Chapter 3

[1]Thiers,Histoire du consulat et de l'empire, iii. 211, 342.

[2]L. von Stein,Geschichte der socialen Bewegung in Frankreich, i. 230.

[3]De Pradt,Histoire des quatre concordats, ii. 212.

[4]See Guizot in theRevue des deux mondes, February 15, 1863.

[5]Sources: Thiers,Histoire du Consulat; Lanfrey,Histoire de Napoléon I.; Mignet,Histoire de la Révolution, ii.; De Pradt,Histoire des quatre concordats; Portalis,Discours et rapports sur le concordat; Lorenz von Stein,Geschichte der socialen Bewegung in Frankreich, i.; Taine,Le régime moderne, i.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In order to strike as deadly a blow as possible at Rousseau's conception of the state as a contract, this conception was represented as not only foolish, but actually criminal. And yet it is but the natural, the inevitable outcome of the eighteenth century's over-estimation of the conscious side of human life and want of understanding of the unconscious, the instinctive. How much more justly does Hegel judge Rousseau! He gives him the credit of having laid down a principle, "the constituent of which is thought"—in other words, will—as the principle of the state, observing that he was only mistaken in understanding by will merely the individual, conscious, and arbitrary will, a misunderstanding which leads to "other, merely reasonable conclusions, subversive of the absolutely divine, and its authority and majesty."[4]

In theContrat SocialJean-Jacques had attempted to find the basis of governments and laws in the nature of man and society, taken purely in the abstract. But before Rousseau's day Montesquieu had written: "I have never heard law discussed without a careful investigation being made into the origin of societies, a proceeding which to me seems perfectly absurd. If human beings did not form a society, if they avoided or fled from one another, one would ask the reason and try to find out why they kept separate; but, as it is, they are all born bound to each other. A son is born in his father's home and remains connected with him—this is society and its cause."

If, for the relation of the child to the father, we substitute the relation to the mother, as being even a closer one, the reasoning is perfectly correct. But Rousseau, leaving this solution out of the question, desired to show what ideas had led men to hold together, what aim they proposed to themselves in so doing, and by what means they could best attain this aim. Now, it admits of no dispute that it is only by the mutual consent of its members that society exists. This consent or contract is most undoubtedly the spiritual basis on which society rests; but the contract is entered into tacitly, is an understood thing, has always existed, has consequently no external actuality. In exactly the same manner we accept the geometric definition of the origin of a ball: A ball, or sphere, is generated by the revolution of a semicircle about its diameter. The definition is perfectly correct, but has no connection whatever with the material conditions requisite to the existence of any given ball. Never yet has a ball been made by causing a semicircle to revolve round its axis.

This same figure may be retained as giving an exact idea of the style of reasoning on social subjects characteristic of the eighteenth century, nay, of the whole intellectual tendency of the century. It is a dissolving, isolating tendency; it is in the direction of geometry and algebra; men endeavour to comprehend the most difficult and most complicated real situations by the aid of abstract ideas. This is a weakness which enables Bonald to gain an easy victory by an appeal to the principle of power. He opposes Rousseau's disintegrating theories with the doctrines of the days of the old absolute monarchy: "God is the sovereignpowerthat rules all beings; the God-man is thepowerthat rules mankind, the head of the state is the power that rules all his subjects, the head of the family is thepowerin his house. As all power is created in the image of God and originates with God, all power is absolute."[5]

Rousseau is, thirdly, attacked in the domain of morality. He had endeavoured to make "the inward, unwritten law," of which Antigone speaks, the source of every outward moral law. He had said: "What God desires man to do, He does not let him know through another man; He tells him it Himself, writes it on the table of his heart." If this be the case, what becomes of tradition and authority and revelations at second hand? Bonald consequently replies: "If man were obliged to obey this inward law, he would be as devoid of will as the stone, which must submit to the law of gravitation; if, on the contrary, he is at liberty not to obey it, anauthorityis required, which shall direct his attention to these laws and teach him to obey them." Thus in morals too the guiding power is transferred from man's own inward feeling to outward authority.

The antagonism to Rousseau is so strong that Bonald, for instance, writes page upon page of declamation against the philosopher's appeal to mothers to nurse their children themselves. One would imagine that, in this instance at least, Rousseau's theories would meet with the approval of the stern inculcators of duty. Not at all—the appeal in question shows that Jean-Jacques looked upon human beings as simply animals. "J. J. Rousseau declared in the name of nature that it was the duty of women to suckle their children, exactly as she-animals do, and for the same reason.... Fathers and mothers, regarded by the philosophers as simply males and females, in turn regarded their children simply as their young."[6]And why is Bonald so wrathful? Evidently because he fears that Rousseau may deprive religion of some of its credit by issuing a reasonable commandment not inscribed on the tables of its laws. "Rousseau," he goes on to say, "probably imagined that he had surprised religion in the neglect of a duty; but possibly religion, more far-sighted than he, feared anything which might serve young married people as a reason or excuse for living separated from each other, even momentarily." The motherly solicitude of the Catholic church for the happiness of spouses and the multiplication of the human race—this also is to be placed in the clearest light by means of an attack on Rousseau.

We have seen to what misunderstanding of the idea of society the unhistoric, mathematical line of thought of the eighteenth century led. A kindred line of thought produced a very similar misunderstanding of poetry. In their admiration for mathematical reasonableness, and for the certainty with which general truths had been arrived at by mathematical inferences, men were eager to communicate to language, as far as possible, the quality of mathematically exact expression. Condillac defined science asune langue bien faite, i.e.a perfectly clear and perfectly exact language. The fact was not sufficiently appreciated that, when it is desired to reproduce impressions which are different in different persons, and which even in the same person may change from one moment to another, a flexible, impressionable language is required, a language which accepts its spirit and whole stamp from the person using it. Scientific men began to deride what they called poetry and style, and maintained that in writing thought was everything, form nothing. Barante, who, in a critical work published at the beginning of the new century, was the first to protest against these ideas of his age, argues cleverly: "When Chimène says to Rodrigue: 'Go! I do not hate thee,' it is plain, if we submit these words to calm investigation, that they mean the same as if she had said: 'Go! I love thee'; and yet, if she used the latter expression, she would be quite a different being; her consideration for her father would be gone, and so would her modesty and her charm."

The poets, who were in reality influenced by the same ideas as the scientists, and were as far as they from conceiving of style as the direct outcome of the personality, set themselves to work to fabricate style, and spoke of it as we speak of the music composed for any given libretto. They looked upon the art of writing as a perfectly external art, and the descriptive school, with Delille at their head, took unpoetic themes—physics, botany, astronomy, sea-voyages—and out of them manufactured style. (See poetical works of Boisjolin, Gudin, Aimé Martin, and Esménard.) Cournand actually wrote a poem in four cantos on style itself and its various species. Poetry was regarded as an artificial form communicated to the matured thought. This was the idea which Buffon had contradicted in his notable proposition:Le style c'est l'homme même, a proposition which was presently to become the most hackneyed of quotations, inevitable whenever the subject of style was broached, and employed by none so frequently as by those who were neither men nor possessors of style.[7]The poets of the eighteenth century derived their conception of the nature of poetry from their own practice. As their own poetry, their own language, was not a natural product, but the result of labour and the observance of certain rules respecting elegance of expression, choice of similes, and employment of mythology, they naturally believed that language and thought originated independently of each other.

When Bonald, in opposition to their theory, propounds his, namely, that language and thought cannot be separated—the theory upon which (in his principal work,La législation primitive) he founds his whole system—he is unquestionably in the right. But this doctrine meets with the same fate as other doctrines propounded by the restorers of the past; the disease of orthodoxy from which the author suffers causes him to twist and turn every true thought until he makes a perfect monster out of it. "The answer to the vital question regarding the intellectual life of man may," says Bonald, "be given in the following form: Man must think his words before he speaks his thought. In other words, man must know the word before he speaks it, which self-evident fact excludes all possibility of his having himself invented language." Thus Bonald arrives at the favourite theory of the nineteenth-century reactionaries, namely, that language was originally given to man by God. Kierkegaard expresses the same idea when he declares that it cannot possibly be conceded that man himself invented language (On the Idea of Fear). Why? Because it was revealed to him by God, ready made.

It is Locke's and Condillac's reasonable theory of the slow evolution of language and ideas which Bonald contradicts with his principle of the necessity of an original revelation of language and ideas. Upon this belief of his he bases nothing less than the dogma of the existence of God, which entails all the others. To it we always come back, turn where we will. As none of the reactionaries have any idea of science—they are men of good parts with such an education as is given in the Jesuit schools—there is nothing in the way of scientific nonsense which they do not talk and write. The science of language is sacrificed along with political and social science on the altar of theocracy. It may be mentioned as a remarkable instance of the manner in which these reactionaries held together that in 1814 Bonald published a new edition of De Maistre's work,Sur le principe générateur des constitutions politiques, that is to say, he circulated a book in which written constitutions were strongly condemned, although he himself, arguing from the standpoint of his theory of the direct revelation of language, had come to the conclusion that every commandment, from the ten commandments downwards, must have been noted down, must exist in black and white. But to him, as to De Maistre, the real matter of importance was that the constitution should make no concession to the spirit of the times, that authority should stand secure, unimperilled by the gales of liberty; therefore he did not hesitate to profit by the aid of a co-religionary, even though he differed from him on an important point.

It was not enough for the reactionaries that they themselves had been brought up in the Jesuit schools; they were fain to have the whole youth of the nation sent there. De Maistre was all his life the patron and ardent champion of the Jesuits. At the court of St. Petersburg he exposed himself to much unpleasantness rather than throw them over.

The third part of Bonald'sLégislation primitive, which treats chiefly of education, is directed against Rousseau'sÉmile; he cannot forgive this book for teaching that religion ought not to form a part of children's education. In all seriousness he mentions, as an example of the fatal results of Rousseau's principles of education, that during the last five months seventy-five children have been sentenced to punishment for various crimes. He then proceeds to expound his own principles. Their aim, as was to be expected, is the suppression of all individuality. "We require a continuous, universal, uniform (perpétuel, universel, uniforme) course of instruction, and consequently continuity, universality, and uniformity in our teachers; therefore we must have a corps of teachers, for without a corps we can ensure neither continuity nor universality nor uniformity." He maintains that married teachers cannot be expected to sacrifice themselves to their calling, and unmarried ones are equally unserviceable unless they are under the restraint of religious vows; "for secular teachers, even though they be unmarried, are incapable of forming a real corps, because they enter it and leave it according to their own inclination and caprice; moreover, no father of a family would dare to entrust his children to an unmarried man whose morals were not certified by his religious vows and discipline." By force of these arguments he arrives at the conclusion that the whole education of the nation should be entrusted to the clergy, should be distinctly religious, and should early accustom children to reverence that authority to which they are to submit throughout their lives.

Obstinate insistence on the principle of authority is, then, the distinctive, the ruling feature of this literary group. The French rebuilders of society champion the principle with much more ardour than those of Germany, partly because of their racial peculiarities, partly because of their different religion. The reactionary movement in German literature has its origin, as we have seen, in the law-defying self-assertion and self-will of the individual.[8]In spite of its Catholic tendencies and its apery of Catholicism, German Romanticism never became so entirely Catholic, so deferential to authority, as the French reaction. Teutonic and Protestant self-will always militated against this. The French mind yielded easily. And it must be allowed that there is something attractive in the complete, unmitigated reaction which is lacking in the undecided, incomplete reaction.

Even when the revulsion is at hand, and the dissolution of the school fast approaching, we find Lamennais maintaining in his book on indifference in the matter of religion that it is not sentiment, and still less the spirit of investigation, which is the mark of true religion, but that "the true religion is incontestably the religion which is founded upon the strongest possiblevisible authority." And from the very beginning of the movement the utterances of all its adherents breathe the same spirit. To Bonald religion is a kind of police for maintaining order. In proof of this let me quote a few sentences which I have collected from his works:—

"Religion, which is thebondin every society, more especially tightens the knot of political society; the very word religion (religare) sufficiently indicates that it is the natural and necessarybondof human society in general, of the family, and of the state.—Religion introducesorderinto society, because it teaches men whencepowerand duties proceed.—The principlesof orderare an essential part of religion.—Religion will triumph because, as Malebranche says,orderis the inviolable law of minds." Rejoicing at the spread of the reaction, he exclaims: "We already see all European authors who have any real title to fame acknowledging or defending the necessity of the Christian religion, and stamping their works with the seal of its immortality; for—let authors mark this well—all works in which the fundamental principles oforderare denied or controverted will disappear; only those in which they are acknowledged and reverently upheld will descend with honour to posterity." We observe that there is no question here of piety, of fervent faith, of sentiment. Religion is the bond, is order, is the principle of authority. How far we are from Germany, where even moonlight sentimentality turned into religion!

Curiously enough, this enthusiastic vindication of religion as order gives Bonald a certain resemblance (which he himself would have angrily refused to acknowledge) to the man he detested almost more than any other, namely, Robespierre. Robespierre, too, had a passionate love of order, and for its sake desired a state religion. The difference is that Robespierre only wished such order as would preserve the gains of the Revolution, whilst to Bonald the word meant the sum and substance of all old tradition.

He and De Maistre are at one on this point. De Maistre says: "Without a Pope no sovereignty, without sovereignty no unity, without unity noauthority, without authority no faith." He places monarchy beyond the reach of all criticism and investigation by pronouncing it to be amiracle. He eulogises brute force as such. In his books he submits military society to the discipline of the corporal's cane, civil society to that of the executioner's axe.[9]This last was the measure which Robespierre took in grim reality, though not until he saw no salvation for the Revolution except in a dictatorship. Thus De Maistre, too, has his points of resemblance to Robespierre. He puts the finishing touch to his work in a eulogy of the Inquisition.

What these writers vindicate is, then, authority and power. In the state authority is overthrown by popular institutions which entail compulsory changes of ministry; in religion it is endangered when the clergy attain to comparative independence of Rome (hence De Maistre's book against Gallicanism), or are made completely independent ("by Presbyterianism," as Bonald has it); in the family it is done away with from the moment that divorce is permitted under any circumstances whatsoever. King, minister, and subject; Pope, priest, and flock; husband, wife, and child—these are to Bonald inseparable triads, formed after the image of the Trinity. And in their inseparability they safeguard the great fundamental principles of authority and order.

By sounding here and sounding there, and everywhere coming upon the same fundamental thought, we have discovered what was the ruling idea of the new period. It may be called by many names. It is the great principle ofexternality, as opposed to that of inward, personal feeling and private investigation; it is the great principle oftheocracy, of the sovereignty of God, as opposed to the sovereignty of the people; it is the principle ofauthority and power, as opposed to the principles of liberty, of human rights, and of human interdependence. And when we examine the life of the day in all its various developments, we everywhere find the same watchword and the same white flag. The fundamental idea sets its mark upon everything.

In the state it leads to the principle of right being superseded by the principle of might—which goes by the name of divine power, and becomes monarchy by the grace of God. In society it banishes the idea of fraternity, substituting a half-patriarchal, half-tyrannical paternal relation—the idea of equality being simultaneously superseded by that of dependence. In the domain of morality it effaces the inward law and substitutes papal bulls and the decrees of church councils. It does not look upon religion as faith, but as a bond, as the "political fetter" which the Revolutionists had so lately upbraided it with being. It champions indissolubility in marriage and in the state. It teaches that language was a direct gift to man from God, thereby stifling the science of language at its birth in order to erect a theological pyramid above its corpse. It makes real scientific progress impossible by keeping all inquiry and research in the leading-strings of powerful outward authority. It dulls the understanding of the rising generation by entrusting its education to a corps of cultivated, well-bred half-men, sworn to blind obedience to the General of the Jesuit order.

And as this same idea, not long after its first vigorous appearance, attains to the possession of a literature, it soon sets its mark upon fiction, upon lyric poetry, from ballad and song to ode and hymn, nay, even upon the drama. In literature, too, the lily reigns. The new school becomes known as the seraphic school. Its heroes, its typical characters, are martyrs, as in Chateaubriand's writings, or prophets, as in Hugo's and De Vigny's. Its poets seek their inspiration and their points of departure in the Bible and Milton. Authoresses like Madame de Krüdener play the rôle of prophetesses, and as such exercise a distinct influence on the social development of the period. The consecration of the King and the birth of the Crown Prince call forth high-flown and deeply reflective poems from such authors as Hugo and Lamartine. The birth of the Count de Chambord is little less than a miracle, and is celebrated in song throughout the country. Chateaubriand, with the cross in his hands, drives heathen mythology out of fiction; and with the cross in their hands, Lamartine and Hugo expel it from lyric poetry. On the stage the Knights Templar and the Maccabees (whose acquaintance we made in Zacharias Werner'sSons of the ValeandThe Mother of the Maccabees) make their appearance, the former introduced by Raynouard, the latter by Guiraud. There is not a feeling in the human heart, not a corner of the human mind, and not a branch of literature, upon which this restoration of the spirit of the past does not set its stamp during its day of power.[10]

[1]See John Stuart Mill's essay on De Vigny inDissertations and Discussions, i.

[2]Emigrant Literature, p. 199.

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