Christopher Olaf Blum Critics of The Enlightenment Readings in The French Counterrevolutionary Tradition 1 PDF
Christopher Olaf Blum Critics of The Enlightenment Readings in The French Counterrevolutionary Tradition 1 PDF
Christopher Olaf Blum Critics of The Enlightenment Readings in The French Counterrevolutionary Tradition 1 PDF
ENLIGHTENMENT
Readings in the French
counter-revolutionary tradition
Introduction
xv
François-René de Chateaubriand
On Buonaparte and the Bourbons (1814)
3
Louis-Gabriel-Amboise de Bonald
On Jacques-Benigne Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux (1815)
43
Thoughts on Various Subjects (1817)
71
Observations upon Madame de Staël’s Considerations
on the Principal Events of the French Revolution (1818)
81
On the Agricultural Family, the Industrial Family,
and the Right of Primogeniture (1826)
107
Joseph de Maistre
Reflections on Protestantism
in its Relations to Sovereignty (1798)
133
On the Pope (1819)
Preliminary Discourse
157
The Objectives of the Popes in Their
Struggles with European Sovereigns
169
The Popes and Civil Liberty
187
Frédéric le Play
Social Reform in France (1864)
Introduction: Prejudices and Facts
197
On the Family
225
Émile Keller
The Encyclical of the 8th of December
and the Principles of 1789 (1865)
The Ultimatum of Church and State
259
Civil Liberty Outside the Church
275
Social Truth, the Principle of Social Liberty
297
sources
339
acknowledgments
341
index
343
CROSSCURRENTS
ISI Books’ Crosscurrents series makes available in English, usually for the first
time, new translations of both classic and contemporary works by authors
working within, or with crucial importance for, the conservative, religious, and
humanist intellectual traditions.
Titles in series
Icarus Fallen, by Chantal Delsol, trans. by Robin Dick
Philippe Bénéton
Furet and Mona Ozouf, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press, 1989), 279.
3 Joseph de Maistre to the count de Marcellus, 9 August 1819, quoted in Richard A. Lebrun,
Joseph de Maistre: An Intellectual Militant (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 1988), 253.
4 Bernanos, La Liberté pour quoi faire? (Paris: Gallimard, 1953), 192.
5 John Henry Newman, Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, sixth edition (1878;
reprinted Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 43.
not for their own sake, as if it were an antiquarian matter, but
because they were convinced that these same principles could, if fol-
lowed, again give birth to the kind of noble and truly human civi-
lization that Europe had been at its best. This is precisely the spirit
in which these authors are presented in this volume. There is no
question today of restoring thrones. Yet to go forward we must have
some conception of our goal, the goal of a life well lived. The texts
presented here can help us by raising issues that are rarely discussed
by Anglo-American conservatives, and thus by challenging us to
look deeper into some of the fundamental aspects of human society.
Although the French conservatives like Maistre were often
inspired by Burke, they went further in their critique of the new
institutions, beliefs, and customs and in their reasoned examination
of the old ones. The Revolution never crossed the English Channel,
although it threatened to do so, and without the profound trans-
formation that Napoleon’s armies brought, English society remained
imbued with many of the manners and morals of the Old Regime
for much of the nineteenth century. In France, however, the
Revolution of 1789 to 1815 was only the first of a series of revolu-
tions and political crises over the next century. France in the nine-
teenth century was like Germany and Russia in the twentieth: the
workshop of history, the place where rival ideas most openly fought
for dominance.6 As a result, French political writing on both sides
of the spectrum is much more radical than is Anglo-American
thought during this period. The Left was not merely democratic or
liberal, it was anticlerical and sometimes violently egalitarian. The
Right was not cautiously conservative; it was robustly so. Such a
polarization does not always bring wisdom to the fore, but it does
bring into sharp relief the contrasting convictions of the opposing
sides.
6 For a recent history that supports this view, see François Furet, Revolutionary France,
1770–1880, trans. Antonia Nevill (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).
are the celebrated “prophets of the past.”7 Chateaubriand ranks with
Hugo and Lamartine as one of the leading French Romantics.
Maistre and Bonald are familiar to Anglo-American conservatives as
Burke’s French interpreters.8 The last three writers are little known
in the English-speaking world. Heirs to Chateaubriand, Bonald,
and Maistre, these men were the leading members of the conserva-
tive school of social thought in the second half of the nineteenth
century. Émile Keller was a prominent defender of Catholic inter-
ests in the French parliament and the author of an influential com-
mentary on Pope Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors. Frédéric Le Play was
one of the founders of sociology in France. Finally, René de La Tour
du Pin, one of the architects of Rerum Novarum, was the last great
expositor of the French counter-revolutionary tradition before the
transformation of French political life caused by the Dreyfus Affair
and the rise of Action Française.
François-René de Chateaubriand
Chateaubriand strode onto Europe’s stage “with the Genius of
Christianity in hand.”9 His timing was impeccable. The eloquent
essay was put on sale in Paris on Good Friday, 1802. Two days later,
on Easter Sunday, the Eldest Daughter of the Church was resur-
rected when Napoleon’s concordat with Pius VII was announced
with a Te Deum and solemn high mass at the Cathedral of Notre-
Dame. For the first time in more than a decade, it was fashionable
to be a Christian in France. Chateaubriand’s fortune rose with the
tide of emotion that followed the concordat. Soon his was a house-
7 Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Les Prophètes du passé, 2nd edition (1851; Paris: Victor Palmé,
1880).
8 See Yves Chiron, “The Influence of Burke’s Writings in Post-Revolutionary France,” in Ian
Crowe, ed., The Enduring Edmund Burke (Wilmington: Intercollegiate Studies Institute,
1997), 85–93.
9 Barbey-d’Aurevilly, Les Prophètes du passé, 128.
hold name, synonymous with the grandeur of the First Consul’s
rule.
Having left the army, Chateaubriand sailed for the New World,
intent on discovering the Northwest Passage. This he had neither
the resources nor the expertise really to attempt. Yet he did see
much of the American back-country and gleaned many experiences
with which to color the tale of Indian life that would first win him
notoriety, Atala: The Love of Two Natives in the Wilderness (1801).
While in rural Virginia, he chanced to see a newspaper detailing
Louis XVI’s flight to Varennes in the summer of 1791 and realized
that his duty lay in France. By the next summer, he had joined the
emigré army on the banks of the Rhine. With them he endured the
insult of marching in the baggage-train of the Austrians into France,
and then fleeing with them to the Low Countries when the invasion
failed. He spent the next eight years in London, frequenting the
11 This is the principal theme of André Maurois, Chateaubriand: Poet, Statesman, Lover, trans.
Vera Fraser (1938; reprinted New York: Greenwood Press, 1969).
12 See, for instance, Jean d’Alembert’s comments on art in his Preliminary Discourse to the
Encyclopedia of Diderot [1751], trans. R. N. Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1995), 61–62.
drals of Paris and Reims showed that “no monument is venerable
lest its long history is, as it were, impressed upon its vaults, black-
ened by the ages.” We cannot enter these Gothic churches, he
wrote, “without a shiver and a vague sensation of the divine.”13 Like
Burke, Chateaubriand had “discovered the value of culture in the
experience of its loss.”14 He wrote of parish processions and church
bells, Gregorian chant, and the superiority of the Bible to Homer.
Thus he led the way for the continental Gothic revival, the rise of
Christian romanticism in literature, and the rebirth of Gregorian
chant at Solesmes. Yet his tastes were not purely medieval. In fact,
one of the central themes of the Genius of Christianity was the excel-
lence of the seventeenth century and its superiority to the eigh-
teenth. The incredulity of the philosophes, he argued, had brought
“abstract definitions, a scientific style, and neologisms: all fatal to
taste and eloquence.”15 The century of Louis XIV was the century of
true giants: La Fontaine and Pascal, Molière and Corneille, Racine
and Bossuet.
Louis de Bonald
If Chateaubriand was the troubadour of the counter-revolution,
then Bonald was its strategist. Neither his career nor his writings
match the Breton poet’s for panache. Where Chateaubriand dashed
nimbly, Bonald strode ponderously. Yet both greatly influenced
their own times and the century that followed. Together they were
the leading minds of the Restoration and, for a time, they were
among its leading politicians. Chateaubriand’s great achievement
was the Spanish expedition of 1823, when the “Hundred Thousand
Sons of Saint Louis” crossed the Pyrenees and marched all the way
to Cadiz to liberate Fernando VII from a liberal revolution. As for-
eign minister, Chateaubriand orchestrated the invasion with con-
summate flair, making it both a diplomatic advance and a public
relations coup.23 Bonald’s achievement was less famous but more
lasting: the repeal of legal divorce. He constantly taught that
the family was the basis of society, and with the repeal of divorce,
which kept divorce illegal in France until 1884, Bonald joined
Chateaubriand in the ranks of those few theorists who have been
able to put their ideas into political practice.24
25 On Bonald’s upbringing and early career, see David Klinck, The French
Counterrevolutionary
Theorist Louis de Bonald (1754–1840) (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 13–46; and Henri
Moulinié, De Bonald: la vie, la carrière politique, la doctrine (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1916;
reprinted New York: Arno Press, 1979), 1–22.
The few who read the tome found Bonald’s Latinate prose to be
impenetrable.26 After a brief reunion with his wife in 1797, he spent
five years in a kind of internal exile in Paris, where, he reckoned, it
was easier both to hide and to influence politics than in the coun-
tryside. While in Paris, he wrote three works that extended and
refined his doctrine: An Analytical Essay on the Natural Laws of the
Social Order (1800), On Divorce (1801),27 and Primitive Legislation
(1802). Napoleon seems to have admired the stern monarchism of
Bonald’s works and probably for that reason removed him from the
list of proscribed emigrés in 1802. This allowed Bonald to return to
Millau, from which he sent a steady stream of political journalism
to the leading Paris reviews. In 1810, after having refused many
offers of preferment from the emperor, he accepted a post on the
Great Council of the University.28
26 It seems that everyone who has read Bonald has found his style to be a stumbling block.
See Michel Toda, Louis de Bonald: théoricien de la contre-révolution (Étampes: Clovis, 1997),
5–10.
27 This is the only work of Bonald’s to receive a complete English translation. See On Divorce,
trans. Nicholas Davidson (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1992).
28 For a descriptions of this period in Bonald’s life and of each of the works mentioned, see
Klink, French Counterrevolutionary Theorist, 47–169.
property. With the Revolution of 1830, Bonald left political life. He
spent his last decade looking after the family property, much of
which he had managed to restore from the ravages and neglect
caused by the Revolution.
The four selections from Bonald included here all date from the
Restoration. He was at his best as a publicist. In his shorter pieces
his considerable practical wisdom emerges, and his shortcomings as
an overly systematic theorist recede to the background. The first
essay is a long review of a biography of Jacques-Benigne Bossuet, the
famous orator. Little known today, Bossuet (1627–1704) was effec-
tively the spokesman for the Church in France under Louis XIV
and thus became a chief target of the philosophes of the eighteenth
century. Indeed, it is not much of an exaggeration to say that the
Enlightenment in France was an extended argument against
Bossuet.29 Bonald accordingly took up the cudgels against the
Enlightenment by championing Bossuet and the earnestness of the
century of Louis XIV.
29 Thus Peter Gay wrote that Bossuet’s Universal History lay “across the philosophes’ path, an
obstacle, a problem.” The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 volumes (New York: Knopf,
1966), I: 75. For Jonathan Israel, the poles of the eighteenth-century debates were set out
in the seventeenth century by Spinoza and Bossuet. See Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy
and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
30 Burke, First Letter on a Regicide Peace [1796], in Select Works of Edmund Burke, 3 volumes
(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999), III: 126.
31 On Parisian culture in the last decades of the eighteenth century, see Simon Schama, Citizens:
A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1989) and the many works
of Robert Darnton, especially The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France
(London: Harper Collins, 1996).
of traditional, country manners and agreed with another counter-
revolutionary, Jane Austen, that “we do not look in great cities for
our best morality.”32
32 Jane Austen, Mansfield Park [1814], ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1990), 83.
33 On these themes in Bonald, see Robert A. Nisbet, “De Bonald and the Concept of the
Social Group,” Journal of the History of Ideas 5 (1944): 315–31; and D. K. Cohen, “The
Vicomte de Bonald’s Critique of Industrialism,” Journal of Modern History 41 (1969):
475–84.
blows at the family by secularizing marriage, legalizing divorce, and
making obligatory the division of a family’s property into equal
shares at the death of the parents.34 The Ultra-Royalists of the
Restoration failed in their attempt to abolish civil marriage, but they
did repeal legal divorce. They also sought to bring back the possi-
bility of keeping a family’s landed property intact through entail and
primogeniture. The proposal was brought before the Chamber of
Peers in 1826 but failed by a wide margin: the egalitarianism of the
day was simply too strong. Nonetheless, Bonald’s essay and political
leadership helped to ensure that the counter-revolutionary move-
ment would retain a strong agrarian element throughout the nine-
teenth century.35
Joseph de Maistre
While Chateaubriand traveled the world in search of adventure, and
Bonald tilled the soil in the provinces, Joseph de Maistre repre-
sented the king of Piedmont in the court of the czar in St.
Petersburg.36 The writings of each man matched his life. Where
Chateaubriand was wild and romantic, and Bonald stodgy, Maistre
was urbane. A native of Chambéry, which lies south of Geneva in
the province of Savoy, then a part of the kingdom of Piedmont-
Sardinia, Maistre (1753–1821) was sent to Turin to study law and
then followed his father in the career of a regional advocate and
jurist. He lived in Chambéry until the French Revolution annexed
Savoy in 1792. He spent the next decade moving around southern
Europe with his family and serving the king of Piedmont in various
capacities. Then in 1803 he was sent to St. Petersburg as the repre-
Maistre gained fame long before the two great works published at
the end of his life. In 1797, while the Directory ruled in Paris, his
Considerations on France appeared. In relatively short compass, he
set out what would remain the central themes of his thought: the
governance of human affairs by Divine Providence, the radical evil
of the French Revolution, the centrality of the Christian faith to
European society, the insufficiency of written constitutions, and the
need to return to Europe’s inherited institutions. He called for the
return of the Bourbons, but he did so in a surprising way. The
Terror, he explained, had been a providential means of purifying
France from her errors and crimes, including her greatest crime,
that of killing Louis XVI. Now that God had purified France, the
rightful king could return with mercy rather than vengeance. He
would need only to restore the proper order:
37 Maistre described the work in this way (quoted in Lebrun, Joseph de Maistre, 254): “It does
a turn, so to say, around all the great questions of rational philosophy, and can shock no
one, except the ideologues and the Lockists. The work is designed to achieve the solemn
wedding of philosophy and the Gospel.” On the Soirées, see Stéphane Rials, “Lecture de
Joseph de Maistre,” in Révolution et contre-révolution au dix-neuvième siècle (Paris: Diffusion
Université Culture, 1987), 22–40.
The return to order will not be painful, because it will
be natural and because it will be favoured by a secret
force whose action is wholly creative. We will see pre-
cisely the opposite of what we have seen. Instead of
these violent commotions, painful divisions, and per-
petual and desperate oscillations, a certain stability, an
indefinable peace, a universal well-being will announce
the presence of sovereignty. . . . [T]his is the great truth
with which the French cannot be too greatly impressed:
the restoration of the monarchy, what they call the
Counter-revolution, will be not a contrary revolution,
but the contrary of revolution.38
40 Thus, for instance, Jacques Maritain, Three Reformers: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau (1929;
New York: Crowell, 1970).
41 See Dale K. Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to the
Civil Constitution, 1560–1791 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996). Van
Kley, it should be noted, dismisses Maistre as a precursor to his own views, citing him as
one of the proponents of the “rightist ideology’s plot theory.”
42 The classic statement of this view may be found in Immanuel Kant’s What Is
Enlightenment?
historiography, including works such as the Spaniard Jaime Balmes’s
Protestantism and Catholicity Compared in Their Effects on the
Civilization of Europe (1846) and, later, Christopher Dawson’s
Religion and the Rise of Western Culture (1950).
43 A well-known collection of excerpts from his works is Jack Lively, ed. and trans., The Works
of Joseph de Maistre (New York: Macmillan, 1965). Since Lively’s collection, Richard A.
Lebrun has been steadily at work producing excellent translations of Maistre’s works.
44 See Isaiah Berlin, “Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism,” in The Crooked Timber
of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (London: John Murray,
1990), 91–174, and Stephen Holmes, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1993), 13–36. For a response to Berlin’s arguments, see Owen
Bradley, A Modern Maistre: The Social and Political Thought of Joseph de Maistre (Lincoln,
Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), especially pages xv–xix.
45 On Action Française, see Eugen Weber, Action Française (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 1962). On this point, see John C. Murray, S.J., “The Political Thought of
Joseph de Maistre,” Review of Politics 11 (1949): 63–86, at 86.
the Catholic faith and European traditions.46
Frédéric le Play
With the July Revolution of 1830, the Bourbon Restoration ended,
and with it the best hope of the counter-revolutionaries for
46 See Stéphane Rials, “Fausses droites, centres morts et vrais modérés dans la vie politique
française contemporaine,” in Révolution et contre-révolution, 41–52, and Rials, Le
légitimisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983).
47 Barbey d’Aurevilly, Prophètes du passé, 63.
48 See Marvin L. Brown Jr., The Comte de Chambord: The Third Republic’s Uncompromising
King (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1967).
49 For instance, the Alfred de Falloux, sponsor of the 1850 law that won for Catholics
freedom for religious instruction in secondary schools. See C. B. Pitman, trans., Memoirs
of the Count de Falloux, 2 volumes (London: Chapman and Hall, 1888), I: 84: “I was in
full tide of enthusiasm for the Soirées de Saint-Petersbourg.” The Oratorian Father Gratry
was inspired by Maistre to attempt to reconcile modern science with Catholic theology. See
Louis Foucher, La philosophie catholique en France au dix-neuvième siècle (Paris: J. Vrin,
1955), 199.
50 See Foucher, La philosophie catholique, 265–66. Their influence in this direction was indi-
rect. In philosophy, Bonald was strongly Cartesian, Maistre an eclectic mixture of ancient
and modern. Yet their powerful arguments about the need for tradition and authority in
philosophy led some of their followers back to St. Thomas.
repairing the social order ravaged by the Revolution. The remainder
of the nineteenth century in France saw a variety of different
regimes, but all were in some way beholden to the Revolution and
the “Principles of 1789.” Under the July Monarchy of Louis-
Philippe d’Orléans (1830–48), political and economic liberalism
was the order of the day. A property qualification kept the electorate
small. Those who complained that they were not represented were
told to “make themselves rich” so that they might qualify to vote.
The overthrow of this crass regime in 1848 was welcomed both by
conservative Catholics and by the new urban radicals, the socialists.
Yet within three years, the Second Republic had gone the way of the
first, and Napoleon III had declared himself emperor of the French.
His authoritarian regime was initially friendly to the church, but it
became anticlerical over time. During his reign (1852–70) many
conservatives joined the Legitimist movement that supported the
claim of the comte de Chambord, the grandson of the last Bourbon
to reign, Charles X. To Chambord and many other conservatives,
the sufferings of workers loomed large. The July Monarchy had
brought France into the industrial age. With the factories came all
the pathologies of the industrial order: urban poverty, unemploy-
ment, child labor, and socialist revolutionary movements. A
remarkable generation of (broadly speaking) conservative thinkers
grew up during the July Monarchy and rose to prominence under
Napoleon III. Men such as Tocqueville, Montalembert, and
Ozanam described themselves as liberals, but they sought to repair
traditional European civilization. One member of this generation,
however, was sufficiently counter-revolutionary in his teaching to
earn the epithet “a rejuvenated Bonald”: Frédéric Le Play.51
Le Play (1806–82) was born to a modest Norman family and
trained in Paris to enter a career in mining.52 He interested himself
51 The phrase is from the literary critic Sainte-Beuve, as quoted in Robert A. Nisbet, The
Social Group in French Thought (1940; reprinted, New York: Arno Press, 1980), 197.
52 For Le Play’s life, see Michael Z. Brooke, Le Play, Engineer and Social Scientist: The Life
and Work of Frédéric Le Play (Harlow, United Kingdom: Longmans, 1970).
in social questions even as a youth. For a time, he lived with an
uncle in Paris who was a confirmed royalist. Then, at the School of
Mines, he befriended Jean Reynaud, a follower of the positivist
Saint-Simon, and in the late 1820s took an immense walking tour
in Germany with Reynaud to investigate mines. The Revolution of
1830 broke out in Paris while Le Play was recovering from a serious
laboratory accident that left his hands damaged for life. Hearing of
the tumult in the streets, and remembering his many conversations
with Reynaud, Le Play determined that he would dedicate his life to
the study of society in an attempt to heal its divisions and ills. Yet
he would do so neither as a Saint-Simonian nor as a Catholic. He
remained an independent and eclectic thinker and returned to the
practice of the Catholic faith only at the end of his life, in 1879.
What marked Le Play’s thinking from his early years was a desire to
observe and to describe human society.
53 See Robert A. Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 61–70.
See also the introduction by Catherine Bodard Silver to her edition of selections from Le Play’s
writings: Frédéric Le Play on Family, Work, and Social Change, ed. Silver (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982), 3–134.
being. His sociological studies were animated by his desire to dis-
cover a means of improving French society, and during the 1840s
he met regularly to discuss social issues with some of the leading
men of the day, including Dupanloup, Lamartine, Montalembert,
Thiers, and Tocqueville.
Le Play had met Napoleon III in Russia during his travels in the
1840s, and from the early years of the emperor’s reign he was active
in political life. In 1855, he was brought in to save the Paris
Exhibition, which was foundering because of poor management.
The following year, Napoleon III asked him to join the Council of
State, the Second Empire’s principal legislative body. Over the next
fifteen years, Le Play’s official duties included numerous investiga-
tions of different industries as well as the management of the Paris
Exhibition of 1867, a mammoth task that extended over a five-year
period.54 At the emperor’s request, he published a statement of his
prescriptions for society: Social Reform in France (1864). After the
fall of the empire in 1870, Le Play spent most of his efforts
founding and directing the Unions of Social Peace, an organization
dedicated to healing France’s political and social divisions through
local study circles of leading men. He also remained the secretary-
general of the International Society for Practical Studies of Social
Economy, which he had founded in 1856. Through these organiza-
tions, his influence did reach some professional economists and
sociologists; nevertheless, it was in conservative and Catholic circles
that his ideas were most popular.
54 Fifteen million visitors came to the exhibition. For a description of it, see Alistair Horne,
The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune, 1870–71 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965),
21–33.
55 It was printed eight times during his life. For a summary and discussion of the volume, see
Nisbet, Social Group in French Thought, 197–221.
and René de La Tour du Pin all drew upon it for inspiration.
Indeed, through its influence on La Tour du Pin, it can be said to
have exercised an important contribution to the origins of Leo
XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum. What Catholics and other con-
servatives found congenial in Le Play’s argument was his unflinching
opposition to the “principles of 1789,” and his recognition of the
positive roles played by religion, private property, and a strong
family in social reform.
Emile Keller
Le Play and his generation were shaped by the failure of the Bourbon
Restoration. They sought to restore the social and political stability
of France within the framework of the liberal institutions brought by
the July Monarchy. The fall of the July Monarchy and the ensuing
June Days considerably diminished liberalism’s prospects. For three
days in June 1848, the streets of Paris were blocked with barricades
as the Second Republic fought for its life against a revolt of the Paris
workers. Some fifteen hundred died in the fighting, and three thou-
sand rebels were subsequently executed by the victorious Republic.
The ensuing regime would be a conservative one, and in 1851, when
Prince-President Louis-Napoleon declared himself emperor, so great
was the perceived threat of socialist revolution that even some lib-
erals accepted his coup as necessary and good. For conservatives, the
June Days and the events of 1848 throughout Europe demonstrated
the need for a strong regime to withstand the danger of socialist rev-
olution.57 For some, however, there was an additional lesson: that
57 See, for instance, the 1849 speech on dictatorship by the Spanish conservative Juan Donoso
Cortes, in Béla Menczer, ed., Tensions of Order and Freedom (1952; reprinted, New Brunswick,
N.J.: Transaction, 1994), 160–76; along with the commentary of Robert A.
Herrera in Donoso Cortes: Cassandra of the Age (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 67–78
those who would preserve European liberties must address the plight
of the industrial laborer, and must do so honestly and effectively.
One of the leading members of this new generation of conserva-
tives in France was Émile Keller (1828–1909).58 Born in Alsace,
Keller was raised and educated in Paris. He spent most of his adult
life there as a parliamentarian and leader in a number of Catholic
institutions. Indeed, he was one of the most remarkable Catholic
laymen of the nineteenth century. He came from a well-to-do
Alsacian family and married a woman from the same circle. Of their
fourteen children, three became Dominican nuns and a fourth
became a Little Sister of the Poor. Keller was one of the leading
members of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul for many years and
then, in the 1860s, was one of the founders of Peter’s Pence, the
Catholic effort in France and other countries to support the papacy,
then recently stripped of the greater part of its temporal dominion.
Finally, in 1891, he was approached by a representative of Leo XIII
and asked to found a Catholic political party in France, an offer he
declined.
58 Details on the life of Keller are taken from Gustave Gautherot, Un demi-siècle de défense
nationale et religieuse: Émile Keller (1828–1909) (Paris: Plon, 1922).
Prussian occupation. There he read the solemn protest of the
Alsace-Lorraine deputation against the dismemberment of France.
No fewer than five of his descendants would die during the Great
War fighting to reunite Alsace and Lorraine to France.
As a politician, Keller’s chief concern was to defend Christian
society against the heritage of the French Revolution.59 Elected to
Parliament in 1859, he gained national attention for his courageous
speech of March 13, 1861, criticizing Napoleon III for his role in
allowing the Kingdom of Piedmont to conquer the greater part of
Italy, including the bulk of the Papal State. For this, the emperor
considered Keller his enemy and arranged his defeat in the next
election, in 1863. Keller returned to Parliament in 1869 and kept a
seat without interruption until 1881. His final term was from 1885
to 1889. During the 1870s and 1880s, he sponsored a number of
measures to protect the Church and Christian society. In 1873, for
instance, he fought for tougher penalties against factory owners who
employed children. In 1879, when radical republicans sought to
overturn the 1814 measure that had restored Sunday as a day of
rest, he fought back, unsuccessfully, with an attempt to extend
Sunday rest to railroads and the post office. Finally, when in 1884
the Republic repealed its prohibition on labor associations, he saw
one of his primary goals accomplished.60
With the encyclical and the Syllabus, Pius IX responded to more than a
decade of revolutionary and anticlerical activity and legislation
throughout Europe, especially in Italy. Thanks to the connivance of
Napoleon III, the king of Piedmont had been able to conquer most
of Italy between 1859 and 1861, and then, on March 14, 1861, had
declared himself to be king of Italy. But King Victor Emmanuel was
a Freemason, and his kingdom had openly persecuted the Church
for years by confiscating land and closing convents. He was, there-
fore, promptly excommunicated by Pius IX. The encyclical Quanta
Cura addressed these and other issues, and for its pronounced
defense of Christian society it may be seen as the origin of the
Church’s many subsequent social encyclicals.63 Most Europeans
were so distracted by the pope’s condemnation of “progress, liber-
alism, and modern civilization” in the famous proposition #80 of
the Syllabus that they were unable to read either document with
patience. Subsequent Catholic interpreters, particularly Bishop
Félix Dupanloup of Orléans, were at pains to point out that the
progress and civilization condemned by the Pope were only those
66 La Moricière wrote of the “conspiracy of silence” in a letter congratulating Keller for the
book. Gautherot, Un demi-siècle, 132.
67 Albert de Mun, Ma vocation sociale: souvenirs de la fondation de l’Oeuvre des cercles
catholiques d’ouvriers (1871–1875) (Paris: Lethielleux, 1908), 13.
had fought on Crusade with St. Louis. He too had lost ancestors to
the guillotine and was implacably opposed to the heritage of the
Revolution. La Tour du Pin was raised on the ancestral property at
Arrancy, near Laon, in the Champagne region northeast of Paris.
His father instilled in him the belief that his aristocratic birth had
conferred a calling upon him, instructing him to “remember that
you are but the administrator of this land for its inhabitants.” This
sense of paternal responsibility for the villagers of the hamlet of
Arrancy would for La Tour du Pin grow into a mission to serve
France as a whole. Initially, his service would be in the army. After
lengthy studies at several schools in the Paris region, he proceeded
to active duty in the Crimean War, in the war against Austria in the
Piedmont in 1859, in Algeria, and finally, on the Rhine frontier
during the Franco-Prussian war. Then came the fateful internment
in Aix-la-Chapelle and his friendship with Albert de Mun, like him
a dutiful soldier from the conservative aristocracy. After their
imprisonment, both Mun and La Tour du Pin returned to Paris,
where they saw firsthand the horrors of the Commune of 1871.
This quickened their resolve to work for the regeneration of the
working class.68
Over the next twelve months, Mun and La Tour du Pin collabo-
rated in founding the Oeuvre des Cercles Catholiques des Ouvriers,
that is, the “Work of the Catholic Working-Men’s Circles.” For the
next thirty years the Oeuvre des Cercles, or simply the Oeuvre, was
the leading voice for the counter-revolution in France. It consisted
of a central committee and a national movement of local circles. At
the high-tide of its influence in 1881, the Oeuvre had some 550
local circles with a total membership of fifty thousand. Each of these
circles brought together wealthy patrons with members of the
working class in an organization that sought to improve the spiri-
tual and material lives of the workers and to protect them from the
propaganda of revolutionary socialism. One would not want to
68 Biographical details are taken from Elizabeth Bossan de Garagnol, Le Colonel de La Tour du
Pin d’après lui-même (Paris: Beauchesne, 1934).
overestimate the influence of a movement of fifty thousand in a
nation with over thirty million inhabitants. Nonetheless, through
Albert de Mun’s fiery parliamentary oratory, the Oeuvre was known
and even somewhat feared by left-leaning politicians.69
La Tour du Pin was the Oeuvre des Cercles’s theoretician. For many
years he directed a group of leading members of the Oeuvre in the
study of social theory and particularly economics. The group was
remarkable for its breadth of vision. Not content only to read
Bonald, its members took up St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theolo-
giae for guidance on the theory of the just wage. Beginning in 1876,
their findings were presented to the public when the Oeuvre founded
its own journal, Association Catholique. The title was indicative of La
Tour du Pin’s central conviction: that the most damaging heritage of
the Revolution was its individualism, and that this must be com-
batted by a new spirit of association or solidarity. He was inspired to
this conviction by the leaders of the Catholic social movement in
Germany and Austria, with whom he became familiar during his
service as military attaché to the Austro-Hungarian Empire from
1877 to 1881. In 1884, he joined a group of leading Catholics for a
series of seven annual congresses at Fribourg, Switzerland. The pro-
ceedings of these meetings were one of the sources for Leo XIII’s
encyclical Rerum Novarum of 1891. La Tour du Pin’s central convic-
tion was there upheld by the pope: that the plight of the worker was
a question of justice, and not merely one of charity.70
69 On the Oeuvre des cercles, see John McManners, Church and State in France, 1870–1914
(New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 81–93. On Mun, see Benjamin F. Martin, Count Albert
de Mun: Paladin of the Third Republic (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina
Press, 1978). For the context of the Oeuvre, see Paul Misner, Social Catholicism in Europe.
70 See Robert Talmy, Aux sources du catholicisme social: l’école de La Tour du Pin (Tournai:
Desclée, 1963). For a more brief account of La Tour du Pin’s thought, see Charlotte
Touzalin Muret, French Royalist Doctrines since the Revolution (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1933), 200–16.
Republic.” As a convinced monarchist and opponent of the rising
socialist faction in French politics, La Tour du Pin could not fail to
be attracted to Charles Maurras’s Action Française. He joined
the movement in 1905 and in 1907 allowed his articles to be
collected by a member of Action Française and published under
the title Towards a Christian Social Order. After the Great War, how-
ever, he left the Action Française movement.71 His deepest principles
were little in accord with those of Maurras. Maurras was a con-
firmed positivist who saw only the functional value of religion
in society, while La Tour du Pin remained a pious Catholic
whose admiration for the Christian Middle Ages was primarily
spiritual.72
Conclusion
The Enlightenment had sought to liberate man from the dead hand
of tradition. His faculties once set free, Voltaire and his followers
believed, man would soar to new heights of felicity. The French
Revolution incarnated this desire and tore apart much of the social
fabric of Europe. When the Church was despoiled, countless chari-
table and educational institutions across Europe were either sup-
pressed or deprived of their financial basis. The end of noble privi-
lege brought with it the centralization of politics and justice. With
the destruction of the craft guilds and trade associations, the patri-
mony of the artisans was confiscated and working men were left
unprotected from the ravages of unlimited competition. Nor did
the Revolution spare the family: through the legalization of divorce
and the enforcement of equal inheritance, the strong family struc-
75 This was true of Schultze-Delitsch, but not of the credit union movement generally. See J.
Carroll Moody and Gilbert C. Fite, The Credit Union Movement: Origins and Development,
1850–1980, 2nd edition (Dubuque: Kendall-Hunt, 1984), 1–18.
76 On which see Matthew H. Elbow, French Corporative Theory, 1789–1948 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1953).
77 For commentary, see Robert Nisbet, Social Group in French Thought, 159–71.
ture of the Old Regime was replaced by an impoverished individu-
alism. On top of all this, the vast cultural inheritance of
Christendom was forcefully stripped away as the Revolution and
then Napoleon’s armies brought rampant iconoclasm, melting
down church bells to make cannons, confiscating works of art and
documents, secularizing the universities, and promulgating the
culture of the Enlightenment. The French critics of the
Enlightenment stood athwart all this progress and called for a return
to the salutary traditions of European civilization. They were cham-
pions of piety towards family and local customs, fidelity towards
kings, solidarity towards fellow men, and loyalty towards the
Church.
78 On this point, see Philippe Chenaux, Entre Maurras et Maritain: une génération intellectuelle
catholique (1920–1930) (Paris: Cerf, 1999).
and what good was present in their ideals was compromised by their
many moral defects.79
79 For an overview of the subject, see Tom Buchanan and Martin Conway, Political
Catholicism in Europe, 1918–1965 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
80 See Richard Griffiths, The Reactionary Revolution: The Catholic Revival in French
Literature,
1870–1914 (New York: Ungar, 1965).
81 See, for instance, Nisbet’s Conservatism: Dream and Reality (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1986), which includes numerous references to Maistre, Bonald, and Le
Play.
82 On which see Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, Ind.:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1988)