would love and revere the Church, the Pope, the Encyclical, the Syllabus, and any document of the Catholic Church, which is the sole moral force that tempers both despotism and libertinism.

…Far from opposing the true conception of liberty (and who could oppose a thing naturally dear to every man?), we have adopted for ourselves the task of solidifying it and purging it of those false principles that, while retaining the name of liberty, destroy it in its substance.

G. The Validity of All Forms of Government

It was also because of the central importance of the presence or absence of the independence principle informing the spirit of the Revolution that the intransigents refused to divinize any one particular form of government. Yes, the man of Reason might have grounds to argue that historical and sociological considerations made one regime preferable to another in a given land. Still, the only thing that counted from the standpoint of the man of Faith was whether or not the system in question was or was not open to correction and transformation in Christ. To be “Catholic above all else” was a motto for the entire movement; everything aside from this was secondary or even indifferent in significance. Louis Veuillot, despite his later, rational decision to support a restoration of the legitimate monarchy, stated the conclusions of the believer well. “In the midst of a Europe agitated and upset by the clash of all systems”, he wrote in 1848, and could equally have asserted thirty years later, “the Church is not especially absolutist, or monarchist, or republican: she is the Church”.⁹⁶

…we reserve our homage and our love for the authority truly worthy of us which, coming out of the present anarchy, marching towards the new destinies of France, a cross in hand, will make it known that it comes from God….We are only entirely hostile to the radical source of disorder, to impiety, to the vitiation of doctrines, to the frightful degradation of morals.

If one took Pretenders such as Don Carlos in Spain and Henry Bourbon in France and placed them at the head of legitimate Catholic monarchies, well-founded hopes of good government could be entertained. “Who”, Veuillot asked after the revolutions of 1848, “would not prefer to live under the absolute scepter of Saint Louis than under the fraternal musket of the democrats of Rome, of Berne, or Vienna, or of Paris?”⁹⁷ But if one deprived a monarchist state of this Catholic driving force and substituted a modern naturalist kingdom in its place, the tables drastically turned against it. Intransigents firmly insisted that it was precisely many of the statist measures of Louis XIV that prepared the way for revolutionary despotism, that Louis XVIII’s cooperation with liberalism was as disastrous as Lamennais had indicated, and that the Enlightenment-tainted legitimism of the nineteenth century in general was doomed to flub the most favorable opportunities for strengthening monarchical rule:⁹⁸

Re-establish the legitimate monarchy, give it a Chamber elected in the most favorable conditions, made up only of the most zealous legitimists themselves; let them impose upon the press draconian laws: there will be an opposition in several months, a Revolution in several years, if it takes that long.

“If there are no more Catholic princes”, Veuillot concluded, when troubled by news of a retreat from the proper religious spirit in the Spanish Carlist camp, “what concern to us are princes!”⁹⁹

Moreover, the same statements were made with regard to republican or democratic forms of government as well as monarchical regimes. If one placed a Garcia Moreno (1821-1875), the zealously Catholic Ecuadorian president, at the head of a republic, Veuillot wrote, no man of Faith could complain that the structures of government somehow made his work impossible. It was the spirit and not the letter of the law that counted: ¹⁰⁰

There is the conspicuous and supreme feature that places him beyond comparison: a man of Jesus Christ in the public life, a man of God! A little southern republic has shown us this marvel: a man sufficiently noble, sufficiently strong, and sufficiently intelligent to persevere in the design of being what one calls a ‘man of his times’, of studying its sciences, accepting its ways, knowing and following its customs and its laws, and nevertheless not ceasing to be a correct and faithful man of the Gospel; that is to say, a correct and faithful servant of God. Moreover, making his people the same thing when he took control of it; a people correct and faithful in the service of God for all peoples of the earth.

Let the democrats be good, just, fearful of God: Democracy is the most beautiful government men can give themselves. Let the democrats be wicked, proud, impious: the society that they will form will only differ from hell in hell’s being eternal. This can be said of all the schemes tried among men to reconcile the necessary rights of governors and the inalienable right of the governed. They have been good or evil insofar as the one group or the other have had more or less the feeling of their reciprocal duties.

We have said it and we repeat it: a new era begins, fruit of the long revolutions that have troubled us. Democracy arises and the Church is there, like the mother around the cradle. She protects this infant that has so many enemies, she tries to enlighten this prince that has so many flatterers. Harsh and dangerous education no doubt! But the Church has made others, she has disciplined illegitimates as savage, she has tenderly served and faithfully loved more ungrateful pupils. Will she succeed nevertheless? God knows! If she does not, one trembles to contemplate the future of the world. What will become of these peoples corrupted by independence and each day more rebellious to all authority? What to expect of these unrestrained desires, these mad ambitions, these greedy passions, if not the infinite miseries of an anarchy without end, of a despotism without chains, of a war without respite?

H. The Attack on Liberalism

Faith indicated that all systems open to correction and transformation in Christ were acceptable in and of themselves. The Church had no writ to mandate one ideal form of government that alone could provide a global supply of good statesmen to ensure an opening to the Word in the changeable earthly realm. Nevertheless, human Reason definitely played a role in this enterprise, pointing men, as it did, to an examination of their country’s history and socio-political conditions for help in regime hunting. Examination of such conditions would demonstrate how the general need for social authority had been “incarnated” within that land under its own particular circumstances in its own peculiar institutions. That historically incarnated authority was the one that the rationally awakened Christian man should most try to shape and guide. Destroy this incarnated form, or render it impotent, and all hell would most likely break loose, to the detriment of the temporal common good as well as the proper performance of the pilgrim dance of life.¹⁰¹

Destruction or emasculation of incarnated authority was one of the specialties of the Revolution.¹⁰² It worked to this end in a variety of ways, the first of them being the willful insistence of many of its proponents upon the universal validity of a single, ideal political system, applicable everywhere, regardless of historical and sociological circumstances. Obviously, radical and moderate revolutionary factions debated what this form should be. Since 1815, however, the more moderate, liberal faction, backed by the economic strength of a bourgeoisie enriched more than every before by the Industrial Revolution, had dominated. We have seen that this faction wanted to secure the benefits that the men of wealth had gained through what they called “the liberties of 1789”, but, of course, without the violence of the Reign of Terror. They proclaimed a readiness to work with existing social authorities to do so. All they sought from the existing legitimate rulers of Europe was the creation of a constitutional system of checks and balances with a parliament elected on the basis of a limited suffrage modeled after that of England in order to satisfy their desires. This, they insisted, was nature’s most obvious common sense tool for proper governance, assuring order and progress at one and the same time.