Children of the Revolution Read online

  Lamennais crossed the frontiers of Catholicism and broke with both the Church and his disciples. He cultivated a new circle of friends, and eyebrows were raised in Paris at his collaboration with the writer George Sand, who in 1837 published advice to young women in his paper, Le Monde.56 He rediscovered his Rousseauistic origins with his Livre du peuple in 1838 which argued that the people had reclaimed their liberty and sovereignty, but it was now necessary to ‘spiritualize man more and more’, to balance his rights by an understanding of duty, using the gospel’s teachings of justice and love.57 Lacordaire, on the other hand, stayed in the Church and was sought out as an intellectual leader by young Catholics who wanted to debate the role of the Church but did not want to follow Lamennais into heresy. In 1833 Montalembert introduced him to Madame Swetchine, a Russian who had left St Petersburg after converting to Catholicism in 1815 and who presided over the most Catholic salon in Paris. In 1835 she secured the consent of the archbishop of Paris both for a private chapel in her house and for permission for Lacordaire to deliver a series of Lenten sermons in Notre-Dame. This was the society event of its day, attended by 6,000 people, including Chateaubriand, Berryer, Montalembert, Tocqueville, Lamartine and Victor Hugo.58 In 1838 Lacordaire went even further on his route to orthodoxy. He went to Rome to train as a Dominican friar, took the habit in 1839, and returned to work for the liberty of religious congregations such as the Dominicans to re-establish themselves in France.59

  Montalembert, meanwhile, from his power-base in the Chamber of Peers, opened a campaign in 1843 for la liberté de l’enseignement, the right of Catholics to set up their own colleges independent of the university. Although many of the teaching staff before 1830 were priests, after 1830 the university was heavily laicized and run by a lay clerisy. Montalembert argued that this monopoly violated the principle of liberty proclaimed by the Charter of 1830 and in his publicity campaign he was assisted by an up-and-coming young journalist of humble origins, a cooper’s son from near Orléans, Louis Veuillot. A fervent Catholic since meeting the pope in 1838, Veuillot was from 1844 editor of L’Univers, a paper founded by Montalembert.60 This crusade, however, was vigorously opposed by two professors of the Collège de France, of the same 1800 generation: Jules Michelet, professor of history, and Edgar Quinet, professor of foreign languages and literature. Montalembert had in fact tried to involve Michelet in L’Avenir, and introduced him to Lamennais in 1831, but since then their ways had parted. In a hugely popular lecture series in 1843 Michelet and Quinet argued that the request for freedom to teach was a trick to allow back the Jesuits, who would soon control all Catholic colleges. The Jesuits, they averred, ‘claimed liberty to kill liberty’, were the sworn enemies of free thought and intellectual life, were fundamentally opposed to ‘the spirit of the French Revolution’, and were defenders of divine-right monarchy and, indeed, of ‘counter-revolution’.61

  As the 1830 Revolution had posed the question of whether Catholicism could ally with liberty, so the 1848 Revolution posed that of the alliance of Catholicism and democracy. Initially, the signs were good. Witnessing a liberty tree being blessed by a priest on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, Quinet reflected that while the Revolution of 1789 ‘thought it could save the world by its own spiritual energy’, that of 1848 ‘believed that it could save the world only with the support of the priest’.62 Lamennais, now close to Michelet, whose book Le Peuple in 1846 echoed his own Livre du peuple, brought out a paper called Le Peuple Constituant which proclaimed ‘the French and European masses’ deep love of and attachment to an ideal republic, which is synonymous with justice and fraternity’. Lamennais was elected to the National Assembly for Paris on 23 April, with 104,000 votes.63 Frédéric Ozanam, who as a student in Paris in 1833 helped form the Society of Saint-Vincent de Paul to spiritualize the elite of society through working with the poor, and was now professor of foreign literature at the Sorbonne, joined forces with Abbé Henri Maret, professor of theology at the Sorbonne, and won over an initially reluctant Lacordaire to launch their new paper, L’Ère Nouvelle. Their argument was that democracy was ‘the work of God’, that equality and fraternity were implicit in the gospel’s teachings of justice and love, but that democracy and the Republic would have to be Christianized if they were not to go down the same road as the First Republic to the September massacres and Terror of 1793.64 Ozanam failed to get elected in his home city of Lyon, but Lacordaire was elected in Marseille, one of twenty priests and three bishops to be elected to the National Assembly, and took his place there dressed in his white Dominican robes. Montalembert, also elected, was no part of the new project. He was hostile to democracy which, he thought, would lead only to catastrophe, and became an apologist for the monarchy and aristocracy.

  Perhaps Montalembert was right. The project of reconciling democracy and Christianity was dealt a series of blows. When the Assembly was invaded by the Paris mob on 15 May 1848 Lacordaire was so upset that he withdrew from active involvement in the Assembly and in L’Ère Nouvelle. During the June Days Ozanam found himself in the National Guard but helped to persuade the archbishop of Paris, Mgr Affre, to go with a white flag to the barricades and negotiate a ceasefire. Unfortunately the archbishop was shot and died the next day, and the workers’ uprising was put down by General Cavaignac and the National Guard with great cruelty. ‘It is not blood that expiates blood,’ Lamennais cried out impotently on 30 June, ‘but forgiveness, love.’ He attacked the ‘butchery’ by the military and the imprisonment of 14,000 workers, after which his paper was banned.65 Ozanam grappled with the reasons for class war, arguing that the materialism of the bourgeoisie that had exploited and impoverished the working classes was driving them to an atheistic socialism. ‘The working class will only accept the hopes and consolations of religion’, he stated, ‘if religion is full of concern for its misery and just towards its legitimate aspirations.’66 Montalembert, for his part, argued that his former colleagues were entirely wrong to argue that ‘Christianity is democracy.’ He had fought for twenty years against the doctrine that Christianity meant the Bourbon monarchy, and ‘I would fight for another twenty years, if God gives them to me, against this new proposition.’67 He duly threw himself into the parti de l’ordre, which campaigned for the election of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte as president of the Republic on 10 December 1848.

  The alliance of Church and state was now not between Church and monarchy but between Church and Republic, under Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte. It was consecrated by the appointment as education minister of the Comte de Falloux, whose law of 1850 enshrined the liberté de l’enseignement for which Montalembert and Veuillot had crusaded, and by the 1849 expedition of French troops to expel republicans from Rome and restore the pope to the Holy City. This recovery of state power by Catholics, however, provoked an equal and opposite reaction from republicans who firmly believed that the Republic should be neutral in matters of religion, not the secular arm of the Catholic Church. They reverted to the argument that Catholicism and liberty were irreconcilable. Victor Hugo opposed French support for the pope in Rome on the grounds that the Papal States were a medieval and barbaric theocracy which had brought back the Inquisition, and denounced the ‘clerical party’ behind the Falloux law as having ‘a history that is written in the annals of human progress, but on the reverse side’.68 Michelet was at the time writing the passage of his History of France that chronicled the attempt by Catholicism and royalism in the Vendée to stab the Revolution in the back.69 Quinet concluded that Catholicism and liberty were indeed irreconcilable, and set a new agenda to separate Church and state, with the state no longer paying the stipends of bishops and priests, and the separation of Church and school, with religious instruction no longer given there.70

  Montalembert supported Louis-Napoleon’s coup of 1852 which ‘routed all the revolutionaries, all the socialists, all the bandits’, but soon realized that the Empire was not a friend of liberty in the political sense and refused the offer of a seat in the Senate.71 In 1859–60
, like all Catholics, he was shocked by the support given by the Empire to Italian unification under the leadership of Piedmont, which took place at the expense of the Austrians, the Bourbons of Naples and the Papal States. His ideal, he told Piedmont’s first minister, Cavour, was ‘a free Church in a free state’, which included the independence of the pope himself, based on the Temporal Power, but what he witnessed was ‘the Church despoiled in a spoliating state’.72 Others, such as Louis Veuillot, were even more pronounced in their commitment to the cause of the Papacy. In 1864 Pope Pius IX published the Syllabus of Errors, which declared that a whole confection of modern ideas, from control of the Church by the state to liberalism, socialism and nationalism, had led to the disaster in which the universal Church now found itself. There could now be no negotiation between the Church and modern ideas, which were roundly anathematized. Catholics such as Montalembert, who had defended a compromise between Catholics and liberty, were left swinging, while the likes of Veuillot, who had defended orthodoxy against error and held that ‘God is the unique truth and the Catholic Church is the unique Church of God’, were vindicated.73

  Lamennais had died in 1854, Ozanam in 1853, but there was now no room for Catholics who argued that Catholicism endorsed democracy. Democracy had led to civil war, then to authoritarian empire. A new generation of republican opponents of the authoritarian Empire, born around 1830, understood that it was not enough to found democracy, but that universal suffrage had to be educated in order to perpetuate the Republic for more than the four years it had lasted after 1848. Rights would have to be balanced by duties in order to ensure a cohesive society and avoid another lapse into violence, but those duties could not be sanctioned by the Church, which had declared itself the enemy of modern ideas. The influence of the Church had to be cut back in state and society, and citizens would have to be educated in a manner fit to underpin a free, equal, fraternal society.

  One approach was to separate Christianity from the Catholic Church, to take the example and teachings of Jesus Christ, leaving behind the paraphernalia of magic, mystery and authority. Ernest Renan, who left the Church in 1845 and was appointed professor of Hebrew at the Collège de France in 1861, saw his first lecture course suspended because he denied the divinity of Christ.74 The lectures were a foretaste of his Life of Jesus, published in 1863, and which sold 50,000 copies in French in the first six months. This was not a celebration of the son of God but a biography of the historical Jesus, who came ‘from the ranks of the people’, inspired a millenarian sect like many others, was ‘in some senses an anarchist’, had no visions, performed no miracles and was not resurrected but was a spiritual genius who preached that ‘the kingdom of God is within you’. ‘Jesus planted religion in humanity,’ concluded Renan, ‘as Socrates planted philosophy and Aristotle science.’75

  Another approach was to extract from all the great world religions, setting aside different doctrines, the kernel of morality that they all taught. Ferdinand Buisson, a Protestant who parted from the fundamentalist wing of his Church, was a disciple of Quinet, also a Protestant, whom he visited in his Swiss exile and who sponsored him for the post of professor of philosophy at the Academy of Neuchâtel. In 1869 he published a Manifesto of Christian Liberalism in which he argued that it was ‘a right and a duty to free our piety and moral activity from belief, which is as enervating as it is treacherous, from divine intervention… and to secularize religion. We take root in the whole human tradition, without chaining ourselves to the letter of a particular past, be it Jewish, Catholic or Protestant.’76 This was a moral core that could be used in the schools, separated from the Church, of which Quinet dreamed.

  The idea of a residual morality taught by all the great religions was entertained by many freemasons. Jean Macé, a republican teacher who had to go into hiding after the failed Montagnard rising of 13 June 1849 and could not teach in the state sector because he refused to swear an oath to the Empire, took a job in a girls’ boarding school in Alsace and promoted the cause of adult education through local libraries. In 1867 he founded the Ligue de l’Enseignement, and used the network of masonic lodges to propagate branches across the country. The task was to educate the people for democracy, a democracy that had been hijacked by the Empire but which at a future date would sustain the Republic. This would require free, compulsory elementary education and would have to be underpinned by a morality that owed nothing to organized religion. In February 1870 Macé described the philosophy of the Ligue as the same as that practised by freemasonry. At the core of all religions was ‘a law of voluntary sacrifice to the ideas of human justice and fraternity’, ‘the fulfilment of a universal duty of love and justice’.77 This philosophy fed through into the programme of free, compulsory and lay elementary education that was implemented by the Republic in 1881–2 in the hope that this time the Republic would endure.

  5

  ‘Le Malheur d’être femme’

  MARRIAGE AND LOVE

  In April 1790 Delphine d’Albémar, recently widowed at twenty-one by the death of a man forty-three years older than she and come into a considerable inheritance, wrote to a poorer cousin, Mathilde de Vernon, to say that she would be delighted to share half her fortune in order to set Mathilde up with the dowry that was necessary to make a noble marriage. Mathilde accepted, asking that the gift remain a secret, and then took it upon herself to criticize Delphine for embarking on a ‘wrong path’, asking:

  Do you think a man would be in a hurry to marry someone who sees everything according to her own ideas, applies her own ideas to her conduct and often scorns received notions? Men who are freest of those truths commonly called prejudices do not wish their wives to be free of any bond. I think it so essential for a woman to pay every respect to opinion that I would advise her in no way to flout it, whether it amounts to superstition (as you would say) or social convention, however puerile it may be.

  Delphine replied blithely,

  I come into society with a good and true character, wit, youth and fortune: why would these gifts of Providence not make me happy? Why should I torment myself with opinions that are not mine or proprieties I do not know? Morality and religion dictated by the heart have sustained men who have had to follow a path much more difficult than my own: these guides will suffice.

  Whether the obedience of a pious young woman to social opinion or that of an independent young woman to the voice of conscience was preferable soon became apparent when they fell in love with the same man, Léonce de Mondoville, who did not defy opinion as men were allowed to do but remained obedient to the aristocratic code of honour. Seeing them both at a soirée he thought that Mathilde sang well but without expression, while Delphine’s passionate dancing drew applause from the whole room. He married Mathilde, because that is what his family wanted, and tried to make Delphine his mistress, because the defence of his own honour did not extend to preserving hers.

  Delphine’s course was always to do what was right in her own eyes and to be loyal to her friends, whatever society thought. She rejected divorce as an option to win back Léonce, not because of his Catholic scruples, but because she would be sacrificing Mathilde’s happiness to her own. Soon afterwards Delphine was raped and felt that the only course open to her was to flee the world. She became a nun in an enclosed convent in Switzerland, the superior of which was Léonce’s aunt. After Mathilde died in childbirth, however, Delphine decided to break her religious vows, which the Revolution now allowed in France, and met Léonce in Germany. Instead of being delighted finally to be with Delphine, Léonce’s sense of honour dictated that he could never marry a woman who had broken her sacred vows, and he went off to join the émigré armies fighting the revolutionaries. Captured at Verdun he was tried and sentenced to death. Delphine visited him in prison, tried to persuade the authorities to spare him, and then took poison. She accompanied Léonce to the plain where he was to be shot, expiring just before he did.

  This story was not in fact true but the plot of a novel, Del
phine, published in 1802 by Germaine de Staël. She was the daughter of the Swiss banker and finance minister to the French crown, Jacques Necker, was hugely privileged in matters of family and wealth, and yet never found happiness in marriage. Originally destined to wed the younger Pitt, she in fact married, in 1786 at the age of nineteen, the Swedish ambassador to the French court, Baron de Staël-Holstein, seventeen years older than she. The love of her life was Louis de Narbonne, said to be an illegitimate son of Louis XV and briefly foreign minister in 1791 before emigrating. She bore him two children, Auguste and Albert. In addition she had a close friendship with Talleyrand and another child, Albertine, by Benjamin Constant, a relationship of the head more than the heart. She separated from her husband in 1800 – he died two years later – and inherited her father’s fortune when he died in 1804.1

  The publication of Delphine was remarked as much by English visitors who swarmed to France after an absence of ten years following the Peace of Amiens as by the French themselves. Maria Edgeworth reported that it was originally to have been called ‘Le Malheur d’être femme’, but that this title had just been snatched up by the French translation of Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman. ‘It is cried down universally,’ she told her brother, no doubt because it exposed the tyranny of opinion to which women were subjected.2 One of the critics, Joseph Fiévée, a former royalist and secret adviser to Napoleon, could not tolerate Delphine’s commitment to following her own judgement, rather than that of society. She ‘speaks of love like a Bacchante, of God like a Quaker, of death like a grenadier, of morality like a Sophist’. For him Mathilde was ‘the only person who behaved well in all circumstances; she is the woman whom every man aware of the duties of marriage would desire for his own.’3 It was an attack not only on a certain image of a liberated woman, whose attempts to find love according to her conscience led ultimately to her death, but also on the female writer who dared to put such subversive literature before the public.