CHRISTIAN POWER IN THE AGE OF REVOLUTION
From
the First French Revolution to the Paris Commune, 1789-1871
Vladimir Moss
© Vladimir Moss, 2004
CONTENTS
Introduction..…………………………………………….……………...…..4
Part
I. Revolution and Counter-Revolution (1789-1830)
1.
The West: The Man-God Arises..…..…….……..…………...…………7
The French Revolution: (1) The
Constitutional Monarchy – Burke versus Paine – The American Constitution and
Slavery - Illuminism – The French Revolution: (2) The Jacobin Terror – The
Revolution and Religion – The French Revolution: (3) Napoleon Bonaparte –
Napoleon and Catholicism - La Grande Nation - The Jews and the
Revolution - Napoleon and the Jews – Napoleon and the Latin American
Revolutions – Romanticism and Nationalism - German Nationalism – The German War
of Liberation - The Ideology of Counter-Revolution
2.
The East: The Man-God Defeated..……….....……………..……….126
Tsar Paul I – The Annexation of
Georgia and the Edinoverie – The Murder of Tsar Paul - The
Golden Age of Masonry – Alexander, Napoleon and Speransky - 1812 – The
Aftermath of Victory – The Holy Alliance - The Polish Question - The Jewish
Question - The Reaction against Masonry - The Serbian Revolution – The Greek
Revolution – The Kollyvades Movement - The Decembrist Rebellion – St. Seraphim
of Sarov
Part II. Liberalism and Autocracy
(1830-1871)
3. The West: The Dual
Revolution….………….………………………216
Art and Revolution: (1) Byronism – Art and
Revolution: (2) The July Days – The Polish Question – Liberalism and Free Trade
– The Irish Famine – The British Empire - De Tocqueville on America – Mill on
Liberty – Victorian Religion - The Collectivist Reaction: (1) English Self-Help
– The Collectivist Reaction: (2) French Socialism – The Collectivist Reaction:
(3) German Historicism – Hegel’s Political Philosophy - Marx’s Historical
Materialism - 1848 and the Spectre of Communism - The World as Will:
Schopenhauer – Nature and Society as Will: Darwin - The American Civil War -
Emperor Napoleon III - Il Risorgimento and the Pope – The Paris Commune
4. The East: The Gendarme of
Europe………………..………………..339
Introduction: Instinct and
Consciousness – Tsar Nicholas I – Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov: The Struggle
against Westernism - Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow: Church and State – Russia
and Europe: (1) Chaadaev vs. Pushkin – Russia and Europe: (2) Belinsky vs.
Gogol – Russia and Europe: (3) Herzen vs. Khomiakov – Russia and Europe: (4)
Kireevsky - Russia and Europe: (5) Dostoyevsky - The Slavophiles on Autocracy:
(1) Kireevsky – The Slavophiles on Autocracy – The Crimean War – St.
Petersburg: the Third Rome? - Relations with Heretics and Schismatics – The
Caucasian Wars – Orthodox America - Nihilism: “Fathers and Sons” – The Great
Reforms: (1) The Emancipation of the Serfs – The Great Reforms: (2) The Zemstvo Assemblies – The Great Reforms: (3)
Crime and Punishment – The Autocracy, the Church and the Revolution
INTRODUCTION
This book
represents a continuation of my earlier books, The Mystery of Christian
Power (to 1453) and Christian Power in the Age of Reason (1453-1789).
It follows the same theme of the struggle between Christian political power and
its enemies into the age of revolution – that is, the age beginning with the
storming of the Bastille in 1789 and ending with the storming of the Paris
Commune in 1871. Of
course, the revolution neither began nor ended in this period. But it may be
called the revolutionary age par excellence insofar as it presented all the main
ideas of the revolution in their classical French expression, and provided the
classic themes and symbolism of the later, and still greater Russian
revolution. Moreover, it is the age in which the counter-revolution - in the
person, in particular, of Orthodox and Autocratic Russia - appeared to have the
measure of its enemies, although a major theme of the book will be the way in
which revolutionary ideas were sapping the foundations of Russian Autocracy,
too.
The book is
divided into two parts, with each part further subdivided into chapters on East
and West on the model of my earlier books. In the first part, we see the first
French revolution, its continuation and internationalisation under Napoleon I,
and its defeat and seeming reversal under the absolutist rule of King Charles
X. The second part continues the story of the French revolutions (of 1830, 1848
and 1871), and their offshoots in other European countries, while outlining the
development of political and economic liberalism in England and America. In the
East, meanwhile, we see Russia, “the Gendarme of Europe”, both administering
the decisive blow to Napoleon I, and, in its suppression of the Polish and
Hungarian uprisings, ensuring that the revolution will not spread to Eastern
Europe. However, Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War at the hands of England,
France and Turkey marks the end of the Congressional System and the first
international attempt to contain the revolution, boding badly for truly
Christian statehood – indeed, for legitimate statehood in general - in the
coming age.
As in my
earlier books, I have tried to look beyond the political and economic events to
the spiritual events that are the real causes of history. For, as Fr. Seraphim
Rose said: “The real cause is the soul and God: whatever God is doing and
whatever the soul is doing. These two things actualise the whole of history;
and all the external events – what treaty was signed, or the economic reasons
for the discontent of the masses, and so forth – are totally secondary. In
fact, if you look at modern history, at the whole revolutionary movement, it is
obvious that it is not the economics that is the governing factor, but various
ideas which get into people’s souls about actually building paradise on earth.
Once that idea gets there, then fantastic things are done, because this is a
spiritual thing. Even though it is from the devil, it is on a spiritual level,
that is where actual history is made…”[1]
In pursuit of
this, the spiritual meaning of history I owe an especial debt to Fr. Seraphim
Rose, Adam Zamoyski, Lev Alexandrovich Tikhomirov, Metropolitan Philaret of
Moscow and the Russian Slavophile philosophers.
Through the
prayers of our Holy Fathers, Lord Jesus Christ, our God, have mercy on us!
December 18/31, 2004.
Holy Martyr Sebastian of Rome.
PART I. REVOLUTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION
(1789-1830)
1. THE WEST: THE MAN-GOD ARISES
Lo, thy dread Empire, CHAOS! is restor’d;
Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain
fall;
And Universal Darkness buries All.
Alexander Pope, Dunciad.
The human I, wishing to depend only on
itself, not recognising and not accepting any other law besides its own will –
in a word, the human I, taking the place of God, - does not, of course,
constitute something new among men. But such has it become when raised to the
status of a political and social right, and when it strives, by virtue of this
right, to rule society. This is the new phenomenon which acquired the name of
the French revolution in 1789.
F.I. Tiutchev, Russia and the Revolution
(1848).
The
nation, this collective organism, is just as inclined to deify itself as the
individual man. The madness of pride grows in this case in the same
progression, as every passion becomes inflamed in society, being refracted in
thousands and millions of souls.
Metropolitan Anastasius (Gribanovsky) of New
York.[2]
After the Humanist-Protestant revolution of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, the English revolution of the seventeenth century and the
Enlightenment Programme of the eighteenth century, the French revolution of
1789 marks the fourth major turning-point in Western life and thought. In some
countries – England, for example, and still more America - some of the less
radical ideas of the French revolution were already being put into effect, at
least partially, well before 1789; while in others – Russia and China, for
example – they did not achieve dominance until the twentieth century.
Eventually, however, the French revolutionary ideals of “Liberty, Equality and
Fraternity” and “the Rights of Man”, combined with an essentially secularist
and utilitarian attitude to religion, became the dominant ideology, not only of
Europe and North America, but of the whole world. For, as Eric Hobsbawn writes,
“alone of all the contemporary revolutions, the French was ecumenical. Its
armies set out to revolutionize the world; its ideas actually did so.”[3]
The period 1789-1815 can be compared, for
its profound impact on the destinies of the world, only with the period
1914-45. Both periods are dominated by a national revolution with enormous
international ramifications – the French in the earlier period, the Russian in
the later – and by international war on a previously unprecedented scale. In
both periods the main victors were an Anglo-Saxon nation (Britain in the
earlier period, America in the later), on the one hand, and Russia (Tsarist
Russia in the earlier period, Soviet Russia in the later), on the other. At the
end of each period Russia became the dominant political power on the continent
of Europe, while the Anglo-Saxon nation became the dominant power outside
Europe, going on to dominate the world economically through its exploitation of
important scientific and technological discoveries.
The French revolution, like its English forerunner, went through several
phases, each of which on its own was profoundly influential outside the borders
of France. The first was the constitutional monarchy (1789-92). The second was
the Jacobin terror (1792-94). The third (after the interregnum of the
Directory) was the Napoleonic dictatorship and empire (1799-1815). Just as the
English revolution had its proto-communist elements, which, however, failed in
the end, so did the French (Babeuf’s failed coup of 1796). Just as the upshot
of the English revolution was to transfer power from the king to the landowning
aristocracy, so the upshot of the French revolution was to transfer power from
the king and the aristocrats to the bourgeoisie – a trend which came to
dominate the whole of Western Europe in the course of the nineteenth century.
From a sociological point of view, France in 1789 had not changed in
essence since the eleventh century; it was an agrarian, hierarchical society consisting
of “the three Estates”: those who prayed (the clergy), those who fought (the
nobility) and those who worked (the rest, mainly peasants, but including
lawyers and intellectuals). The ideas of the Enlightenment and Masonry had
infected a narrow stratum of the more educated classes. But the mass of the
population lived and thought as they had lived and thought for centuries.
It is customary to explain the French revolution as the product of
corrupt political, social and economic conditions, and in particular of the
vast gap in wealth and power between the ancien régime and the
people. Discontent with social and economic injustices undoubtedly played a
large part in fuelling this horrific atheist and anti-theist outburst. But it
was not the king who was primarily to blame for these injustices. In the years
1745-89 he and his ministers made numerous attempts at economic reform and a
more equitable redistribution of the tax burden. But they were always foiled by
opposition at court and in the Parlements from the aristocrats, who paid
no tax. Thus when five of his minister Turgot’s Six Edicts were rejected by the
Paris Parlement in 1776, Louis XVI observed: “I see well that there is
no-one here but M. Turgot and myself who love the people.”[4] This
prompted de Tocqueville’s words: “The social order destroyed by a revolution is
almost always better than that which preceded it; and experience shows that the
most dangerous moment for a bad government is generally that in which it sets
about reform. Only great genius can save a ruler who takes on the task of
improving the lot of his subjects after long oppression…”[5]
The aristocrats claimed that their opposition was an expression of
Montesquieu’s doctrine of the necessity of checks on executive power. In fact,
however, they were trying to replace a royal “despotism” with their own
aristocratic one. For, as Hobsbawm writes, “the Revolution began as an
aristocratic attempt to recapture the state.”[6] And
here, as so often in history, the “despotism” of one man standing above the
political fray turned out to be less harmful to the majority of the population
than the despotism of an oligarchical clique pursuing only one class or
factional interest. Indeed, the problem with the French monarchy was not its
excessive strength, but its weakness, its inability to impose its will on the
privileged class.
However, there was much more to the Revolution than a conflict between
king and nobility, letting in the Third Estate that destroyed them both. The
essential conflict was between two ideas of the origin of authority: between
the idea that it comes from above – ultimately, from God, and the idea
that it comes from below – ultimately from what the Masons called “Nature”.
King Louis XVI stated the Christian
principle: “I have taken the firm and sincere decision to remain loftily,
publicly and generously faithful to Him Who holds in His hand kings and
kingdoms. I can only be great through Him, because in Him alone is greatness,
glory, majesty and power; and because I am destined one day to be his living
image on earth.”[7]
This firm, but humble statement of the doctrine, not so much of the Divine right
of kings, as of their Divine dependence on the King of kings, was
opposed by the satanic pride of the revolutionary faith. “The Revolution is
neither an act nor a fact,” said De Mounier. “It is a political doctrine which
claims to found society on the will of man instead of founding it on the will
of God, which puts the sovereignty of human reason in the place of the Divine law.[8]
This anti-theistic character of the French Revolution was confirmed by
the great Anglo-Irish parliamentarian, Edmund Burke, wrote: “We cannot, if we
would, delude ourselves about the true state of this dreadful contest. It is
a religious war. It includes in its object undoubtedly every other interest
of society as well as this; but this is the principal and leading feature. It
is through this destruction of religion that our enemies propose the
accomplishment of all their other views. The French Revolution, impious at once
and fanatical, had no other plan for domestick power and foreign empire. Look
at all the proceedings of the National Assembly from the first day of declaring
itself such in the year 1789, to this very hour, and you will find full half of
their business to be directly on this subject. In fact it is the spirit of the
whole. The religious system, called the Constitutional Church, was on the face
of the whole proceeding set up only as a mere temporary amusement to the
people, and so constantly stated in all their conversations, till the time
should come, when they might with safety cast off the very appearance of all
religion whatsoever, and persecute Christianity throughout Europe with fire and
sword… This religious war is not a controversy between sect and sect as
formerly, but a war against all sects and all religions…”[9]
So the real question that the Revolution sought to answer was not
political or economic, but theological or ideological, not: who pays the
taxes?, but: who rules the universe?
It is striking how similar was the sequence of events in the French
Revolution to that in its English predecessor. Just as the English revolution
started with the king’s compelling need to seek money for his war against the
Scots, so the French revolution started with a severe financial crisis caused
by the king’s intervention in the American War of Independence. And just as the
English parliament’s refusal to accede to the king’s request led successively
to civil war, the overthrowing of the State Church, the execution of the king,
a radicalisation of the country to a state of near-communist revolution,
foreign wars (in Scotland and Ireland), and finally a military dictatorship
under Cromwell that restored order while preserving many of the fruits of the
revolution, so the refusal, first of the Nobles’ Assembly and then of the
Estates General to accede to the French king’s request led to a constitutional
monarchy, the overthrowing of the State Church, the execution of the king, increased
radicalisation and the Great Terror, wars with both internal and external
enemies, and finally a military dictatorship under Napoleon that restored order
while consolidating many of the results of the revolution.
But the French Revolution went much further than the English in the
number of its victims, in the profundity of its effects, not only on France but
also on almost every country in Europe, and in its unprecedented radicalism,
even anti-theism. It really began on June 17, 1789, when the Third Estate
gathered a so-called National Assembly, of which they declared: “To it, and it
alone, belongs the right to interpret and express the general will of the
nation. Between the throne and this Assembly there can exist no veto, no power
of negation.”[10]
This, writes Davies, “was the decisive break. Three days later, locked out of
their usual hall, the deputies met on the adjacent tennis court, le jeu de
paume, and swore an oath never to disband until France was given a
Constitution. ‘Tell your master,’ thundered Count Mirabeau to the troops sent
to disperse them, ‘that we are here by the will of the people, and will not
disperse before the threat of bayonets.’
“Pandemonium ensued. At court, the King’s conciliatory ministers fell
out with their more aggressive colleagues. On 11 July [the chief minister]
Jacques Necker, who had received a rousing welcome at the opening of the
Estates General, was dismissed. Paris exploded. A revolutionary headquarters
coalesced round the Duc d’Orléans at the Palais Royal. The gardens of
the Palais Royal became a notorious playground of free speech and free love.
Sex shows sprang up alongside every sort of political harangue. ‘The exile of
Necker,’ screamed the fiery orator Camille Desmoulins fearing reprisals, ‘is the
signal for another St. Bartholomew of patriots.’ The royal garrison was won
over. On the 13th a Committee of Public Safety[11] was
created, and 48,000 men were enrolled in a National Guard under General
Lafayette. Bands of insurgents tore down the hated barrières or
internal customs posts in the city, and ransacked the monastery of Saint-Lazare
in the search for arms. On the 14th, after 30,000 muskets were
removed from the Hôtel des Invalides, the royal fortress of the Bastille
was besieged. There was a brief exchange of gunfire, after which the governor
capitulated. The King had lost his capital.”[12]
Power appeared to have passed from the king to the National Assembly and
the Third Estate; but already at this early stage of the revolution (as in
February, 1917 in Russia), real power was neither with the king nor with any of
the Estates, but with the mob – or rather, with those who incited and
controlled the mob. Thus on July 20 Arthur Young wrote: “I hear nothing of
their [the Assembly’s] moving from Versailles; if they stay there under the
control of an armed mob, they must make a government that will please the mob;
but they will, I suppose, be wise enough to move to some central town, Tours,
Blois or Orléans, where their deliberations may be free. But the
Parisian spirit of commotion spreads quickly…”
So quickly, in fact, that a year later Antoine, Comte de Rivarol could
write: “Three million armed peasants, from one end of the kingdom to the other,
stop travellers, check their papers, and bring the victims back to Paris; the
town hall cannot protect them from the fury of the patriotic hangman; the
National Assembly in raising Paris might well have been able to topple the
throne, but it cannot save a single citizen. The time will come… when the National
Assembly will say to the citizen army: ‘You have saved me from authority, but
who will save me from you?’ When authority has been overthrown, its power
passes inevitably to the lowest classes of society… Such is today the state of
France and its capital.”[13]
The success of the Revolution was assured by the weakness of the King;
for when “he who restrains” stops restraining, “then everything is permitted”.
Doyle writes: “News of the king’s surrender to popular resistance broke all
restraints. His acquiescence in the defeat of the privileged orders was taken
as a signal for all his subjects to take their own measures against public
enemies. The prolonged political crisis has spawned countless wild rumours of
plots to thwart the patriotic cause by starving the people. Monastic and noble
granaries, reputedly bulging with the proceeds of the previous season’s rents,
dues, and tithes, seemed obvious evidence of their owners’ wicked intentions.
Equally suspicious were urban merchants scouring country markets far beyond
their usual circuits to provide bread for hungry townsmen. Besides, the roads
were thronged with unprecedented numbers of men seeking work as a result of the
slump. Farmers had good reason to dread the depredations of bands of travelling
vagrants, and now took little persuading that the kingdom was alive with
brigands in aristocratic pay. It was just a year since the notorious storms of
July 1788, and as a promising harvest began to ripen country people were
particularly nervous. All this produced the ‘Great Fear’, a massive panic that
swept whole provinces in the last weeks of July and left only the most
peripheral regions untouched. Peasants assembled, armed themselves, and
prepared to fight off the ruthless hirelings of aristocracy. Seen from a
distance, such armed bands were often taken for brigands themselves, and so the
panic spread.
“In many areas villagers did not wait for the marauders to arrive. Then
it would be too late. They were determined to make sure of aristocratic defeat
by striking pre-emptively. After all, they would only anticipating what the
Assembly was bound to decree. As one country priest explained, ‘When the
inhabitants heard that everything was going to be different they began to
refuse to pay both tithes and dues, considering themselves so permitted, they
said, by the new law to come.’”[14]
On August 4, under pressure of the peasant revolt, the National or
Constituent Assembly declared that it “abolishes the feudal system in its
entirety”. It also proclaimed “King Louis XVI Restorer of French Liberty”…
In his pamphlet What is the Third Estate? published in that year,
Abbé Sieyès asked: What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has
it been in the political order up to the present? Nothing. What does it demand?
To become something…” Now the Third Estate was something. Rarely, if ever, in political history has a
single act had such a huge and immediate effect (the abdication of the Tsar in
February, 1917 is perhaps the only parallel).
On August 26, the Assembly passed the Declaration of the Rights of Man
and the Citizen, which listed the following “natural, inalienable and sacred
rights”:
“’I. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social
distinctions can only be founded on public utility.
II. The purpose of every political association is the preservation of
the natural and unprescriptible rights of men. These rights are liberty,
property, and safety from, and resistance to, oppression.
III. The principle of all sovereignty lies in the nation. No body of
men, and no individual, can exercise authority which does not emanate directly
therefrom.
IV. Liberty consists in the ability to do anything which does not harm
others.
V. The Law can only forbid actions which
are injurious to society…
VI. The Law is the expression of the General Will… It should be the same
for all, whether to protect or to punish.
VII. No man can be accused, arrested, or detained except in those
instances which are determined by law.
VIII.
The Law should only establish punishments which are strictly necessary. No
person should be punished by retrospective legislation.
IX. No man [is] presumed innocent till
found guilty…
X. No person should be troubled for his opinions, even religious ones,
so long as their manifestation does not threaten public order.
XI. The free communication of thoughts and opinions is one of men’s most
precious rights. Every citizen, therefore, can write, speak, and publish
freely, saving only the need to account for abuses defined by law.
XII. A public force is required to guarantee the [above] rights. It is
instituted for the benefit of all, not for the use of those to whom it is
entrusted.
XIII. Public taxation is indispensable for the upkeep of the forces and
the administration. It should be divided among all citizens without
distinction, according to their abilities.
XIV. Citizens… have the right to approve the purposes, levels, and
extent of taxation.
XV. Society has the right to hold every public servant to account.
XVI. Any society in which rights are not guaranteed nor powers separated
does not have a constitution.
XVII. Property being a sacred and inviolable right, no person can be
deprived of it, except by public necessity, legal process, and just
compensation.’
“Social convention held that the ‘Rights of Man’ automatically subsumed
the rights of women. But several bold souls, including Condorcet, disagreed,
arguing that women had simply been neglected.[15] In due
course the original Declaration was joined by new ideas, notably about human
rights in the social and economic sphere. Article XXI of the revised
Declaration of June 1793 stated: ’Public assistance is a sacred obligation [dette].
Society owes subsistence to unfortunate citizens, whether in finding work for
them, or in assuring the means of survival of those incapable of working.’
Slavery was outlawed in 1794. Religious toleration was guaranteed.”[16]
In October a great crowd of hungry women brought the king from
Versailles to Paris. Thereafter the forging of a new Constitution that would
include limited powers for the king went ahead relatively peacefully. However,
the king.could not make up his mind whether to accept or reject the Revolution[17]; and
this vacillation, combined with his arrest at Varennes on June 21, 1791 while
attempting to flee the country, gradually undermined what remained of his
authority.[18]
For, as Hobsbawn points out, “traditional kings who abandon their peoples lose
the right to royalty".[19] In a
similar situation in 1917, Tsar Nicholas II was given the opportunity to flee
by the Provisional Government, but chose not to…
Moreover, while the Assembly passed a large number of laws, it
completely failed to solve the problems which had propelled it to power – the
financial insolvency of the country. It simply printed money which rapidly
deteriorated in value, fuelling inflation, and in 1791 collected only 249
livres in taxes against 822.7 livres expended.[20]
In spite of these problems, the first anniversary of the storming of the
Bastille, witnessed an extraordinary celebration of the revolution in which
even the king took part.
Zamoyski writes: “It was to be a kind of Rousseauist troth-pledging, at
which the nation would come together and symbolically constitute itself as a
body, simultaneously paying homage to itself as such – the first of many acts
of political onanism. Bailly [the mayor of Paris] suggested that the solemnity
should take the form of a ‘National Federation’, with delegations from every
corner of France meeting in Paris while those from surrounding villages
congregated in every provincial town. Lafayette steered the whole exercise into
the military sphere, substituting companies of National Guards from every part
of the country for civilian delegates.
“The capital was to be decked out in a fitting manner to greet those
making their long pilgrimage. Half the population of Paris spent three days in
the pouring rain putting up triumphant arches and decorations. The
Champ-de-Mars was transformed into a vast elliptical arena surrounded by grass
banks on which seats were erected for spectators. At the end nearest the
École Militaire there was a stand draped in the tricolor for the members
of the Assembly and important guests. At the opposite end, nearest the River
Seine, was the entrance, through a triple triumphal arch in the Roman style.
Between the two stood a podium with a throne for the king and seats for the
royal family, and, towering above everything else, a great square plinth with
steps on all four sides, on which stood an altar.
“The morning of 14 July was wetter than ever, and the feet of the
300,000 Parisians soon turned the Champ-de-Mars into a quagmire. This did not
make the event any easier to manage, but good humour triumphed. As they waited
in the rain, people made jokes about being baptized in the national rain, and
groups from different parts of the country showed off regional dances to each
other.
“The king and queen arrived at noon, but it took a long time for them to
be settled into their stand. Then came a march-past by 50,000 National Guards.
It was not until four in the afternoon that the Bishop of Autun, Charles
Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, attended by four hundred priests wearing
the tricolor, began to celebrate mass. The altar at which he officiated was not
a traditional liturgical mensa, but a circular neoclassical affair
redolent of burnt offerings in ancient Rome. It was not the altar of God, on
which sacrifice was offered up to the Almighty, it was the autel de la
patrie, on which citizens pledged their devotion to the motherland.
“Lafayette was much in evidence all day on his white charger, and when
the mass was over, he took centre stage. As if by a miracle, the weather
cleared and the sun came out, bathing the whole scene in a soft luminous aura.
While trumpets blared, Lafayetter ascended the steps of the altar. As he began
to swear loyalty to the king, the nation and the law, he drew his sword with a
flourish and laid it on the altar. Fifty thousand National Guardsmen then
repeated the same oath, followed by the king. Next came the singing of the Te
Deum specially composed by François Gossec, during which people of
all stations embraced tearfully in a hundred thousand acts of national
fraternity. Lafayetter was carried by the crowd to his white horse, on which he
majestically left the field, with people kissing his hands and his clothers…
“The Fête de la
Fédération represented a reconciliation of all the people living
in France, and their betrothal as one nation. It mimicked Rousseau’s vision of
the Corsicans coming together to found their nation through a common pledge.
The festival was also a recognition that the Marquis de Lafayette and the
humblest peasant in France were brothers, both as members of a biological
family and through the ideological kinship represented by the oath. At the same
time, the celebration exposed a new reality. It showed how far the concept of
nationhood had altered from the Enlightenment vision of a congeries living in
consensus to something far more metaphysical and inherently divine…”[21]
Burke versus Paine
The ideas of the French revolution posed a great threat to the British,
who prided themselves on being the home of liberty, but who saw that French
revolutionary “liberty” would speedily destroy their own. Already the Americans
had shown that libertarianism and empire made an uncomfortable fit; and the fit
would look still worse in India and Ireland as the French ideas filtered
through. Moreover, the first effects of the industrial revolution on the
industrial poor, and of the “dark, satanic mills” on England’s “green and
pleasant land”, threatened to arouse revolutionary passions among the poor.
“’Two causes, and only two, will rouse a peasantry to rebellion,’ opined
Robert Southey, a radical turned Tory: ‘intolerable oppression, or religious
zeal’. But that moderately comforting scenario no longer applied: ‘A
manufacturing poor is more easily instigated to revolt: they have no local
attachments… they know enough of what is passing in the political world to
think themselves politicians’. England’s rulers must pay heed: ‘If the
manufacturing system continues to be extended, I believe that revolution
inevitably must come, and in its most fearful shape’.”[22]
Already in the years 1778-83 a debate had begun on whether the ideas of
the founding philosopher of English liberalism, John Locke, had been right
after all. In 1783 the Baptist Noel Turner wondered whether the “present
national propensity” was the deployment of Locke on behalf of the “many-headed
majesty” of “king-people”. And in the same year Josiah Tucker publish his “On
the Evil Consequences Arising from the Propagation of Locke’s Democratic
Principles”. Tucker’s disciple Soame Jenyns declared that he had refuted the
Lockean philosophy of the Whigs, writing:
I controvert these five positions
Which Whigs pretend are the conditions
Of civil rule and liberty;
That men are equal born – and free –
That kings derive their lawful sway
All from the people’s yea and nay –
That compact is the only ground,
On which a prince his rights can found –
Lastly, I scout that idle notion,
That government is put in motion,
And stopt again, like clock or chime,
Just as we want them to keep time.[23]
This debate became more urgent as the atrocities of the French
revolution became known. Could the ideas of the urbane and civilised Locke
really have led to such barbarism? William Jones thought so. Writing in 1798,
he said that “with Mr. Locke in his hand”, that “mischievous infidel Voltaire”
had set about destroying Christianity. And Locke was “the oracle of those who
began and conducted the American Revolution, which led to the French
Revolution; which will lead (unless God in his mercy interfere) to the total
overthrow of religion and government in this kingdom, perhaps in the whole
Christian world.”[24]
However, the most famous ideological attack on the French revolution
came from Edmund Burke, who had adopted a liberal position on America and
Ireland[25], and
who now tried to defend English liberalism while attacking French radicalism.
His Reflexions on the Revolution in France (1790) foresaw saw that the
French revolution would bring in its train, not freedom, but tyranny - and
precisely because of its populist character. For “the tyranny of a multitude,”
he wrote, “is a multiplied tyranny”.[26] Burke
agreed with the Catholic monarchist Joseph de Maistre in calling the revolution
“satanic”. And, as we have seen, he called the war that broke out between
revolutionary France and Britain in 1793 “a religious war”. For truly, the war
between the revolution and its opponents was a religious war, a war
between two opposed ideas of who rules human society: God or the people.
Burke laid great emphasis on the importance of tradition and the organic
forms of social life, which was important at a time when the rage was all for
the destruction of everything that was old and venerable. In this respect
(although not in others) he went against one of the main presuppositions of the
English social contract theorists, following rather in the line of thought of
the German Counter-Enlightenment thinkers Hamann and Herder.
As Berlin writes: “Burke’s famous onslaughts on the principles of the
French revolutionaries was founded upon the selfsame appeal to the myriad
strands that bind human beings into a historically hallowed whole, contrasted
with the utilitarian model of society as a trading-company held together by
contractual obligations, the world of ‘sophisters, oeconomists, and
calculators’ who are blind and deaf to the unanalysable relationships that make
a family, a tribe, a nation, a movement, any association of human beings held
together by something more than a quest for mutual advantage, or by force, or
by anything that is not mutual love, loyalty, common history, emotion and
outlook.”[27]
Society exists over several generations, so why, asked Burke, should
only one generation’s interests be respected in drawing up the social contract?
For, as Roger Scruton writes, interpreting his thought, “the social contract
prejudices the interests of those who are not alive to take part in it: the
dead and the unborn. Yet they too have a claim, maybe an indefinite claim, on
the resources and institutions over which the living so selfishly contend. To
imagine society as a contract among its living members, is to offer no rights
to those who go before and after. But when we neglect those absent souls, we
neglect everything that endows law with its authority, and which guarantees our
own survival. We should therefore see the social order as a partnership, in
which the dead and the unborn are included with the living.”[28]
“Every people,” writes L.A. Tikhomirov, “is, first of all, a certain
historical whole, a long row of consecutive generations, living over hundreds
or thousands of years in a common life handed down by inheritance. In this form
a people, a nation, is a certain socially organic phenomenon with more or less
clearly expressed laws of inner development… But political intriguers and the
democratic tendency does not look at a people in this form, as a historical,
socially organic phenomenon, but simply in the form of a sum of the
individual inhabitants of the country. This is the second point of view,
which looks on a nation as a simple association of people united into a state
because they wanted that, living according to laws which they like, and
arbitrarily changing the laws of their life together when it occurs to them.”[29]
Burke rejected the idea that the French Revolution was simply the
English Revolution writ large. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 was not a
revolution in the new, French sense, because it left English traditions,
including English traditions of liberty, intact: it “was made to preserve our ancient
indisputable laws and liberties, and that ancient constitution of
government which is our only security for law and liberty… We wished at the
period of the Revolution, and do now wish, to derive all we possess as an
inheritance from our forefathers… All the reformations we have hitherto
made, have proceeded upon the principle of reference to antiquity.”[30] In
fact, far from making the people the sovereign power, the English parliament in
1688 had sworn “in the name of the people” to “most humbly and faithfully
submit themselves, their heirs and posterities” to the Monarchs William and
Mary “for ever”. The French Revolution, by contrast, rejected all tradition.
“You had,” he told the French, “the elements of a constitution very nearly as
good as could be wished…; but you chose to act as if you have never been
moulded into civil society, and had everything to begin anew. You began ill,
because you began by despising everything that belonged to you.” “Your
constitution, it is true,… suffered waste and dilapidation; but you possessed
in some parts the walls and, in all, the foundations of a noble and venerable
castle. You might have repaired those walls; you might have built on those old
foundations. Your constitution was suspended before it was perfected.” “Rage
and phrenzy will pull down more in half an hour, that prudence, deliberation,
and foresight can build up in an hundred years.”[31] There
was in fact nothing new about the French Revolution. It was just another
disaster “brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust,
sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal”. The “rights of man” were just a
“pretext” invented by the “wickedness” of human nature.[32]
“It was Burke’s Reflections,” writes G.P. Gooch, “which overthrew
the supremacy of Locke [for the time being], and formed the starting-point of a
number of schools of thought, agreeing in the rejection of the individualistic
rationalism which had dominated the eighteenth century. The work is not only
the greatest exposition of the philosophic basis of conservatism ever written,
but a declaration of the principles of evolution, continuity, and solidarity,
which must hold their place in all sound political thinking. Against the
omnipotence of the individual, he sets the collective reason; against the
claims of the present, he sets the accumulated experience of the past; for
natural rights he offers social rights; for liberty he substitutes law. Society
is a partnership between those who are living, those who are dead, and those
who are yet to be born.”[33]
Burke, writes Doyle, attributed the fall of the old order “to a
conspiracy. On the one hand were the ‘moneyed interest’, resentful at their
lack of esteem and greedy for new profits; on the other, and even more important,
were the so-called philosophers of the Enlightenment, a ‘literary cabal’
committed to the destruction of Christianity by any and every available means.
The idea of a philosophic conspiracy was not new. It went back to the only one
ever conclusively proved to have existed, the plot of the self-styled
Illuminati to undermine the Church-dominated government of Bavaria. The
Bavarian government published a sensational collection of documents to
illustrate its gravity, and Burke had read it. Although he was not the first to
attribute events in France to conspiracy of the sort thwarted in Bavaria, the
way he included the idea in the most comprehensive denunciation of the
Revolution yet to appear lent it unprecedented authority. Nor was the
destruction of Christianity and the triumph of atheism the only catastrophe he
predicted. Disgusted by the way the ‘Republic of Paris’ and its ‘swinish
multitude’ held the government captive, the provinces would eventually cut
loose and France would fall apart. The assignats would drive out sound coinage
and hasten, rather than avert, bankruptcy. The only possible end to France’s
self-induced anarchy would come when ‘some popular general, who understand the
art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of command,
shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself. Armies will obey him on his
personal account… the moment in which that event will happen, the person who
really commands the army is your master.’”[34]
Burke’s Reflections were answered by Tom Paine’s Rights of Man,
which sold still more copies – an astonishing 250,000 in two years. This debate
between two Englishmen, which was eagerly followed all over Europe, turned out
to be the first of the major debates between “right” and “left” that have
dominated European intellectual life since 1789, taking the place of the old
Catholic-Protestant polemics. Burke proved to be more accurate than Paine in
its forecasts about the future of the revolution (he predicted both the killing
of the king and the military dictatorship); but it was to be Paine’s ideas that
proved to be the more popular and influential.
[35]
Paine admitted that Louis XVI had “natural moderation”; but the
revolution, he argued, was not against people, but against principles
– in particular, the principle of despotism. In any case, he wrote, “[Burke] is
not affected by the showy resemblance of it striking his imagination. He pities
the plumage, but forgets the dying bird… His hero or his heroine must be a
tragedy victim, expiring in show, and not the real prisoner of misery, sliding
into death in the silence of a dungeon.”[36]
However, Paine himself was soon to become “a real prisoner of misery” in a
Jacobin dungeon, just one of the hundreds of thousands of people –
including the “naturally moderate” King and vast numbers of the poorer classes
– far more than the ancien régime had caused in centuries.
As for the principle of despotism, Paine saw it everywhere: “When
despotism has established itself for ages in a country, as in France, it is not
in the person of the King only that it resides. It has the appearance of being
so in show, and in nominal authority; but it is not so in practice, and in
fact. It has its standard everywhere. Every office and department has its
despotism, founded upon custom and usage. Every place has its Bastille, and
every Bastille its despot. The original hereditary despotism resident in the
person of the King, divides and subdivides itself into a thousand shapes and
forms, till at last the whole of it is acted by deputation. This was the case
in France; and against this species of despotism, proceeding on through an
endless labyrinth of office till the source of it is scarcely perceptible,
there is no mode of redress. It strengthens itself by assuming the appearance of
duty, and tyrannizes under the pretence of obeying.
“When a man reflects on the condition which France was in from the
nature of her government, he will see other causes for revolt than those which
immediately connect themselves with the person or character of Louis XVI. There
were, if I may so express it, a thousand despotisms to be reformed in France,
which had grown up under the hereditary despotism of the monarchy, and became
so rooted as to be in a great measure independent of it. Between the monarchy,
the parliament, and the church, there was a rivalship of despotism,
besides the feudal despotism operating locally, and the ministerial despotism
operating everywhere.”[37]
So even parliament was despotic! Paine gives himself away here: his real
target is not despotism, but hierarchy, every relationship in society
which involves the submission of one person to another. He rejected the role of
tradition in politics as radically as Luther and Calvin had rejected it in
theology.
“Every age and generation,” he wrote, “must be as free to act for
itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it. The
vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave, is the most ridiculous
and insolent of all tyrannies. Man has no property in man; neither has any
generation property in the generations which are to follow. The parliament or
the people of 1688, or of any other period, has no more right to dispose of the
people of the present day, or to bind or to control those who are to live a
hundred or a thousand years hence. Every generation is, and must be, competent
to all the purposes which its occasions require. It is the living, and not the
dead, that are to be accomodated. When man ceases to be, his power and his
wants cease with him; and having no longer any participation in the concerns of
this world, he has no longer any authority in directing who shall be its
governors, or how its government shall be organized, or how administered…. I am
contending for the rights of the living, and against their being willed
away by the manuscript assumed authority of the dead…
“The error of those who reason by precedents drawn from antiquity,
respecting the rights of man, is, that they do not go far enough into
antiquity. They do not go the whole way. They stop in some of the intermediate
stages of an hundred or a thousand years, and produce what was then done, as a
rule for the present day. This is no authority at all. If we travel still
farther into antiquity, we shall find a direct contrary opinion and practice
prevailing; and if antiquity is to be authority, a thousand such authorities
may be produced, successively contradicting each other:
“…If the mere name of antiquity is to govern the affairs of life, the
people who are to live an hundred or a thousand years hence, may as well take
us for a precedent, as we make a precedent of those who lived an hundred or a
thousand years ago. The fact is, that portions of antiquity, by proving
everything, establish nothing. It is authority against authority all the way,
till we come to the divine origin of the rights of man at the creation. Here
our inquiries find a resting-place, and our reason finds a home. If a dispute
about the rights of man had arisen at the distance of an hundred years from the
creation, it is to this same source of authority they must have referred, and
it is to the same source of authority that we must now refer.
“Though I mean not to touch upon any sectarian principle of religion,
yet it may be worth observing, that the genealogy of Christ is traced to Adam.
Why then not trace the rights of man to the creation of man? I will answer the
question. Because there have been upstart governments, thrusting themselves
between, and presumptuously working to un-make man.
“If any generation of men ever possessed the
right of dictating the mode by which the world should be governed for ever, it
was the first generation that existed; and if that generation did it not, no
succeeding generation can show any authority for doing it, nor can set any up.
The illuminating and divine principle of the equal rights of man, (for it has
its origin from the Maker of man) relates, not only to the living individuals,
but to generations of men succeeding each other. Every generation is equal in
rights to the generations which preceded it, by the same rule that every
individual is born equal in rights with his contemporary.”[38]
Paine had a point. Arguments based on merely human tradition are
relative; one precedent from antiquity is cancelled out by another. Human
tradition needs to be supported by Divine Tradition – that is, the
Tradition handed down from God to His Chosen People and passed on by them from
generation to generation in the Church.
Burke had this problem not only in relation to Paine, but also in
relation to other contemporary English radicals. If he claimed that British
liberties “were an entailed inheritance peculiar to the inhabitants of the
island” and going back to William the Conqueror, “his radical opponents, who
were rather less keen on entails, claimed that their rights were derived from
the alleged practices of free-born Englishmen before the days of the ‘Norman
yoke’.”[39] And the
precedent his opponents pointed to was both older and more noble; for, as Paine
pointed out, if any ruler was a despot and usurper, - that is, a destroyer
of tradition - it was William the Conqueror. And he was right: it had been
William who, in 1066, cut off England from the One, True Church in the East and
destroyed her traditions, both human and Divine.
Again, since Burke accepted the legitimacy of both the English and
American revolutions (while preferring to rest on their least revolutionary
moments), he could not attack the French revolution from a position of basic
principle (for its principles were not fundamentally different from those of
its Anglo-Saxon predecessors), but only because it carried those principles
“too far”. But if the principle itself is accepted, who is to say when the
application of the principle has gone “too far”? In any case, both Burke and
his English radical opponents (but not Paine) agreed that the rights they were
talking about “did not rest on principle and had no relevance to foreigners”[40] - and
so had no relevance to the French revolution, either.
And yet Burke was not defending just the English way of doing things,
which was relevant only to Englishmen (in other of his works he defended the
rights of the Irish and the Indians to keep their own traditions within the
British Empire). The French revolution attacked the very foundation of society
– religion.
So in defending the Christian religion Burke was defending a universal
principle: “We know, and what is better, we feel inwardly[41], that
religion is the basis of civil society, and the source of all good and of all
comfort. In England we are so convinced of this, that there is no rust of
superstition… that ninety-nine in a hundred of the people of England would not
prefer to impiety… We know, and it is our pride to know, that man is by his
constitution a religious animal; that atheism is against, not only our reason,
but our instincts; and that it cannot prevail long. But if… we should uncover
our nakedness, by throwing off that Christian religion which has hitherto been
our boast and comfort, and one great source of civilisation amongst us, and
among many other nations, we are apprehensive (being well aware that the mind
will not endure a void) that some uncouth, pernicious, and degrading
superstition might take the place of it.”[42]
The
very radicalism of Paine’s rejection of tradition and hierarchy undermined the
validity of his argument. First, no society can exist without tradition or
hierarchy – least of all revolutionary ones, which immediately act to fill the
void they have created. Secondly, if sovereignty resides in the Nation,
as Paine affirms, the question arises: what is the Nation if it has to be
constantly re-inventing itself, holding nothing from the past as sacred and
starting again from a tabula rasa with every new generation? A Nation
defines itself precisely by its continuity over time and over many generations;
there must be some loyalty to, and preservation of, the past if the Nation is
to recognise itself as the same Nation throughout its transformations.
But Paine, true revolutionary that he was, was as sweeping in his
rejection of temporal tradition as he was of spatial hierarchy. Not
surprisingly, therefore, he had little time for religion, the main guarantor of
both the spatial and the temporal dimensions of society. “My country is the
world,” he wrote, “and my religion is to do good”.[43] There
was no one, true dogmatic religion for Paine, only conflicting human opinions
which he made no attempt to evaluate: “With respect to what are called
denominations of religion, if everyone is left to judge of his own religion,
there is no such thing as a religion that is wrong; but if they are to judge of
each other’s religion, there is no such thing as a religion that is right; and
therefore, all the world is right, or all the world is wrong…”[44] “Every
religion is good that teaches man to be good”. “I do not believe in the creed
professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by
the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of.
My own mind is my own church.”[45]
Paine was not anti-religious as such; but in his attitude to religion
there was more than a hint of contempt: “All religions are in their nature kind
and benign [!], and united with principles of morality. They could not have
made proselytes at first, by professing anything that was vicious, cruel,
persecuting, or immoral. Like everything else, they had their beginning; and
they proceeded by persuasion, exhortation, and example. How then is it that
they lose their native mildness, and become morose and intolerant?
“It proceeds from the connexion which Mr. Burke recommends. By
engendering the church with the state, a sort of mule-animal, capable only of
destroying, and not of breeding up, is produced, called The Church
established by Law. It is a stranger, even from its birth, to any parent
mother on which it is begotten, and whom in time it kicks out and destroys.”[46]
On this principle, Paine should have been very happy in America, where
he spent his last years, insofar as the American Constitution made a complete
separation between Church and State. But where there is no persecution from the
State, there can still be criticism from individuals – indeed, that is their
right according to Paine’s own principles. And the Americans criticised him for
his Deist views, so that Paine spent his last years in loneliness and misery.
For all his Rousseauist iconoclasm, Paine’s revolutionary zeal was
profoundly non-Rousseauist, Anglo-Saxon and individualist. Society exists,
according to him, for the sake of the individual and his needs, especially his
need to be free from various ills. There is no place in his system for a
general will that is superior to the individual and which forces him to be free
to be himself. “Civil power, properly considered as such, is made up of
the aggregate of that class of the natural rights of man, which becomes
defective in the individual in point of power, and answers not to his purpose;
but when collected to a focus, becomes competent to the purpose of every one.”[47] In
other words, the State has no special rights over an individual unless he
interferes with the rights of other individuals; it simply exists to service
the individual(s), to help him to do things he would not be able to do on his
own.
Paine was more influential than Burke, and even the stolid and
traditionalist British found themselves moving along the path that he
indicated. Thus, as Hampson points out, “it was the British who moved towards the
attitudes proclaimed by the French Revolution… After 1832 it was conceded that,
irrespective of precedent and tradition, whole categories of Englishmen had a
right to vote.”[48]
Moreover, Paine’s vision of a welfare state outlined in part two of The
Rights of Man was to inspire generations of British and American radicals.
And yet, it was Burke, not Paine, who was right on the Revolution…
The
American Constitution and Slavery
The success of the American revolution had provided an inspiration for the French revolution in its first phase; and the French revolution in its turn influenced the further development of the American. The debate between Burke and Paine had its analogues in the controversies among the Founding Fathers. Some, such as Alexander Hamilton and George Washington, still looked towards the more conservative and authoritarian British model of democracy, in spite of the experience of the War of Independence; while others, such as Thomas Jefferson, drew inspiration from the French revolution even in its later, Jacobin phase in his almost anarchical drive to “rekindle the old spirit of 1776”.
Thus Hamilton said to the Constitutional Convention in 1787: “I believe the British government forms the best model the world ever produced… All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well born, the other the mass of the people… The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second… Nothing but a permanent body can check the impudence of democracy.”[49]
Jefferson, on the other hand, believed that a rebellion every 20 years or so was necessary to stop the arteries of freedom from becoming sclerotic. As he wrote to William Stephens Smith in 1787: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is its natural manure.”[50] And to James Madison he wrote in the same year: “I hold it, a little rebellion now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical… It is a medicine for the sound health of government.”[51]
These different understandings of democracy were reflected in different views on the two most important issues of the day: the relative powers of the central government and the states, and slavery.
With regard to the first issue, the champions of a strong central government, the federalists, believed that a strong central government was necessary in order to preserve the gains of the revolution, to guarantee taxation income, and preserve law and order. As George Washington put it: “Let then the reins of government be braced and held with a steady hand, and every violation of the Constitution be reprehended. If defective, let it be amended, but not suffered to be trampled on whilst it has an existence.”[52]
Not surprisingly, many of the antifederalists thought that Washington himself was substituting his own style of monarchy for the British king. As Joseph J. Ellis writes, they were haunted by “the ideological fear, so effective as a weapon against the taxes imposed by Parliament and decrees of George III, that once arbitrary power was acknowledged to reside elsewhere [than in the states], all liberty was lost. And at a primal level it suggested the unconscious fear of being completely consumed, eaten alive.”[53]
With regard to slavery, there can be no question that the main thrust of the ideology of the American revolution was against it. The Declaration of Independence in 1776 declared that it was “not possible that one man should have property in person of another”. “Removing slavery, however, was not like removing British officials or revising constitutions. In isolated pockets of New York and New Jersey, and more panoramically in the entire region south of the Potomac, slavery was woven into the fabric of American society in ways that defied appeals to logic and morality. It also enjoyed the protection of one of the Revolution’s most potent legacies, the right to dispose of one’s property without arbitrary interference from others, especially when the others resided far away or claimed the authority of some distant government. There were, to be sure, radical implications latent in the ‘principles of ‘76’ capable of challenging privileged appeals to property rights, but the secret of their success lay in their latency – that is, the gradual and surreptitious ways they revealed their egalitarian implications over the course of the nineteenth century. If slavery’s cancerous growth was to be arrested and the dangerous malignancy removed, it demanded immediate surgery. The radical implications of the revolutionary legacy were no help at all so long as they remained only implications.
“The depth and apparent intractability of the problem became much clearer during the debates surrounding the drafting and ratification of the Constitution. Although the final draft of the document was conspicuously silent on slavery, the subject itself haunted the closed-door debates. No less a source than Madison believed that slavery was the central cause of the most elemental division in the Constitutional Convention: ‘the States were divided into different interests not by their difference of size,’ Madison observed, ‘but principally from their having or not having slaves… It did not lie between the large and small States: it lay between the Northern and Southern.’
“The delegates from New England and most of the Middle Atlantic states drew directly on the inspirational rhetoric of the revolutionary legacy to argue that slavery was inherently incompatible with the republican values on which the American Republic had been based. They wanted an immediate end to the slave trade, an explicit statement prohibiting the expansion of slavery into the western territories as a condition for admission into the union, and the adoption of a national plan for gradual emancipation analogous to those state plans already adopted in the North…
“The southern position might more accurately be described as ‘deep southern’, since it did not include Virginia. Its major advocates were South Carolina and Georgia, and the chief burden for making the case in the Constitutional Convention fell almost entirely on the South Carolina delegation. The underlying assumption of this position was most openly acknowledged by Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina – namely, that ‘South Carolina and Georgia cannot do without slaves’. What those from the Deep South wanted was open-ended access to African imports to stock their plantations. They also wanted equivalently open access to western lands, meaning no federal legislation restricting the property rights of slave owners…
“Neither side got what it wanted at Philadelphia in 1787. The Constitution contained no provision that committed the newly created federal government to a policy of gradual emancipation, or in any clear sense placed slavery on the road to ultimate extinction. On the other hand, the Constitution contained no provisions that specifically sanctioned slavery as a permanent and protected institution south of the Potomac or anywhere else. The distinguishing feature of the document when it came to slavery was its evasiveness. It was neither a ‘contract with abolition’ nor a ‘covenant with death’, but rather a prudent exercise in ambiguity. The circumlocutions required to place a chronological limit on the slave trade or to count slaves as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation in the House, all without ever using the forbidden word, capture the intentionally elusive ethos of the Constitution. The underlying reason for this calculated orchestration of non-commitment was obvious: Any clear resolution of the slavery question one way or the other rendered ratification of the Constitution virtually impossible…”[54]
Even Washington was silent about slavery when he came to make his
retirement address in 1796. “His silence on the slavery question was strategic,
believing as he did that slavery was a cancer on the body politic of America
that could not at present be removed without killing the patient…”[55] And
with reason; for by 1790 the slave population was 700,000, up from about
500,000 in 1776. This, and the implicit threat that South Carolina and Georgia
would secede from the Union if slavery were outlawed, made it clear that
abolition was impractical as politics (but not on a personal level – Washington
decreed in his will that all his slaves should be freed after his wife’s death).
And so “the effort to make the Revolution truly complete seemed diametrically
opposed to remaining a united nation.”[56]
Illuminism
In order to understand how the French Revolution passed from its first,
democratic and relatively non-violent phase to the second, proto-communistic
and exceedingly bloody phase, it is necessary to study the history of the
secret society known as the Illuminati. Illuminism arose as a kind of
parasite feeding on the body of Masonry. Its appearance was preceded by an
astonishing increase in the number of masonic lodges in France. Zamoyski writes
that “there were 104 lodges in France in 1772, 198 by 1776, and a staggering
629 by 1789. Their membership included virtually every grandee, writer, artist,
lawyer, soldier or other professional in the country, as well as notable
foreigners such as Franklin and Jefferson – some 30,000 people.”[57]
“Between 800 and 900 masonic lodges,” writes Doyle, “were founded in
France between 1732 and 1793, two-thirds of them after 1760. Between 1773 and
1779 well over 20,000 members were recruited. Few towns of any consequence were
without one or more lodges by the 1780s and, despite several papal
condemnations of a deistic cult that had originated in Protestant England, the
élite of society flocked to join. Voltaire was drafted in on his last
visit to Paris, and it was before the assembled brethren of the Nine Sisters
Lodge that he exchanged symbolic embraces with Franklin.”[58]
Franklin, as we have seen, was an American mason, a famous scientist,
and a major player in the American revolution in which French and Americans had
co-operated in overthrowing British monarchical rule. The American revolution
had demonstrated that the ideas of the philosophes were not just
philosophical theory, but could be translated into reality. And the meeting of
Franklin and Voltaire showed that science and philosophy could meet in the womb
of Masonry to bring forth the common dream - liberty and “the pursuit of
happiness”.
But just as the American Revolution was child’s play compared with the
savagery and radicalism of the French Revolution, so these earlier masonic
lodges and orders were innocent by comparison with the profound evil of
Illuminism, which was founded on May 1, 1776[59] by a
Bavarian professor called Weishaupt, who assumed the name of “Spartacus” (from
the slave who rebelled against Rome in the first century BC). It appears to
have arisen out of the dissatisfaction of a group of Masons with the general
state of Masonry. Thus another founder member, the famous Count Mirabeau, noted
in his Memoir in the same year of 1776: “The Lodge Theodore de Bon Conseil
at Munich, where there were a few men with brains and hearts, was tired of
being tossed about by the vain promises and quarrels of Masonry. The heads
resolved to graft on to their branch another secret association to which they
gave the name of the Order of the Illuminés. They modelled it on
the Society of Jesus, whilst proposing to themselves diametrically opposed.”[60]
“Our strength,” wrote Weishaupt, “lies in secrecy. Therefore we must
without hesitation use as a cover some innocent societies. The lodges of blue
masonry are a fitting veil to hide our real aims, since the world is accustomed
to expecting nothing important or constructive from them. Their ceremonies are
considered pretty trifles for the amusement of big children. The name of a
learned society is also a magnificent mask behind which we can hide our lower
degrees.”[61]
“Weishaupt construced his
organization on several levels, revealing his most radical plans only to his
chosen co-workers. Weishaupt chose the members of his organization mainly
amidst young people, carefully studying each candidature.
“Having sifted out the unreliable and dubious, the leaders of the order performed
on the rest a rite of consecration, which took place after a three-day fast in
a dark basement. Every candidate was consecrated separately, having first had
his arms and legs bound. [Then] from various corners of the dark basement the
most unexpected questions were showered upon the initiate.
“Having replied to the questions, he swore absolute obedience to the
leaders of the order. Every new member signed that he would preserve the
secrets of the organization under fear of the death penalty.
“However, the newcomer was not yet considered to be a full member of the
organization, but received the status of novice and for one to three months had
to be under the observation of an experienced illuminé. He was told to
keep a special diary and regularly present it to the leaders. The novice filled
in numerous questionnaires, and also prepared monthly accounts of all matters
linking him with the order. Having passed through all the trials, the novice
underwent a second initiation, now as a fully-fledged member.
“After his initiation the new member was given a distinguishing sign,
gesture and password, which changed depending on the rank he occupied.
“The newcomer received a special pseudonym (order’s name), usually
borrowed from ancient history…, and got to know an ancient Persian method of
timekeeping, the geography of the order, and also a secret code.
“Weishaupt imposed into the order a system of global spying and mutual
tailing.
“Most of the members were at the lowest level
of the hierarchy.
“No less than a thousand people entered the organization, but for
conspiratorial purposes each member knew only a few people. As Weishaupt
himself noted, ‘directly under me there are to, who are completely inspired by
me myself, while under each of them are two, etc. Thus I can stir up and put
into motion a thousand people. This is how one must command and act in
politics.”[62]
“Do you realize sufficiently,” he wrote in the discourse of the
reception of the Illuminatus Dirigens, “what it means to rule – to rule
in a secret society? Not only over the lesser or more important of the
populace, but over the best men, over men of all ranks, nations, and religions,
to rule without external force, to unite them indissolubly, to breathe one
spirit and soul into them, men distributed over all parts of the world?” [63]
The supposed aim of the new Order was to improve the present
system of government and to abolish “the slavery of the peasants, the servitude
of men to the soil, the rights of main morte and all the customs and privileges
which abase humanity, the corvées under the condition of an equitable
equivalent, all the corporations, all the maîtrises, all the burdens
imposed on industry and commerce by customs, excise duties, and taxes… to
procure a universal toleration for all religious opinions… to take away all the
arms of superstitions, to favour the liberty of the press, etc.”[64] This
was almost exactly the same programme as that carried out by the Constituent
Assembly at the beginning of the French revolution in 1789-91 under the
leadership of, among others, the same Count Mirabeau – a remarkable
coincidence!
However, this liberal democratic
programme was soon forgotten when Weishaupt took over control of the Order. For
“Spartacus” had elaborated a much more radical programme, a programme that was
to resemble the socialism of the later, more radical stages of the revolution.
“Weishaupt had made into an absolute theory the misanthropic gibes [boutades]
of Rousseau at the invention of property and society, and without taking into
account the statement so distinctly formulated by Rousseau on the impossibility
of suppressing property and society once they had been established, he proposed
as the end of Illuminism the abolition of property, social authority, of
nationality, and the return of the human race to the happy state in which it
formed only a single family without artificial needs, without useless sciences,
every father being priest and magistrate. Priest of we know not what religion,
for in spite of their frequent invocations of the God of Nature, many
indications lead us to conclude that Weishaupt had, like Diderot and d’Holbach,
no other God than Nature herself…”[65]
Weishaupt proceeded to create an inner secret circle concealed within
Masonry. He used the religious forms of Masonry, and invented a few “mysteries”
himself. But his aim was the foundation of a political secret
organisation controlled by himself.
His political theory, according to Webster, was “no other than that of
modern Anarchy, that man should govern himself and rulers should be gradually
done away with. But he is careful to deprecate all ideas of violent revolution
– the process is to be accomplished by the most peaceful methods. Let us see
how gently he leads up to the final conclusion:
“’The first stage in the life of
the whole human race is savagery, rough nature, in which the family is the only
society, and hunger and thirst are easily satisfied… in which man enjoys the
two most excellent goods, Equality and Liberty, to their fullest extent. … In
these circumstances… health was his usual condition… Happy men, who were not
yet enough enlightened to lose their peace of mind and to be conscious of the
unhappy mainsprings and causes of our misery, love of power… envy… illnesses
and all the results of imagination.’
“The manner in which man fell from this primitive state of felicity is
then described:
“’As families increased, means of subsistence began to lack, the nomadic
life ceased, property was instituted, men established themselves firmly, and
through agriculture families drew near each other, thereby language developed
and through living together men began to measure themselves against each other,
etc… But here was the cause of the downfall of freedom; equality vanished. Man
felt new unknown needs…’
“Thus men became dependent like minors under the guardianship of kings;
the human must attain to majority and become self-governing:
“’Why should it be impossible that the human race should attain to its
highest perfection, the capacity to guide itself? Why should anyone be
eternally led who understands how to lead himself?’
“Further, men must learn not only to be independent of kings but of each
other:
“’Who has need of another depends on him
and has resigned his rights. So to need little is the first step to freedom;
therefore savages and the most highly enlightened are perhaps the only free
men. The art of more and more limiting one’s needs is at the same time the art
of attaining freedom…’
“Weishaupt then goes on to show how the further evil of Patriotism
arose:
“’With the origin of nations and peoples the world ceased to be a great
family, a single kingdom: the great tie of nature was torn… Nationalism took
the place of human love…. Now it became a virtue to magnify one’s fatherland at
the expense of whoever was not enclosed within its limits, now as a means to
this narrow end it was allowed to despise and outwit foreigners or indeed even
to insult them. This virtue was called Patriotism…’
“And so by narrowing down affection to one’s fellow-citizens, the
members of one’s own family, and even to oneself:
“’There arose out of Patriotism, Localism, the family spirit, and
finally Egoism… Diminish Patriotism, then men will learn to know each other
again as such, their dependence on each other will be lost, the bond of union
will widen out…’
“… Whilst the ancient religions taught the hope of a Redeemer who should
restore man to his former state, Weishaupt looks to man alone for his
restoration. ‘Men,’ he observes, ‘no longer loved men but only such and such
men. The word was quite lost…’ Thus in Weishaupt’s masonic system the ‘lost
word’ is ‘Man,’ and its recovery is interpreted by the idea that Man should
find himself again. Further on Weishaupt goes on to show how ‘the redemption of
the human race is to be brought about’:
“’These means are secret schools of wisdom, these were from all time the
archives of Nature and of human rights, through them will Man be saved from his
Fall, princes and nations will disappear without violence from the earth, the
human race will become one family and the world the abode of reasonable men.
Morality alone will bring about this change imperceptibly. Every father of a
family will be, as formerly Abraham and the patriarchs, the priest and
unfettered lord of his family, and Reason will be the only code of Man. This is
one of our greatest secrets…’
“… His first idea was to make Fire Worship the religion of Illuminism;
the profession of Christianity therefore appears to have been an after-thought.
Evidently Weishaupt discovered, as others have done, that Christianity lends
itself more readily to subversive ideas than any other religion. And in the
passages which follow we find adopting the old ruse of representing Christ as a
Communist and as a secret-society adept. Thus he goes on to explain that ‘if
Jesus preaches contempt of riches, He wishes to teach us the reasonable use of
them and prepare for the community of goods introduced by Him,’ and in which,
Weishaupt adds later, He lived with His disciples. But this secret doctrine is
only to be apprehended by initiates…
“Weishaupt thus contrives to give a purely political interpretation to
Christ’s teaching:
“’The secret preserved through the Disciplinam Arcani, and the
aim appearing through all His words and deeds, is to give back to men their
original liberty and equality… Now one can understand how far Jesus was the
Redeemer and Saviour of the world.’
“The mission of Christ was therefore by means of Reason to make men
capable of freedom: ‘When at last reason becomes the religion of man, so will
the problem be solved.’
“Weishaupt goes on to show that Freemasonry can be interpreted in the
same manner. The secret doctrine concealed in the teaching of Christ was handed
down by initiates who ‘hid themselves and their doctrine under the cover of
Freemasonry,’ and in a long explanation of Masonic hieroglyphics he indicates the
analogies between the Hiramic legend and the story of Christ. ‘I say then Hiram
is Christ.’… In this manner Weishaupt demonstrates that ‘Freemasonry is hidden
Christianity… But this is of course only the secret of what Weishaupt calls
‘real Freemasonry’ in contradistinction to the official kind, which he regards
as totally unenlightened.”[66]
But the whole of this religious side of Weishaupt’s system is in fact
simply a ruse, a cover, by which to attract religious men. Weishaupt himself
despised religion: “You cannot imagine,” he wrote, “what consideration and
sensation our Priest’s degree is arousing. The most wonderful thing is that
great Protestant and reformed theologians who belong to Q [Illuminism] still believe that
the religious teaching imparted in it contains the true and genuine spirit of
the Christian religion. Oh! men, of what cannot you be persuaded? I never
thought that I should become the founder of a new religion.”[67]
Only gradually, and only to a very few of his closest associates, did
Weishaupt reveal the real purpose of his order – the revolutionary overthrow of
the whole of society, civil and religious. Elements of all religions and
philosophical systems, including Christianity and Masonry, were used by
Weishaupt to enrol a body of influential men (about 2500 at one time[68]) who
would obey him in all things while knowing neither him personally nor the real
aims of the secret society they had been initiated into. The pyramidal
structure of his organization, whereby nobody on a lower level knew what was
happening on the one above his, while those on the higher levels knew
everything about what was happening below them, was copied by all succeeding
revolutionary organizations.
Weishaupt was well on the way to taking over Freemasonry (under the
guise of its reform) when, in July, 1785, an Illuminatus was struck by
lightning and papers found on him led to the Bavarian government banning the
organisation. However, both Illuminism and Weishaupt continued in existence –
only France rather than Germany became the centre of their operations. Thus the
Parisian lodge of the Amis Réunis, renamed the Ennemis Réunis,
gathered together all the really radical Masons from various other lodges, many
of which were still royalist, and turned them, often unconsciously, into agents
of Weishaupt. These adepts included no less than thirty princes. For it was
characteristic of the revolution that among those who were most swept up by the
madness of its intoxication were those who stood to lose most from it.
Some far-sighted men, such as the Apostolic Nuncio in Vienna and the
Marquis de Luchet, warned against Illuminism, and de Luchet predicted almost
exactly the course of events that the revolution would take on the basis of his
knowledge of the order. But no one paid any attention. But then, in October,
1789 a pamphlet was seized in the house of the wife of Mirabeau’s publisher
among Mirabeau’s papers and published two years later.
“Beginning with a diatribe against the French monarchy,” writes Webster,
“the document goes on to say that ‘in order to triumph over this hydra-headed
monster these are my ideas’:
“’We must overthrow all order, suppress all laws, annul all power, and
leave the people in anarchy. The law we establish will not perhaps be in force
at once, but at any rate, having given back the power to the people, they will
resist for the sake of the liberty which they will believe they are preserving.
We must caress their vanity, flatter their hopes, promise them happiness after
our work has been in operation; we must elude their caprices and their systems
at will, for the people as legislators are very dangerous, they only establish
laws which coincide with their passions, their want of knowledge would besides
only give birth to abuses. But as the people are a lever which legislators can
move at their will, we must necessarily use them as a support, and render
hateful to them everything we wish to destroy and sow illusions in their path;
we must also buy all the mercenary pens which propagate our methods and which
will instruct the people concerning their enemies which we attack. The clergy,
being the most powerful through public opinion, can only be destroyed by
ridiculing religion, rendering its ministers odious, and only representing them
as hypocritical monsters… Libels must at every moment show fresh traces of
hatred against the clergy. To exaggerate their riches, to makes the sins of an
individual appear to be common to all, to attribute to them all vices; calumny,
murder, irreligion, sacrilege, all is permitted in times of revolution.’
“’We must degrade the noblesse and attribute it to an odious
origin, establish a germ of equality which can never exist but which will
flatter the people; [we must] immolate the most obstinate, burn and destroy
their property in order to intimidate the rest, so that if we cannot entirely
destroy this prejudice we can weaken it and the people will avenge their vanity
and their jealousy by all the excesses which will bring them to submission.’
“After describing how the soldiers are to be seduced from their
allegiance, and the magistrates represented to the people as despots, ‘since
the people, brutal and ignorant, only see the evil and never the good of
things,’ the writer explains they must be given only limited power in the
municipalities.
“’Let us beware above all of giving them too much force; their despotism
is too dangerous, we must flatter the people by gratuitous justice, promise
them a great diminution in taxes and a more equal division, more extension in
fortunes, and less humiliation. These phantasies [vertiges] will
fanaticise the people, who will flatten out all resistance. What matter the
victims and their numbers? Spoliations, destructions, burnings, and all the
necessary effects of a revolution? Nothing must be sacred and we can say with
Machiavelli: “What matter the means as long as one arrives at the end?”’”[69]
The early phase of the revolution appears to have been driven by the
more idealistic kind of Freemasons – men such as the Duc d’Orléans. But
its later stages were controlled by the Illuminati with their more
radically destructive plans. Thus “according to Lombard de Langres [writing in
1820]: ’France in 1789 counted more than 2,000 lodges affiliated to the Grand
Orient; the number of adepts was more than 100,000. The first events of 1789
were only Masonry in action. All the revolutionaries of the Constituent
Assembly were initiated into the third degree. We place in this class the Duc
d’Orléans, Valence, Syllery, Laclos, Sièyes, Pétion,
Menou, Biron, Montesquiou, Fauchet, Condorcet, Lafayette, Mirabeau, Garat,
Rabaud, Dubois-Crancé, Thiébaud, Larochefoucauld, and others.’
“Amongst these others [continues Webster] were not only the Brissotins,
who formed the nucleus of the Girondin party, but the men of the Terror –
Marat, Robespierre, Danton, and Desmoulins.
“It was these fiercer elements, true disciples of the Illuminati,
who were to sweep away the visionary Masons dreaming of equality and brotherhood.
Following the precedent set by Weishaupt, classical pseudonyms were adopted by
these leaders of the Jacobins, thus Chaumette was known as Anaxagoras, Clootz
as Anacharsis, Danton as Horace, Lacroix as Publicola, and Ronsin as Scaevola;
again, after the manner of the Illuminati, the names of towns were changed and
a revolutionary calendar was adopted. The red cap and loose hair affected by
the Jacobins appear also to have been foreshadowed in the lodges of the Illuminati.
“Yet faithfully as the Terrorists carried out the plan of the Illuminati,
it would seem that they themselves were not initiated into the innermost
secrets of the conspiracy. Behind the Convention, behind the clubs, behind the
Revolutionary Tribunal, there existed, says Lombard de Langres, that ‘most
secret convention [convention sécrétissime] which directed
everything after May 31, an occult and terrible power of which the other
Convention became the slave and which was composed of the prime initiates of
Illuminism. This power was above Robespierre and the committees of the
government,… it was this occult power which appropriated to itself the
treasures of the nation and distributed them to the brothers and friends who
had helped on the great work.’”[70]
Illuminism represents perhaps the first clearly organised expression of
that philosophy which Hieromonk Seraphim Rose called “the Nihilism of
Destruction”.[71]
Fr. Seraphim considered that this philosophy was unique to the twentieth
century; but the evidence for its existence already in the eighteenth century
is overwhelming. With Illuminism, therefore, we enter the atmosphere of the
twentieth-century totalitarian revolutions....
The French Revolution: (2) The
Jacobin Terror
In June, 1791 Louis XVI tried, unsuccessfully, to flee abroad, and in
August the monarchs of Austria and Prussia met at Pillnitz to co-ordinate
action against the Revolution. Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden and Catherine of
Russia also prepared to crush the “orang-outangs of Europe”. From the summer of
1791 to the summer of 1792 power steadily slipped away from the elected
Constituent Assembly, which was still broadly in favour of a constitutional
monarchy, and into the hands of the mob, or the Paris Commune. Their passionate
hatred of refractory priests and monarchists inside the country was inflamed by
the first attempts of the foreign powers to invade France and restore
legitimate authority from outside.
The rhetoric became increasingly bloody. Thus on April 25, 1792 the
“Marseillaise” was composed for the army of the Rhine; “impure blood, it
exulted, would drench the tracks of the conquering French armies.”[72] And on
the same day the new invention of the Guillotine claimed its first victim…
On June 20 the mob or sansculottes (without breeches), invaded
the Tuileries. “By sheer weight of numbers,” writes Zamoyski, “the crowd pushed
through the gates of the royal palace and came face to face with Louis XVI in
one of the upstairs salons, where the defenceless monarch had to endure the
abuse of the mob. Pistols and drawn sabres were waved in his face, and he was
threatened with death. More significantly, he was made to don a red cap [symbol
of the revolution] and drink the health of the nation – and thereby to
acknowledge its sovereignty. By acquiescing, he toasted himself off the
throne.”[73]
For a brief moment, on July 14, the third anniversary of the storming of
the Bastille, it looked as if constitutional monarchy could be saved. Louis was
called “king of the French” and “father
of his country”. But on the same day Marie Antoinette’s nephew, Francis II, was
crowned Holy Roman Emperor in Frankfurt in a ceremony that reaffirmed with
great splendour the principle of autocratic monarchy. Between the revolution
celebrated in France and the autocracy celebrated in Germany there could be no
permanent compromise. The centre, constitutional monarchy, could not hold…
Pressure mounted on the Assembly to declare the dethronement of the
king. Finally, on August 10, the Tuileries was again invaded, 600 Swiss guards
were brutally massacred, and the king was imprisoned. The Assembly “had little
alternative but to ‘invite’ the French people to form a convention ‘to assure
the sovereignty of the people and the reign of liberty and equality. The next
day it decreed that the new assembly was to be elected by manhood suffrage,
without distinction between citizens. Only servants and the unemployed had no
vote.”[74]
Paris was ruled by the mob now. In September the prisons were opened and
suspected royalists were slaughtered. On September 20 the Prussian army was
defeated at Valmy, and the next day the monarchy was officially abolished.[75]
The newly elected Convention’s task was to legislate for a new
republican Constitution. It was divided between “Montagnards” (Jacobins) on the
left, led by Marat, Danton, Robespierre and the Parisian delegates, and the
“Girondins” on the right, led by Brissot, Vergniaud and the “faction of the
Gironde”. The Montagnards were identified with the interests of the Paris mob
and the most radical ideas of the Revolution; the Girondins – with the
interests of the provinces and the original liberal ideals of 1789. The
Montagnards stood for disposing of the king as soon as possible; the Girondins
wanted a referendum of the whole people to decide.
The Montagnard Saint-Just said that a trial was unnecessary; the people
had already judged the king on August 10; it remained only to punish him. For
“there is no innocent reign… every King is a rebel and a usurper.”[76]
Robespierre had voted against the death penalty in the Assembly, but now he
said that “Louis must die that the country may love”. And he agreed with
Saint-Just: “Louis cannot be judged, he has already been judged. He has been
condemned, or else the Republic is not blameless. To suggest putting Louis XVI
on trial, in whatever way, is a step back towards royal and constitutional
despotism; it is a counter-revolutionary idea; because it puts the Revolution
itself in the dock. After all, if Louis can still be put on trial, Louis can be
acquitted; he might be innocent. Or rather, he is presumed to be until he is
found guilty. But if Louis can be presumed innocent, what becomes of the
Revolution?”[77]
There was a certain logic in these words: since the Revolution
undermined all the foundations of the ancien régime, the
possibility that the head of that régime might be innocent implied that
the Revolution might be guilty. So “revolutionary justice” required straight
execution rather than a trial; it could not afford to question the foundations
of the Revolution itself. It was the same logic that led to the execution
without trial of Tsar Nicholas II in 1917.
But the majority of the deputies were not yet as “advanced” in their
thinking as Robespierre. So “during the third week of January 1793,” writes
Ridley, “the Convention voted four times on the issue. A resolution finding
Louis guilty of treason, and rejecting the idea of an appeal to the people by a
plebiscite [so much for Rousseauist democracy!], was carried by 426 votes to 278;
the decision to impose the death penalty was carried by 387 to 314. Philippe
Egalité [the Duke of Orléans and cousin of the king who became
Grand Master of the Masons, then a Jacobin, renouncing his title for the name
‘Philippe Egalité’] voted to convict Louis and for the death penalty. A
deputy then proposed that the question of what to do with Louis should be
postponed indefinitely. This was defeated by 361 to 360, a single vote.
Philippe Egalité voted against the proposal, so his vote decided the
issue. On 20 January a resolution that the death sentence should be immediately
carried out was passed by 380 to 310, and Louis was guillotined the next day.”[78]
After the execution a huge old man with a long beard who had been
prominent in the murdering of priests during the September riots mounted the
scaffold, plunged both hands into the kind’s blood and sprinkled the people
with it, shouting: “People of France! I baptise you in the name of Jacob and
Freedom!”[79]
“Traditionally,” writes Zamoyski, “the death of a king of France was
announced with the phrase: ‘Le Roi est mort, vive le Roi!’, in order to
stress the continuity of the institution of monarchy. When the king’s head, was
held aloft on that sunless day, the crowd assembled around the scaffold shouted:
‘Vive la Nation!’ The message was unequivocal. The nation had replaced
the king as the sovereign and therefore as the validating element in the state.
The dead king’s God had been superseded by ‘Our Lord Mankind’, to use the words
of one prominent revolutionary.”[80]
“The condemnation of the king,” wrote Camus, “is the crux of
contemporary history. It symbolizes the secularization of our history and the
disincarnation of the Christian God. Up to now, God played a part in history
through the medium of kings. But His representative in history has been
killed…”[81]
The execution of the king was the signal for the abandonment of all
restraint. The cause of the Revolution became the absolute value to which every
other value was to be subordinated and sacrificed. In February, 1793, after the
British broke off relations because of the execution of the king, the
Convention declared war on the British and the Dutch, and in effect “bade
defiance to the whole of Europe. ‘They threaten you with kings!’ roared Danton
to the Convention. ‘You have thrown down your gauntlet to them, and this
gauntlet is a king’s head, the signal of their coming death.’ ‘We cannot be
calm,’ claimed the ever-bombastic Brissot, ‘until Europe, all Europe, is in
flames.’ In token of this defiance, annexations were now vigorously pursued…”[82] No
matter that the Declaration of the Rights of Man had declared for the freedom
of every nation: revolutionary casuistry interpreted sovereignty to be the
right only of revolutionary nations; all others deserved to become slaves of
the Republic.
Moreover, on December 15, 1792 “generals were authorized in all occupied
territories to introduce the full social programme of the French Republic. All
existing taxes, tithes, feudal dues, and servitudes were to be abolished. So
was nobility, and all types of privilege. The French motto would be, declared
some deputies, War on the castles, peace to the cottages! In the name of
peace, help, fraternity, liberty and equality, they would assist all people to
establish ‘free and popular’ governments, with whom they would then
co-operate.”[83]
But practice did not match theory: the theory of cosmopolitan
universalism too often gave way to the practice of imperialist nationalism.
Thus when Holland was conquered by the revolutionary armies, “it was compelled
to cede various southern territories, including control of the mouth of the
Scheldt, and pay for the upkeep of a French occupying army of 25,000 men.
Finally, it was forced to conclude an alliance with the French Republic whose
chief attraction was to place the supposedly formidable Dutch navy in the
balance against Great Britain. This, then, was what the fraternity and help of
the French Republic actually meant: total subordination to French needs and purposes.”[84]
Imperialism abroad was matched by despotism at home, forced conscription
and crippling taxes. And now for the first time there was massive resistance.
First came the peasant counter-revolution in the western regions of Brittany
and the Vendée, which was crushed with great cruelty[85] with
the loss of about 250,000 lives, about ten times more than were claimed by the
guillotine. At about the same time the revolutionary army under Dumouriez was
defeated by the Austrians at Neerwinden. Dumouriez then changed sides, and it
was only the army’s refusal to co-operate that prevented him from marching on
Paris to restore the constitution of 1791 with Louis XVII as king.[86]
The peasant revolt in the Vendée was by far the most serious and
prolonged that the revolutionaries had to face, and it is significant that it
was fought under the banner of the restoration of the king and the Church. The
rebels wore “sacred hearts, crosses, and the white cockade of royalism. ‘Long
live the king and our good priests,’ was their cry. ‘We want our king, our
priests and the old regime.’”[87]
However, the counter-revolution in other parts of the country, and
especially among the bourgeoisie of such large cities as Marseilles,
Lyons and Bourdeaux, was less principled and therefore much less effective. As
one general reported of the Bordelais: “They appeared to me determined not to
involve themselves in Parisian affairs, but more determined still to retain
their liberty, their property, their opulence… They don’t want a king: they
want a republic, but a rich and tranquil republic.”[88]
This difference in motivation between different parts of the
counter-revolution, and the failure of many of its leaders to condemn the
revolution in toto and as such, and not just some of its wilder
excesses, doomed it to failure in the long term. As long as the revolutionaries
held the centre, and were able to use the methods of terror and mass
conscription to send large armies into the field against their enemies, the
advantage lay with them. And their position was strengthened still further by
the coup against the Girondist deputies carried out between May 31 and June 2,
1793.
“In July 1793,” writes Ridley, “a young Girondin woman, Charlotte
Corday, gained admission to Marat’s house by pretending that she wished to give
him a list of names of Girondins to be guillotined. She found him sitting as
usual in his bath to cure his skin disease, and she stabbed him to death.[89] She was
guillotined, and the Girondin party was suppressed.
“In Lyons, the Girondins had gained control
of the Freemasons’ lodges. In the summer of 1793 the Girondins there defied the
authority of the Jacobin government in Paris, and guillotined one of the local
Jacobin leaders. The Lyons Freemasons played a leading part in the rising
against the Paris Jacobins; but the Jacobins suppressed the revolt, and several
of the leading Girondin Freemasons of Lyons were guillotined.”[90]
And so the Revolution was frenziedly devouring its own children.[91] Or
rather, the Masons were devouring their own brothers; for the struggle between
the Girondists and the Montagnards was in fact, according to Lev Tikhomirov, a
struggle between different layers of Masonry.[92]
“However, in the period of the terror the majority of Masonic lodges were
closed. As Louis Blanc explains, a significant number of Masons, though
extremely liberal-minded, could still not, in accordance with their personal
interests, character and public position, sympathise with the incitement of the
maddened masses against the rich, to whom they themselves belonged. In the
hottest battle of the revolution it was those who split off into the highest
degrees who acted. The Masonic lodges were replaced by political clubs,
although in the political clubs, too, there began a sifting of the
revolutionaries into the more moderate and the extremists, so that quite a few
Masons perished on the scaffolds from the hands of their ‘brothers’. After the
overthrow of Robespierre on 9 Thermidor the Masonic lodges were again opened.”[93]
Now the Terror went into overdrive. The guillotine was used to eliminate
traitors, backsliders, suspects, speculators and “egoists”. “The spirit of
moderation,” declared Leclerc, needed to be expunged.[94]
On September 17 a comprehensive Law of Suspects was passed, which
empowered watch committees “to arrest anyone who ‘either by their conduct,
their contacts, their words or their writings, showed themselves to be
supporters of tyranny, of federalism, or to be enemies of liberty’, as well as
a number of more specific categories such as former nobles ‘who have not
constantly manifested their attachment to the revolution.’ Practically anybody
might fall foul of such a sweeping law. In the weeks following even everyday
speech acquired a sansculotte style. Those who refused to call each other
‘citizen’ rather than the deferential ‘Monsieur’, and to use the familiar form
of address (tutoiement), fell under automatic suspicion. Then on 29
September the Convention passed a General Maximum Law which imposed price
controls on a wide range of goods defined as of first necessity from food and
drink to fuel, clothing, and even tobacco. Those who sold them above the
maximum would be fined and placed on the list of suspects. The Revolutionary
Army was at last set on foot…”[95]
The Committee of Public Safety now took over control of the government,
subject only to the oversight of the Convention. This anti-democratic move was
said to be temporary and justified by the emergency situation. “It is
impossible,” said Saint-Just in the Committee’s name, “for revolutionary laws
to be executed if the government itself is not constituted in a revolutionary
way.”[96]
The revolutionary government now took terrible revenge on its defeated
enemies. On October 12 the Committee “moved a decree that Lyons should be
destroyed. Its very name was to disappear, except on a monument among the ruins
which would proclaim ‘Lyons made war on Liberty. Lyons is no more.’”[97] Lyons
was not completely destroyed, but whole ranges of houses were burnt and
thousands were guillotined and shot. “The effect… was designed to be a salutory
one. ‘What cement for the Revolution,’ gloated Achard in a letter to Paris.”[98]
In order to carry out its totalitarian programme of control of the whole
population, the government issued “certificates of civisme – identity
cards and testimonials of public reliability all in one. Originally only
foreigners had been required to carry these documents, but the Law of Suspects
made the requirement general [thereby showing that for the revolutionary
government all citizens were aliens]. Those without them were liable to arrest
and imprisonment; and in fact up to half a million people may have been
imprisoned as suspects of one sort or another during the Terror. Up to 10,000
may have died in custody, crowded into prisons never intended for such numbers,
or makeshift quarters no better equipped. These too deserve to be numbered
among the victims of the Terror, although not formally condemned. So do those
who were murdered or lynched without trial or official record during the
chaotic, violent autumn of 1793, when the supreme law of public safety seemed
to override more conventional and cumbersome procedures. Altogether the true
total of those who died under the Terror may have been twice the official
figure – around 30,000 people in just under a year… Nor is it true that most of
those killed in the Terror were members of the former ‘privileged orders’,
whatever the Revolution’s anti-aristocratic rhetoric might suggest. Of the
official death sentences passed, less than 9 per cent fell upon nobles, and
less than 7 per cent on the clergy. Disproportionately high as these figures
may have been relative to the numbers of these groups in the population as a
whole, they were not as high as the quarter of the Terror’s victims who came
from the middle classes. And the vast majority of those who lost their lives in
the proscriptions of 1793-4 – two-thirds of those officially condemned and
doubtless a far higher proportion of those who disappeared unofficially – were
ordinary people caught up in tragic circumstances not of their own making, who
made wrong choices in lethal times, when indifference itself counted as a
crime.”[99]
The incarnation of the revolution in this, its bloodiest phase was the
lawyer Maximilien Robespierre. Uniting in his own person the despotism of Louis
XIV and the freedom-worship of Rousseau, he said: “I am not a flatterer, a
conciliator, an orator, a protector of the people; I myself am the
people.” Again, uniting opposites in thoroughly Hegelian fashion, he said: “The
impulse behind the people’s revolutionary government is virtue and terror:
virtue without which terror is pernicious; terror without which virtue is
impotent… The government of the Revolution is the despotism of liberty over
tyranny…”[100]
As the Girondin Manon Roland said just before his execution: “Oh,
Liberty! How many crimes are committed in thy name!”[101]
The institution which suffered most in the years 1789-91 was
the Catholic Church. It lost its feudal dues in August and its lands in
October, 1789. In February, 1790 all monasteries and convents, except those
devoted to educational and charitable work, were dissolved, and new religious
vows were forbidden. The Assembly then “replaced the 135 bishops with 85, one
for each départment, and provided one curé for
every 6,000 inhabitants. Bishops were henceforth to be elected (by an
electorate including non-believers, Protestants and Jews) without reference to
Rome.”[102]
The weakened position of the Church encouraged the Protestants, and in
June 300 died in clashes between Catholics and Protestants in Nîmes.
Meanwhile, 150,000 papal subjects living in Avignon and the Comtat agitated for
integration with France. Pope Pius VI rejected this, and on March 29 he also
rejected the Declaration of the Rights of Man and all the religious legislation
so far passed in the Assembly. On July 12 a Civil Constitution for the Clergy
was passed, rationalising the Church’s organisation, putting all the clergy on
the State’s pay-roll and decreeing the election of the clergy by lay assemblies
who might included Protestants and Jews as well as Catholics. The Pope had
already, on July 10, pleaded with the King to veto the Civil Constitution, but
the king, advised by weak bishops, had already given his preliminary sanction.
With the Pope against the Civil Constitution, its acceptance or
rejection became a test of faith for Catholics. As opinion polarised, on
October 30 thirty bishops from the Assembly signed an Exposition of
Principles, explaining that, as Doyle writes, “they could not connive at
such radical changes without consulting the Church through either a council or
the Pope. Nevertheless patriots saw it as an incitement to disobey the law, and
local authorities, clamorously supported by Jacobin clubs, began to enforce it.
Bishops began to be expelled from suppressed sees; chapters were dissolved. In
October and early November the first departmental bishops were elected. But this
time the clergy did not meekly accept its fate. There were protests. ‘I can no
more’, declared the incumbent of the doomed see of Senez, ‘renounce the
spiritual contract which binds me to my Church than I can renounce the promises
of my baptism… I belong to my flock in life and in death… If God wishes to test
his own, the eighteenth century, like the first century, will have its
martyrs.’ The first elected bishop, the deputy Expilly, who was chosen by the
Finistère department, was refused confirmation by the archbishop of
Rennes. In Soissons, the bishop was dismissed by the departmental authorities
for denouncing the Civil Constitution. It was impossible to dismiss all the 104
priests of Nantes who did the same, but their salaries were stopped. Evidently there
was to be no peaceful transition to a new ecclesiastical order, and indignant
local authorities bombarded the Assembly with demands for action. Eventually,
on 27 November, action was taken. The deputies decided, after two days of
bitter debate, to dismiss at once all clerics who did not accept the new order
unequivocally. And to test this acceptance they imposed an oath. All beneficed
clergy were to swear after mass on the first available Sunday ‘to be faithful
to the nation, the King and the law, and to uphold with all their power the
constitution declared by the National Assembly and accepted by the king.’ All
who refused were to be replaced at once through the procedures laid down in the
Civil Constitution.
“The French Revolution had many turning-points: but the oath of the
clergy was, if not the greatest, unquestionably one of them. It was certainly
the Constituent Assembly’s most serious mistake. For the first time the
revolutionaries forced fellow citizens to choose; to declare themselves publicly
for or against the new order… With no word from Rome, the king sanctioned the
new decree of 26 December, so that oath-taking (or refusal) dominated public
life throughout the country in January and February 1791. The clergy in the
Assembly themselves set the pattern, in that they were completely divided. Only
109 took the oath, and only two bishops, one of them Talleyrand. As the
deadline approached on 4 January the Assembly was surrounded by crowds shouting
for nonjurors to be lynched; and the patriots, led unpersuasively by the
Protestant Barnave, used every possible argument and procedural ploy to sway
waverers. But there were none. And faced with this example from the majority of
clerical deputies, it is little wonder that so many clerics in the country at
large became refractories (as nonjurors were soon being called)… Above all,
there was a massive refusal of the oath throughout the west…In the end, about
54 per cent of the parish clergy took the oath. This suggests that well over a
third of the country was now prepared to signal that the Revolution had gone
far enough…”[103]
There is a bitter irony in these events. How often, since 1066 and the
Investitures Conflict, had Popes bent western kings to their evil will!
However, as present events now demonstrated, these were pyrrhic victories,
which, in weakening the Monarchy, ultimately weakened the Church, too, in that
Church and Monarchy are the two essential pillars of every Christian society.
Right up to the Reformation the Popes had failed to understand that attacks on
the throne were also attacks on the altar, and that an accusation of “royal
despotism” would almost invariably be linked with one of “episcopal despotism”.
The Counter-Reformation Popes were more careful to respect monarchical authority,
and Louis XIV’s abrupt about-turn from Gallicanism to Ultramontanism witnessed
to their continuing influence. But the constant political intrigues of the
papal society of the Jesuits, which made them a kind of “state within the
state”, led to their being banned by all the governments of Western Europe - a
severe blow from which the power of the Popes never fully recovered and which
was an important condition of the success of the revolution. The Masons and
even more radical groups like the “Illuminati” (see below) were quick to take
the place of the Jesuits as the main threat to established authority, while
using the Jesuits’ methods. And now, at the end of the eighteenth century, when
papism was in full retreat before the onslaught of enlightened despots like
Joseph II and revolutionary democrats like the French National Assembly, and
the Popes were desperately in need of the support of “Most Catholic Kings” such
as Louis XVI, they paid the price for centuries of papal anti-monarchism.
Indeed, since it was Papism that destroyed the Orthodox symphony of powers, and
thereby created the conditions for the revolution, there was some sense in
Catherine II’s suggestion that the European powers “embrace the Greek religion
to save themselves from this immoral, anarchic, wicked and diabolical plague…”[104]
In its second, Jacobin phase the revolution revealed its anti-Christian
essence most clearly. Thus at the funeral of Marat in July, 1793, the following
eulogy was given: “O heart of Marat, sacré coeur… can the
works and benevolence of the son of Mary be compared with those of the Friend
of the People and his apostles to the Jacobins of our holy Mountain?… Their
Jesus was but a false prophet but Marat is a god…”[105]
The revolution was in essence anti-Christian because it came to provide
a new faith instead of Christianity: the cult of the nation. Let us recall the
earlier stages in the rise of the cult of the nation: the oath to the nation
that Rousseau provided for Napoleon’s native Corsica; the speech of the Polish
marshal, Josef Pulaski at Bar in 1768, when he said: “We are to die so that the
motherland may live; for while we live the motherland is dying”[106]; the
birth of the American nation in 1776; the abortive Irish revolution of 1783;
the abortive Dutch revolution of 1785, which declared liberty the “inalienable
right” of every citizen, and whose “Leiden draft” declared: “the Sovereign is
no other than the vote of the people”.[107]
But these were merely dress-rehearsals for the full emergence of the new
nationalist faith, whose foundation stone, as we have seen, was the third of
the Rights of Man declared by the French National Assembly on August 26, 1789:
“The principle of all sovereignty lies in the nation. No body of men, and no
individual, can exercise authority which does not emanate directly therefrom.”
It should be understood that this was not simply an expression of
patriotism, but precisely a new faith to replace all existing faiths.
For “the nation, as Abbé Siéyès put it, recognized no interest
on earth above its own, and accepted no law or authority other than its own –
neither that of humanity at large nor of other nations”[108] – nor,
it goes without saying, of God. The nation therefore stood in the place of God;
in the strict sense of the word, it was an idol. So Hobsbawm rightly comments:
“’The people’ identified with ‘the nation’ was a revolutionary concept; more
revolutionary than the bourgeois-liberal programme which purported to express
it.”[109]
But what precisely was the nation, and how was it revealed? To this
question the most revolutionary of the philosophes and the prophet of
nationalism, Rousseau, had provided the answer. The nation, he said, is
revealed in the general will, which was not to be identified with the will of
any individual, such as the king, or group, such as a parliamentary majority,
but only in some spontaneous, mystical upswelling of emotion that carried all
before it and was not to be questioned or criticised by any rational
considerations. It was a “holy madness”, to use Lafayette’s phrase.[110]
“’He who would dare to undertake to establish a nation would have to
feel himself capable of altering, so to speak, human nature, to transform each
individual, who by his very nature is a unique and perfect whole, into a mere
part of a greater whole, from which this individual would in a sense receive
his life and his being,’ Rousseau had written. He understood that any polity,
however logical, simple, elegant, poetic or modern, would be inadequate to
replace the layered sacrality of something like the Crown of France and the
whole theological and mythical charge of the Catholic Church. Human emotions
needed something richer to feed on than a mere ‘system’ if they were to be
engaged. And engaged they must be, for if one removed religious control of
social behaviour and the monarch’s role as ultimate arbiter, the very
fount-head of civil sanction would dry up. Something had to be put in their
place. The question was ultimately how to induce people to be good in a godless
society.
“As it was the people themselves who gave the state its legitimacy, it
was they who had to be invested with divinity. The monarch would be replaced by
a disembodied sovereign in the shape of the nation, which all citizens must be
taught to ‘adore’. ‘It is education that must give to the souls of men the
national form, and so direct their thoughts and their tastes, that they will be
patriotic by inclination, by passion, by necessity,’ Rousseau explained. This
education included not only teaching but also sport and public ceremonies
designed to inculcate the desired values. ‘From the excitement caused by this
common emulation will be born that patriotic intoxication which alone can
elevate men above themselves, and without which liberty is no more than an
empty word and legislation but an illusion.’
“A precondition of this was the the total elimination of Christianity.
Being a sentimental person, Rousseau could not remain entirely unmoved by what
he saw as the ‘sublime’ core of Christianity. But the existence of a morally
independent religion alongside the civil institutions was bound to be
destructive. ‘Far from binding the hearts of the citizens to the state, it
detaches them from it, as from all earthly things,’ he writes: ‘I can think of
nothing more contrary to the social spirit.’ It forced on people ‘two sets of
laws, two leaders, two motherlands’, subjecting them to ‘contradictory duties’
and preventing them from being ‘both devout practitioners and good citizens’.
Christianity demanded self-denial and submission, but only to God, and not to
any creation of Man’s. A Christian’s soul could not be fused with the
‘collective soul’ of the nation, challenging the very basis of Rousseau’s
proposition. His assertion that ‘a man is virtuous when his particular will is
in accordance in every respect with the general will’, was heresy in Christian
terms, according to which virtue consists in doing the will of God. There was
no room for someone whose ultimate loyalty was to God in Rousseau’s model,
which substituted the nation for God.”[111]
Zamoyski continues: “Anthropologically visualized as a universal ideal
female, the nation kindled desire for selfless sacrifice in its cause, and that
was the great strength of the French revolution. ‘Since it appeared to be more
concerned with the regeneration of the human race than with reforming France,
it aroused feelings that no political revolutions had hitherto managed to
inspire,’ explained Tocqueville. ‘It inspired proselytism and gave birth to the
propagande,’ he continued, and, ‘like Islam, flooded the whole world
with its soldiers, its apostles and its martyrs.’”[112]
A
programme known as de-christianization was now launched. The calendar and
festivals of the old religion were replaced by those of the new, civic religion
of the nation. Thus July 14, August 10, January 21 (the day of the execution of
Louis XVI) and May 31 (the day of the establishment of the Jacobin tyranny)
were commanded to be celebrated as feast-days.
Bamber Gascoigne writes: “August 10th was the first
anniversary of the day on which the Paris mob had stormed the Tuileries and had
put an effective end to the monarchy. The occasion was celebrated with a
Festival of Regeneration, also known by the even more uninspiring name of
Festival of the Unity and Indivisibility of the Republic. Among the ruins of
the Bastille Jacques-Louis David had built a huge figure of a seated woman. She
was Mother Nature. From her breasts there spurted two jets of water, at which
delegates filled their cups and drank libations. Three months later there was a
Festival of Reason, in which an actress from the opera played the Goddess of
Reason and was enthroned in the cathedral of Notre-Dame – with the red bonnet
of Liberty on her head and a crucifix beneath one of her elegant feet.”[113]
All the churches in Paris were closed, and the royal tombs were
destroyed. Then there arrived in the Nièvre in September, 1793 the
representative Fouché, who “transformed it into a beacon of religious
terror. Fouché, himself a former priest, came from the Vendée,
where he had witnessed the ability of the clergy to inspire fanatical
resistance to the Revolution’s authority. Christianity, he concluded, could not
coexist in any form with the Revolution and, brushing aside what was left of
the ‘constitutional’ Church, he inaugurated a civic religion of his own
devising with a ‘Feast of Brutus’ on 22 September at which he denounced
‘religious sophistry’. Fouché particularly deplored clerical celibacy:
it set the clergy apart, and in any case made no contribution to society’s need
for children. Clerics who refused to marry were ordered to adopt and support
orphans or aged citizens. The French people, Fouché declared in a
manifesto published on 10 October, recognized no other cult but that of
universal morality; and although the exercise of all creeds was proclaimed to
be free and equal, none might henceforth be practised in public. Graveyards
should exhibit no religious symbols, and at the gate of each would be an
inscription Death is an eternal sleep. Thus began the movement known as
dechristianization. Soon afterwards Fouché moved on to Lyons; but during
his weeks in Nevers his work had been watched by Chaumette, visiting his native
town from Paris. He was to carry the idea back to the capital, where it was
energetically taken up by his colleagues at the commune.
“Other representatives on mission, meanwhile, had also taken to
attacking the outward manifestations of the Catholic religion. At Abbeville, on
the edge of priest-ridden Flanders, Dumont favoured forced public abjuration of
orders, preferably by constitutional clergy whose continued loyalty to the
Revolution could only now be proved by such gestures. On October 7 in Rheims,
Ruhl personally supervised the smashing of the phial holding the sacred oil of
Clovis used to anoint French kings. None of this was authorized by the
Convention: on the other hand the adoption on 5 October of a new republican
calendar marked a further stage in the divorce between the French State and any
sort of religion. Years would no longer be numbered from the birth of Christ,
but from the inauguration of the French Republic on 22 September 1792. Thus it was already the Year II. There would
be twelve thirty-day months with evocative, seasonal names; each month would
have three ten-day weeks (décades) ending in a rest-day (décadi).
Sundays therefore disappeared and could not be observed unless they coincided
with the less-frequent décadis. The introduction of the system at
this moment only encouraged representatives on mission to intensify their lead;
and dechristianization became an important feature of the Terror in all the
former centres of rebellion when they were brought to heel. Once launched it
was eminently democratic. Anybody could join in smashing images, vandalizing
churches (the very word was coined to describe this outburst of iconoclasm),
and theft of vestments to wear in blasphemous mock ceremonies. Those needing
pretexts could preach national necessity when they tore down bells or walked
off with plate that could be recast into guns or coinage. Such activities were
particular favourites among the Revolutionary Armies. The Parisian detachments
marching to Lyons left a trail of pillaged and closed churches, and smouldering
bonfires of ornaments, vestments, and holy pictures all along their route.
Other contributions took more organization, but Jacobin clubs and popular
societies, not to mention local authorities, were quite happy to orchestrate
festivals of reason, harmony, wisdom, and other such worthy attributes to
former churches; and to recruit parties of priests who, at climactic moments in
these ceremonies, would renounce their vows and declare themselves ready to
marry. If their choice fell on a former nun, so much the better.
“When Chaumetter returned from Nevers, the Paris Commune made
dechristianization its official policy. On 23 October the images of kings on
the front of Notre-Dame were ordered to be removed: the royal tombs at Saint-Denis
had already been emptied and desecrated by order of the Convention in August.
The word Saint began to be removed from street names, and busts of Marat
replaced religious statues. Again the Convention appeared to be encouraging the
trend when it decreed, on 20 October, that any priest (constitutional or
refractory) denounced for lack of civisme by six citizens would be
subject to deportation, and any previously sentenced to deportation but found
in France should be executed. Clerical dress was now forbidden in Paris, and on
7 November Gobel, the elected constitutional bishop, who had already sanctioned
clerical marriage for his clergy, came with eleven of them to the Convention
and ceremonially resigned his see. Removing the episcopal insignia, he put on a
cap of liberty and declared that the only religion of a free people should be
that of Liberty and Equality. In the next few days the handful of priests who
were deputies followed his example. Soon Grégoire, constitutional bishop
of Blois, was the only deputy left clinging to his priesthood and clerical
dress. The sections meanwhile were passing anti-clerical motions, and on 12
November that of Gravilliers, whose idol had so recently been Jacques Roux,
sent a deputation to the Convention draped in ‘ornaments from churches in their
district, spoils taken from the superstitious credulity of our forefathers and
repossessed by the reason of free men’ to announce that all churches in the
section had been closed. This display followed a great public ceremony held in
Notre-Dame, or the ‘Temple of Reason’, as it was now redesignated, on the
tenth. On this occasion relays of patriotic maidens in virginal white paraded
reverently before a temple of philosophy erected where the high altar had
stood. From it emerged, at the climax of the ceremony, a red-capped female
figure representing Liberty. Appreciatively described by an official recorder
of the scene as ‘a masterpiece of nature’, in daily life she was an actress;
but in her symbolic role she led the officials of the commune to the
Convention, where she received the fraternal embrace of the president and
secretaries.
“However carefully choreographed, there was not much dignity about these
posturings; and attacks on parish churches and their incumbents (who were
mostly now popularly elected) risked making the Revolution more enemies than
friends. Small-town and anti-religious Jacobin zeal, for example, provoked a
minor revolt in the Brie in the second week in December. To shouts of Long
live the Catholic Religion, we want our priests, we want the Mass on Sundays
and Holy Days, crowds of peasants sacked the local club. Several thousands
took up arms and joined the movement, and only a force of National Guards and
sansculottes from the Revolutionary Army restored order in a district whose
tranquillity was vital to the regular passage of food supplies to the capital
from southern Champagne. But even before this the Committee of Public Safety
was growing anxious about the counter-productive effects of dechristianization.
Robespierre in particular, who [following his teacher, Rousseau] believed that
religious faith was indispensable to orderly, civilized society, sounded the
alarm. On November 21 he denounced anti-religious excesses at the Jacobin club.
They smacked of more fanaticism than they extinguished.[114] The
people believed in a Supreme Being, he warned, whereas atheism was
aristocratic.[115]
At the same time he persuaded the Committee to circularize popular societies
warning them not to fan superstition and fanaticism by persecution. On 6
December, finally, the Convention agreed to reiterate the principle of
religious freedom in a decree which formally prohibited all violence or threats
against the ‘liberty of cults’. But by then it was too late. The example of
Paris had encouraged Jacobin zealots everywhere, and with the repression of
revolt in full swing and the role of priests in the Vendée particularly
notorious, the remaining trappings of religion were too tempting a target to
ignore. The commune’s response to Robespierre on 23 November had been to decree
the closing of all churches in the capital; and soon local authorities were
shutting them wholesale throughout the country. By the spring, churches were
open for public worship only in the remotest corners of France, such as the
Jura mountains. By then, perhaps 20,000 priests had been bullied into giving up
their status, and 6,000 had given their renunciation the ultimate confirmation
by marrying. In some areas, such as Provence, dechristianization only reached
its peak in March or April 1794."[116]
On October 31 the Girondists went to the guillotine. By the Law
of 14 Frumaire (4 December) extreme centralisation was decreed, heralding the
end of the Terror, but accelerating the Terror within the central
administration itself. In March it was the turn of the Hébertists; in
April – of the Dantonists. On March 27 the Revolutionary Army was disbanded. By
the end of April the commune had been purged.
Robespierre was still alive, preaching the new, revolutionary virtue and
religion. By the Decree of 18 Floréal (7 May) it was declared that the
French people recognised a Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul, and
that a cult worthy of the Supreme Being was the fulfilment of a man’s civic
duties. Thus the emphasis was still on man’s civic duties: religion had
no independent function outside the State, in accordance with the words of
Abbé Guillaume Raynal in 1780: “The State, it seems to me, is not made
for religion, but religion for the State.”[117]
It was the same with morality, which was now defined to include among
the highest virtues “the hatred of bad faith and tyranny, the punishment of
tyrants and traitors, help to the unhappy, respect for the weak, protection to
the oppressed, to do all the good possible to others and to be unjust to nobody.”[118]
On 20 Prairial (8 June), Robespierre moved that “the nation should
celebrate the Supreme Being. Thus every locality was given a month to make its
preparations. The fact that 8 June was also Whit Sunday may or may not have
been a coincidence; if not, it could have been conceived either as a challenge
or as an olive branch to Christianity. In the event little direction was given
to the localities on how to organize the festival. Some adopted the props of
all-too-recent festivals of reason, merely painting out old slogans with new
ones. Others used the opportunity to allow mass to be said publicly for the
first time in months. But in Paris the organization of the occasion was
entrusted to the experienced hands of the painter David, himself a member of
the Committee of General Security. He built an artificial mountain in the Champ
de Mars, surmounted by a tree of liberty, and thither a mass procession made
its way from the Tuileries. At its head marched the members of the Convention,
led by their president, who happened that week to be Robespierre. He used the
opportunity to deliver two more eulogies of virtue and republican religion,
pointedly ignoring, though not failing to notice, the smirks of his fellow
deputies at the posturings of this pseudo-Pope. Others found it no laughing
matter. ‘Look at the bugger,’ muttered Thuriot, an old associate of Danton.
‘It’s not enough for him to be master, he has to be God.’”[119]
Like the other gods of the revolution[120],
Robespierre did not survive its terror. On 22 Prairial (10 June, 1794),
witnesses and defending counsels were decreed to be no longer necessary in
trials – so no one was safe. On 9 Thermidor (27 June) Robespierre fell from
power. The next day, screaming in terror, he was executed.
While the fall of Robespierre marked the end of the most fanatical phase
in the revolution, normal life was not restored quickly. “On 18 September 1794,
the Convention had carried the drift of the Revolution since 1790 to a logical
conclusion when it finally renounced the constitutional Church. The Republic,
it decreed, would no longer pay the costs or wages of any cult – not that it
had been paying them in practice for a considerable time already. It meant the
end of state recognition for the Supreme Being, a cult too closely identified
with Robespierre. But above all it marked the abandonment of the Revolution’s
own creation, the constitutional Church. For the first time ever in France,
Church and State were now formally separated. To some this decree looked like a
return to dechristianization, and here and there in the provinces there were
renewed bursts of persecution against refractories. But most read it,
correctly, as an attempt to deflect the hostility of those still faithful to
the Church from the Republic. The natural corollary came with the decree of 21
February 1795 which proclaimed the freedom of all cults to worship as they
liked. The tone of the law was grudging, and it was introduced with much
gratuitous denigration of priestcraft and superstition. Religion was defined as
a private affair, and local authorities were forbidden to lend it any
recognition or support. All outward signs of religious affiliation in the form
of priestly dress, ceremonies, or church bells remained strictly forbidden. The
faithful would have to buy or rent their own places of worship and pay their
own priests or ministers…”[121]
The
French Revolution: (3) Babeuf and the Directory
Let us summarise the effects of the revolution so far. “Where the Church
was concerned,” writes Hampson, “the Civil Constitution of 1790 had the social
effect of a Reformation, in the sense that it deprived a wealthy corporate
institution of its autonomous position within the state. Politically, this was
the opposite of a Reformation, since it destroyed the basis of the Gallican
Church and made the French clergy dependent upon Rome.”[122]
“Nobles were never proscribed as such and their property was not
confiscated unless they went into exile or were condemned for political
offences. Some noble families suffered very heavy casualties during the Terror;
others survived without much difficulty. The ‘anti-feudal’ legislation of the
Constituent Assembly bore heavily on those who income was derived mainly from
manorial dues; those whose wealth came from their extensive acres may have
gained more from the abolition of tithes than they lost from increased
taxation. Some made profitable investments in church land which were the ‘best
buy’ of the revolution since massive inflation reduced to a nominal figure the
price paid by those who had opted to buy in instalments…Over the country as a
whole the proportion of land owned by the nobility was somewhat reduced by the
revolution but in most parts a substantial proportion of the landowners still
came from the nobility, and the land was the most important source of wealth
until well into the nineteenth century.”[123]
“The urban radicals whom the more radical – but nevertheless gentlemanly
– revolutionary leaders liked to eulogize as sans-culottes, fared badly… As an
observer reported in 1793, ‘That class has suffered badly; it took the
Bastille, was responsible for the tenth of August and so on… Hébert and
Marat, two of the most extreme of the radical journalists, agreed that the
sans-culottes were worse off than they had been in 1789. Soon, of course, all
this was going to change… but it never did.”[124]
“The revolution did not ‘give the
land to the peasants’. They already possessed about a quarter of it, although
most of them did not own enough to be self-sufficient. The Church lands were
mostly snapped up by the wealthier farmers or by outside speculators… The
prevailing economic theories persuaded the various assemblies to concentrate
very heavily on direct taxation, most of which fell on the land. Requisitioning
of food, horses and carts was borne exclusively by the peasants….
“Once again the revolution greatly increased the impact of the state on
the day-to-day life of the community. This was especially obvious where
religion was concerned.”[125]
After Thermidor and the execution of Robespierre, a new phase of the
Revolution began. In 1795 a committee of five, the Directory, was established.
Fearing coups from the royalist right as well as the Jacobin left, it continued
the slow torture of the Dauphin (Louis XVII), who died in prison on June 10.
“With the Directory,” writes Edmund Wilson, “the French Revolution had
passed into the period of reaction which was to make possible the domination of
Bonaparte. The great rising of the bourgeoisie, which, breaking out of the
feudal forms of the monarchy, dispossessing the nobility and the clergy, had
presented itself to society as a movement of liberation, had ended by
depositing the wealth in the hands of a relatively small number of people and
creating a new conflict of classes. With the reaction against the Terror, the
ideals of the Revolution were allowed to go by the board. The five politicians
of the Directory and the merchants and financiers allied with them were
speculating in confiscated property, profiteering in army supplies, recklessly
inflating the currency and gambling on the falling gold louis. And in the
meantime, during the winter of 1795-96, the working people of Paris were dying
of hunger and cold in the streets.”[126]
This situation led to attempts to overthrow the government, the most
significant of which was that of “Gracchus” Babeuf, who “rallied around him
those elements of the Revolution who were trying to insist on its original
aims. In his paper, The Tribune of the People, he denounced the new
constitution of 1795, which had abolished universal suffrage and imposed a high
property qualification. He demanded not merely political but also economic
equality. He declared that he would prefer civil war itself to ‘this horrible
concord which strangles the hungry’. But the men who had expropriated the
nobles and the Church remained loyal to the principle of property itself. The
Tribune of the People was stopped, and Babeuf and his associates were sent
to prison.
“While Babeuf was in jail, his seven-year-old daughter died of hunger.
He had managed to remain poor all his life. His popularity had been all with
the poor. His official posts had earned him only trouble. Now, as soon as he
was free again, he proceeded to found a political club, which opposed the
policies of the Directory and which came to be known as the Society of the
Equals. They demanded in a Manifesto of the Equals (not, however, at that time made public) that
there should be ‘no more individual property in land; the land belonged to no
one… We declare that we can no longer endure, with the enormous majority of
men, labor and sweat in the service and for the benefit of a small minority. It
is has now been long enough and too long that less than a million individuals
have been disposing of that which belongs to more than twenty millions of their
kind… Never has a vaster design been conceived or put into execution. Certain
men of genius, certain sages, have spoken of it from time to time in a low and
trembling voice. Not one of them has had the courage to tell the whole truth…
People of France! Open your eyes and your heart to the fullness of happiness.
Recognize and proclaim with us the Republic of Equals!’
“The Society of Equals was also suppressed; Bonaparte himself closed the
club. But, driven underground, they now plotted an insurrection; they proposed
to set up a new directory. And they drafted a constitution that provided for ‘a
great national community of goods’ and worked out with some precision the
mechanics of a planned society. The cities were to be deflaed and the
population distributed in villages. The State was to ‘seize upon the new-born
individual, watch over his early moments, guarantee the milk and care of his
mother and bring him to the maison nationale, where he was to acquire
the virtue and enlightenment of a true citizen.’ There was thus to be equal
education for all. All able-bodied persons were to work, and the work that was
unpleasant or arduous was to be accomplished by everybody’s taking turns. The
necessities of life were to be supplied by the government, and the people were
to eat at communal tables. The government was to control all foreign trade and
to pass on everything printed.
“In the meantime, the value of the paper money had depreciated almost to
zero. The Directory tried to save the situation by converting the currency into
land warrants, which were at a discount of eight-two per cent the day they were
issued; and there was a general belief on the part of the public that the government
had gone bankrupt. There were in Paris along some five hundred thousand people
in need of relief. The Babouvistes placarded the city with a manifesto…; they
declared that Nature had given to every man an equal right to the enjoyment of
every good, and it was the purpose of society to defend that right, that Nature
had imposed on every man the obligation to work, and that no one could escape
this obligation without committing a crime; that in ‘a true society’ there
would be neither rich nor poor; that the object of the Revolution had been to
destroy every inequality and to establish the well-being of all; that they
Revolution was therefore ‘not finished’, and that those who had done away with
the Constitution of 1793 were guilty of lese majesté against the
people…
“Babeuf’s ‘insurrectionary committee’ had agents in the army and the
police, and they were doing such effective work that the government tried to
send its troops out of Paris, and, when they refused to obey, disbanded them.
During the early days of May, 1796, on the eve of the projected uprising, the
Equals were betrayed by a stool pigeon and their leaders were arrested and put
in jail. The followers of Babeuf made an attempt to rally a sympathetic police
squadron, but were cut down by a new Battalion of the Guard which had been
pressed into service for the occasion.
“Babeuf was made a public example by being taken to Vendôme in a
cage – an indignity which not long before had filled the Parisians with furty
when the Austrians had inflicted it on a Frenchman…
“[At this trial] the vote, after much disagreement, went against Babeuf.
One of his sons had smuggled in to him a tin dagger made out of a candlestick,
and when he heard the verdict pronounced, he stabbed himself in the Roman
fashion, but only wounded himself horribly and did not die. The next morning
(May 27, 1797) he went to the guillotine. Of his followers thirty were executed
and many sentenced to penal servitude or deportation.”[127]
The
French Revolution: (4) Napoleon Bonaparte
Thus the revolution appeared to have lost its way, consumed in poverty,
corruption and mutual blood-letting. It was saved by a young soldier, Napoleon
Bonaparte, who was as sincerely faithful to the spirit of the revolution as
Cromwell had been. Madame de Stael called Robespierre on horseback After all,
he came from Corsica, which in 1755 had successfully rebelled from Genoa, and
for which Rousseau wrote one of his most seminal works, Project de
constitution pour la Corse, in 1765. But, like Cromwell (and Caesar), he
found that in order to save the republic he had to take control of it and rule
it like a king.
His chance came on 19 Brumaire (November 10), 1799, when he overthrew the Directory (he described
parliamentarism as “hot air”), and frightened the two elective assemblies into
submission. On December 13 a new constitution was proclaimed with Bonaparte as
the first of three Consuls with full executive powers. And on December 15 the
three Consuls declared: “Citizens, the Revolution is established upon its
original principles: it is consummated…”[128]
Paul Johnson writes, “the new First Consul
was far more powerful than Louis XIV, since he dominated the armed forces
directly in a country that was now organized as a military state. All the
ancient restraints on divine-right kingship – the Church, the aristocracy and
its resources, the courts, the cities and their charters, the universities and
their privileges, the guilds and their immunities – all had been swept away by
the Revolution, leaving France a legal blank on which Bonaparte could stamp the
irresistible force of his personality.”[129]
But, again like Caesar and Cromwell, he could never confess to being a
king in the traditional sense. Under him, in Davies’ phrase, “a pseudo-monarchy
headed pseudo-democratic institutions; and an efficient centralized
administration ran on a strange cocktail of legislative leftovers and bold
innovation.”[130]
So, as J.M. Roberts writes, while Napoleon reinstituted monarchy, “it was in no
sense a restoration. Indeed, he took care so to affront the exiled Bourbon
family that any reconciliation with it was inconceivable. He sought popular
approval for the empire in a plebiscite and got it.[131]
This was a monarchy Frenchmen had voted for; it rested on popular
sovereignty, that is, the Revolution. It assumed the consolidation of the
Revolution which the Consulate had already begun. All the great institutional
reforms of the 1790s were confirmed or at least left intact; there was no
disturbance of the land sales which had followed the confiscation of Church
property, no resurrection of the old corporations, no questioning of the
principle of equality before the law. Some measures were even taken further,
notably when each department was given an administrative head, the prefect, who
was in his powers something like one of the emergency emissaries of the Terror
(many former revolutionaries became prefects)…”[132]
Cromwell had eschewed the trappings and ceremonial of monarchy, but
Napoleon embraced them with avidity. The trend towards monarchy and hierarchy
was already evident elsewhere; and “earlier than is generally thought,” writes
Philip Mansel, “the First Consul Bonaparte aligned himself with this
monarchical trend, acquiring in succession a guard (1799), a palace (1800),
court receptions and costumes (1800-02), a household (1802-04), a dynasty
(1804), finally a nobility (1808)… The proclamation of the empire in May 1804,
the establishment of the households of the Emperor, the Empress and the Imperial
Family in July, the coronation by the pope in December of that year, were
confirmations of an existing monarchical reality.”[133]
Moreover, Napoleon spread monarchy throughout Europe. In the wake of his
conquests, and excluding the direct annexations to the French Empire, the
kingdoms and Grand Duchies of Italy, Venice, Rome, Naples, Lucca, Dubrovnik,
Holland, Mainz, Bavaria, Württemburg, Saxony, Baden, Hesse-Darmstadt,
Westphalia and Spain were all established or re-established with still greater
monarchical power - and all ruled by Napoleon’s relations by blood or marriage.
According to Stendhal, Napoleon’s court “totally corrupted” him “and exalted
his amour propre to the state of a disease… He was on the point of
making Europe one vast monarchy.”[134]
“As one of his secretaries Baron Meneval wrote, he saw himself as ‘the
pillar of royalty in Europe’. On January 18th, 1813, he wrote to his
brother Jerome that his enemies, by appealing to popular feeling, represented
‘upheavals and revolutions… pernicious doctrines.’ In Napoleon’s opinion his
fellow monarchs were traitors to ‘their own cause’ when in 1813 they began to
desert the French Empire, or in 1814 refused to accept his territorial terms
for peace…”[135]
Jocelyn Hunt writes: “Kings before 1791 were said to be absolute but
were limited by all kinds of constraints and controls. The Church had an almost
autonomous status. Bonaparte ensured that the Church was merely a branch of the
civil service. Kings were anointed by the Church, and thus owed their authority
to God: Bonaparte took power through his own strength, camouflaged as ‘the
General Will’ which, as Correlli Barnett acidly remarks, ‘became synonymous
with General Bonaparte’.[136]
Indeed, when he became emperor in 1804, he crowned himself...
“The First Consul’s choice of ministers was a far more personal one than
had been possible for the kings of France. Bonaparte established a system of
meeting his ministers individually, in order to give his instructions. In the
same way, Bonaparte chose which ‘ordinary’ citizens he would consult; kings of
France had mechanisms for consulting ‘the people’ but these had fallen into
disuse and thus, when the Estates General met in 1789, the effect was
revolutionary. Bonaparte’s legislative body was, until 1814, submissive and
compliant.…
“Police control and limitations on personal freedom had been a focus of
condemnation by the Philosophes before the Revolution, but had not been
entirely efficient: a whole industry of importing and distributing banned texts
had flourished in the 1770s and 1780s. Bonaparte’s police were more thorough,
and so swingeing were the penalties that self-censorship rapidly became the
safest path for a newspaper to take. Bonaparte closed down sixty of the
seventy-three newspapers in Paris in January, 1800, and had a weekly summary
prepared of all printed material, but he was soon able to tell his Chief of
Police, Fouché, ‘They only print what I want them to.’[137] In the
same way, the hated lettres de cachet appear limited and inefficient
when compared to Bonaparte’s and Fouché’s record of police spies, trials
without jury and imprisonment without trial. Bonaparte’s brief experience as a
Jacobin leader in Ajaccio had taught him how to recognise, and deal with,
potential opponents.[138]
“The judiciary had stood apart from the kings of the ancien
régime: while the King was nominally the supreme Judge, the training
of lawyers and judges had been a matter for the Parlements, with their inherent
privileges and mechanisms. The Parlements decided whether the King’s laws were
acceptable within the fundamental laws of France. Under the Consulate, there
were no such constraints on the legislator. The judges were his appointees, and
held office entirely at his pleasure; the courts disposed of those who opposed
or questioned the government, far more rapidly that had been possible in the
reign of Louis XVI. Imprisonment and deportation became regularly used
instruments of control under Bonaparte.
“Kings of France were fathers to their people and had a sense of duty
and service. Bonaparte, too, believed that he was essential to the good and
glory of France, but was able to make his own decisions about what constituted
the good of France in a way which was not open to the king. Finally, while the
monarchy of France was hereditary and permanent, and the position of First
Consul was supposed to be held for ten years, Bonaparte’s strength was
demonstrated when he changed his own constitution, first to give him the role
for life and then to become a hereditary monarch. All in all, no monarch of the
ancien régime had anything approaching the power which Bonaparte
had been permitted to take for himself…
“When a Royalist bomb plot was uncovered in December, 1800, Bonaparte
seized the opportunity to blame it on the Jacobins, and many were guillotined,
with over a hundred more being exiled or imprisoned. The regime of the Terror
had operated in similar ways to remove large numbers of potential or actual
opponents. Press censorship and the use of police spies ensured that
anti-government opinions were not publicly aired. The Declaration of the Rights
of Man had guaranteed freedom of expression; but this freedom had already been
eroded before Bonaparte’s coup. The Terror had seen both moral and political
censorship, and the Directory had on several occasions exercised its
constitutional right to censor the press. Bonaparte appears merely to have been
more efficient…
“Bonaparte certainly held power without consulting the French people; he
took away many of the freedoms they had been guaranteed in 1789; he taxed them
more heavily than they had been taxed before. [In 1803 he wrote:] ‘I haven’t
been able to understand yet what good there is in an opposition. Whatever it
may say, its only result is to diminish the prestige of authority in the eyes
of the people’.”[139]
In 1804, he even declared himself emperor with the name Napoleon, after
which Beethoven tore out the title-page of his Eroica symphony,
which had been dedicated to him, and said: “So he too is nothing but a man. Now
he also will trample all human rights underfoot, and only pander to his own
ambition; he will place himself above everyone else and become a tyrant…”[140] As
Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: “Absolute government found huge scope for its
rebirth [in] that man who was to be both the consummator and the nemesis of the
Revolution.”[141]
So Napoleon was undoubtedly a despot, but a despot who could claim many
precedents for his despotism in the behaviour of the Jacobins and Directory.
And if he was not faithful to the forms of the revolution in its early phase,
replacing democracy (of a despotic kind) with monarchy (of a populist kind), he
nevertheless remained faithful to its spirit.
And what was that spirit? On the one hand, the principle that nobody and
nothing should be independent of the State – in other words, the principle of
totalitarianism. And on the other, the principle that the Nation was the
supreme value, and serving and dying for the Nation the supreme glory.
And yet “at bottom,” as Johnson notes, “Bonaparte despised the French,
or perhaps it would be more exact to say the Parisians, the heart of the
‘political nation’. He thought of them, on the basis of his experience during
the various phases of the Revolution, as essentially frivolous.”[142] The
truth is, therefore, that it was neither the State nor the Nation that
Bonaparte exalted above all, – although he greatly increased the worship of
both State and Nation in subsequent European history, – but himself.
So the spirit that truly reigned in the Napoleonic era can most
accurately be described as the spirit of the man-god, of the Antichrist,
of whom Bonaparte himself, as the Russian Holy Synod quite rightly said, was
the incarnation and forerunner. This antichristian quality is most clearly
captured in Madame De Staël’s characterization: “I had the disturbing
feeling that no emotion of the heart could ever reach him. He regards a human
being like a fact or a thing, never as an equal person like himself. He neither
hates nor loves… The force of his will resides in the imperturbable
calculations of his egotism. He is a chess-master whose opponents happen to be
the rest of humanity… Neither pity nor attraction, nor religion nor attachment
would ever divert him from his ends… I felt in his soul cold steel, I felt in
his mind a deep irony against which nothing great or good, even his own
destiny, was proof; for he despised the nation which he intended to govern, and
no spark of enthusiasm was mingled with his desire to astound the human race.”[143]
Napoleon
and Catholicism
The Revolution had already swept away all the complex structures of
feudalism, thereby preparing the way for the totalitarian state. But Napoleon
went further. Thus in addition to the measures discussed above, he abolished
trade unions, introduced a standardised system of weights and measures, and a
standardised system of education and legislation, the famous Code
Napoléon. Everything, from religion and charity to economics and the
government of friendly sister-republics, such as Holland, had to be controlled
from the centre. And the centre was Napoleon.
Napoleon’s attitude towards religion was on the one hand respectful and
on the other hand manipulative and utilitarian. His respectfulness is revealed
in the following remark: “There are only two forces in the world: the sword and
the spirit; by spirit I mean the civil and religious institutions; in the long
run the sword is always defeated by the spirit.”[144] On the
other hand, his essentially unbelieving, utilitarian attitude is revealed in
the following: “I see in religion not the mystery of the Incarnation but the
mystery of order in society”.[145] “What
is it that makes the poor man take it for granted that ten chimneys smoke in my
palace while he dies of cold – that I have ten changes of raiment in my
wardrobe while he is naked – that on my table at each meal there is enough to
sustain a family for a week? It is
religion, which says to him that in another life I shall be his equal, indeed
that he has a better chance of being happy there than I have.”[146]
In other words, religion was powerful, and as such had to be respected.
But it was powerful not because it was true, but because it was a – perhaps the
– major means of establishing order in society. More particularly, it was the
major means of establishing obedience to his rule – which is why he
issued an Imperial Catechism whose purpose was to “bind by religious sanctions
the conscience of the people to the august person of the Emperor”[147]:
A: Because God… has made him the
agent of His power on earth. Thus it is that to honour and serve our Emperor is
to honour and serve God Himself.[148]
Napoleon, writes Doyle, “never made the mistake of underestimating
either the power of religion or the resilience of the Church. Under orders in
the spring of 1796 to march on Rome to avenge the murder by a Roman mob of a
French envoy, he was confronted by a Spanish emissary from the pontiff. ’I told
him [the Spaniard reported], if you people take it into your heads to make the
pope say the slightest thing against dogma or anything touching on it, you are
deceiving yourselves, for he will never do it. You might, in revenge, sack,
burn and destroy Rome, St. Peter’s etc. but religion will remain standing in
spite of your attacks. If all you wish is that the pope urge peace in general,
and obedience to legitimate power, he will willingly do it. He appeared to me
captivated by this reasoning…’ Certainly he continued while in Italy to treat
the Pope with more restraint than the Directory had ordered: and when, early
the next year, the Cispadane Republic was established in territories largely
taken from the Holy See, he advised its founders that: ‘Everything is to be
done by degrees and with gentleness. Religion is to be treated like property.’
Devoid of any personal faith, in Egypt he even made parade of following Islam
in the conviction that it would strengthen French rule. By the time he returned
to Europe, it was clear that Pope Pius VI would not after all be the last…
“This approach bore one important fruit: in his Christmas sermon for
1797 the new Pope, Pius VII, declared that Christianity was not incompatible
with democracy – a very major concession to the revolution that later Popes
would take back.
“On his second entry into Milan, in June 1800, he convoked the city’s
clergy to the great cathedral, and declared, even before Marengo was fought:
‘It is my firm intention that the Christian, Catholic and Roman religion shall
be preserved in its entirety, that it shall be publicly performed… No society
can exist without morality; there is no good morality without religion. It is
religion alone, therefore, that gives to the State a firm and durable support…’”[149]
Religious toleration was both in accordance with the ideals of democracy
and politically expedient. Thus to the same clergy convocation he said: “The
people is sovereign; if it wants religion, respect its will.” And to his own
Council of State he said: “My policy is to govern men as the majority wish.
That, I believe, is the way to recognize the sovereignty of the people. It was…
by turning Muslim that I gained a hold in Egypt, by turning ultramontane that I
won over people in Italy. If I were governing Jews, I should rebuild Solomon’s
temple.”[150].
It is in this astonishingly cynical attitude to religion that Napoleon
reveals his modernity. It is what made him perhaps the closest forerunner to
the Antichrist that had yet appeared on the stage of world history, and closer
even, in some ways, than Lenin or Stalin. For the Antichrist will not – at
first – persecute religion; he will rather try to be the champion of all
religions – in order to subdue them all to his will. He will very likely
be an ecumenist as Napoleon was. And he will rebuild Solomon’s temple…
Napoleon’s first task in the religious sphere was to heal the breach
between the Constitutional Church, which had accepted the revolution, and the
non-jurors, who had rejected it. Only the non-jurors were recognised by the
Pope, so an agreement had to be reached with Rome. Finally, on July 15, 1801, a
Concordat was signed.
“This document,” writes Cronin, “opens with a preamble describing Roman
Catholicism as ‘the religion of the great majority of the French people’ and
the religion professed by the consuls. Worship was to be free and public. The
Pope, in agreement with the Government, was to re-map dioceses in such a way as
to reduce their number by more than half to sixty. The holders of bishoprics
were to resign and if they declined to do so, were to be replaced by the Pope.
The First Consul was to appoint new bishops; the Pope was to invest them. The
Government was to place at the disposal of bishops all the un-nationalized
churches necessary for worship, and to pay bishops and curés a suitable
salary.
“The Concordat was an up-to-date version of the old Concordat, which had
regulated the Church in France for almost 300 years. But it was less Gallican,
that is, it gave the French hierarchy less autonomy. Napoleon conceded to the
Pope not only the power of investing bishops, which he had always enjoyed, but
the right, in certain circumstances, to depose them, which was something new.
Napoleon did this in order to be able to effect a clean sweep of bishops.
“Napoleon did not discuss the Concordat beforehand with his Council of
State. When he did show it to them they criticized it as insufficiently
Gallican. The assemblies, they predicted, would never make it law unless
certain riders were added. Finally seventy ‘organic articles’ were drawn up and
added to the Concordat. For example, all bulls from Rome were to be subject to
the Government’s placet, one of which asserted that the Pope must abide
by the decisions of an ecumenical council…”[151]
In April, 1802, Napoleon reopened the churches in France, which proved
to be one of his most popular measures, and it enabled him to enlist the Church
in support of his government – as did, of course, his coronation by the Pope.
Moreover, notes Johnson, “by making peace with the Church, he prepared the way
for a reconciliation with the old landowners and aristocrats who had been
driven into exile by the Revolution, and whom he wanted back to provide further
legitimacy to his regime.”[152]
“But even while seeking the Church’s support,” writes Cronin, “Napoleon
kept firmly to the principle that the temporal and spiritual are two separate
realms, and had to be kept separate in France. He might easily have used his
growing authority to subordinate the Church to the State, but although he was
occasionally tempted to do so, he quickly drew back… Equally, Napoleon
refrained from subordinating the State to the Church. When bishops urged him to
shut all shops and cabarets on Sundays so that the faithful should not be
enticed from Mass, Napoleon replied: ‘The curé’s power resides in
exhortations from the pulpit and in the confessional; police spies and prisons
are bad ways of trying to restore religious practices.’”[153]
However, while Napoleon wanted the Church to flourish, he was too
fundamentally irreligious to allow it to escape the general control of the
State. This was made abundantly clear at his coronation in 1804, when instead
of allowing the Pope to crown him, he took the crown from his hands and crowned
himself! “For the pope’s purposes,” he said to Cardinal Fesch, “I am
Charlemagne… I therefore expect the pope to accommodate his conduct to my
requirements. If he behaves well I shall make no outward changes; if not, I
shall reduce him to the status of bishop of Rome…”[154] Not
for nothing did Napoleon say: “If I were not me, I would like to be Gregory VII.” [155] Gregory
had secularised the papacy by making it into a secular kingdom. Napoleon had
done the same from the opposite direction…
Again, he appointed a Minister of Religions to solve the day-to-day
problems of the Church, and fixed the salary of curés at 500 francs.
Then, in 1809, he occupied Rome and the Papal States and removed Pius from his
position as ruler in exchange for a handsome salary. “Our Lord Jesus Christ,”
he said, “although a descendant of David, did not want an earthly kingdom…”
Pius then excommunicated Napoleon for his “blasphemy” and refused to invest his
nominees to vacant bishoprics. Napoleon had still not tamed the rebellious
priest by the time of his downfall…[156]
Monsieur Emery, the director of Saint-Sulpice, defended the Pope,
reminding Napoleon “that God had given the Pope spiritual power over all
Christians. ‘But not temporal power,’ objected Napoleon. ‘Charlemagne gave him
that, and I, as Charlemagne’s successor, intended to relieve him of it. What do
you think of that, Monsieur Emery?’ ‘Sire, exactly what Bossuet thought. In his
Declaration du clergé de France he says that he congratulates not
only the Roman Church but the Universal Church on the Pope’s temporal
sovereignty because, being independent, he can more easily exercise his
functions as father of all the faithful.’ Napoleon replied that what was true
for Bossuet’s day did not apply in 1811, when western Europe was ruled by one
man, not disputed by several”.[157]
Thus in France, as in England, the established Church survived the
Revolution. The restoration of the one-man-rule went hand-in-hand with the
restoration of the Church, if not to a position of independence, still less
“symphony” with the State, at any rate of greater influence. In the longer
term, however, the Catholic Church’s authority and influence continued to
decline…
With regard to the Nation, Napoleon managed to persuade his
fellow-countrymen that everything he did was for the glory and honour of
France, and that nothing was more important than the glory and honour of
France. And so while his despotism angered some Frenchmen, the tickling of
their pride was ample compensation, and enabled them reconcile themselves with
the loss of their freedom. “As Frenchmen accorded more and more weight to
Napoleon’s wishes, so the notion of honour came to the fore in the French
Republic: honour and its sister concept, glory, patriotism à outrance
and the chivalry that had made Napoleon crown Josephine…”[158]
If the nation was the new Church, and Napoleon its new Christ, the
revolution itself was the Holy Spirit. It blew where it wished, overthrowing
kings, liberating subject peoples and making them into “real” nations. This
liberation of nations was conceived as being a democratic, egalitarian process;
it by no means implied the superiority of any one nation over the others, which
would simply be a repetition, on the collective level, of the despotism that
the revolution had come to destroy. The religion of the French revolution was a
universalist religion based on equal rights for all men and all nations. It was
believed that once the kings had been removed, the general will of each nation
would reveal itself, spreading peace and harmony not only within, but also
between, nations. Thus “sooner or later,” said Mirabeau to the National
Assembly, “the influence of a nation that… has reduced the art of living to the
simple notions of liberty and equality – notions endowed with irresistible
charm for the human heart, and propagated in all the countries of the world –
the influence of such a nation will undoubtedly conquer the whole of Europe for
Truth, Moderation and Justice, not immediately perhaps, not in a single day…”[159]
But it was not long before such noble sentiments were being transformed
into a purely pagan pride. “’You are, among the nations, what Hercules was
amongst the heroes,’ Robespierre assured his countrymen. ‘Nature has made you
sturdy and powerful; your strength matches your virtue and your cause is that
of the gods.’ France was unique in her destiny, she was La Grande Nation,
and all interests were necessarily subordinate to hers. Her service was the highest
calling, since it naturally benefited mankind.”[160]
Soon it became evident to other nations, whether those bordering France
or her overseas colonies, that the French believed not so much in the Nation
(i.e. any and every nation) as the Nation (one particular nation, the
only truly Great Nation) – which could only be France. Thus in 1802
Napoleon himself said: “Never will the French Nation give chains to men whom it
has once recognized as free.”[161] And
yet in the very same year, when the former French colony of Haiti became the
first country to declare its freedom in the wake of the revolution, Napoleon
tried to reintroduce slavery there, and his troops were defeated by black
soldiers singing the Marseillaise...[162]
And that was only the beginning. In the next thirteen years Napoleon
created a swathe of suffering and destruction throughout Europe from Lisbon to
Moscow that had not been seen since the invasions of the Huns and the Goths. In
retrospect, the seemingly irrational and chaotic system of old Europe, whereby
kings could buy and sell territories to which they were quite unrelated by
birth or upbringing, turned out to have kept the peace far better than the
system of more clearly defined, homogeneous nation-states that emerged as a
result of the Napoleonic wars. This is not to say, of course, that there were
no wars under the old system. But they tended to be short in duration, with
relatively few casualties, which were mainly confined to the warrior class, and
they were very quickly patched up by some redistribution of territories among
the monarchs. By contrast, the revolutionary wars that began after 1792 were
more like the religious wars of pre-1648 vintage: much bloodier and crueller,
involving far greater casualties among the civilian populations.[163]
Moreover, they never came to a real end, since the losers felt bound to recover
the territories lost and avenge the wounds inflicted on their national or
regional pride. After all, if the people, and not the king, was now sovereign,
victory in war had to be won over the people (or rather, the “enemies” of “the
people”) as well as the king. Thus as Napoleon exported the ideals of Freedom,
Equality and Fraternity into neighbouring countries, their freedom was
destroyed, their equality with their “brothers” who had “liberated” them was
jettisoned, and the dream of universal brotherhood became the nightmare of
universal war. For “abroad, liberty simply meant French rule.”[164]
How did the internationalist dream turn into a nationalist nightmare?
The problem was partly a conceptual one: it turned out to be notoriously
difficult to define what “the nation” was, by what criteria it should be
defined (territory? religion? blood? language?). Revolutionary definitions of
who was a “patriot” – that is, the true member of the nation - invariably meant
defining large sections of the population who did not accept this definition or
did not come under it as being “aliens” or “traitors” or “enemies of the
people”.
But the problem went deeper: even when a certain degree of unanimity had
been achieved in the definition of the nation, - as Napoleon achieved it for
France, for example, in the period 1800-1813, - there were now no accepted
limits on the national will, no authority higher than the nation itself. This
inevitably resulted in nationalism in the evil sense of the word that has
become so tragically familiar to us in twentieth-century fascism – not a
natural pride in one’s own nation and its achievements, but the exaltation of
the nation to the level of divinity, and of faith in the nation to the level of
the true faith, the defence of which justified any and every sacrifice of self
and others. If in “Dark Age” (i.e. Orthodox) and Medieval (i.e. Catholic)
Europe, men had seen in the Church a higher, supranational authority which
arranged “Truces of God” and served, at least in principle, as a higher court
of appeal to which kings and nations submitted, this was now finally swept away
by article three of the Rights of Man, which pitted the “general wills” of an
ever-increasing number of sovereign nations against each other in apparently
endless and irreconcilable hostility.
Unless, that is, they all recognized France, the revolutionary nation par
excellence, as their true nation. And there were some who did this; Thomas
Jefferson, for example, American ambassador to Paris, said: “Every man has two
countries – his own, and France.” Others, while not recognizing France as their
own nation, nevertheless welcomed the conquering French armies into their own
land Thus as late as 1806 the German philosopher Hegel called Napoleon “that
world spirit” and hoped that he would defeat his opponents: “Everyone prays for
the success of the French army”. Such a substitution of loyalty to the
messianic revolutionary nation of the time rather than one’s own was to
manifest itself again in the twentieth century, when millions of people around
the world betrayed their own country for the sake of the greater glory of the
Soviet Union…
However, as captivation turned to captivity, pious internationalism (or
French messianism) turned into violent xenophobia, and enthusiasm into
disillusion. Among the nations that had been “forced to be free” by the French,
only the Poles (conveniently protected by Germany from French invasion, and
needing French support against Russia) remained faithful to the Napoleonic
vision.
Doyle writes: “An exuberant, uncompromising nationalism lay behind
France’s revolutionary expansion in the 1790s: but when the French found, after
this first impact of a nation in arms on its neighbours, was that the
neighbours responded in kind. They found that the doctrine of the sovereignty
of the nation, proclaimed by them at the outset of the Revolution in 1789,
could be turned against them by other peoples claiming their own national
sovereignty. In states long united by custom and language, such as the Dutch
Republic, all the French example did was to reinforce patriotic sentiments
already strong. In areas never before united, like Italy, it created a powerful
national sentiment for the first time by showing that archaic barriers and
divisions could be swept away. The first Italian nationalists placed their
hopes in French power to secure their ends, but from the start their attitude
was double-edged. ‘Italy,’ declared the winning entry for an essay competition
on the best form of Italian government, sponsored by the new French regime in
Milan in 1796, ‘has almost always been the patrimony of foreigners who, under
the pretext of protecting us, have consistently violated our rights, and, while
giving us flags and fine-sounding names, have made themselves masters of our
estate. France, Germany and Spain have held lordship over us in turn… it is
therefore best to provide… the sort of government capable of opposing the
maximum of resistance to invasion.’ The tragedy for nationalistic Italian
Jacobins was that, when popular revulsion against the French invaders swept the
peninsula in 1798 and 1799, they found themselves identified with the hated
foreigners. Elsewhere, peoples and intellectual nationalists found themselves
more at one; and not the least of the reasons why France’s most inveterate
enemies were able to resist her successfully was the strength of volunteering.
An Austrian call for volunteers against the French produced 150,000 men in
1809. Three years later the Russians were able to supplement their normal armed
forces with over 420,000 more or less willing recruits to drive out the alien
invader. Only nationalism could successfully fight nationalism: and when it
did, as Clausewitz… saw, it would be a fight to the death.”[165]
Again, as Hobsbawm notes, the Anglo-French conflict had “a persistence
and stubbornness unlike any other. Neither side was really – a rare thing in
those days, though a common one today – prepared to settle for less than total
victory”.[166]
The main legacy of the revolution, therefore, was total war. War between
classes, war between nations, war between religions. Such was the “fraternity” the revolution of
the revolution…
The
Jews and the Revolution
Of all the nationalisms stirred up by the
revolution, the most important was that of the Jews. In fact, it was the French
revolution that gave the Jews the opportunity to burst through into the
forefront of world politics for the first time since the fall of Jerusalem in
70 A.D. There were 39,000 of them in France in 1789; most (half according to
one estimate, nine-tenths according to another[167])
were Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim living in Alsace and Lorraine, which France
had acquired under the terms of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.
“It is important,” writes Nesta Webster,
“to distinguish between these two races of Jews [the Ashkenazi and the
Sephardim] in discussing the question of Jewish emancipation at the time of the
Revolution. For whilst the Sephardim had shown themselves good citizens and
were therefore subject to no persecutions, the Ashkenazim by their extortionate
usury and oppressions had made themselves detested by the people, so that
rigorous laws were enforced to restrain their rapacity. The discussions that
raged in the National Assembly on the subject of the Jewish question related
therefore mainly to the Jews of Alsace.”[168]
The eighteenth century had already witnessed some important changes in
the relationship between the State and Jewry. In England, the Jews had achieved
emancipation de facto, if not de jure. This was helped by the
small number of Jews in Britain, and the non-ideological, approach of the
British government.
It was a different matter on the continent, where a more ideological
approach prevailed. In 1782 the Masonic Austrian Emperor Joseph II published
his Toleranzpatent, whose purpose was that “all Our subjects without
distinction of nationality and religion, once they have been admitted and
tolerated in our States, shall participate in common in public welfare,… shall
enjoy legal freedom, and encounter no obstacles to any honest way of gaining
their livelihood and of increasing general industriousness… Existing laws
pertaining to the Jewish nation… are not always compatible with these Our most
gracious intentions.” Most restrictions on the Jews were removed, but these new
freedoms applied only to the “privileged Jew” – that is, the Jew whom the State
found “useful” in some way – and not to the “foreign Jew”. Moreover, even
privileged Jews were not granted the right of full citizenship and craft
mastership.[169]
For Joseph wanted to grant tolerance to the Jews, but not full equality.
As for France, “already, in 1784, the Jews of Bordeaux had been accorded
further concessions by Louis XVI; in 1776 all Portuguese Jews had been given
religious liberty and the permission to inhabit all parts of the kingdom. The
decree of January 28, 1790, conferring on the Jews of Bordeaux the rights of
French citizens, put the finishing touch to this scheme of liberation. [The
Sephardic Jews of South-West France and papal Avignon, who were already more
assimilated than their Ashkenazi co-religionists in Alsace, were given full
citizenship in July, 1790.] But the
proposal to extend this privilege to the Jews of Alsace evoked a storm of
controversy in the Assembly and also violent insurrections amongst the Alsace
peasants.”[170]
In their first debate on the subject, on September 28, 1789, they made a
further important distinction between the nation and the individuals
constituting the nation. Thus Stanislas Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre argued that
“there cannot be a nation within a nation”, so “the Jews should be denied
everything as a nation but granted everything as individuals.”[171] A
separate nation of the Jews could not be allowed to exist within France.
For “virtually all – moderates no less than radicals, Dantonists no less than
Robespierrists, Christians as well as deists, pantheists, and atheists – held
that equality of status in the state they were in their various ways intent on
establishing was bound up of necessity with the elimination of all groups,
classes, or corporations intermediate (and therefore mediating) between the
state itself and the citizen.”[172]
Vital writes: “The immediate issue before the Assembly was the admission
of certain semi-pariah classes – among them actors and public executioners – to
what came to be termed ‘active citizenship’. It was soon apparent, however,
that the issues presented by the Jews were very different. It was apparent,
too, that it would make no better sense to examine the Jews’ case in tandem
with that of the Protestants. The latter, like the Jews, were non-Catholics,
but their national identity was not in doubt, nor, therefore, their
right to the new liberties being decreed for all. Whatever else they were, they
were Frenchmen. No one in the National Assembly thought otherwise. But were the
Jews Frenchmen? If they were not, could they become citizens? The contention of
the lead speaker in the debate, Count Stanislaw de Clermont-Tonnerre, was that
the argument for granting them full rights of citizenship needed to be founded
on the most general principles. Religion was a private affair. The law of the
state need not and ought not to impinge upon it. So long as religious
obligations were compatible with the law of the state and contravened it in no
particular it was wrong to deprive a person, whose conscience required him to
assume such religious obligations, of those rights which it was the duty of all
citizens qua citizens to assume. One either imposed a national religion
by main force, so erasing the relevant clause of the Declaration of the Rights
of Man and the Citizen to which all now subscribed. Or else one allowed
everyone the freedom to profess the religious opinion of his choice. Mere tolerance
was unacceptable. ‘The system of tolerance, coupled.. to degrading
distinctions, is so vicious in itself, that he who is compelled to tolerate
remains as dissatisfied with the law as is he whom it has granted no more than
such a form of tolerance.’ There was no middle way. The enemies of the Jews
attacked them, and attacked him, Clermont-Tonnerre, on the grounds that they
were deficient morally. It was also held of the Jews that they were unsociable,
that their laws prescribed usury, that they were forbidden to mix with the
French by marriage or at table or join them in defence of the country or in any
other common enterprise. But these reproaches were either unjust or specious.
Usury was blameworthy beyond a doubt, but it was the laws of France that had
compelled the Jews to practise it. And so with most of the other charges. Once
the Jews had title to land and a country of their own the practice of usury
would cease. So would the unsociability that was held against them. So would
much of their religious eccentricity [ces travers religieux]. As for the
further argument, that they had judges and laws of their own, why so they did,
and on this matter he, Clermont-Tonnerre, would say to his critics (coming to
the passage in his address to the Assembly that would be quoted over and over
again in the course of the two centuries that followed), that that indeed was
impermissible.
“’As a nation the Jews must be denied everything, as individuals they
must be granted everything; their judges can no longer be recognized; their
recourse must be to our own exclusively; legal protection for the doubtful laws
by which Jewish corporate existence is maintained must end; they cannot be
allowed to create a political body or a separate order within the state; it is
necessary that they be citizens individually.’
“There remained the question, what if, as some argued, it was the case
that the Jews themselves had no interest in citizenship? Why in that case, he
went on, ‘if they do not want it, let them say so, in which case expel them [s’ils
veulent ne l’être pas, qu’ils le disent, et alors, qu’on les bannisse]’.
The idea of a society of non-citizens within the state and a nation within a
nation was repugnant to him. But in fact, the speaker concluded, that was not
at all what the Jews wanted. The evidence was to the contrary. They wished to
be incorporated into the nation of France.
“Clermont-Tonnerre was promptly contradicted on this last, vital point
by the abbé Maury. The term ‘Jew’, said the abbé did not denote a
religious sect, but a nation, one which had laws which it had always followed
and by which it wished to continue to abide. ‘To proclaim the Jews citizens would
be as if to say that, without letters of naturalization and without ceasing to
be English or Danish, Englishmen and Danes could become Frenchmen.’ But Maury’s
chief argument was of a moral and social order. The Jews were inherently
undesirable, socially as well as economically. They had been chased out of
France, and then recalled, no less than seven times – chased out by avarice, as
Voltaire had rightly put it, readmitted by avarice once more, but in
foolishness as well.
“’The Jews have passed seventeen centuries without mingling with the
other nations. They have never engaged in anything but trade in money; they
have been the plague of the agricultural provinces; not one of them has ever
dignified [su ennoblir] his hands by driving a plough. Their laws leave
them no time for agriculture; the Sabbath apart, they celebrate fifty-six more
festivals than the Christians in each year. In Poland they possess an entire
province. Well, then! While the sweat of Christian slaves waters the furrows in
which the Jews’ opulence germinates they themselves, as their fields are
cultivated, engage in weighing their ducats and calculating how much they can
shave off the coinage without exposing themselves to legal penalties.’
“They have never been labourers,
Maury continued, not even under David and Solomon. And even then they were
notorious for their laziness. Their sole concern was commerce. Would you make
soldiers of them, the abbé asked. If you did, you would derive small
benefit from them: they have a horror of celibacy and they marry young. He knew
of no general who would wish to command an army of Jews either on the Sabbath –
a day on which they never gave battle – or indeed at any other time. Or did the
Assembly imagine that they could make craftsmen of them when their many
festivals and sabbath days presented an insurmountable obstacle to such an
enterprise. The Jews held 12 million mortgages in Alsace alone, he informed his
colleagues. Within a month of their being granted citizenship they would own
half the province outright. In ten years’ time they would have ‘conquered’ all
of it, reducing it to nothing more than a Jewish colony – upon which the hatred
the people of Alsace already bore for the Jews would explode.[173]
“It was not that he, Maury, wished the Jews to be persecuted. ‘They are
men, they are our brothers; anathema on whoever speaks of intolerance!’ Nor
need their religious opinions disturb anyone [!!!]. He joined all others in
agreeing that they were to be protected. But that did not mean that they could
be citizens. It was as individuals that they were entitled to protection, not
as Frenchmen.
“Robespierre took the opposite line, supporting Clermont-Tonnerre. All who fulfilled the generally applicable conditions of eligibility to citizenship were entitled to the rights that derived from it, he argued, including the right to hold public office. And so far as the facts were concerned, much of what Maury had said about the Jews was ‘infinitely exaggerated’ and contrary to known history. Moreover, to charge the Jews themselves with responsibility for their own persecution at the hands of others, was absurd.
“’Vices are imputed to them… But to whom should these vices be imputed
if not to ourselves for our injustice?… Let us restore them to happiness, to
country [patrie], and to virtue by restoring them to the dignity of men
and citizens; let us reflect that it can never be politic, whatever anyone
might say, to condemn a multitude of men who live among us to degradation and
oppression.’”[174]
Thus spoke the man who was soon to lead the most degrading and
oppressive régime in European history to that date. Indeed, it is
striking how those who spoke most fervently for the Jews – apart from leaders
of the Jewish community such as the banker Cerfbeer and Isaac Beer – were
Freemasons or Illuminati.
Thus in the two years before the crucial debate on September 27, 1791,
writes General Nechvolodov, “fourteen attempts were made to give the Jews civic
equality and thirty-five major speeches were given by several orators, among
them Mirabeau, Robespierre, Abbé Grégoire, Abbé
Sièyes, Camille, Desmoulins, Vernier, Barnave, Lameth, Duport and
others.
“’Now there is a singular comparison to be made,’ says Abbé
Lemann, ‘- all the names which we have just cited and which figure in the Moniteur
as having voted for the Jews are also found on the list of Masons… Is this
coincidence not proof of the order given, in the lodges of Paris, to work in
favour of Jewish emancipation?’
“And yet, in spite of the revolutionary spirit, the National Assembly
was very little inclined to give equality of civil rights to the Jews. Against
this reform there rose up all the deputies from Alsace, since it was in Alsace
that the majority of the French Jews of that time lived….
“But this opposition in the National Assembly did not stop the Jews. To
attain their end, they employed absolutely every means.
“According to Abbé Lemann, these means were the following:
“First means: entreaty. A charm exercised over several presidents of the
Assembly. Second: the influence of gold. Third means: logic. After the National
Assembly had declared the ‘rights of man’, the Jews insisted that these rights
should logically be applied to them, and they set out their ideas on this
subject with an ‘implacable arrogance’.
“Fourth means: recourse to the suburbs and the Paris Commune, so as to
force the National Assembly under ‘threat of violence’ to give the Jews
equality.
“’One of their most thorough historians (Graetz),’ says Abbé
Lemann, ‘did not feel that he had to hide this manoeuvre. Exhausted, he says,
by the thousand useless efforts they had made to obtain civil rights, they
thought up a last means. Seeing that it was impossible to obtain by reason and
common sense what they called their rights, they resolved to force the National
Assembly to approve of their emancipation.
“’To this end, naturally, were expended vast sums, which served to
establish the ‘Christian Front’ which they wanted.
“’In the session of the National Assembly of January 18, 1791, the Duke de Broglie expressed himself completely openly on this subject: ‘Among them,’ he said, ‘there is one in particular who has acquired an immense fortune at the expense of the State, and who is spending in the town of Paris considerable sums to win supporters of his cause.’ He meant Cerfbeer.
“At the head of the Christian Front created on this occasion were the
lawyer Godard and three ecclesiastics: the Abbés Mulot, Bertoliot and
Fauchet.
“Abbé Fauchet was a well-known illuminatus, and
Abbé Mulot – the president of the all-powerful Paris Commune, with the
help of which the Jacobins exerted, at the time desired, the necessary pressure
on the National and Legislative Assemblies, and later on the Convention.
“What Gregory, curé of Embermeuil, was for the Jews in the heart
of the National Assembly, Abbé Mulot was in the heart of the Commune.
“However, although they were fanatical Jacobins, the members of the
Commune were far from agreeing to the propositions of their president that they
act in defence of Jewish rights in the National Assembly. It was necessary to
return constantly to the attack, naturally with the powerful help of Cerfbeer’s
gold and that of the Abbés Fauchet and Bertoliot. This latter declared
during a session of the Commune on this question: ‘It was necessary that such a
happy and unexpected event as the revolution should come and rejuvenate France…
Let us hasten to consign to oblivion the crimes of our fathers.’
“Then, during another session, the lawyer Godard bust into the chamber
with fifty armed ‘patriots’ dressed in costumes of the national guard with
three-coloured cockades. They were fifty Jews who, naturally provided with
money, had made the rounds of the sections of the Paris Commune and of the
wards of the town of Paris, talking about recruiting partisans of equality for
the Jews. This had its effect. Out of the sixty sections of Paris fifty-nine
declared themselves for equality (only the quartier des Halles abstained). Then
the Commune addressed the National Assembly with an appeal signed by the
Abbés Mulot, Bertoliot, Fauchet and other members, demanding that
equality be immediately given to the Jews.
“However, even after that, the National Assembly hesitated in declaring
itself in the manner provided. Then, on September 27, the day of the
penultimate session of the Assembly before its dissolution, the Jacobin deputy
Adrien Duport posed the question of equality for the Jews in a categorical
fashion. The Assembly knew Adrien Duport’s personality perfectly. It knew that
in a secret meeting of the chiefs of Freemasonry which preceded the revolution,
he had insisted on the necessity of resort to a system of terror. The Assembly
yielded. There followed a decree signed by Louis XVI granting French Jews full
and complete equality of rights…”[175]
The power of the Jewish minority was revealed especially during the
reign of terror under Robespierre. 2300 Catholic churches were converted into
“temples of Reason”. And at that point some voices were raised, writes
Tikhomirov, “demanding that the ban be spread onto the Jews also, and that
circumcision be forbidden. These demands were completely ignored, and were not
even put to the vote. In the local communes individual groups of especially
wild Jacobins, who had not been initiated into higher politics, sometimes broke
into synagogues, destroying the Torah and books, but it was only by 1794 that
the revolutionary-atheist logic finally forced even the bosses to pose the
question of the annihilation not only of Catholicism, but also of Jewry. At
this point, however, the Jews were delivered by 9 Thermidor, 1794. Robespierre
fell and was executed. The moderate elements triumphed. The question of the ban
of Jewry disappeared of itself, while the Constitution of Year III of the
Republic granted equal rights to the Jews.”[176]
But this was not the end of the matter. In the late 1790s a new wave of
Ashkenazis entered France from Germany, attracted by the superior status their
French brothers now enjoyed. This was to lead to further disturbances in
Alsace, which it was left to Napoleon to deal with…
“Nevertheless,” as Paul Johnson writes, “the deed was done. French Jews
were now free and the clock could never be turned back. Moreover, emancipation
in some form took place wherever the French were able to carry the
revolutionary spirit with their arms. The ghettos and Jewish closed quarters
were broken into in papal Avignon (1791), Nice (1792) and the Rhineland
(1792-3). The spread of the revolution to the Netherlands, and the founding of
the Batavian republic, led to Jews being granted full and formal rights by law
there (1796). In 1796-8 Napoleon Bonaparte liberated many of the Italian
ghettos, French troops, young Jews and local enthusiasts tearing down the
crumbling old walls.
“For the first time a new archetype, who had always existed in embryonic
form, began to emerge from the shadows: the revolutionary Jew. Clericalists in
Italy swore enmity to ‘Gauls, Jacobins and Jews’. In 1793-4 Jewish Jacobins set
up a revolutionary regime in Saint Esprit, the Jewish suburb of Bayonne. Once
again, as during the Reformation, traditionalists saw a sinister link between
the Torah and subversion.”[177]
However, the above picture of the Jewish struggle for emancipation in
Paris and, later, Bayonne should not obscure the fact that there was still very
strong opposition to the idea of emancipation from within Jewry itself led
especially by the rabbinic leaders of Ashkenazi Jewry in Poland.
Thus Zalkind Hourwitz was a Polish Jew who won a prize for an essay
advocating Jewish emancipation from the Royal Society for Arts and Sciences at
Metz in 1787. Nevertheless, as Vital writes, he “made no bones about his view of
the internal constraints to which Jews in all parts were subject through the
workings of the rabbinical-Talmudic system: of the limits it set upon their
worldly freedom, of the manner in which it effectively barred their entry into
society on a basis of equality. The social liberation of the Jews was
conditional, he believed, on the power that the rabbis and the parnassim
[chief synagogue officials] jointly exercised over ordinary people in their
daily lives being terminated – in great matters as in small. ‘Their rabbis and
syndics [i.e. parnassim] must be strictly forbidden to assume the least
authority over their fellows outside the synagogue, or refuse honours to those
who have shaved off their beards, or curled their hair, or who dress like
Christians, go to the theatre, or observe other customs that bear no actual
relation to their religion, but derive from superstition alone as a means of
distinguishing them from other peoples.’”[178]
In France, it had been the less typical, socially marginalized Jews who
had pressed for emancipation. Even the more acculturated Sephardic Jews of
Bourdeaux and Bayonne had been slow to ask for emancipation, first, because
they feared that they might have to pay for liberties which they already
enjoyed de facto, and secondly, because they wanted to be clearly
delineated from the Ashkenazi Jews of Alsace.
The latter, continues Vital, “had been slower still to ask for
liberation. There is no evidence of their authorized representatives pressing
for anything remotely of the kind before the Revolution; and when they made
their own first approach to the new National Assembly it was to ask for no more
than an end to the special taxes laid upon them and the abolition of the
residential, and travel restrictions to which they were subject. The greatest
anxiety of the Alsatians was to retain their own internal communal autonomy –
to which end, with only rare exceptions, they (at all events, their authorized
representatives) were prepared to forgo emancipation altogether. Only when they
learned that other branches of French Jewry, the small community in Paris among
them, were prepared to yield to the demand that they give up their ancient
corporate status did the Alsatians and Lorrainers fall, reluctantly, into
line.”[179]
The
question: to emancipate or not to emancipate? was to cause bitter divisions in
Jewry that have continued to the present day. It brought into sharp focus
another question: was it possible for the Jews, while remain Jewish,
ever to become an integral part of non-Jewish society? And if not, how were
they to live – as a separate nation with its own homeland and language as the
other Gentile nations, or in some other way?
The extreme revolutionary zeal of many of the champions of Jewish
emancipation, on the one hand, and the equally extreme bigotry and
ghetto-creating mentality of the opponents of emancipation, on the other,
suggested that there was no easy solution to this problem, even with the best
intentions of the Gentile rulers.
For, as Norman Stone points out, “Jewish emancipation was a double-edged
operation. It required a fundamental change in the conduct and the attitudes
both of the host societies and of the Jews themselves. It demanded the
dismantling not only of the constraints imposed on Jews from outside but also
of the ‘internal ghetto’ in Jewish minds. Modern concern with the roots of
anti-Semitism sometimes overlooks the severity of the Jews’ own laws of
segregation. Observant Jews could not hold to the 613 rules of dress, diet, hygience
and worship if they tried to live outside their own closed community; and
intermarriage was strictly forbidden. Since Judaic law taught that Jewishness
was biologically inherited in the maternal line, Jewish women were jealously
protected. A girl who dared to marry out could expect to be disowned by her
family, and ritually pronounced dead. Extreme determination was needed to
withstand such acute social pressures…”[180]
Napoleon
and the Jews
If the French revolution gave the Jews their first great political
victory, Napoleon gave them their second. On May 22, 1799, Napoleon’s Paris Moniteur
published the following report, penned from Constantinople on April 17:
“Buonaparte has published a proclamation in which he invites all the Jews of
Asia and Africa to come and place themselves under his flag in order to
re-establish ancient Jerusalem. He has already armed a great number and
their battalions are threatening Aleppo.”
This was not the first time that the Jews had persuaded a Gentile ruler
to restore them to Jerusalem. In the fourth century the Roman Emperor Julian
the Apostate allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem and start rebuilding the
Temple. However, fire came out from the foundations and black crosses appeared
on the workers’ garments, forcing them to abandon the enterprise.[181]
And the Jews were to be thwarted again. For British sea-power prevented
Napoleon from reaching Jerusalem and making himself, as was reported to be his
intention, king of the Jews. The Jews would have to wait over a century before
another Gentile power – this time, the British – again offered them a return to
Zion.
Napoleon now learned what many rulers before and after had learned: that
kindness towards the Jews does not make them more tractable. Nechvolodov
writes: “Since the first years of the Empire, Napoleon I had become very
worried about the Jewish monopoly in France and the isolation in which they
lived in the midst of the other citizens, although they had received
citizenship. The reports of the departments showed the activity of the Jews in
a very bad light: ‘Everywhere there are false declarations to the civil
authorities; fathers declare the sons who are born to them to be daughters…
Again, there are Jews who have given an example of disobedience to the laws of
conscription; out of sixty-nine Jews who, in the course of six years, should
have formed part of the Moselle contingent, none has entered the army.’
“By contrast, behind the army, they give themselves up to frenzied
speculation.
“’Unfortunately,’ says Thiers describing the
entry of the French into Rome in his History of the Revolution, ‘the
excesses, not against persons but against property, marred the entry of the
French into the ancient capital of the world… Berthier had just left for Paris,
Massena had just succeeded him. This hero was accused of having given the first
example. He was soon imitated. They began to pillage the palaces, convents and
rich collections. Some Jews in the rear of the army bought for a paltry price the
magnificent objects which the looters were offering them.’
“It was in 1805, during Napoleon’s passage through Strasbourg, after the
victory of Austerlitz, that the complaints against the Jews assumed great
proportions. The principal accusations brought against them concerned the
terrible use they made of usury. As soon as he returned to Paris, Napoleon
judged it necessary to concentrate all his attention on the Jews. In the State
Council, during its session of April 30, he said, among other things, the
following on this subject:
“’The French government cannot look on with indifference as a vile,
degraded nation capable of every iniquity takes exclusive possession of two
beautiful departments of Alsace; one must consider the Jews as a nation and not
as a sect. It is a nation within a nation; I would deprive them, at least for a
certain time, of the right to take out mortgages, for it is too humiliating for
the French nation to find itself at the mercy of the vilest nation. Some entire
villages have been expropriated by the Jews; they have replaced feudalism… It
would be dangerous to let the keys of France, Strasbourg and Alsace, fall into
the hands of a population of spies who are not at all attached to the
country.’”[182]
Napoleon eventually decided on an extraordinary measure: to convene a
111-strong Assembly of Jewish Notables in order to receive clear and
unambiguous answers to the following questions: did the Jewish law permit mixed
marriages; did the Jews regard Frenchmen as foreigners or as brothers; did they
regard France as their native country, the laws of which they were bound to
obey; did the Judaic law draw any distinction between Jewish and Christian
debtors? At the same time, writes Johnson, Napoleon “supplemented this secular
body by convening a parallel meeting of rabbis and learned laymen, to advise
the Assembly on technical points of Torah and halakhah. The response of the
more traditional elements of Judaism was poor. They did not recognize
Napoleon’s right to invent such a tribunal, let alone summon it…”[183]
However, if some traditionalists did not welcome it, other Jews received
the news with unbounded joy. “According to Abbé Lemann,” writes
Nechvolodov, “they grovelled in front of him and were ready to recognize him as
the Messiah. The sessions of the Sanhedrin [composed of 46 rabbis and 25 laymen
from all parts of Western Europe] took place in February and March, 1807, and
the Decision of the Great Sanhedrin began with the words:
“’Blessed forever is the Lord, the God of Israel, Who has placed on the
throne of France and of the kingdom of Italy a prince according to His heart.
God has seen the humiliation of the descendants of ancient Jacob, and He has
chosen Napoleon the Great to be the instrument of His mercy… Reunited today
under his powerful protection in the good town of Paris, to the number of
seventy-one doctors of the law and notables of Israel, we constitute a Great
Sanhedrin, so as to find in us a means and power to create religious ordinances
in conformity with the principles of our holy laws, and which may serve as a
rule and example to all Israelites. These ordinances will teach the nations
that our dogmas are consistent with the civil laws under which we live, an do
not separate us at all from the society of men…’”[184]
“Love of country is in the heart of Jews a sentiment so natural, so
powerful, and so consonant with their religious opinions, that a French Jew
considers himself in England, as among strangers, although he may be among
Jews; and the case is the same with English Jews in France. To such a pitch is
this sentiment carried among them, that during the last war, French Jews were
fighting desperately against other Jews, the subject of countries then at war
with France.”[185]
“The Jewish delegates,” writes Platonov, “declared that state laws had
the same obligatory force for Jews, that every honourable study of Jewish
teaching was allowed, but usury was forbidden, etc. [However,] to the question
concerning mixed marriages of Jews and Christians they gave an evasive, if not
negative reply. ‘Although mixed marriages between Jews and Christians cannot be
clothed in a religious form, they nevertheless do not draw upon them any
anathema.”[186]
On the face of it, the Decision of the Sanhedrin was a great
triumph for Napoleon, who could now treat Jewry as just another religious
denomination, and not a separate nation.[187] And
indeed, as Douglas Reed says, “Orthodox Judaism, with the face of it turned
towards the West, denied any suggestion that the Jews would form a nation
within nations. Reform Judaism in time ‘eliminated every prayer expressing so
much as even the suspicion of a hope or desire for any form of Jewish national
resurrection’ (Rabbi Moses P. Jacobson).”[188]
However, the Jews did not restrain their money-lending and speculative
activities, as Napoleon had pleaded with them. On the contrary, only one year
after the convening of the Great Sanhedrin, Napoleon was forced to adopt
repressive measures against their financial excesses. Moreover, Napoleon
created rabbinic consistories in France having disciplinary powers over Jews
and granted rabbis the status of state officials – a measure that was
strengthen the powers of the rabbis over their people. In time Jewish
consistories were created all over Europe. They “began the stormy propaganda of
Judaism amidst Jews who had partially fallen away from the religion of their
ancestors, organised rabbinic schools and spiritual seminaries for the
education of youth in the spirit of Talmudic Judaism.”[189]
Moreover,
as Tikhomirov points out, “no laws could avert the international links of the
Jews. Sometimes they even appeared openly, as in Kol Ispoel Khaberim (Alliance
Israelite Universelle), although many legislatures forbid societies and
unions of their own citizens to have links with foreigners. The Jews gained a
position of exceptional privilege. For the first time in the history of the
diaspora they acquired greater rights than the local citizens of the countries
of the dispersion. One can understand that, whatever the further aims for the
resurrection of Israel might be, the countries of the new culture and statehood
became from that time a lever of support for Jewry.”[190]
Indeed, the main result of the Great Sanhedrin, writes Nechvolodov, “was
to unite Judaism still more. “’Let us not forget from where we draw our
origin,’ said Rabbi Salomon Lippmann Cerfbeer on July 26, 1808, in his speech
for the opening of the preparatory assembly of the Sanhedrin:- ‘Let it no
longer be a question of “German” or “Portuguese” Jews; although disseminated
over the surface of the globe, we everywhere form only one unique people.’”[191]
The emancipation of the Jews in France led to their emancipation in
other countries under French influence, as we have seen. Even after the fall of
Napoleon, on June 8, 1815, the Congress of Vienna decreed that “it was
incumbent on the members of the German Confederation to consider an
‘amelioration’ of the civil status of all those who ‘confessed the Jewish faith
in Germany.’”[192]
Gradually, though not without opposition, Jewish emancipation spread throughout
Europe.
Napoleon
and the Latin American Revolutions
Another kind of nationalism owed its origins to the impact of Napoleon,
not on whole societies, but directly on certain individuals, who then tried to
imitate Napoleon’s impact on society as a whole. Such individuals were
generally ambitious adventurers who managed by hook or by crook to impose
themselves on weakened government structures and then claim for themselves the
mandate of the people, as if their individual will represented the “general
will” of the people. Simple despotism, in other words, disguised as liberation
from despotism. Very often these “liberated” peoples had no idea that they had
been a distinct nation before, and would have been much happier without any
“liberator”. They were indeed “forced to be free”, in Rousseau’s phrase.
The most famous of the “liberators” was Simon Jose Antonio de la
Santissima Trinidad de Bolivar. Bolivar is a good example of the terrible
spiritual damage done to a whole generation of young men by the heroic image of
Napoleon. Just as Napoleon himself stood between the rationalism of the
Enlightenment and the passion of the Romantic age, uniting them in the image of
himself fighting for both the ideals of the Enlightenment and the death-defying
glory of the romantic hero, so did Bolivar and a host of similar adventurers in
Central and South America aspire to unite national “liberation” with personal
glory.
“Bolivar arrived in the French capital just in time for Napoleon’s
coronation as Emperor of the French, an event he watched with fascination. In
March 1805 ... he saw Napoleon crown himself king of Italy. ‘I centred my
attention on Napoleon and saw nothing but him out of that crowd of men,’ he
wrote. He travelled on to Rome under the spell of this vision and there, after
considering what he had seen, he ascended the Monte Sacro, where he fell on his
knees and swore an oath before Rodriguez to liberate South America.”[193]
Bolivar seized his chance after Napoleon
deposed King Ferdinand VII of Spain, which eventually unleashed a strong
nationalist backlash in Spain – but not before breaking the legal links between
Spain and its colonies in the Americas. Returning to Venezuela, Boliva
proceeded to win, lose and finally reconquer Caracas from the Spaniards in a
series of civil wars distinguished by appalling savagery on both sides.
Although the Venezuelan Republic had been proclaimed on a whites-only franchise
in 1811, thereby excluding all Indians and blacks from “the nation”, and
although Bolivar himself was a slave-owner and to all intents and purposes
Spanish, on reconquering Caracas in 1813 he immediately likened all royalist
Spaniards to wandering Jews, to be “cast out and persecuted”, and declared:
“Any Spaniard who does not work against tyranny in favour of the just cause, by
the most active and effective means, shall be considered an enemy and punished
as a traitor to the country and in consequence shall inevitably be shot.
Spaniards and Canarios, depend upon it, you will die, even if you are simply
neutral, unless you actively espouse the liberation of America.”[194]
Bolivar was as good as his word, and proceeded to slaughter the whole Spanish
population of Caracas – whereupon the people he had supposedly come to
liberate, the Indians and blacks, both free and slave, marched against him
under the slogan of “Long live Ferdinand VII”! After murdering a further 1200
Spaniards in retaliation, Bolivar then harangued the inhabitants of Caracas,
saying: “You may judge for yourselves, without partiality, whether I have not
sacrificed my life, my being, every minute of my time in order to make a nation
of you.”[195]
Like his idol Napoleon, and many Latin American strongmen since, Bolivar
did not like the people expressing its will in elections, which he called “the
greatest scourge of republics [which] produce only anarchy”. The liberator of
Mexico, Agustin de Iturbide, agreed, proclaiming himself Emperor in 1822. But
such unrepublican immodesty was nothing compared to Bolivar’s, who “hung in the
dining room of his villa outside Bogota a huge portrait of himself being
crowned by two genii, with the inscription: ‘Bolivar is the God of Colombia’.”[196]
Nor, in the end, did he have much time for the people he had liberated.
Shortly after the assassination of his right-hand man, General José
Antonio de Sucre, when he was in self-imposed exile in Europe, he admitted that
independence was the only benefit he had brought “at the cost of everything
else”, and declared: “America is ungovernable. He who serves the revolution ploughs the sea… This country will
inexorably fall into the hands of uncontrollable multitudes, thereafter to pass
under… tyrants of all colours and races. Those who have served the revolution have
ploughed the sea. The only thing to do in America is emigrate.”[197] And
again: “America can be ruled only by an able despotism.”[198]
Despotism also prevailed in another “liberated” country of the region,
Paraguay, where it became a “secular replacement” for the former “Jesuit
communist empire”.[199]
“After independence,” writes David Landes, “like other debris states of
the great Hispanic empire, Paraguay had fallen almost immediately under the
control of dictators. The laws said republic, but the practice was one-man rule
– a mix of benevolent despotism and populist tyranny. The first of these
dictators…, Dr. Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia, was something special. A Jacobin
ideologue, and like many of the French variety, a lawyer by training, Francia
was committed to a republic of equals and him more equal than the rest. He was
he was the ‘organic leader’, the elitist embodying the popular will… Dr.
Francia and his successors, Lopez father and son, would turn the country into
an enlightened Sparta – egalitarian, literate, disciplined, and brave.”[200]
“It is generally accepted,” writes Zamoyski, “that the former Spanish
colonies never again achieved the wealth in which they had basked before 1810.
Some maintain that they were also better governed, more lawful and more
peaceful under Spanish rule than at any time since, and there is something to
be said for this view.
“Slavery was finally abolished in the former Spanish colonies in the
late 1850s, but economic slavery remained endemic throughout the region. The
manner in which independence and nationhood were forced upon these societies
gave rise to systemic instability. The various Liberators could not count on
devotion to a cause to animate their troops and supporters, as the cause was
imaginary. Nor could they mobilize one whole section of the population on
behalf of a specific interest for any length of time. And they certainly could
not depend on colleagues, who were bound, sooner or later, to contest their
authority. They therefore had to keep rearranging alliances and decapitating
any faction that grew too strong. In order to enlist the loyalty and sympathy
of the lower orders, they would make a point of drawing these into the army.
But as such recruits became professionals, they cut their links with the
classes they came from and grew into arrogant Praetorians who carried with them
an element of incipient mutiny.”[201]
There is a profound irony here. The cult of the nation introduced by
article three of the Rights of Man was meant to unite the peoples, not disunite
them. But in fact it divided and splintered the Americas, as it had divided and
splintered Europe.
Romanticism
and Nationalism
Reference has already been made to that broader movement, known as Romanticism,
which fed into the development of nationalism from the other side of the Rhine.
Romanticism was born as a reaction to the Enlightenment and, more generally, to
the whole classical concept of civilisation. If the English Enlightenment
dominated the cultural life of the early 18th century, and the French
Enlightenment - the later part of the century, then German Romanticism
dominated the intellectual and cultural life of the 19th century.
Hume had shown that the empirical, rationalist view of the world had,
paradoxically, no rational foundations, for it led to a denial of the objective
existence of God, the soul, morality and even of the external world. Kant
desperately attempted to rescue something from Hume’s withering criticism. But
ultimately he begat, not a rebirth of empiricism on rational foundations, but
the German philosophy of idealism, which turned everything on its head
by defining the world as spirit, the objective as the subjective.
Romanticism is the counterpart in art to idealism in philosophy. Jacques
Barzun attempts to define it thus: “In Romanticism thought and feeling are
fused; its bent is toward exploration and discovery at whatever risk of error
or failure; the religious emotion is innate and demands expression. Spirit is a
reality but where it is placed varies and is secondary: the divine may be
reached through nature or art. The individual self is a source of knowledge on
which one must act; for one is embarked – engagé, as the 20C
Existentialists say. To act, enthusiasm must overcome indifference or despair;
impulse must be guided by imagination and reason. The search is for truths,
which reside in particulars, not in generalities; the world is bigger and more
complex than any set of abstractions, and it includes the past, which is never
fully done with. Meditating on past and present leads to the estimate of man as
great and wretched. But heroes are real and indispensable. They rise out of the
people, whose own mind-and-heart provides the makings of high culture. The errors
of heroes and peoples are the price of knowledge, religion, and art, life
itself being a heroic tragedy.”[202]
Sir Isaiah Berlin’s definition is also illuminating: “Since the Greeks,
and perhaps long before them, men have believed that to the central questions
about the nature and purpose of their lives, and of the world in which they
lived, true, objective, universal and eternal answers could be found. If the
answers could not be discovered by me, then perhaps by someone more expert or
wiser than I; if not in the circumstances in which I found myself, then in
others more propitious: in an innocent and happy past – a Garden of Eden from
which our ancestors had for their sins been expelled, or perhaps in a golden
age that still lay in the future, which posterity (perhaps after much labour
and suffering) would, or at any rate could, one day reach. It was assumed that
all the truly central problems were soluble in principle even if not in
practice. Somewhere true answers to all genuine questions must exist, if not in
the minds of men, then in the mind of an omniscient being – real or imaginary,
material or ideal, a personal deity, or the universe come to full consciousness
of itself.
“This presupposition, which underlies most classical and Christian thought,
orthodox and heretical, scientific and religious, was connected with the belief
that, whether men knew it or not, the whole of life on earth was in some sense
bound up with the search for answer to the great, tormenting questions of fact
and of conduct; of what there is, was, will be, can be; of what to do, what to
live by, what to seek, hope for, admire, fear, avoid; whether the end of life
was happiness or justice or virtue or self-fulfilment or grace and salvation.
Individuals, schools of thought, entire civilisations differed about what the
answers were, about the proper method of discovering them, about the nature and
place of moral or spiritual or scientific authority – that is to say, about how
to identify the experts who are qualified to discover and communicate the
answers. They argued about what constitutes such qualifications and justifies
such claims to authority. But there was no doubt that the truth lay somewhere;
that it could in principle be found. Conflicting beliefs were held about the
central questions: whether the truth was to be found in reason or in faith, in
the Church or the laboratory, in the insights of the uniquely privileged
individual – a prophet, a mystic, an alchemist, a metaphysician – or in the
collective consciousness of a body of men – the society of the faithful, the
traditions of a tribe, a race, a nation, a social class, an academy of experts,
an elite of uniquely endowed or trained beings – or, on the contrary, in the
mind or heart of any man, anywhere, at any time, provided that he remained
innocent and uncorrupted by false doctrines. What was common to all these views
– incompatible enough for wars of extermination to have been fought in their
name – was the assumption that there existed a reality, a structure of things,
a rerum natura, which the qualified enquirer could see, study and, in
principle, get right. Men were violently divided about the nature and identity
of the wise – those who understood the nature of things – but not about the
proposition that such wise men existed or could be conceived, and that they
would know that which would enable them to deduce correctly what men should
believe, how they should act, what they should live by and for.
“This was the great foundation of belief which romanticism attacked and
weakened. Whatever the differences between the leading romantic thinkers – the
early Schiller and the later Fichte, Schelling and Jacobi, Tieck and the
Schlegels when they were young, Chateaubriand and Byron, Coleridge and Carlyle,
Kierkegaard, Stirner, Nietzsche, Baudelaire – there runs through their writings
a common notion, held with varying degrees of consciousness and depth, that
truth is not an objective structure, independent of those who seek it, the
hidden treasure waiting to be found, but is itself in all its guises created by
the seeker. It is not to be brought into being necessarily by the finite
individual: according to some it is created by a greater power, a universal
spirit, personal or impersonal, in which the individual is an element, or of
which he is an aspect, an emanation, an imperfect reflection. But the common
assumption of the romantics that runs counter to the philosophia perennis
is that the answers to the great questions are not to be discovered so much as
to be invented. They are not something found, they are something literally
made. In its extreme Idealistic form it is a vision of the entire world. In its
more familiar form, it confines itself to the realm of values, ideals, rules of
conduct – aesthetic, religious, social, moral, political – a realm seen not as
a natural or supernatural order capable of being investigated, described and
explained by the appropriate method – rational examination or some more
mysterious procedure – but as something that man creates, as he creates works
of art; not by imitating, or even obtaining illumination from, pre-existent
models or truths, or by applying pre-existent truths or rules that are
objective, universal, eternal, unalterable but by an act of creation, the
introduction into the world of something literally novel – the activity,
natural or supernatural, human or in part divine, owing nothing to anything
outside it (in some versions because nothing can be conceived as being outside
it), self-subsistent, self-justified, self-fulfilling. Hence that new emphasis
on the subjective and ideal rather than the objective and the real, on the
process of creation rather than its effects, on motives rather than
consequences; and, as a necessary corollary of all this, on the quality of the
vision, the state of mind or soul of the acting agent – purity of heart,
innocence of intention, sincerity of purpose rather than getting the answer
right, that is, accurate correspondence to the ‘given’. Hence the emphasis on
activity, movement that cannot be reduced to static segments, the flow that
cannot be arrested, frozen, analysed without being thereby fatally distorted;
hence the constant protest against the reduction of ‘life’ to dead fragments,
of organism to ‘mere’ mechanical or uniform units; and the corresponding
tendency towards similes and metaphors drawn from ‘dynamic’ sciences – biology,
physiology, introspective psychology – and the worship of music, which, of all
the arts, appears to have the least relation to universally observable, uniform
natural order. Hence, too, the celebration of all forms of defiance directed
against the ‘given’ – the impersonal, the ‘brute fact’ in morals or in politics
– or against the static and the accepted, and the value placed on minorities
and martyrs as such, no matter what the ideal for which they suffered.
“This, too, is the source of the doctrine that work is sacred as such,
not because of its social function, but because it is the imposition of the
individual or collective personality, that is, activity, upon inert stuff. The
activity, the struggle is all, the victory nothing: in Fichte’s words, ‘Frei
sein ist nichts – frei werden ist der Himmel’ (‘To be free is nothing – to
become free is very heaven’). Failure is nobler than success. Self-immolation
for a cause is the thing, not the validity of the cause itself, for it is the
sacrifice undertaken for its sake that sanctifies the cause, not some intrinsic
property of it.
“These are the symptoms of the romantic attitude. Hence the worship of
the artist, whether in sound, or word, or colour, as the highest manifestation
of the ever-active spirit, and the popular image of the artist in his garret,
wild-eyed, wild-haired, poor, solitary, mocked-; but independent, free,
spiritually superior to his philistine tormentors. This attitude has a darker
side too: worship not merely of the painter or the composer or the poet, but of
that more sinister artists whose materials are men – the destroyer of old
societies, and the creator of new ones – no matter at what human cost: the
superhuman leader who tortures and destroys in order to build on new
foundations – Napoleon in his most revolutionary aspect. It is this embodiment
of the romantic ideal that took more and more hysterical forms and in its
extreme ended in violent irrationalism and Fascism. Yet this same outlook also
bred respect for individuality, for the creative impulse, for the unique, the
independent, for freedom to live and act in the light of personal, undictated
beliefs and principles, of undistorted emotional needs, for the value of
personal life, of personal relationships, of the individual conscience, of
human rights. The positive and negative heritage of romanticism – on the one
hand contempt for opportunism, regard for individual variety, scepticism of
oppressive general formulae and final solutions, and on the other
self-prostration before superior beings and the exaltation of arbitrary power,
passion and cruelty – these tendencies, at once reflected and promoted by
romantic doctrines, have done more to mould both the events of our century and
the concepts in terms in which they are viewed and explained than is commonly
recognised in most histories of our time.”[203]
Romanticism was an individualist attitude par excellence: but it
had its collectivist analogues, including nationalism, which may therefore be
said to have been nurtured from the streams both of the French Enlightenment
and of the German Romantic anti-Enlightenment. Thus “for Byronic romantics,”
writes Berlin, “’I’ is indeed an individual, the outsider, the adventurer, the
outlaw, he who defies society and accepted values, and follows his own – it may
be to his doom, but this is better than conformity, enslavement to mediocrity.
But for other thinkers ‘I’ becomes something much more metaphysical. It is a
collective – a nation, a Church, a Party, a class, an edifice in which I am
only a stone, an organism of which I am only a tiny living fragment. It
is the creator; I myself matter only in so far as I belong to the movement, the
race, the nation, the class, the Church; I do not signify as a true individual
within this super-person to whom my life is organically bound. Hence German
nationalism: I do this not because it is good or right or because I like it – I
do it because I am a German and this is the German way to live. So also modern
existentialism – I do it because I commit myself to this form of existence.
Nothing makes me; I do not do it because it is an objective order which I obey,
or because of universal rules to which I must adhere; I do it because I create
my own life as I do; being what I am, I give it direction and I am responsible
for it. Denial of universal values, this emphasis on being above all an element
in, and loyal to, a super-self, is a dangerous moment in European history, and
has led to a great deal that has been destructive and sinister in modern times;
this is where it begins, in the political ruminations and theories of the
earliest German romantics and their disciples in France and elsewhere.”[204]
German Nationalism
Thus modern European nationalism is the fruit of the union of two ideas
coming from two different directions: the French Enlightenment idea of the sovereignty
and rights of the Nation, and the German Romantic idea of the uniqueness
and self-justification of the Nation. However, if these were the
general ideological sources of modern nationalism, in the particular cases of
French and German nationalism the immediate causes were more mundane: in the
French case, pride, the pride of knowing that France was the first nation to
proclaim and realise the ideals of the revolution, and in the German case wounded
pride, “some form of collective humiliation"[205] as a
result of Napoleon’s victories.
In its early stages Kant, Hegel and Goethe had all praised the
Revolution; and Kant’s disciple, Fichte, had even declared that “henceforth the
French Republic alone can be the country of the Just”. “But,” writes Zamoyski,
“as the revolution progressed, the feeling grew in Germany that the French,
with their habitual shallowness, had got it all wrong. They had allowed the
pursuit of liberty to degenerate into mob rule and mass slaughter of innocent
people because they perceived liberty in mechanical terms. German thinkers were
more interested in ‘real liberty', and many believed that it was the ‘corrupt’
nature of the French that had doomed the revolution to failure. Such
conclusions allowed for a degree of smugness, suggesting as they did that the
French Enlightenment, for all its brilliance, had been flawed, while German
intellectual achievements had been more profound and more solid.
“Fichte identified Germany’s greatness as lying in her essentially
spiritual destiny. She would never stoop to conquer others, and while nations
such as the French, the English or the Spanish scrambled for wealth and
dominance, Germany’s role was to uphold the finest values of humanity.[206]
Similar claims to a moral mission for Germany were made by Herder,
Hölderlin, Schlegel and others…
“It had been central to Herder’s argument that each nation, by virtue of
its innate character, had a special role to play in the greater process of
history. One after another, nations ascended the world stage to fulfil their
ordained purpose. The French were crowding the proscenium, but there was a
growing conviction that Germany’s time was coming, and her destiny was about to
unfold. The Germans certainly seemed ready for it. The country was awash with
under-employed young men, and since the days of the proto-romantic movement of Sturm
und Drang the concept of action, both as a revolt against stultifying
rational forces and as a transcendent act of self-assertion, had become well
established. Fichte equated virtually any action, provided it was bold
unfettered, with liberation.
“The problem was that the nation was still not properly constituted.
Some defined it by language and culture, or, like Fichte, by a level of
consciousness. The Germans were, according to him, more innately creative than
other nations, being the only genuine people in Europe, an Urvolk,
speaking the only authentic language, Ursprache. Others saw the nation
as a kind of church, defined by the ‘mission’ of the German people. Adam
Müller affirmed that this mission was to serve humanity with charity, and
that any man who dedicated himself to this common purpose should be considered
a German. In his lectures of 1806, Fichte made the connection between committed
action and nationality. Those who stood up and demonstrated their vitality were
part of the Urvolk, those who did not were un-German. Hegel saw the
people as a spiritual organism, whose expression, the collective spirit or Volksgeist,
was its validating religion. The discussion mingled elements of theology,
science and metaphysics to produce uplifting and philosophically challenging
confusion.
“But in the absence of clear geographical or political parameters,
Germany’s national existence was ultimately dependent on some variant of the
racial concept. And this began to be stated with increasing assertiveness. ‘In
itself every nationality is a completely closed and rounded whole, a common tie
of blood relationship unites all its members; all… must be of one mind and must
stick together like one man’, according to Joseph Görres, who had once
been an enthusiastic internationalist. ‘This instinctive urge that binds all
members into a whole is a law of nature which takes preference over all
artificial contracts… The voice of nature in ourselves warns us and points to
the chasm between us and the alien’.
“The location and identification of this ‘closed and rounded whole’
involved not just defining German ethnicity, but also delving into the past in
search of a typically German and organic national unit to set against the old
rationalist French view of statehood based on natural law and the rights of
man. The bible of this tendency was Tacitus’s Germania. Placed in its
own time, this book is as much about Rome as about Germanic tribes. It imagines
the ultimate non-Rome, a place that had not been cleared and cultivated, and a
people innocent of the arts of industry and leisure. The forest life it
describes is the antithesis to the classical culture of Rome. It is also in
some ways the original noble savage myth, representing everything that decadent
Rome had lost; beneath Tacitus’s contempt for the savage denizens of the forest
lurks a vague fear that by gaining in civilization the Romans had forfeited
certain rugged virtues.
“The German nationalists picked up this theme, which mirrored their
relation to French culture. Roma and Germania, the city and the forest,
corruption and purity, could stand as paradigms for the present situation. The
ancient Teutonic hero Arminius (Hermann) had led the revolt of the German
tribes against Rome and defeated the legions in the Teutoburg Forest. His
descendants who aspired to throw off the ‘Roman’ universalism of France could
take heart.”[207]
Dostoyevsky developed the theme of Germany versus Rome: “Germany’s aim
is one; it existed before, always. It is her Protestantism – not that
single formula of Protestantism which was conceived in Luther’s time, but her
continual Protestantism, her continual protest against the Roman world, ever
since Arminius, - against everything that was Rome and Roman in aim, and
subsequently – against everything that was bequeathed by ancient Rome to the
new Rome and to all those peoples who inherited from Rome her idea, her formula
and element; against the heir of Rome and everything that constitutes this
legacy…
“Ancient Rome was the first to generate the idea of the universal unity
of men, and was the first to start thinking of (and firmly believing in)
putting it practically into effect in the form of universal empire. However,
this formula fell before Christianity – the formula but not the idea. For this
idea is that of European mankind; through this idea its civilization came into
being; for it alone mankind lives.
“Only the idea of the universal Roman empire succumbed, and it was
replaced by a new ideal, also universal, of a communion in Christ. This new
ideal bifurcated into the Eastern ideal of a purely spiritual communion of men,
and the Western European, Roman Catholic, papal ideal diametrically opposed to
the Eastern one.
“This Western Roman Catholic incarnation of the idea was achieved in its
own way, having lost, however, its Christian, spiritual foundation and having
replaced it with the ancient Roman legacy. [The] Roman papacy proclaimed that
Christianity and its idea, without the universal possession of lands and
peoples, are not spiritual but political. In other words, they cannot be
achieved without the realization on earth of a new universal Roman empire now
headed not by the Roman emperor but by the Pope. And thus it was sought to
establish a new universal empire in full accord with the spirit of the ancient
Roman world, only in a different form.
“Thus, we have in the Eastern ideal – first, the spiritual communion of
mankind in Christ, and thereafter, in consequence of the spiritual unity of all
men in Christ and as an unchallenged deduction therefrom – a just state and
social communion. In the Roman interpretation we have a reverse situation:
first it is necessary to achieve firm state unity in the form of a universal
empire, and only after that, perhaps, spiritual fellowship under the rule of
the Pope as the potentate of this world.
“Since that time, in the Roman world this scheme has been progressing
and changing uninterruptedly, and with its progress the most essential part of
the Christian element has been virtually lost. Finally, having rejected
Christianity spiritually, the heirs of the ancient Roman world likewise
renounced [the] papacy. The dreadful French revolution has thundered. In
substance, it was but the last modification and metamorphosis of the same
ancient Roman formula of universal unity. The new formula, however, proved
insufficient. The new idea failed to come true. There even was a moment when
all the nations which had inherited the ancient Roman tradition were almost in
despair. Oh, of course, that portion of society which in 1789 won political
leadership, i.e. the bourgeoisie, triumphed and declared that there was no
necessity of going any further. But all those minds which by virtue of the
eternal laws of nature are destined to dwell in a state of everlasting
universal fermentation seeking new formulae of some ideal and a new word
indispensable to the progress of the human organism, - they all rushed to the
humiliated and the defrauded, to all those who had not received their share in
the new formula of universal unity proclaimed by the French revolution of 1789.
These proclaimed a new word of their own, namely, the necessity of universal
fellowship not for the equal distribution of rights allotted to a quarter, or
so, of the human race, leaving the rest to serve as raw material and a means of
exploitation for the happiness of that quarter of mankind, but, on the contrary
– for universal equality, with each and every one sharing the blessings of this
world, whatever these may prove. It was decided to put this scheme into effect
by resorting to all means, i.e., not by the means of Christian
civilisation – without stopping at anything.
“Now, what has been Germany’s part in this, throughout these two
thousand years? The most characteristic and essential trait of this great,
proud and peculiar people – ever since their appearance on the historical
horizon – consisted of the fact that they never consented to assimilate their
destiny and their principles to those of the outermost Western world, i.e. the
heirs of the ancient Roman tradition. The Germans have been protesting
against the latter throughout these two thousand years. And even though they
did not (never did so far) utter ‘their word’, or set forth their strictly
formulated ideal in lieu of the ancient Roman idea, nevertheless, it seems
that, within themselves, they always were convinced that they were capable of
uttering this ‘new word’ and of leading mankind. They struggled against the
Roman world as early as the times of Arminius, and during the epoch of Roman
Christianity they, more than any other nation, struggled for the sovereign
power against the new Rome.
“Finally, the Germans protested most vehemently, deriving their formula
of protest from the innermost spiritual, elemental foundation of the Germanic
world: they proclaimed the freedom of inquiry, and raised Luther’s banner. This
was a terrible, universal break: the formula of protest had been found and
filled with a content; even so it still was a negative formula, and the new, positive
word was not yet uttered.
“And now, the Germanic spirit, having uttered this ‘new word’ of
protest, as it were, fainted for a while, quite parallel to an identical
weakening of the former strictly formulated unity of the forces of his adversary.
The outermost Western world, under the influence of the discovery of America,
of new sciences and new principles, sought to reincarnate itself in a new
truth, in a new phase.
“When, at the time of the French revolution, the first attempt at such a
reincarnation took place, the Germanic spirit became quite perplexed, and for a
time lost its identity and faith in itself. It proved impotent to say anything
against the new ideas of the outermost Western world. Luther’s Protestantism
had long outlived its time, while the idea of free inquiry had long been
accepted by universal science. Germany’s enormous organism more than ever began
to feel that it had no flesh, so to speak, and no form for self-expression. It
was then that the pressing urge to consolidate itself, at least outwardly, into
a harmonious organism was born in Germany in anticipation of the new future
aspects of her eternal struggle against the outermost Western world…”[208]
This “pressing urge” could only be satisfied by the creation of a
powerful state, the German Reich. For, wrote Fichte: “Though… the bones of our
national unity… may have bleached and died in the storms and rains and burning
suns of several centuries, yet the reanimating breath of the spirit world has
not ceased to inspire. It will yet raise the dead bones of our national body
and join them bone to bone so that they shall stand forth grandly with a new
life… No man, no god, nothing in the realm of possibility can help us, but we
alone must help ourselves, as long as we deserve it.”[209]
Striking here is the Biblical imagery on the one hand (the vision of the
dead bones from Ezekiel 37), and the explicit affirmation that “no man,
no god” can help the German nation in its quest for resurrection. How different
this quasi-Christian, but in fact pagan call was from the much more Christian
call to arms issued by the Russian Church and State to its people only five
years later! This shows that the revival of German nationalism owed less to the
resurrection of Christian faith than to the resurrection of paganism, and of
the myths of the pagan German gods; whose final burial would come over a
century later, in the ruins of Nazi Berlin…
“Fichte,” writes Paul Johnson, “was much impressed by Niccolò
Machiavelli and saw life as a continuing struggle for supremacy among the
nations. The nation-state most likely to survive and profit from this struggle
was the one which extended its influence over the lives of its people most
widely. And such a nation-state – Germany was the obvious example – would
naturally be expansive. ‘Every nation wants to disseminate as widely as
possible the good points which are peculiar to it. And, in so far as it can, it
wants to assimilate the entire human race to itself in accordance with an urge
planted in men by God, an urge on which the community of nations, the friction
between them, and their development towards perfection rest.’
“This was a momentous statement because it gave the authority of
Germany’s leading academic philosopher to the proposition that the power
impulse of the state was both natural and healthy, and it placed the impulse in
the context of a moral world view. Fichte’s state was totalitarian and
expansive, but it was not revolutionary. Its ‘prince” ruled by hereditary divine
right. But ‘the prince belongs to his nation just as wholly and completely as
it belongs to him. Its destiny under divine providence is laid in his hands,
and he is responsible for it.’ So the prince’s public acts must be moral, in
accordance with law and justice, and his private life must be above reproach.
In relations between states, however, ‘there is neither law nor justice, only
the law of strength. This relationship places the divine, sovereign fights of
fate and of world rule in the prince’s hands, and it raises him above the
commandments of personal morals and into a higher moral order whose essence is
contained in the words, Salus et decus populi suprema lex esto.’ This
was an extreme and menacing statement that justified any degree of ruthlessness
by the new, developing nation-state in its pursuit of self-determination and
self-preservation. The notion of a ‘higher moral order’, to be determined by
the state’s convenience, was to find expression, in the 20th
century, in what Lenin called ‘the Revolutionary Conscience’ and Hitler ‘the
Higher Law of the Party’. Moreover, there was no doubt what kind of state
Fichter had in mind. It was not only totalitarian but German. In his Addresses
to the German Nation (1807), he laid down as axiomatic that the state of
the future can only be the national state, in particular the German national
state, the German Reich.”[210]
It was the German Masons who first changed towards Napoleon. As
Tikhomirov writes, “having betrayed their fatherland at first, they raised
their voices against the French, by virtue of which the German national
movement arose.”[211] The
stimulus to this was undoubtedly, as Zamoyski writes, “Napoleon’s crushing
defeat of the Prussians at the Battle of Jena in 1806. The humiliation of
seeing the prestigious army created by the great Frederick trounced by the
French led to painful self-appraisal and underlined the need for regeneration.
But it also stung German pride and dispelled the last shreds of sympathy for France
– and, with them, the universalist dreams of the previous decade.
“The French became villains, and Napoleon himself was even portrayed as
the Antichrist, a focus for the crusading struggle of deliverance that would
regenerated Germany. Poets composed patriotic verse and anti-Napoleonic songs…
“An analogous wave of renewal swept through society. In 1808 the
Tugenbund or League of Virtue, a society for the propagation of civic virtue,
was formed in Königsberg and quickly ramified through Prussia. In 1809
Ludwig Jahn founded the more middle-class Deutsche Bund, based in Berlin.
Joseph Görres demanded that all foreign elements be expunged from national
life, so that essential German characteristics might flourish, and declared
that no power could stand in the way of a nation intent on defending its soul.
‘That to which the Germans aspire will be granted to them, the day when, in
their interior, they will have become worthy of it.’ Even the archetypically
Enlightenment cosmopolitan Wilhelm von Humboldt was turning into a Prussian
patriot. He was reorganizing the state education system at the time, and manage
to transform it into a curiously spiritual one in which education and religion
of state are inextricably intertwined.
“But while the mood changed, reality had not. Germany was still divided
and cowered under French hegemony. To the deep shame of much of her officer
corps, Prussia was still an ally of France when Napoleon invaded Russia in
1812. Her forces, which did not take part in the march on Moscow, were to
support the French and secure their flank in East Prussia. And it was when the
frozen remnants were trudging back into Prussia and Poland that this support
would have been most welcome. But it was precisely then that the Prussian military
judged it safe to show their colours. General von Yorck, in command of 14,000
men in East Prussia, found himself in a pivotal position. With his support,
Marshal Macdonald would be able to hold the line of the River Niemen and keep
the Russians out of Poland; without it, he had no option but full retreat. The
Prussian general had been in touch with the Russians for some time, through the
intermediary of a young German officer in Russian service by the name of Carl
von Clausewitz. On Christmas Day 1812 Yorck met the commander of the Russian
advance guard and, by a convention he signed with them at Tauroggen, repudiated
Prussia’s alliance with France. It was an act of mutiny, the first in a series
of acts by the German army to ‘save’ the fatherland against the orders of its
political leaders. It was also the signal for all the nationalists to come out
into the open.
“The irascible Ernst Moritz Arndt was well to the fore. ‘Oh men of
Germany!’ he exhorted, ‘feel again your God, hear and fear the eternal, and you
heard and fear also your Volk; you feel again in God the honour and
dignity of your fathers, their glorious history rejuvenates itself again in
you, their firm and gallant virtue reblossoms in you, the whole German
Fatherland stands again before you in the august halo of past centuries… One
faith, one love, one courage, and one enthusiasm must gather again the whole
German Volk in brotherly community… Be Germans, be one, will to be one
by love and loyalty, and no devil will vanquish you.’
“The
king of Prussia did not feel quite brave enough to ‘be German’ yet. He ordered
the arrest of Yorck, and then moved to Breslau, where he was out of reach of
the French. In March 1813, when he saw that it was safe for him to jump on the
anti-Napoleon bandwagon, Frederick William announced the formation of citizens’
volunteer forces, the Landwehr and the Landsturm. On 17 March he issued a
proclamation to the effect that his soldiers would ‘fight for our independence
and the honour of the Volk’, and summoned every son of the fatherland to
participate. ‘My cause is the cause of my Volk,’ he concluded, less than
convincingly. But nobody was looking too closely at anyone’s motives in the
general excitement. The cause of the German fatherland justified everything.
‘Strike them dead!’ Heinrich von Kleist had urged the soldiers setting off to
war with the French. ‘At the last judgement you will not be asked for your
reasons!’
“The campaign of 1813, when the patched-up Napoleonic forces attempted
to stand up to the combined armies of Russia, Prussia, Sweden and Austria, and
finally succumbed at Leipzig, should, according to Chateaubriand, go down in
history as ‘the campaign of young Germany, of the poets’. That was certainly
the perception. The by no means young Fichte finished his lecture on the
subject of duty and announced to his students at Berlin that the course was
suspended until they gained liberty or death. He marched out of the hall amid
wild cheers, and led the students off to put their names down for the army…
“The War of Liberation, Freiheitskrieg, was, above all, a war of
purification and self-discovery. It did not stop with the expulsion of French
forces from Germany in 1813. If anything, it was in the course of 1814, when
Napoleon's forces were fighting for survival on French soil, that the War of
Liberation really got going in Germany…
“But the War of Liberation was being waged no less vehemently at the
cultural level. The poets were not squeamish when it came to singing of the
national crusade, while the painters rallied to the cause in a memorable way.
Caspar David Friedrich, who had already done so much to represent the symbolic
German landscape as an object of worship through a series of paintings in which
people are depicted contemplating its wonder like so many saints adoring the
nativity in a medieval triptych, now turned to glorifying the nation. He
painted several representations of an imaginary tomb of Hermann, evocatively
set among craggy boulders and fir trees. And he also produced various
set-pieces representing the war. Other painters depicted groups of patriotic
German volunteers going forth in their hats to free the fatherland. Joseph
Görres led a movement demanding the completion of Cologne Cathedral as a
sign of German regeneration. ‘Long shall Germany live in shame and humiliation,
a prey to inner conflict and alien arrogance, until her people return to the
ideals from which they were seduced by selfish ambition, and until true
religion and loyalty, unity of purpose and self-denial shall again render them
capable of erecting such a building as this,’ he wrote.”[212]
And yet the majority of the German people no longer believed either in
the Catholicism that had erected Cologne cathedral, nor in the Protestantism
that had first raised the word of protest against the Franco-Roman world
and civilisation. As so often happens with nationalistic movements, the attempt
to resurrect the past was actually a sign that the past was definitely dead.
Thus European nationalism, of which German nationalism was perhaps the most
characteristic example, was a new, degenerate religion taking up the
void in the European soul that was left by the death of Christianity.
“The nation,” writes Mosse, “was the intermediary between the individual
and a personal scheme of values and ethics; outside the nation no life or
creativity was possible.”[213]
Görres put it as follows: “Let the nation learn to trace itself to its source, delve into its roots: it will find in its innermost being a fathomless well-spring which rises from subterranean treasure; m