Religion and the Post-revolutionary Mind: Idéologues, Catholic Traditionalists, and Liberals in France 9780228016595

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M c Gill-Queen’s Studies in the History of Ideas Series Editor: Philip J. Cercone 71 Before Copernicus: The Cultures and Contexts of Scientific Learning in the Fifteenth Century Edited by Rivka Feldhay and F. Jamil Ragep

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88 Religion and the Postrevolutionary Mind: Idéologues, Catholic Traditionalists, and Liberals in France Arthur McCalla

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Religion and the Post-revolutionary Mind Idéologues, Catholic Traditionalists, and Liberals in France

Arthur McCalla

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

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©   McGill-Queen’s University Press 2023 ISBN 978-0-2280-1658-8 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-2280-1659-5 (ePDF) ISBN 978-0-2280-1660-1 (ePUB) Legal deposit first quarter 2023 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Religion and the post-revolutionary mind : idéologues, Catholic traditionalists, and liberals in France / Arthur McCalla. Names: McCalla, Arthur, author. Series: McGill-Queen’s studies in the history of ideas; 88. Description: Series statement: McGill-Queen’s studies in the history of ideas ; 88 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2022043915X | Canadiana (ebook) 20220439192 | ISBN 9780228016588 (cloth) | ISBN 9780228016601 (ePUB) | ISBN 9780228016595 (ePDF) Subjects: LCSH: Religion and sociology—France—History—19th century. | LCSH: Philosophy and religion—France—History—19th century. | LCSH: Religion and politics—France—History—19th century. | LCSH: Catholic traditionalist ­movement—France—History—19th century. | LCSH: Idéologues (French ­philosophers)—History—19th century. | LCSH: Liberalism (Religion)—France— History—19th century. | LCSH: Religion—Historiography. | LCSH: France— Intellectual life—19th century. Classification: LCC BL980.F8 M33 2023 | DDC 200.9440909/034—dc23

This book was typeset by Marquis Interscript in 10,5 /13 New Baskerville.

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For Áine

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Contents

Acknowledgments  ix Dramatis Personae  xi Introduction 3

P a rt O n e   A L i b e r at i o n i s t C r i t i q u e : The Idéologues 1  The Idéologues’ Science of Ideas  17 2  The Idéologues’ Critique of Religion  29 3  From Critique of Religion to Religious Policy  49

Part Two  Sociological Traditionalism: Louis de Bonald 4  Bonald’s Science of Society  69 5  Bonald’s History of Religions  96 6  Bonald and Restoration Policy  119

Part Three  Theological Traditionalism: Félicité de Lamennais and the Mennaisians 7  Lamennais’s Theological Traditionalism  135 8  The Mennaisian Science of Religions  160 9  Mennaisian Political Theology  181

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Contents

P a rt F o u r   S tat i s t L i b e r a l i s m : D o c t r i n a i r e s a n d Globistes 10  Rational Spiritualism  199 11  The Philosophical Status of Religion  220 12  The Civil Status of Religion  238

Part Five  Pluralist Liberalism: Benjamin Constant 13  Benjamin Constant and De la religion  255 14  Constant’s History of Religions  278 15  Liberal Pluralism’s Religion  306

Part Six  Orientalist Traditionalism: Ferdinand d’Eckstein 16  Eckstein’s Traditionalism  329 17  An Orientalist History of Religions  349 18  Eckstein’s Political Theology  375 Conclusion  399 Bibliography  409 Index  439

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Acknowledgments

It is my pleasure to acknowledge the numerous debts that I incurred over the long gestation of this project. Mount Saint Vincent University supported this work with internal grants, release time awards, and ­sabbaticals. I am thankful to teach at a university that recognizes the value of long-term research projects in the humanities. It would be ­difficult to find a more collegial environment than the one that I enjoy in the university’s History Department, for which my thanks go to Adriana, Roni, Jon, Corey, and Martha. My office neighbours in the Modern Languages Department kindly answered many questions for me. There are numerous scholars from whom I have a learned so much, particularly the members of the North American Society for the Study of Religion, the Canadian Society for the Study of Religion, and the American Academy of Religion (Nineteenth-Century Theology Group, Cultural Study of the History of Religion Group, and Critical Discourses on Religion Group), who helped me to refine the ideas presented here. The librarians and archivists at Mount Saint Vincent University, the Bibliothèque nationale (Mitterrand and Arsenal), and the University of Toronto provided critical assistance. The comments and criticisms of the anonymous readers for McGill-Queen’s University Press ­materially improved the final version of this book. And, finally, I owe my gratitude to Kyla Madden and her team at the press for all of their work. This book draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (grant 410-2010-026). Some of the material in this book has previously appeared in somewhat different form in the following articles: “Paganism in Restoration France: Eckstein’s Traditionalist Orientalism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 76, no. 4 (2015): 563–85; “The Free Market in Religion and the Metaphysical Invisible Hand: Benjamin Constant and the Construction of Religion

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x

Acknowledgments

as Private,” Religion 42, no. 1 (2012): 87–103; “The Mennaisian ‘Catholic Science of Religion’: Epistemology and History in Early NineteenthCentury French Study,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 21, no. 3 (2009): 285–309; and “Louis de Bonald’s Traditionalist Science of Society and Early Nineteenth-Century Biological Thought,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques 30, no. 2 (2004): 337–57.

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Dramatis Personae

Marie-François-Pierre-Gonthier de Biran (1766–1824) Louis-Gabriel-Amboise, vicomte de Bonald (1754–1840) Augustin Bonnetty (1798–1879) Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis (1757–1808) Benjamin Constant (1767–1830) Victor Cousin (1792–1867) Jean-Philibert Damiron (1794–1862) Pierre-Claude-François Daunou (1761–1840) Antoine Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836) Paul-François Dubois (1793–1874) Ferdinand d’Eckstein (1790–1861) Dominique-Joseph de Garat (1749–1833) Olympe-Philippe Gerbet (1798–1864) François Guizot (1787–1874) Théodore Jouffroy (1796–1842) Hugues-Félicité Robert de Lamennais (1782–1854) Charles de Montalembert (1810–70) Charles de Rémusat (1797–1875) Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard (1763–1845) Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832) Louis-Antoine de Salinis (1798–1861) Friedrich von Schlegel (1772–1829) Constantin-François Volney (1757–1820)

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R e l i g i o n a nd the P o s t - r e vo l u t i onary Mind

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Introduction

The French Revolution swept away the Old Regime. What would take its place? The new order of things that we retrospectively identify as intellectual modernity emerged from the diverse and contested responses to this urgent and inescapable question worked out by ­thinkers in the post-revolutionary period – chronologically bracketed for the purposes of this study by the years 1794 to 1830, or in political terms, from the establishment of the Directory to the overthrow of the Bourbon Restoration by the July Revolution. This single question, moreover, almost immediately refracted into a host of further questions about epistemology, about history and historicity, about the nature and ­meaning of social change and the possibility of progress, and about political organization and the balance between individual liberties and state authority. Religion figured prominently in this intellectual ferment as writer after writer from across the political spectrum grappled with the claims of revelation versus those of reason, the relationship between religious transcendence and history, the ultimate meaning of the ­historical process, the status of religious liberty as a right, the authority of ecclesiastical or civil institutions over religious belief and expression, and the relationship of church and state. To theorize about religion in the post-revolutionary period was simultaneously to theorize about epistemology, history, society, and politics. Three fundamental and interconnected questions lay at the heart of all this theorizing across diverse intellectual registers: what is the nature of religion, what is or ought to be the place of religion in post-revolutionary intellectual, social, and political life, and does society ultimately rest on religious foundations? Post-revolutionary thinkers’ various rival assessments of the place of religion in the emerging new order of things produced a

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Religion and the Post-revolutionary Mind

set of conceptualizations of religion – and secondarily of revelation, tradition, natural religion, idolatry, tolerance, and apologetics – that both ­structured a body of knowledge and organized social space.1 This study, in contending that debates over religion were at the heart of the construction of a post-revolutionary intellectual, social, and political order, argues that conceptualizations of religion constructed by Idéologues, Catholic Traditionalists, and Liberals in post-­revolutionary France were central to modern European efforts at self-definition and contributed importantly to the historical transformations from which intellectual modernity arose. In so doing, its engagement with an archive relatively neglected by intellectual historians – the historio­ graphy of religion – elucidates the complex relationship between models of modernity that broke radically with Europe’s religious and political pasts and alternative models of modernization that accommodated those pasts to varying degrees. Its analyses of how Idéologue, Catholic Traditionalist, and Liberal conceptualizations of religion developed in conjunction with major historical events and how they served diverse post-­revolutionary projects illuminate aspects of the history of France and of French Catholicism from the Directory to the early years of the July Monarchy. Moreover, as the place of religion in the new post-­ revolutionary order of things was a central problem with profound intellectual, social, and political consequences that had to be faced, to one degree or another and sooner or later, by all European nations and churches, this study contributes to broader European intellectual and religious history. Notably, it highlights the flow of ideas between Germany and France, particularly the reception in France of German scholars and philosophers such as Friedrich von Schlegel, Friedrich Creuzer, Immanuel Kant, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. This study’s demonstration that each of the post-revolutionary conceptualizations of religion displays internal contradictions and holds forces in tension deepens our understanding of developments and impasses in presentday ­conceptualizations of religion – such as those held by proponents

Unless quoted from English sources, all translations of French quotations are my own, and all instances of italics in quotations occur in the original sources. Volume numbers cited herein refer to the reprint publications listed in the Bibliography, not to the volume numbers of the original publications.  1 Here, I apply François Laplanche’s assertion about the purpose of myth. Laplanche, La Bible en France, 11.

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Introduction 5

of liberationist critiques, political theology, laïcité, and liberal pluralism – that constitute the afterlife of the various post-revolutionary ­conceptualizations. This study, finally, contributes to the historiography of religion itself by recuperating a period in the history of the study of religion that has been largely overlooked in favour of the eighteenth and later nineteenth centuries.

I d é o l o g u e s , C at h o l i c T r a d i t i o n a l i s t s , and Liberals The Idéologues, Catholic Traditionalists, and Liberals were rival groups of thinkers in post-revolutionary France. The Idéologues, c­ onceptualizing religion as error or delusion that arose naturally from the ­psychological nature and existential situation of early humankind, sought to liberate people from religion’s calamitous civil effects by imbuing the civil order with secular, republican values. Catholic Traditionalists conceptualized religion as a body of revealed truths of supernatural origin that ought to be authoritative over every facet of human life. Some Traditionalists opposed all aspects of the revolutionary inheritance, whereas others accepted certain elements of post-revolutionary intellectual, social, or political life as providentially ordained, but all the Traditionalists, in their various ways, subordinated reason and knowledge to revelation and reasserted the supremacy of the spiritual principle over society. Liberals conceptualized religion within the dual framework of an ­idealist ontology that recognizes a spiritual reality distinct from the material world and a historical perspective according to which humankind progressively achieves a more and more adequate comprehension of the spiritual truths. And although Liberals who advocated a strict ­separation of church and state can be distinguished from those who mandated state control over religion, their common goal was to replace Christian orthodoxy with a new public faith consonant with liberal values. Differences among Idéologue, Catholic Traditionalist, and Liberal conceptualizations of religion are obvious enough. Is religion a ­supernatural reality or a human construct? Does revelation explain history or is revelation something to be explained within the historical development of humankind? Is idolatry or paganism the opposite of true ­religion or just another form of religion? Is the end result ­apologetics or critique of religion? Nevertheless, these thinkers from

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Religion and the Post-revolutionary Mind

across a broad ideological spectrum not only shared epistemological and historical problems but also used similar methods to resolve them. Further, ­particularly when viewed from a distance of 200 years, the various c­ onceptualizations display a number of common elements arising from their shared post-revolutionary historical context, ­including a concern for epistemology, a specific sort of historicalmindedness, demeaning attitudes toward the non-Western other, and religious modernization. Epistemologically, all post-revolutionary conceptualizations of religion explicitly and foundationally addressed the relation between revelation  and reason and/or empirically derived knowledge. François Laplanche has shown how the tight and mutually confirming relationships between revelation and reason, narrative and meaning, and history and truth constructed over the centuries by Western Christian societies were ­loosened over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth ­centuries, opening up tension between their elements and ultimately producing a set of dualisms that destabilized the relationship between the authority of truth in its various theological, philosophical, and ­scientific registers and the institutional authority of churches, states, and learned bodies.2 Post-revolutionary thinkers, inheriting these ­dualisms, sought to ­overcome them in various ways: some regrounded intellectual and social life on revelation; others reconstituted the ­relationships on new bases; and still others abandoned revealed religion or worked to undermine it further. Historical-mindedness, for Catholic Traditionalists and Liberals alike, took the form of a metaphysical philosophy of history in which history has a direction, a telos, and a meaning that are to be found outside of history itself, whether in the divinely ordained providential order, the successive moments of the manifestation of the divine idea, or the progressive realization of human perfectibility. The Idéologues, for their part, who held that the eternal truths of reason are untouched by historicity, placed historical research in the service of a metahistory of human reason. The idea of radical historicity – that is, non­teleological, nonpurposive, contingent change – was not only foreign to but also forcibly repudiated by these post-revolutionary thinkers.

  2 Ibid., 11, 49, 126.

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Introduction 7

The price paid for the metaphysical comfort supplied by these ­ hilosophies of history was the racism, anti-Semitism, and Orientalism p that leap out at the present-day reader. Idéologue and Liberal use of terms such as “savages,” “primitive,” and “barbarism” was not a surface blemish but integral to the developmentalist anthropology and stadial theory authorized by their teleological philosophies of history. Catholic Traditionalists failed to see Judaism as anything other than a precursor to Christianity and rehearsed venerable Christian calumnies against the Jews, including the charge of deicide. For its part, Orientalism in the post-revolutionary period was as much a product of metaphysical philosophies of history as of the colonial projects that for the most part came later in the nineteenth century. Catholic Traditionalists ­assimilated non-Christian religions into a biblical framework, and all the figures in this study presumed that they understood the true, or world-historical, meaning of Asian religions better than their adherents themselves did. All three blocs, finally, were modern in that they confronted and responded to the intellectual, social, and political upheavals of the French Revolution and its aftermath. Post-revolutionary conceptualizations of religion, therefore, were experiments in religious ­modernization. That Traditionalist conceptualizations of religion, no less than the others, were forms of religious modernization demonstrates the ­complexity of the place of religion in the emerging new order of things and problematizes any identification, as in the modernization or secularization thesis, of religion as an instance of the survival of pre-modern modes of thought and practice within modernity. However, despite the common elements identified above, the various post-revolutionary conceptualizations of religion belonged to fundamentally opposed and rival programs for the construction of the new order of things. They represent, in short, rival forms of intellectual modernity. The Idéologue conceptualization links modernity and secularism: the point of understanding religion is to overcome it as a ­necessary step in the progressive amelioration of society. The Catholic Traditionalist project of reinscribing intellectual and social modernity under the authority of revealed truth is a form of political theology, or the insistence that political and social institutions and practices derive their legitimation from revealed truths. Liberals, who were divided into factions on the basis of their differing strategies for reconciling the rights and liberties of individuals with the legitimacy of the sovereign

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Religion and the Post-revolutionary Mind

state, similarly disagreed over conceptualizing religion; it is not a matter, therefore, of “liberalism’s religion”3 but of liberalism’s religions. Statist Liberals conceptualized religion as the symbolic expression of truths whose proper and full comprehension requires their translation into rational concepts, whereas pluralist Liberals conceptualized religion as a supra-rational sentiment that is encountered in but not reducible to historical forms of religion.

Methodological Framework This inquiry into the conceptualization of religion in post-revolutionary France, which may be classified as “curiosity applied to the history of human conceptual behavior,”4 draws its methodological orientation from three related approaches to intellectual history and corresponding work in the study of religion: historical epistemology, dialogic history, and the history of scholarship. Historical epistemology, as practised in the history of science, recognizes that scientific concepts are not timeless constants or free-standing ideas but are instead epistemological objects. In other words, the ­concepts that we use in thinking about knowledge and belief have a history whose trajectory crosses cultural, institutional, material, and theoretical domains.5 My approach to intellectual history analogously treats religion as an epistemological object by examining its diverse engagements with cultural, institutional, material, and theoretical practices in the post-revolutionary period as one particular moment in the career of this concept.6 This approach to intellectual history, which pays close attention to the intimate connections between ­philosophical reflection, historical research, literary production, and politics in the constructions with which human beings order and interpret their experience,7 corresponds to recent work in the study of religion that does not identify it as a distinctive cross-cultural domain

  3 Laborde, Liberalism’s Religion.   4 Kors, Atheism in France, 4.   5 Daston, “Introduction,” 13; Hacking, Historical Ontology, 8–9.   6 For studies of other such moments, see P. Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the Religions; Despland, L’émergence des sciences; Hunt, Jacob, and Mijnhardt, Book That Changed Europe.   7 See Sternhell, Anti-Enlightenment Tradition, 31.

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Introduction 9

of human life but instead regards it as a historically conditioned and culturally specific Western ­ideological category.8 Historians have increasingly recognized the dialogic nature of intellectual change. Didier Masseau has programmatically urged intellectual historians to study the play of contradictory forces, the tensions, and the dialogues among adversaries that shape intellectual movements instead of approaching them as a succession of monolithic epistemes.9 This study, accordingly, examines how the various post-revolutionary conceptualizations of religion created and transformed one another in a process of dynamic intercrossing or “entanglement.”10 This approach has affinities with histoire croisée historiography, which examines relationships among entities and objects of research in terms of the dialogic relationships, interactions, and circulations by which they mutually transform one another in a dynamic and complex process of cultural change.11 Thus, although Idéologues, Catholic Traditionalists, and Liberals formed three distinct blocs with distinct conceptualizations of religion and related concepts, these blocs were neither monolithic nor independent. I employ the categories of sociological, theological, and Orientalist Traditionalism and the categories of statist and pluralist liberalism to give salience to the internal complexity of each bloc as well as to emphasize dialogues and rivalries among them. The history of scholarship, finally, demonstrates that actual historical practice is not merely an epiphenomenon of underlying philosophical or political categories but is also a driver of intellectual change in its own right. Dimitri Levitin has shown how early modern scholarship on idolatry is of central importance to humanizing the biblical narrative and to establishing a new approach to paganism. He has further noted that studying the fundamental question of why major changes in the writing of historia sacra happened at all requires going beyond the wellknown Enlightenment texts and immersing oneself in theological

  8 Balagangadhara, “Heathen in His Blindness,” 1; Dubuisson, Western Construction of Religion, 5–6; Nongbri, Before Religion, 7. See also Asad, Genealogies of Religion; and King, Orientalism and Religion.   9 Masseau, Les ennemis des philosophes, 211. 10 The term “entanglement” is favoured by the author of a recent study of ­eighteenth-century intellectual history. See Burson, Culture of Enlightening, 22. 11 Werner and Zimmerman, “Beyond Comparison,” 38–9.

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Religion and the Post-revolutionary Mind

debates.12 The lesson for the historian of post-revolutionary conceptualizations of religion is the need to pay close attention to theological and apologetic texts.13 To do so is not, of course, to practise theology or apologetics. In accordance with the methodological principle that one cannot speak analytically of a form of knowledge with the vocabulary and essential conceptions of that knowledge,14 religion serves this study as an object, not a tool, of analysis.15

Structure of the Book This book consists of six parts, each of which focuses on a distinct conceptualization of religion as worked out by a particular theorist or group of theorists in post-revolutionary France. Each part is subdivided into three chapters: the first chapters of each part place the theorists in their biographical and historical contexts before setting out the philosophical foundation of their conceptualizations of religion; the second chapters carry out a detailed analysis of their conceptualizations of religion by focusing on specific texts; and the third chapters treat the social and political implications of the various conceptualizations of religion. This architecture instantiates the book’s governing principle that post-­ revolutionary conceptualizations of religion both structured a body of knowledge and organized social space. Part 1, “A Liberationist Critique: The Idéologues,” takes up a conceptualization of religion as an error or delusion that carried with it calamitous civil effects that broke radically with Europe’s religious and political pasts and established the paradigm of modern liberationist critiques of religion. The principal Idéologues discussed in this study are Antoine Destutt de Tracy, Constantin-François Volney, PierreJean-Georges Cabanis, and Pierre-Claude-François Daunou. Chapter 1 ­outlines the Idéologues’ anti-theological science of ideas, or idéologie, 12 Levitin, “From Sacred History,” 1133, 1159–60. 13 In her critique of twentieth-century discourse on “world religions,” Tomoko Masuzawa similarly notes that religious studies’ neglect of comparative theology in favour of the alternative domain of “comparative religion” has been detrimental to our historical understanding. Masuzawa, Invention of World Religions, 104. 14 Dubuisson, Western Construction of Religion, 55. See also Lincoln, “Theses on Method,” 227. 15 This approach has been urged by Timothy Fitzgerald, among others. Fitzgerald, Ideology of Religious Studies, 4.

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Introduction 11

in terms of their sensationalist epistemology, reflections on history, and moral philosophy. Chapter 2 analyzes their conceptualization of religion through close study of Destutt de Tracy’s Analyse de l’origine de tous les cultes (1799) and Volney’s Les ruines, ou Méditations sur les révolutions des empires (1791). Chapter 3 examines the Idéologues’ efforts during the period between 1794 and 1800 to convert their critique of religion into the liberation of humankind from superstition and tyranny by imbuing the civil order with secular, republican values. Part 2, “Sociological Traditionalism: Louis de Bonald,” discusses a version of Catholic Traditionalism that, despite being little known today, represents a model of modernity whose intransigent insistence that social and individual flourishing depend on total submission to revealed truth is one of the foundational expressions of political theology in the modern world. Chapter 4 first analyzes the science of society at the heart of Bonald’s sociological Traditionalism, emphasizing his epistemological principle of the passive reception of language and ideas and his conception of history as teleological development, and then links Bonald’s critique of Enlightenment and Idéologue philosophy to the question of the rights of the individual in relation to society. Chapter 5 extricates Bonald’s conceptualization of religion from the history of religions in which it is embedded by analyzing first his accounts of the proper unfolding of religion across the three ages of monotheism and then his assessments of idolatry, paganism, and atheism as deviations from this trajectory. Chapter 6 discusses Bonald’s attempt to operationalize his political theology through his interventions in Restoration politics and policy. Part 3, “Theological Traditionalism: Félicité de Lamennais and the Mennaisians,” presents a variation on the Catholic Traditionalist project of reinscribing modern society under the authority of revealed truth. Whereas Bonald’s sociological Traditionalism attempted to identify the rational and empirical laws underlying and structuring social order, Lamennais’s theological Traditionalism was built on the general reason of humankind, or universal consent to the ideas contained in the primitive revelation. The Mennaisians were the circle of young clerics and lay Catholics (including, among many others, Olympe-Philippe Gerbet and Charles de Montalembert) who gathered around Lamennais in the 1820s. Chapter 7 first sets out the program of Lamennais’s fourvolume Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de religion (1817–23), focusing on his critique of philosophy and his alternative sensus communis

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Religion and the Post-revolutionary Mind

epistemology, and then discusses the Mennaisians’ concept of Catholic science by which they attempted to subordinate intellectual inquiry to Catholic doctrines about the origin and ultimate end of humankind. Chapter  8 analyzes Lamennais’s theology of religions and then the Catholic science of religions by which the Mennaisians sought to enhance its evidential basis, focusing on their threefold demonstration that there must be one true religion, that the one true religion is knowable by the authority of universal witness or the general reason of ­humankind, and that the one true religion is Catholicism. Chapter 9 discusses the political theology that the Mennaisians developed in the 1820s and its evolution around 1830 into liberal-Catholicism, which embraced certain civil and political liberties but conceived of them as products of and as subordinate to the supremacy of the spiritual principle over society. The theological and political evolution of the Mennaisians not only produced a model of modernity that adapted political theology to new historical realities but also offered strategies for engagement with the administrative state that have persisted within both Catholicism and conservative Protestantism. Part 4, “Statist Liberalism: Doctrinaires and Globistes,” discusses the conceptualization of religion inherent in the form of liberalism championed by the Doctrinaires (principally Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard, François Guizot, Maine de Biran, and Victor Cousin) and by a group of younger thinkers closely linked to them and associated with Le Globe journal (including Théodore Jouffroy, Jean-Philibert Damiron, and Charles de Rémusat). These thinkers produced a model of modernity that preserved a role for religion by reconceptualizing revelation as the symbolic expression of rational truths. Chapter 10 sets out the Doctrinaires’ critique of sensationalism and their alternative psychological method in philosophy as the epistemological basis for their p­hilosophy of rational spiritualism, which was further developed in the 1820s under the name of Eclecticism. The Globistes adopted the rational ­spiritualism of their elders, with some modifications, as well as the ­latter’s recognition of history as the progressive instantiation of reason and their concomitant teleological conviction that the end point of the social and moral progress of civilization would be the full earthly ­realization of the precepts of reason, truth, and justice. Chapter 11 establishes the philosophical status that they granted to religion by analyzing first Maine de Biran’s and Victor Cousin’s presentations of the relationship between philosophy and religion and then the Globistes’

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Introduction 13

critique of Idéologue and Catholic Traditionalist conceptualizations of revelation and tradition, with particular focus on Jouffroy’s landmark article “Comment les dogmes finissent” (1825). Chapter 12 sets out the civil status of religion according to the Doctrinaires and Globistes in light of their efforts to replace Christianity with a laicized rational spiritualism, the former through a statist, dirigiste application to religious policy of the sovereignty of reason and the latter by advocating for a total separation of church and state. Part 5, “Pluralist Liberalism: Benjamin Constant,” discusses a variation on the Liberal project of preserving the centrality of religion by reconceptualizing its basis  – an approach that has close affinities with ­contemporary discourses on tolerance and religious pluralism. Chapter 13 sets out Constant’s long struggle to achieve a mediation between historicism and idealism, which served as the philosophical foundation for his conceptualization of religion as a supra-rational sentiment, by tracing the history of the composition of his five-volume De la religion, considérée dans sa source, ses formes et ses développements ­(­1824–31). Chapter 14 analyzes Constant’s conceptualization of religion by examining the conceptual framework and key moments of De la religion’s history of religions, including his fundamental distinction between religious sentiment and religious forms and his conviction that religious ideas evolve through successive forms that are progressively purer and less dogmatic. Chapter 15 discusses the grounds and consequences of Constant’s conviction that religion will be in harmony with liberal values if governments remain neutral toward religion, as well as his warnings about the threat to tolerance and social order posed by illiberal conceptualizations of religion. Part 6, “Orientalist Traditionalism: Ferdinand d’Eckstein,” presents a third variant of Traditionalism, this one distinguished by its incorporation of newly accessible Asian philosophical and religious texts. Eckstein, beyond further attesting to the diversity of Catholic Traditionalism, provides a window onto the flow of ideas from Germany to France and the complexity of their reception as well as onto the incorporation of Asian texts into European thought. Chapter 16 sets out the epistemological foundation of Eckstein’s Traditionalism both in terms of primitive revelation and cosmogonic history and in terms of his critique of rationalist, empiricist, and idealist philosophies. Chapter 17 analyzes Eckstein’s conceptualization of religion in light of his deployment in his journal, Le Catholique (1826–29), of Orientalist

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Religion and the Post-revolutionary Mind

erudition to strengthen and extend Traditionalism and to refute rival approaches to mythography. Chapter 18 examines Eckstein’s liberalCatholic political theology in terms of his prescriptions for the ­subordination of society to the spiritual principle and then places it in a dialogic relationship with the religio-social views of various Liberals. Many of the thinkers investigated in this study are largely unknown to English-speaking scholars and students, and other thinkers who have enjoyed greater exposure have not been studied in the context of the thick historiography of religion. I have excluded from consideration writers whose publications appeared predominantly or entirely after 1830 (including Louis Bautain, the Saint-Simonians, and Edgar Quinet), whose theatre of operations was not primarily France (above all, Joseph de Maistre), or whose work on religion did not principally take the form of a history of religions (notably FrançoisRené de Chateaubriand).

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P art O n e A Liberationist Critique: The Idéologues The three chapters comprising part 1 of this study trace the construction of the critique of religion that the Idéologues worked out in the last years of the eighteenth century, establishing the paradigm of modern liberationist critiques of religion. Chapter 1 first introduces the Idéologues, noting their relationship to eighteenth-century philosophes and their political allegiances during the French Revolution, and then outlines their science of ideas, which provided the philosophical foundation for their conceptualization of religion. The Idéologues sought both to recast metaphysics as a scientific discipline through a sensationalist epistemology that derived all knowledge from experience and to laicize morality by relocating it from the sphere of religion to that of their science of ideas. Chapter 2 sets out the critique of religion that emerged from the Idéologues’ science of ideas by analyzing Destutt de Tracy’s Analyse de l’origine de tous les cultes (1799) and Constantin-François Volney’s Les ruines, ou Méditations sur les révolutions des empires (1791), a key Idéologue work. The theoretical framework of the Idéologues’ critique of religion features projection, allegory, and alienation, and the critique itself addresses two moments: first, the origin of religion in the psychological nature and existential situation of early humankind; and second, the conversion of beliefs and myths into theological systems allied with state power. Chapter 3 discusses the Idéologues’ efforts to put into practice the elimination of the civil effects of religion called for by their critique of religion during the period between 1794 and 1800, when they held important legislative, administrative, and diplomatic posts. They envisioned a secular

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state that tolerated even skeptics and atheists, and they regarded freedom of religion not as a positive value to be defended but as a provisional state pending the republicanization and secularization of the populace.

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The Idéologues’ Science of Ideas

The Idéologue Circle Who were the Idéologues? We must first decide between a broad or narrow definition. The case for a broad definition of the Idéologues has an illustrious early precedent in François Picavet’s inclusion of a wide range of figures from the first half of the nineteenth century whose thought broadly reflected Enlightenment values and methods.1 More recently, scholars interested in charting broad intellectual developments in nineteenth-century France have similarly favoured an expansive definition.2 Most modern studies, however, restrict the Idéologues to the members of a small coterie of thinkers united by a common philosophical and political program and recognized as such by con­ temporaries.3 Based on this narrow definition, which will be used in the present study, the principal Idéologues included Antoine Destutt de Tracy, Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis, Constantin-François Volney, Pierre-Claude-François Daunou, and Dominique-Joseph de Garat. The term “coterie” is apposite. These men constituted neither a political party in the modern sense nor a strictly defined philosophical school. They are best thought of as a distinct group of thinkers who retained

 1 Picavet, Les Idéologues.  2 For example, see E.A. Williams, Physical and the Moral.  3 Kennedy, Philosophe in the Age of Revolution; Kitchin, Un journal “philosophique”; Staum, Minerva’s Message; Head, Ideology and Social Science; Head, Politics and Philosophy; Goldstein, Post-revolutionary Self.

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their intellectual independence but were linked by mutually reinforcing intellectual, political, social, and institutional bonds.4 The Idéologues’ social anchorages were the salons of two widows of Enlightenment philosophes: Anne-Catherine Helvétius, who lived at Auteuil on the outskirts of Paris (for which reason they were sometimes known as the Auteuil Circle), and Sophie de Condorcet. They also dined together at a café on the Rue du Bac on the third day of each décade (the ten-day period that replaced the week in the revolutionary ­calendar). The two primary institutions through which they publicized their views were Décade philosophique, littéraire et politique, a journal that appeared every ten days between 1794 and 1807, and the Second Class (Moral and Political Sciences) of the Institut national des sciences et arts.5 Politically, the Idéologues were anti-Jacobin and anti-royalist. They remained faithful throughout their careers to the ideals of the early, or moderate, phase of the French Revolution, during which several of them had been active participants in the National Constituent Assembly and then in the subsequent legislative assemblies. The Idéologues all survived the Terror but only just: Daunou, Destutt de Tracy, Garat, and Volney had all been arrested and imprisoned, and Cabanis, the ­guardian of Helvétius, hid in her villa for the duration. Their experiences during the Terror deeply marked their post-revolutionary social and political views (see chapter 3). The Idéologues’ fundamental bond was intellectual. And this fact raises a second historiographical question, one about the relationship of the Idéologues to the Enlightenment. Forty years ago, an already old debate over the degree to which the Idéologues were the heirs of the Enlightenment philosophes was resolved in favour of the view that the Idéologues were the direct successors of the philosophes in both their intellectual and political programs.6 Since then, however, scholarship on the historiographical status of “Enlightenment” has problematized this judgment on two counts. First, it has displaced the singular concept of “the Enlightenment” in favour of multiple national and confessional “Enlightenments,” which in turn were subsequently shown to pose substantial historiographical problems of their own. Second, the  4 Gusdorf, La conscience révolutionnaire, 453.  5 Palmer, Improvement of Humanity, 223; Lyons, France under the Directory, 119; Welch, Liberty and Utility, 28–9.  6 Bergeron, France under Napoleon, 91–2.

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The Idéologues’ Science of Ideas 19

Idéologues are now seen not as heirs to but as late participants in a culture of enlightenment stretching from about 1650 to 1815.7 Parallel to these historiographical developments, Jonathan Israel has recently presented the Idéologues as the bearers of the values and goals of the radical Enlightenment in the later years of the Revolution and the postrevolutionary period. He distinguishes, in a series of books, between two types of enlightenment. On the one hand, there was a moderate Enlightenment that sought, intellectually, to reconcile reason and ­religion while attempting, politically, to reform and modernize (but not to overthrow) the monarchy, aristocracy, and ecclesiastical authority. On the other hand, there was a radical Enlightenment8 that was committed intellectually to atheistic materialism and whose political goal was the overthrow of the political and ecclesiastical institutions of the Old Regime in the name of democracy, equality, and republicanism. Israel attributes the French Revolution to the fruition in the late ­eighteenth century of the ideas of the radical Enlightenment rather than of the moderate Enlightenment and identifies the leading lights of the early Revolution (but emphatically not the authors of the Terror) as the continuators of the radical Enlightenment.9 Israel’s overall program has proved highly controversial among historians, both interpretively for exaggerating the coherence and continuity of his radical Enlightenment and methodologically for imposing an ahistorical coherence and unity on a package of philosophical ideas instead of describing the shifting function of ideas across different historical contexts.10 Nevertheless, it is Israel’s filiation of the Idéologues to his radical Enlightenment that concerns us. Many ­historians consider Israel to have overvalued the Idéologues’ commitment to equality, if not to republican democracy, and to have greatly undervalued the influence on them of the moderate Enlightenment’s

 7 For a recent overview of enlightenment historiography, see Burson, Culture of Enlightening, 7–20.  8 The term “radical Enlightenment” was coined by Margaret Jacob in The Radical Enlightenment. On the relation between Israel’s and Jacob’s uses of the term, see Wright, “Review Essay on Jonathan Israel,” 11.  9 Israel, Radical Enlightenment; Israel, Enlightenment Contested; Israel, Democratic Enlightenment; Israel, Revolutionary Ideas. 10 See Ferrone, Enlightenment, 160–6.

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ideas and of Lockean sensationalism in particular.11 Although these criticisms carry weight, it is nevertheless the case that this is an ­argument not over the Idéologues’ intellectual stance but over their intellectual paternity. Further, as Israel’s critics concede, one commitment that does unite the Idéologues and all those whom Israel identifies as ­members of his radical Enlightenment, above all Helvétius, Condorcet, and Paul-Henri Thiry d’Holbach, is their absolute denial that religion is either intellectually true or politically necessary.12 The Idéologues, we must again acknowledge, were not a monolithic bloc; in religion, as in other matters, a range of views may be discerned. All of the Idéologues were resolutely anti-clerical, but whereas Destutt de Tracy and Volney were militantly irreligious, others like Daunou and Cabanis did not rule out some sort of naturalistic basis for spiritual experience.13 It remains true, however, that in the Idéologues’ division of intellectual labour, it was Volney and Destutt de Tracy who published the major statements on religion. In this sense, then, the Idéologues, as we shall see more fully below, perpetuated radical Enlightenment attitudes in matters of religion, but they did so only by adapting them to the postrevolutionary historical context.

Idéologie : A n A n t i - t h e o l o g i c a l Science of Ideas Destutt de Tracy, who along with Cabanis was the acknowledged intellectual leader of the Idéologues, coined the term idéologie in 1796. The term did not signify for him what “ideology” has come to mean in standard usage today;14 instead, idéologie was to be the study or ­science of ideas as both an epistemological program and the basis for stabilizing post-revolutionary society. Idéologie in this sense provided the philosophical foundation for the Idéologues’ conceptualization of religion.

11 See Bell, “Very Different French Revolution,” 59; Baker, “Review Essay on Jonathan Israel,” 51. 12 See Armenteros, “Review Essay on Jonathan Israel,” 37. 13 Gusdorf, La conscience révolutionnaire, 331–50. 14 See “Ideology” in R. Williams, Keywords, 153–7.

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The Idéologues’ Science of Ideas 21

Sensationalist Epistemology and the Structure of Knowledge Epistemology held the key to ending the upheavals of the French Revolution, Destutt de Tracy thought, because social and political ­stability can rest only on reliable knowledge, which requires an accurate understanding of how ideas are formed. Destutt de Tracy set out the fundamental Idéologue equation of ideas with perceptions and of thinking with perceiving in a series of papers read to the Institut national and collected in his Eléments d’idéologie (1801). Building on but pushing beyond John Locke and especially Étienne Bonnot de Condillac’s Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (1746), Destutt de Tracy maintained that sensations are epistemologically primary; other aspects of thought, including memory, judgment, and will, arise from combinations and comparisons of sensations. Cabanis, a physiologist, in a series of papers again presented to the Institut national and collected in Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme (1802), further developed the Idéologues’ “transformed sensations model” by insisting that although sensation is indeed the source of all ideas, it is not a matter solely of data received by our five senses but also of what he called “internal impressions,” or bodily functions such as digestion. The Idéologues further maintained that to understand how ideas are formed and to evaluate their validity requires decomposing or breaking down complex ideas into their constituent elements. Their term for this process, a methodological keyword in their science of ideas, was “analysis.”15 Armed with this sensationalist epistemology, the Idéologues sought to recast metaphysics as a scientific discipline and to relegate theological metaphysics to the pre-scientific past by rejecting any separation of the mental world from the material world.16 Programmatically insisting that all knowledge arises solely from experience and rejecting any role for revelation, innate ideas, or intuition in the acquisition of knowledge,17 they dismissed as false knowledge all ideas that were not based in sense perception, first among them the idea of the soul. Whereas Condillac had retained the bare existence of a human soul (his “l’âme oisive”), the Idéologues denied that any part of a human being transcends the 15 Head, Ideology and Social Science, 31–2; E.A. Williams, Physical and the Moral, 84–8; Lyons, France under the Directory, 119–20. 16 Head, Ideology and Social Science, 32, 54. 17 Crossley, French Historians and Romanticism, 12.

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material world. They did not deny that the capacity for reason, sentiment, and morality distinguishes human beings from other animals, but they insisted that these qualities do not transcend our physiological nature. Destutt de Tracy, in fact, objected to the term “psychology” because it implied the existence of a spiritual entity within us. Other theological ideas dismissed by the Idéologues included those of God, revelation, heaven, and immortality.18 Idéologie, then, was to restrict itself to facts and observation. Scientific advancement, in turn, was to be achieved by eliminating from its discourse ideas and concepts not based on sense experience and by clarifying those ideas and concepts that were so based.19 The Idéologues paid close attention to language on the grounds that theological metaphysics receives powerful support from words that do not correspond to facts. Against claims that language was either divinely revealed or innate, the Idéologues – Destutt de Tracy and Cabanis in particular – regarded language as an artificial and social phenomenon invented by groups of human beings as they pursued the satisfaction of material needs. The connection between a word and its meaning was similarly established and maintained by convention. Advancement of knowledge of any aspect of nature or humankind, they thought, requires not only the mastery of words and concepts relevant to that domain of inquiry but also the use of words that accurately correspond to observed facts and the formulation of concepts that are securely anchored in such facts.20 Idéologie was thus conceived first and foremost as a method of intellectual progress applicable to all the individual positive sciences; it was to be nothing less than the means of effecting the transition from the pre-scientific period of a given discipline to its scientific stage. Idéologie, as François Azouvi has noted, is as much a theory of knowledge as it is a transformed sensationalism.21 The human capacity to acquire and improve knowledge, in turn, provided the basis for the Idéologues’ belief in historical progress. Their conviction that increasing knowledge will result in increased happiness and social solidarity affirmed the doctrine of moral and intellectual 18 Palmer, Improvement of Humanity, 222–3; Staum, Minerva’s Message, 106; Head, Ideology and Social Science, 56. 19 Head, Ideology and Social Science, 40, 54. 20 Ibid., 45–6. 21 Azouvi, “La notion de système,” 110–11.

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The Idéologues’ Science of Ideas 23

perfectibility articulated by Helvétius and, most programmatically, by Nicolas de Condorcet in his Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (1795). Perfectibility, however, did not imply linear ­progress. Although Volney and Destutt de Tracy echoed Holbach’s identification of the remote past as a time of savagery and suffering (rather than as a golden age) and regarded it as the starting point of human progress, the Idéologues easily accepted periods of retrogression (the Middle Ages, for example) in humankind’s path as a corollary of their anti-theological outlook. History, for them, manifests not a ­providentially guided process toward some preordained end but instead the unpredictable actions of human beings who, more often than not, remain firmly in the grip of irrational passions and prejudices.22 History The Idéologues regarded history with a corresponding ambivalence. On the one hand, they considered the content of history to be almost entirely a record of prejudice, superstition, and theological ideas and consequently to be of no value to their new science of ideas. On the other hand, some Idéologues, notably Daunou and Volney, gave history serious thought as an intellectual discipline. Daunou, in works such as Essai historique sur la puissance temporelle des papes (1799), explained ­historical events entirely in terms of human agency and contingency, pointedly rejecting readings of history that discerned in its unfolding a providential or metaphysical direction.23 Volney, for his part, reflected on history’s status as a scientific discipline in a series of lectures on the lessons of history delivered at the École normale supérieure in 1795.24 History, he argued, cannot achieve the degree of certainty possible in the natural sciences for two reasons: first, the facts with which it deals are uncertain because they are not directly accessible to the empirical experience of the historian but are instead filtered through the written sources that record them; and second, the historical evidence on which

22 Edelstein, Terror of Natural Right, 89; Crossley, French Historians and Romanticism, 13, 16; Staum, Minerva’s Message, 27. 23 Crossley, French Historians and Romanticism, 12–13, 19. 24 Volney’s task, as the occupant of the Chair of History in the newly established École normale supérieure, was not to teach history to future teachers but to reflect on the pedagogic value of teaching history. Gusdorf, La conscience révolutionnaire, 126, 506.

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the discipline of history is based cannot be entirely freed from the personal biases and the cultural prejudices and superstitions of the authors of the written records.25 The Idéologues took it for granted that history as a discipline concerns itself with written records. Writing emerged, however, Volney noted, only at a fairly advanced stage of civilization, and before its invention, early humans passed down their understanding of themselves through speech. Volney thus designated written records and oral testimonies as the two registers of historical evidence, but he granted only the former standing as sources for the discipline of history, designating the latter as “tradition” and declaring it to be inherently unreliable. First, since tradition is inevitably altered and corrupted as it is passed down, Volney took it as axiomatic that tradition becomes more unreliable as distance increases from the thing reported. Second, since tradition reflects the mentality of the people who produced it, the further back in history that we go, the more inexperienced and barbaric people were and the more unreasonable and contrary to true nature were their traditions. Volney concluded, adding to his pessimism about history, that “the empire of tradition extended over the entire duration of the centuries that preceded the invention of writing.”26 The second historiographical principle that Volney drew from the nature of historical evidence is the necessity for a critical attitude toward sources and the claims of earlier historians. It is the duty of the historian to interrogate witnesses and narrators of historical evidence, testing their claims both objectively against what is likely to be true given our knowledge of the physical universe and subjectively against our ­judgment of their reliability.27 This is not just an academic point. Volney thought that unjustified claims for certitude in history, or what he called abuses of history, have two serious consequences: first, dogmatic ­assertions of alleged historical facts have served throughout history to ­legitimate political and especially religious despotism; and second, historical ­models can serve to authorize socially destructive practices in the ­present. Volney’s case in point here – very much alive to his auditors in 1795 – was the use made of Greek and Roman models by the Jacobins during the Terror. Volney argued that ancient societies were violent, 25 Volney, Leçons d’histoire, 36. 26 Ibid., 24–8 (quotation at 26), 80. 27 Ibid., 10–11.

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The Idéologues’ Science of Ideas 25

unjust, and superstitious and should not be used as models for modern European societies.28 Nevertheless, Volney did allow that history ­possesses moral utility. First, a properly critical-minded historiography will disabuse people of civil and religious prejudices by undermining their traditional legitimation. Relatedly, Volney thought that by ­widening our historical perspective beyond classical Antiquity to encompass Asia – he noted that so-called universal history had been shown to be parochial and needed to be remade – we will gain a better understanding of early history and thus expose the true origins of many civil and religious prejudices that are considered sacred only because their source is unknown. Second, the panorama of the social development over time and under diverse conditions of the human faculties and passions ­provided by the critical study of history offers a valuable resource for ongoing social improvement.29 Ultimately, however, Volney sought to temper the influence of history on society. Because history as an inherently imperfect science will always be vulnerable to the political passions and prejudices of the day, its practice should be restricted to a properly trained elite. Volney therefore believed that the study of history is not appropriate for children at the primary school level or indeed for most people and social classes. In both cases, he suggested, inculcating in them the moral maxims that can be distilled from history is preferable to exposing them to history itself.30 Moral Philosophy In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the term moralité and its cognates pertained to social and political solidarity as well as to ethics narrowly defined. The key concept in this field of the Idéologues’ thought is self-interest, and here their indebtedness to the radical Enlightenment is particularly clear. Helvétius, proclaiming the pursuit of self-preservation to be an ­observable natural law, had argued in De l’esprit (1758) and De l’homme (1772) that the happiness of the greatest number would be achieved by ­d irecting the self-interested passions of pleasure-seeking, 28 Ibid., 39–42, 74–5, 124–7, 131. 29 Ibid., 108–10, 133–4. 30 Ibid., 66–7, 80–2. See also Crossley, French Historians and Romanticism, 14–16; Despland, L’émergence des sciences, 35, 441.

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pain-avoiding human beings toward the social good. Holbach concurred but was careful to distinguish in his Système de la nature (1770) between good self-interest and bad self-interest. The latter is selfish, autonomous egocentricity; the former is the recognition that what is truly good for oneself is what is good for other people as well. The Idéologues wholeheartedly adopted Holbach’s principle that good self-interest is ­synonymous with virtue and as such is the foundation of both individual morality and social solidarity. Volney, for his part, made explicit the connection between virtue and happiness: enlightened self-interest, by encouraging full development of all human faculties, not only ­stabilizes society but also allows for the flourishing of human life.31 His La loi naturelle, ou Catéchisme du citoyen français (1793) was an attempt to set out – in the simple format of a catechism designed for ordinary people – a secular morality based on evidence, experience, and reason as a substitute for theologically based moralities. Volney’s natural-law morality defined virtue as that which permits the free development of the various human faculties, and he defined vice as that which obstructs and suppresses them.32 The Idéologues self-consciously laicized morality by relocating it from the sphere of religion to that of their science of ideas: morality, they asserted, like all knowledge, is based on empirical experience – in this case, the sensations of pain and pleasure – and is restricted to facts and observations. Idéologue moral philosophy, in turn, comprised an empirically based science that was constructed, like all others, from knowledge of causes and effects but was applied to moral knowledge.33 This ­conception of moral philosophy is captured in the first sentence of the first issue of the Idéologues’ journal, Décade philosophique: “In the moral world, as in the physical world, everything is action and reaction; it is a perpetual linkage of causes and effects.”34 The Idéologues regarded members of the Catholic priesthood as their primary rivals as moral experts in the reconstruction of French society after the revolutionary upheavals. And whereas their own claim to expertise in this area was based on their laicization of morality as an empirical science, priests were committed to a theological morality. 31 Staum, Minerva’s Message, 119, 122; Rohou, “Volney et ses prédécesseurs,” 240. 32 Garnham, “Raison et superstition,” 168; Gaulmier, Un grand témoin, 151. 33 Versini, “Préhistoire de l’idéologie,” 94; Lyons, France under the Directory, 118. 34 Unsigned, “Histoire naturelle,” 1.

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The Idéologues’ Science of Ideas 27

“Priests are to morality what charlatans are to medicine,” Maximilien Robespierre had declared in a 1794 address reported in Décade ­philosophique.35 And although the Idéologues did not share Robespierre’s deism, the idea of the priest as a type of charlatan exactly captures their position: morality, thanks to idéologie, had become an empirical science, and only those trained in this new science were qualified to address matters of individual well-being and social order; priests, in contrast, peddled moral snake oil concocted from the pseudoscience of theology.36 The Idéologue laicization of morality challenged not only traditional Christian derivations of moral prescriptions from the will of God but also the widespread view – shared by Christians, moderate Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire, revolutionaries like Robespierre, as well as, to anticipate, Napoleon Bonaparte – that unquestioned acceptance of the idea of an afterlife and of the accompanying threat of eternal punishment was necessary to compel moral behaviour among the mass of humankind and to ensure social stability.37 And just as Helvétius’s and Holbach’s laicized morality had drawn harsh criticism from the religious opponents of philosophie,38 so too did the Idéologues face the charge that without the restraining effects of religion, their hedonistic principle of self-interest would unleash the anarchic passions of avarice, crime, ambition, and lust. The Idéologues’ reply to this charge was that only a moral philosophy based on knowledge of the natural laws governing human existence is capable of stabilizing society, whereas religiously oriented moralities, based as they are on arbitrary and often absurd theological opinions, fluctuate and perish along with these opinions, rendering them incapable of providing individuals with moral certainty and society with stability. Further, as Volney argued, religious moralities actively subvert social solidarity because they put obedience to the will of a divine being over concern for the well-being of other humans. Finally, as the economist Jean-Baptiste Say – closely linked to the Idéologues through friendship and through his written and editorial contributions to Décade philosophique – pointed out in Olbie, ou Essai sur les moyens de reformer les moeurs d’une nation (1800), the historical record 35 Robespierre, “Fin du rapport de Robespierre,” 242–3. 36 Staum, Minerva’s Message, 96; Goetz, “La critique de l’imaginaire religieux,” 178. 37 Garnham, “Raison et superstition,” 173; Staum, Minerva’s Message, 95. 38 See McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment, 36–7.

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offers exhaustive proof that the eras of the greatest devotion have always been the eras of the greatest ferocity, intolerance, and barbarism.39 It is religion, in short, that is the true danger to social order. Say’s claim is an excellent example of the Idéologues’ approach, which focused on the deleterious effects of religion rather than on disproving its doctrines. In fact, the Idéologues thought that theological claims cannot be proved or disproved because, not being empirically based, they do not meet the standard of a knowledge claim that can be judged true or false. They accordingly denied that articles of faith such as the existence or the nature of God, the divinity of Jesus Christ, and the existence of the soul or spirits belong to the sphere of philosophy; but they did not deny them outright, hence Destutt de Tracy’s protest to Germaine de Staël against the injustice of labelling the Idéologues materialists when they instead held that the question of the reality of spiritual entities requires a scrupulous agnosticism.40 Although this protestation was somewhat disingenuous inasmuch as their anti-­theological program was clearly materialist and carried antireligious implications, it does highlight the fact that the urgent target of the Idéologues was not private faith but clericalism, or the civil effects of religion. The Idéologues’ critique of religion – the subject of the next chapter – emerged, in fact, from their attempts to explain religion’s dangerous effects.

39 Staum, Minerva’s Message, 95–6; Garnham, “Raison et superstition,” 168–9. On Olbie, see Jainchill, Reimagining Politics, 100–7. 40 Garnham, “Raison et superstition,” 168; Antoine Destutt de Tracy to Madame [Germaine] de Staël, 23 February 1805, quoted in Goetz, “La critique de l’imaginaire religieux,” 179.

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The Idéologues’ Critique of Religion

The Idéologues’ critique of religion is a specific application of their general principle that in order to overcome effects one must address causes. This chapter sets out the Idéologues’ critique of religion through an analysis of their two principal statements on religion, Antoine Destutt de Tracy’s Analyse de l’origine de tous les cultes (1799) and Constantin-François Volney’s Les ruines, ou Méditations sur les révolutions des empires (1791). The critique of religion occupies a central place in Idéologue thought because, as Rose Goetz has noted in relation to Destutt de Tracy, “the critique of theology is nothing other than idéologie itself.”1

Destutt de Tracy’s Analyse de l’origine de tous les cultes Charles-François Dupuis’s twelve-volume Origine de tous les cultes, ou Religion universelle (1795) offered a materialist explanation of the ­religious doctrines of Antiquity in place of the theological explanation that identifies them as having originated in a primitive revelation by God to the first human beings. There is no need, Dupuis remarked, to have recourse to the absurdity of supernatural revelation when the origin and content of religion can be fully explained by physical causes – n ­ otably, the sun, moon, stars, seasons, and elements – and by the ­operations of the human mind. Theological or spiritual explanations of religion, he argued, are later mystifications of the true

  1 Goetz, “La critique de l’imaginaire religieux,” 176.

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material causes, and believers are profoundly ignorant about the origin of their religion.2 Dupuis’s work was enthusiastically welcomed by the Idéologues. Décade philosophique, littéraire et politique praised it as “the most precious ­collection of preservatives against all superstitions, the richest mine of ­explanations of all myths, and the most complete collection of the ingenious emblems with which were originally covered all the secrets of philosophy and all the great phenomena of nature.”3 Destutt de Tracy, for his part, undertook to summarize Dupuis’s arguments for the benefit of readers daunted by the scale of his work in a series of articles in Mercure français in 1797 and 1798. And when Dupuis himself later published a two-volume abridgement under the title of Abrégé de l’origine de tous les cultes (1798), Destutt de Tracy thought that it would still be useful to explicate Dupuis’s ideas and to promote them among the general educated public, particularly given that his run of articles had been terminated prematurely by the sudden disappearance of Mercure français in early 1798. Further, whereas Dupuis had written for a small intellectual elite whom he hoped to shield from the ravages of religion – he confessed that he had abandoned the multitude to the priests in the sad conviction that, for the majority of people, religion is an all but incurable disease4 – Destutt de Tracy and the Idéologues were more optimistic that Dupuis’s ideas could contribute to the transformation of society. In 1799, therefore, Destutt de Tracy published, anonymously, a summary of Dupuis’s work as Analyse de l’origine de tous les cultes (republished in 1804, bracketed by a new Discours préliminaire and a Post-scriptum, as Analyse raisonnée de l’origine de tous les cultes). Here, Destutt de Tracy both summarized at length Dupuis’s materialist and psychological explanation of all religions as allegories of astronomical phenomena and placed Dupuis’s theory of religion explicitly within the framework of idéologie. Destutt de Tracy’s account of the origin of religion applied the characteristic premise of the Idéologues’ method: “When we seek the origin of the first religious ideas, it is not knowledge of history that will guide us but knowledge of our intellectual faculties.”5 The innate human  2 Dupuis, Abrégé de l’origine, 34, 246, 256–7.   3 G., “Origine de tous les cultes,” 286. See also Lalande, “Fin de l’exposé,” 18–20.  4 Dupuis, Abrégé de l’origine, 274, 276–7.   5 Destutt de Tracy, Analyse raisonnée, 143.

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tendency to suppose that the unknown cause of an observed effect is the product of a will, Destutt de Tracy said, had caused early humans, ignorant as they were of the true material causes of natural phenomena, to attribute their operations, and above all those of astronomical ­bodies, to wills analogous to the human will. There was no empirical evidence for the existence of these wills, but innate psychological tendency was stronger than the evidence of the senses, and so belief in invisible spirits was born. Moreover, as soon as the projection of the human will onto inanimate natural objects had created spirits, people sought to please, placate, and influence these imagined entities. And almost as ­immediately, certain clever individuals claimed to be in communication with the spirits and to know what actions pleased and displeased them. Thus priests came into the world and, with them, ritual and theological ­morality. Priestly influence over the people, Destutt de Tracy continued, had become increasingly malign as society developed: organized, ­hierarchical priesthoods succeeded the individual local priests of ­primitive times, and sacerdotal power systematized beliefs and myths into an all-­encompassing doctrinal system governing belief and ­behaviour. At the same time, armed with their unlimited power over believers, priesthoods attained domination over civil authority, using state power to suppress all challenges to their authority, or they allied themselves with powerful civil authorities, whose oppression of their subjects they supported by preaching the duty of civil obedience in return for state support.6 The Idéologues’ account of religion thus identified two stages in its development: first, religion emerged as an effect caused by the psychological nature and existential situation of humankind; second, although fictitious in its content, religion then became, via the intermediary of priests, the cause of deleterious social effects by subjugating the people to theological and political despotism.7 For Destutt de Tracy, as Goetz nicely says, “theology assumes a function of mediation between the religious imaginary and the instruments of the state, which, in order to oppress and repress, give back to the priesthood part of the power that it owes to them.”8 An effect of religion is thus collusion between ­political oppression and theological despotism.   6 Ibid., 143–4.   7 Goetz, “Trois Idéologues,” 276.  8 Ibid.

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Oppression, however, is hardly the end of the harmful effects of religion. Destutt de Tracy noted that it also deprives people of their reason because priests, who must at all costs avoid being exposed as imposters, cannot allow any questioning of the veracity of their doctrines, and so they elevate blind credulity to the highest virtue while using their power to suppress the exercise of reason and empirical observation. Worse, by habituating people to seek the rules of their conduct in the will of an unknown being instead of discovering them in their enlightened selfinterest (intérêt bien entendu), religion prevents people from recognizing the intimate link between virtue and happiness, thereby depriving them of the most powerful motivation for acting morally. In sum, the social effects of religion are catastrophic and overwhelming: political despotism, the confusion of reason, and the corruption of morality. Destutt de Tracy’s concluding definition of religion, in good Idéologue fashion, identified its effects rather than its content: “All religion may be defined as an obstacle to good logic and to healthy private and public morality.”9 Religion’s false metaphysics and the defective morality that follows from it can be overcome, Destutt de Tracy concluded, only by replacing them with a healthy metaphysics and a rationally based system of morality. A healthy metaphysics, based on sensationalist epistemology and an analysis of the operations of the human mind, will demonstrate the error of belief in spiritual or supernatural beings, and a rational moral philosophy will attach socially valuable duties to enlightened self-interest instead of using the threat of punishment by an imaginary being to terrorize people into observing socially detrimental duties.10 Destutt de Tracy’s Analyse may be taken as a summary of the Idéologues’ position on religion as set out most fully in Volney’s Les ruines.11

Volney and Les ruines Volney, born Constantin-François Chasseboeuf de Boisgirais at Craon, Anjou, was the son of an ennobled family of local notables from Mayenne in the Loire Valley. His relationship with his father was distant, and he was legally emancipated at age seventeen, at which time he received an   9 Destutt de Tracy, Analyse raisonnée, 144–6, 149 (quotation). 10 Ibid., 13, 147–8. 11 On Destutt de Tracy’s Analyse raisonnée, see also Head, Ideology and Social Science, 57–61; Goetz, “La critique de l’imaginaire religieux”; and Goetz, “Trois Idéologues.”

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inheritance from his mother, who had died during his childhood. However, the inheritance was relatively modest, and so, having to find a profession, young Constantin-François enrolled first in the faculty of law at Angers and then, in 1777, in the School of Medicine at Paris. There, he met and became close friends with Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis, who introduced him to the salons of the baron Paul-Henri Thiry d’Holbach and Anne-Catherine Helvétius. These introductions gave Volney an entrée into the elite of Parisian radical intellectual life. The Holbach salon, where Volney was befriended by the baron’s second son, quickly became his intellectual home. In late 1782, having come into a further inheritance, Constantin-François set out on a prolonged period of travel in the Egyptian and Syrian provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Shortly before his departure, he discarded his family name for “Volney,” constructed, somewhat surprisingly given his intellectual apprenticeship in the Holbach and Helvétius salons, from Voltaire and Ferney (Voltaire’s estate in Switzerland). Upon his return in the spring of 1785 from twenty-eight months of travel in the Near East, his primary intellectual affiliation became Helvétius’s salon at Auteuil.12 Volney established himself in the lineage of the radical Enlightenment with the publication of his two-volume Voyage en Syrie et en Egypte, pendant les années 1783, 1784, et 1785 (1787).13 This work was at once a narrative of his observations of the current societies of Syria and Egypt, an empirical confirmation and vindication of his intellectual masters’ philosophical principles, and a political lesson about despotism and superstition. Voyage presented the Near East as a formerly prosperous land where philosophy and the sciences had once flourished but where misery, backwardness, and ignorance now prevailed. What, Volney asked himself, was the cause of this general degradation? He acknowledged, with Montesquieu, that climate and physical environment may have been some part of the answer but rejected them as decisive factors and instead offered his observations as empirical support both for Helvétius’s theoretical claim that arbitrary power is the source of social and moral calamity and for the Holbach circle’s critique of religion as irrational superstition whose exploitation by priesthoods impoverished and oppressed the populace and vitiated intellectual progress. 12 Gaulmier, Un grand témoin, 25–8, 38. 13 Beginning with the fifth edition of 1822, the title changed to Voyage en Egypte et en Syrie.

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Nevertheless, the lesson that Volney drew from his observations was not one of despair. Since the cause of Oriental misery was neither innate to the Arab people nor determined by geography and climate but was instead the consequence of political and religious institutions, it might be overcome by transforming these very institutions in accord with the principles of enlightened philosophy.14 The political lesson of Voyage – that social and individual well-being is achieved by overcoming despotism and superstition – was well suited to the reformist currents swirling in France itself. Volney, in fact, leapt into politics upon his return from abroad. By 1788, he was in Rennes, in Brittany, agitating against Old Regime privileges in speeches, newspapers, and a five-pamphlet series, La sentinelle du peuple. In 1789, this work and the reputation of Voyage en Syrie et en Egypte won Volney election to the Estates General as a representative of the Third Estate for Angers.15 Volney both participated in and enthusiastically supported the early phases of the French Revolution as an active member of the National Constituent Assembly – he was elected its secretary – and subsequently of the Legislative Assembly that succeeded it in the fall of 1791. During this period, Volney was aligned in the Legislative Assembly first with the faction influenced by Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau, and by the abbé Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès and then, after October 1791, with the Brissotins.16 In late 1791, the Legislative Assembly sent Volney to Corsica as its envoy, tasking him with revolutionizing the island. Corsica presented Volney with a panorama of feudalism, ignorance, and corruption almost as disheartening as anything that he had seen in the Orient. He set to work in co-operation with a few local revolutionaries: Philippe Buonarroti, a Tuscan noble converted to the revolutionary cause; Pasquali Paoli, from a powerful local family; and a young artillery officer named Napoleon Bonaparte, with whom Volney enjoyed ­extensive conversations during his first months on the island. Volney and his allies launched a three-pronged attack on the Corsican Old Regime: intellectually, they proclaimed freedom of the press and encouraged the dissemination of revolutionary ideas; politically, they sought to replace Old Regime institutions with revolutionary ones; and 14 Gaulmier, Un grand témoin, 56–9. See also Israel, Revolutionary Ideas, 656–8. 15 Israel, Revolutionary Ideas, 36–7; Gaulmier, Un grand témoin, 63. 16 Gaulmier, Un grand témoin, 117; Barni, Les moralistes français, 210.

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economically, they attempted to transform the Corsican economy – and to compensate France for the loss of its Caribbean colonies – by introducing cash crops such as coffee, cotton, sugar, and indigo to the island. (Volney personally attempted to put this agricultural policy into practice at an estate that he bought near Ajaccio and programmatically named “Petites-Indes”). The revolutionary program failed on all counts. The vast majority of Corsicans followed the lead of their priests and noble families in opposing the French Revolution, and when Paoli himself joined the Counter-Revolution and turned the island over to the British, Buonarroti and the small indigenous revolutionary party were forced to flee. Volney himself, denounced by Paoli as an atheist, returned to Paris in March 1793. Meanwhile, to add insult to injury, his estate was caught up in financial and tax complications. Upon his return to France, Volney had to navigate the shifting currents of the Revolution. On 16 November 1793, in the midst of the Terror, he was arrested on the order of the Committee for Public Safety and imprisoned at the fortress of La Force, although his arrest seems not to have been for political reasons but for debts linked to his Corsican property.17 In addition to his legislative and administrative activities, Volney in the early years of the Revolution was writing a new book that was to be a continuation of sorts of the Voyage en Syrie et en Egypte. The very questions that drove it, in fact, appeared in the conclusion of Voyage. The new work, whose various sections, it seems, were written separately over a period of several years and then incorporated into a single programmatic work during a period of revolutionary ferment,18 appeared in 1791 under the title of Les ruines, ou Méditations sur les révolutions des

17 Bossange, “Notice sur la vie,” xxvii; Israel, Revolutionary Ideas, 331–3, 666. 18 Urs App has reconstructed the chronology of the four sections of Les ruines based on chapter content, statements by Volney, analysis of changes in style, sources, and annotation density. To summarize his conclusions, the introductory section dates from 1787 or even earlier. Chapters 5 to 18, addressing political matters, date from 1789 and 1790 (when Volney was a member of the Estates General and then the National Constituent Assembly). Chapters 19 to 21, on the assembly of religions, date from 1787–90, and chapter 22, on the origin and genealogy of religious ideas, ­predates 1787. App sharply distinguishes between the two sections on religion. He argues that chapter 22 was written before the rest of Les ruines as a separate essay and primarily reflects the ideas of Holbach, Helvétius, and Dupuis, whereas chapters 19 to 21 show evidence of much more extensive familiarity with the broader Orientalist scholarship of the previous decades. App, Birth of Orientalism, 455–60.

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empires.19 Hailed by a modern scholar as “one of the master works of revolutionary thought,”20 Les ruines exploited the (temporary) absence of censorship in the period between the collapse of the Old Regime and the establishment of the Napoleonic Empire to present openly and uncompromisingly the program of the radical Enlightenment. The mise-en-scène of the work is established by its Narrator’s recollection of how, during his travels through Syria, he was one day thrown into a deep reverie by questions brought to his mind as he gazed at the ruins of Palmyra, the once-opulent capital city of a powerful empire. Why have the fortunes of these countries changed so dramatically? Why have so many cities been destroyed and fertile lands become desert? Could the same fate one day befall European countries? Allowing himself a feint in the spirit of David Hume, that welcome visitor to the Holbach salon in the early 1760s, the Narrator professes himself puzzled that the prosperity that ought to be the prize of piety was enjoyed by these lands under paganism, whereas they have now fallen into sterility and become deserted under believing and holy peoples. Summarizing his reflections, he ponders whether the desolate situation that he saw before him in Syria is the consequence of blind fate or the incomprehensible judgment of a mysterious God.21 At this moment, the Phantom of tombs and ruins appears and chastises the Narrator for blaming the heavens

19 Les ruines was quickly translated, anonymously, into English as Ruins, or A Survey of the Revolutions of Empires (London: J. Johnson, 1792) and deeply influenced British radicals, who issued excerpts from the work as pamphlets and broadsides. A second edition was needed in 1795 and a third the next year. In 1802, this version was ­superseded by a new translation by Thomas Jefferson and Joel Barlow. The fact that subsequent editions and new translations appeared throughout the nineteenth century and the fact that Les ruins has never been out of print in Britain or America testify to its status as a key text in the secularist and free thought movements of the Englishspeaking world. See E.P. Thompson, Witness against the Beast, 199, 202; Weir, Brahma in the West, 48; and Godwin, Theosophical Enlightenment, 35. 20 Gusdorf, La conscience révolutionnaire, 256. 21 Volney, Les ruines, 9–12. My references are to the 1825–26 edition of Les ruines published as volume 1 of Oeuvres complètes de C.F. Volney. In addition to major changes to the notes (see below), there are minor differences in the text between the Oeuvres edition and the 1791 edition: updated orthography and capitalization, small changes in phrasing, a few emendations in the chronology of ancient events and persons, removal of references to current events, and revisions to some lines of text in a number of chapters. None of these changes significantly alter the ultimate religious (and political) message of Les ruines.

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unjustly. The answers to his questions lie not in fate or divine will but in the actions of human beings. The Phantom, or the Génie, as he is alternatively called, will speak for reason and the lessons of the past. The Narrator then directs a new set of questions to the Phantom that embody the heart of the book: “By what underlying cause are empires raised up and brought down? From what causes are born the prosperity and misfortunes of nations? On what principles, finally, can the peace of societies and the happiness of individuals be established?”22

Volney’s Critique of Religion in Les ruines This section sets out key elements of Volney’s critique of religion by focusing on the origin of religion, the genealogy of religious ideas, and liberation from the civil effects of religion. It highlights the role of projection, allegory, and alienation in the Idéologues’ theorizing about religion. Origin of Religion Volney’s critique of religion in Les ruines was built on the Idéologues’ anti-theological program and on its materialist cosmology and sensationalist epistemology. The universe, he asserted, is governed by a regular order of causes and effects, of principles and consequences. The natural laws that express this regular order govern human life and are the source of the good and evil that variously befall humankind – and human beings, correspondingly, can create their own destiny by understanding these natural laws and thereby knowing both the causes of the good and evil that they experience and what can be done to remedy the ­latter.23 And just as no supernatural power interferes with the regular order of causes and effects, so too did the development of early ­humankind from its original savage state follow the natural laws imprinted in human nature. Like the other animals, early humans, lacking both experience of the past and foresight of the future, wandered through the forest guided only by their senses and an innate

22 Volney, Les ruines, 20. 23 Ibid., 26–9.

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self-interest (amour de soi). Volney sketched a classic sensationalist primal scene where the impressions gathered by the senses awakened the faculties and developed the understanding of early humans and where their aversion to suffering and desire for well-being gradually drew them out of savagery and into a social order that eventually carried them to the heights of civilization.24 The sensationalist principle that ideas arise only by the intermediary of the senses means that the attribution of an idea to an origin other than experience and reflection on sensations must be false. The prime example for Volney of such an epistemological error was supernatural explanations for the origin of religion. Religion, he said, was not divinely revealed to the first human beings, nor is it innate in the human heart; it has an origin in history. The earliest humans, having no experience or knowledge, did not possess religion. Religion arose only after early humans’ intellectual faculties had developed sufficiently to give rise to reflection on their condition. The newly possible recognition by early humans of their dependence on elemental forces – sun, fire, water, thunder, wind – that were stronger than them and independent of their will gave rise to a chain of reasonings. The idea of power arose from the recognition of human weakness in the face of the natural elements; next, because the differential effect of the various elements aroused sensations of pleasure or pain, understood as good and evil, early humans invested the various natural powers with love or fear; finally, as a result of an innate psychological tendency to explain all phenomena by analogy with their own nature, early humans supposed that the ­natural powers were intelligent beings like them, which in turn led to an inevitable induction: since human beings can be influenced by ­supplication and gifts, so too could these powerful intelligent beings who dominated human life be affected. In this way, Volney said, the animation of natural elements by human passions substituted a ­fantastic world for the real world and brought spirits and divinities into existence as factitious beings to frighten and torment humankind.25 Volney’s account of the origin of religion, which followed the historical-­ psychological template identified by Frank Manuel as typical of French Enlightenment theories of religion,26 was a projection theory. Words 24 Ibid., 29–33. 25 Ibid., 165–8. 26 See Manuel, Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods, 34.

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that Volney placed in the mouth of the Phantom made this explicit: “Now I recognize the lie of man! By seeing how he has depicted Divinity, I said to myself: No, no, it is not God who made man in his own image; it is man who figured God in his. Man gave to God his mind, clothed him in his inclinations, lent him his judgments.”27 Volney’s method for investigating religious ideas emerged from his projection theory. On the one hand, the things that the various religions of the world claim are true – a bewildering variety of spirits and ­divinities, revelations and miracles, metaphysical claims and cosmological ­doctrines – have no real existence outside of human minds; on the other hand, they may be investigated precisely as the products of human minds. Volney’s sensationalist epistemology further requires that ­religious ideas cannot be pure fantasy but must have a basis in the ­physical world. Specifically, Volney asserted that all gods and spirits, and all mythological stories and theological doctrines about them, are ­personifications of astronomical phenomena.28 Here, Volney borrowed heavily from Dupuis’s thesis that all religions are allegories of the movement of the sun through the Egyptian zodiac. (Although Dupuis’s Origine de tous les cultes was not published until 1795, his thesis was well known in Parisian intellectual circles from his 1781 Mémoire sur l’origine des constellations and from his presentations to the Royal Academy of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres.) The explanatory structure of Volney’s materialist account of how religious ideas had first arisen from human misunderstanding and misrepresentation of physical objects identified the true or deeper (materialist) meaning of religion hidden beneath its false or surface (theological) meaning. It joined, in short, a figurative or allegorical theory of religion to its projection theory. The Genealogy of Religious Ideas If religion originated in the responses of the human mind to natural phenomena, it follows that the history of religions is really a history of the human mind. Volney asserted that although believers claim that their doctrines are immutable and eternal, there is a genealogical order to religious ideas because they directly reflect the sequence of social

27 Volney, Les ruines, 64. 28 Ibid., 162–4.

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orders in human history.29 Volney sketched this genealogy of religious ideas through his analysis of the thirteen religious and metaphysical systems into which he divided the religious experience of humankind. The key transitional moments in this genealogy display the central ­elements of the Idéologues’ conceptualization of religion. The first form of religion corresponds to the pre-social state of early humankind, which Volney characterized as savagery. The religion of savages was polytheistic, simple in its worship, and private in the sense of not requiring priests or any other mediators between individuals and the gods. Volney underlined this last point: “As people had nothing superfluous to give, there were neither parasites under the name of priest, nor tribute under the name of victim, nor empire under the name of altar.”30 The critical transition from the savage condition to the social state was effected by the practice of agriculture and occurred (on the authority of Dupuis) in Egypt about 15,000 years ago. A new religious system, Sabeism or star worship, emerged along with and directly reflected this first social order.31 In Volney’s reconstruction, the careful observation of the path of the sun through the zodiac, of the phases of the moon, and of the stars and planets that was required for the practice of agriculture spontaneously led agricultural societies to conclude that these celestial bodies were divine powers that governed both the natural world and human life. Further, the social hierarchy that had come into being with the rise of agricultural societies was projected onto the deities, producing a celestial hierarchy complete with the sun as king and the moon as queen. Finally, reflecting the more complex, public, and administered social life of agricultural societies, the formerly simple and private worship of savage times became public and solemn, with more elaborate rituals and richer offerings, permanent places of worship, and priesthoods and creeds.32 Volney was careful to insist that this development of religious ideas had changed nothing about their first principles: the idea of God remains the idea of physical entities imprinting sensations of pain or pleasure, which are interpreted

29 Ibid., 161–2, 164. 30 Ibid., 170. 31 In designating this system “Sabeism,” Volney, via Dupuis, here offered an anticlerical variation on scholarly speculation about the Sabians (or Sabaeans) and their religion that goes back to Maimonides. See Stroumsa, New Science, 93–4, 104–6. 32 Volney, Les ruines, 171–4.

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as acting for good or evil; dogma remains knowledge of their laws or manners of acting; virtue and sin remain the observation or infraction of these laws; and morality remains the practice of everything that contributes to the preservation of the existence and well-being of oneself and one’s fellows.33 The next transition in Volney’s genealogy of religious ideas was from star worship to idolatry, which Volney defined as the worship of symbols. This transition arose not out of a new social order but from an internal development within agricultural society. Early agricultural peoples, Volney said, needed names for the celestial powers that ruled their lives, but their languages, being concrete, lacked abstraction and were thus incapable of expressing metaphysical ideas. Their solution was to give the stars and other celestial bodies the names of animals or natural processes linked to them by their influence on the yearly cycle of ­vegetation and agriculture. Thus the constellation associated with the flooding of the Nile was given the name of Aquarius (i.e., a water bearer), and the constellation that marked the time to plough the fields received the name of Taurus (i.e., a steer or bull). Resulting from need and human ingenuity, this practice of associating animals and other ­terrestrial objects with the celestial powers functioned well at first but turned pernicious as a result of further social development. The catalyst was the invention of the calendar. Substituting the calendar as the regulator of the agricultural year in place of observation of the sky led over time to the loss of the reasoning behind the association of animals with the celestial powers even though the association itself persisted. The result was that the religious mind eventually confused the symbol with the celestial power that it represented and now directed prayers and rituals to the animals themselves. In this way, Volney said, zoolatry and other forms of idolatry arose from the corruption of symbolism.34 The second consequence of the social development that brought about the loss of direct observation of the skies by those engaged in agriculture was that knowledge of astronomy became restricted to ­certain families who kept it secret from the rest of the people as sacred mysteries. The emergence of sacred mysteries along with a caste of astronomer-priests was calamitous. First, ordinary people were plunged

33 Ibid., 173. 34 Ibid., 175–9.

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deeper into superstition and servility as priesthoods – a caste of hypocrites and deceivers, Volney called them – established themselves as the sole mediators between the people and the gods and claimed a monopoly over all religious teaching. Priestcraft, in fact, is a recurrent theme in Les ruines; Volney elsewhere called priests imposters who attach merit to indifferent or ridiculous practices and transform harmless actions into transgressions.35 Second, corrupted symbolism produced fanciful, violent, and immoral tales about the gods, which in turn became models for human behaviour, deepening superstition and leading to sectarianism and war. Worse, because the corrupted gods of idolatrous societies became models for the behaviour of rulers, religion consecrated the crimes of despots and perverted the principles of government.36 Religious despotism, finally, allied itself with political despotism, further corrupting justice and virtue and leading nations into a labyrinth of errors and calamities.37 What Volney called the perfecting of the science of oppression by rulers and priesthoods eventually reduced the various peoples to despair. Projecting their experience of human tyrants, they then depicted the gods as despots, producing melancholy and misanthropic religions. The idea of an otherworldly homeland where the happiness denied to humankind on earth could be enjoyed forever arose as an illusory but natural reaction to this dismal situation. But the consequences were devastating: Smitten with an imaginary world, man scorned the world of nature; for ­chimerical hopes, he neglected reality. His life was no more in his eyes than a fatiguing voyage, a painful dream; his body was a prison, an obstacle to his happiness; and the earth was a place of exile and pilgrimage that he no ­longer deigned to cultivate. Then a sacred idleness was established in the political world; the countryside was deserted, the fallow land was multiplied, empires were depopulated, monuments were neglected, and everywhere ­ignorance, superstition, and fanaticism joined their effects, multiplying the devastation and ruin.38

35 36 37 38

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Ibid., 64–5. Ibid., 184–7. Ibid., 36, 64–5. Ibid., 55–7 (quotation 56–7).

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Volney argued here, anticipating Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx, that otherworldly religions produce alienation and have anti-social consequences. Alienation thus joined projection and allegory as one of the three key elements of Volney’s critique of religion. The balance of Volney’s discussion of the genealogy of religious ideas addresses first the theological systems of Antiquity and then a number of specific religions. He explained the various ancient theological ­systems, including those of dualism and a world soul, as arising from different physical theories developed by the priest-astronomer elites. His brief treatments of Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Brahmanism, and Christianity drive home his point that there is nothing new in the history of religions, only the existing elements of astronomical allegory and corrupted symbolism in new combinations. He took particular care, with help from Dupuis, to unveil Christianity as yet another allegorical solar religion. The above account of Volney’s history of religions is drawn from chapter 22 of Les ruines, plus some material from an earlier section summarizing the program of the radical enlightenment. In Urs App’s persuasive identification of three phases of Orientalist scholarship in Les ruines,39 this chapter corresponds to the earliest phase, whereas the three that precede it date from the second phase, where Volney recognized the importance of basing his understanding of Eastern religions on Asian texts rather than on analogies with classical or Christian ideas. 39 The first phase, dating from 1787 or earlier, corresponds to chapter 22; Volney here reiterated the radical enlightenment’s identification of ancient Egypt as the source of all Eastern religions and civilizations. His sources for this section were restricted to classical authors, Church Fathers, Maimonides, and a very few modern works from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The second phase, dating from 1789–90 and represented by chapters 19 to 21, reflects extensive reading in works on Asian peoples and their religions from the second half of the eighteenth century, including the new British textual scholarship that was beginning to transform Orientalism. The third phase, discernible in the 1825–26 Oeuvres edition of Les ruines, reflects Volney’s continued study of Eastern religions from the mid-1790s until his death in 1820 – critical years in the maturation and institutionalization of Orientalist textual scholarship, although they represent only the very beginning of reliable European knowledge of Asian religions. This research resulted in changes being made to the notes between 1816 and 1820, with some notes receiving minor revisions and others major revisions. The only substantial change to the body of the text was that the sections on Buddhism and Brahmanism in chapter 22 were completely ­rewritten and their order switched. App, Birth of Orientalism, 459–62.

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This was an important recognition, but what did it mean for Volney’s critique of religion? In fact, there is a tension between Volney’s genuine curiosity about and evolving understanding of the various Eastern ­religions and his unwavering conviction that all religions are false. His newly acquired knowledge about Eastern religions, displayed in ­chapters 19 to 21, was made to serve the program of Les ruines by further demonstrating the diversity and contradictions of religion as a false form of knowledge. Ultimately, these chapters buttress the critique of religion set out in chapter 22, even as they go beyond the latter’s sources for and understanding of Eastern religions. Liberation from Religion Volney’s genealogy of religious ideas does not amount to a history of religion because, in his view, religion does not have a history. The ­religious mind has always followed the same path of creating divinities and dogmas out of physical phenomena and innate human passions and prejudices. So, although the genealogy of religious ideas follows the development of social orders, religion itself has no meaningful direction; it is the story of humankind’s innate desire for truth and happiness subverted by its ignorance and capacity for illusion into a vicious cycle: The entire history of the religious mind is only that of the uncertainties of the  human mind, which, placed in a world that it does not understand, ­nevertheless wants to solve the enigma; and which, always an astonished ­spectator of this mysterious and visible prodigy, imagines causes, supposes ends, builds systems; then, finding one defective, destroys it for another no less vicious; hates the error that it leaves, failing to recognize the error that it embraces; pushes away the truth that summons it; composes chimeras of ­disparate beings; and, dreaming without cease of wisdom and happiness, ­wanders in a labyrinth of suffering and folly.40

If, then, religion is nothing but “a labyrinth of suffering and folly,” is humankind doomed to wander forever lost in its coils? For Volney, this question was in part about the philosophy of history. He rejected outright the pessimistic view that sees human history as an inevitable decline

40 Volney, Les ruines, 221–2 (quotation at 222).

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and the related conceit of an unobtainable Golden Age in the distant past as contradicted by humankind’s progression from savagery to civilization and by the intrinsic human capacity to learn from experience.41 Yet the evidence from history and human nature is ambivalent; after all, religion and despotism are also the products of human nature, and it is their development over time that constructs the “labyrinth of ­suffering and folly.” Nevertheless, Volney accentuated the positive. Although religion poses a massive obstacle to social amelioration, humankind can overcome what it has brought into existence.42 How, then, might a society liberate itself from religion? Volney answered that liberation from the labyrinth requires a two-stage process of first exposing and then overcoming what he called the contradictions of religion. Exposing the lie of the venerable argument from universality, these contradictions arise from the prodigious religious diversity of the peoples of the world because the teachings of the various religions – and even of rival sects within a specific religion – contradict each other.43 However, the cause of the endemic violence and oppression recorded by history is not the mere fact of religious diversity but the further claim made by each religion and sect that it alone is the true 41 Ibid., 78–9. 42 Ibid., 90–1 43 Ibid., 115–26. App argues that in chapter 21 a group of Siamese Talapoins, or  Buddhist monks, speaks for Volney’s own religious views. He points out that Buddhist monks would be an appropriate vehicle for Volney’s atheist viewpoint on the grounds  that in early modern Europe a connection had already been made between modern “atheists” like Baruch Spinoza, ancient atheists like Epicurus and Lucretius, and “­esoteric” Buddhism. App, Birth of Orientalism, 470. Some of the Talapoins’ views are indeed reminiscent of Volney’s own: they assert that theological opinions are allegories of moral ideas and physical processes, that the soul is only the vital principle, and that morality is a matter of necessary causes and effects. However, some of their views depart from Volney’s own, such as their statement that everything is an illusion. Volney, Les ruines, 154–6. In fact, in the context of the chapter, the function of the Talapoins is not to speak for Volney but to cap the demonstration of the contradictions of religion in the most extreme manner – as dramatized by the cries of “materialism” and “atheism” that they provoke from the representatives of the other religions. Volney’s point is not that any one religious view is correct but instead that religions inevitably contradict each other and therefore foment violence. It is the Legislator, who then immediately speaks up and offers the summary of the entire chapter on the problems of religious contradictions that I have just cited, who truly speaks for Volney. Further, the Legislator’s words lead directly into chapter 22 and its nonreligious account of the genealogy of religious ideas.

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religion; that is, the problem of the contradictions of religion is at ­bottom an epistemological one of competing claims to truth. And whereas the doctrines claimed by religions to be true are multitudinous, Volney observed that the justifications offered for these claims rest on the same few arguments. First, all religions claim to be divinely revealed, and they all cite miracles, testimony, and martyrs to support their claim. The problem here, Volney pointed out, is that since each religion offers miracles, testimony, and martyrs in support of the divinely revealed status of its particular doctrines, these criteria fail to identify the one true religion. Similarly, theologians’ attempts to offer rational proofs of the truth of their particular religion and the falsity of other religions fail because the same theological method is used to defend contradictory doctrines. Shifting from contradictions to common elements, Volney next noted that far from resolving conflict, the mutual recognition among religions that they share certain doctrines and beliefs proves to be a further ground for conflict because each religion claims that it is the original source and accuses the others of plagiarizing and ­distorting the elements in question.44 Religions themselves, Volney continued, in fact recognize that they have no rational or empirical criteria for j­udging the truth of their claims when they declare that they receive their doctrines as tradition. The idea of tradition, however, is not itself a criterion of truth but instead simply pushes the problem one remove into the past since people long ago had no more proof for their beliefs than do people in the present. Noting that the faithful ultimately declare ­religious ideas to be mysteries, Volney remarked that the entire theological edifice lacks a sound epistemological foundation and is nothing more than a complicated problem of metaphysics and history. It was in this context that he spoke of “the fabulous empire of traditions.”45 So far, Volney had argued that the contradictions of religion cannot be overcome from within religion. He then turned to the intellectual critique of religion, where, as we have seen above, he discovered the origin of religious ideas in the psychological nature and environmental experience of early humans and traced their genealogy through the social development of humankind. This enlightened perspective on religion, Volney suggested, challenges the religious understanding of

44 Volney, Les ruines, 127–8, 157–8. 45 Ibid., 160–2 (quotation at 162).

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religion. Something more, however, than an intellectual critique of religion is required in order to liberate a people from the “labyrinth of suffering and folly.” What is needed is a practical or legislative solution to the contradictions of religion. Such a solution must, however, in good Idéologue fashion, be grounded in epistemology. Volney sharply distinguished between matters that can be decided by empirical evidence and matters of conjecture. Everyone, he said, agrees that sugar is sweet; generalizing from the particular case (and illustrating a common Enlightenment view), we may be sure that there is universal agreement on sensations because our senses give us a direct and true understanding of the objects that we perceive. Agreement on a matter decidable by empirical evidence requires that certitude has previously been established by verifying that the mind correctly reflects objects as they truly are. Such agreement is impossible on principle for conjectural matters – that is, for claims that go beyond empirical evidence. On such matters, we can have only opinions rather than knowledge; in Volney’s words, about conjectural matters, there is “no rule, no term of comparison, no means of certitude.”46 The contradictions of religious ideas are the sign of their conjectural status. There can be no certitude to religious ideas, Volney said, because they cannot be tested empirically, and where there is no certitude, there can be no agreement. Religions, therefore, will always contradict each other and consequently foment social conflict. In order to free ourselves from “the labyrinth of suffering and folly,” we must neutralize the power of religion to sow discord. As we have seen, Volney thought that achieving agreement among religions would not overcome the contradictions of religion. It must be done by changing the relationship between religion and civil society: “Hence one must conclude that, in order to live in harmony and in peace, we must agree not to make judgments about such objects, to attach no importance to them; in a word, we must trace a line of demarcation between verifiable objects and those that cannot be verified and must separate with an inviolable barrier the world of fantastic beings from the world of realities; that is to say, we must eliminate all civil effects of theological and religious opinions.”47 Volney’s critique of religion thus culminated in the

46 Ibid., 238–42 (quotation at 242). 47 Ibid., 242.

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conclusion that the contradictions of religion and the violence that flows from them can be overcome only by relegating religion to the private sphere; that is, Volney’s remedy for the mal sacerdotal is legislative action to eliminate the civil effects of religion.48 Les ruines in general and its concluding pages in particular reflect the optimism of the early phase of the French Revolution. In the years that followed, Volney and the Idéologues would discover, as the next chapter shows, that neither spreading an enlightened understanding of religion among the people nor eliminating the civil effects of religion through legislation would be easily achieved.

48 There is an element of squaring the circle to Volney’s program: enlightened laws on religion would liberate a people from the “labyrinth of suffering and folly,” but only an already liberated people could establish such laws. Volney seems to have originally conceived of the character of the Legislator as a literary device to elude precisely this problem of circular reasoning: in the preface to the 1791 edition of Les ruines, he noted that in 1784 the Legislator had been a fictive and hypothetical being, whereas in 1790 he really existed; that is, history had caught up with fiction. Volney, Les ruines (1791), x.

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From Critique of Religion to Religious Policy

The decade from 1794 to 1804 – or in political terms, the fraught period from the overthrow of the Jacobins through the Directory and the Consulate to the establishment of the First French Empire – brought the Idéologues to the threshold of political power. At the same time, they never renounced their critical perspective and, by the end of this decade, once again found themselves in the ranks of the opposition.1 This chapter traces the Idéologues’ attempts to convert their critique of religion into government policy. It necessarily involves some discussion of political events and structures.

T h e r m i d o r a n d t h e E a r ly D i r e c t o ry With its overthrow of the Jacobins, the coup d’état of 9 Thermidor, Year II (27 July 1794), ended the Terror and revoked most of its exceptional measures. The Thermidorian Convention then set to work on a new constitution that would consolidate the key achievements of the early French Revolution and restore the individual rights that had been   1 As regards periodization, I have adopted Howard G. Brown’s argument that it makes better historiographical sense to integrate the Brumaire coup d’état that brought Napoleon Bonaparte to power into a decade (1794–1804) characterized by the struggle to end and move beyond the French Revolution rather than to see it as the close of a revolutionary decade (1789–1799). Brown’s own writings make a ­convincing case for this alternate periodization, and for the purposes of the present study, it has the additional benefit of capturing both the period of the Idéologues’ most active participation in the political life of France and their overriding concern with establishing a stable post-revolutionary order. Brown, “Search for Stability,” 20; Brown and Miller, “New Paths,” 16.

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effaced during the Terror while restricting the political rights of the poorest classes and repudiating Jacobin excesses. The resulting Constitution of Year III (1795) endowed the new regime of the Directory, which took power in October 1795 after national elections, with a bicameral legislature and an executive of five directors chosen from the legislature. The directors, one of whom would be replaced by lot each year, possessed considerable authority over administration, foreign affairs, and the armed forces but lacked control over finances and had few recourses to counter opposition from legislators. The system of five directors, in fact, represented a deliberate attempt to safeguard against dictatorship by diluting executive power.2 The Idéologues emerged from the Terror as an influential body whose moderate republican, anti-clerical views aligned them with the Thermidorian political leadership. They held legislative and upper-level administrative and diplomatic positions under the Directory and more generally advised the regime on a range of policy matters.3 The Terror, however, had confirmed for them the wisdom of Claude-Adrien Helvétius’s and Nicolas de Condorcet’s caution that only after the spread of enlightenment to the popular classes could the latter be entrusted with political rights. The Terror, like the Jacobin conception of the general will, in this view, was not an expression of revolutionary values at all but the result of false, even counter-revolutionary, conceptions of popular sovereignty. The Idéologues referred to their alternative political ideal – which they understood as restoring the true values of 1789 – as the democracy of enlightened reason, or what the people would want if they were sufficiently enlightened to recognize that what was best for society as a whole was what was best for themselves as individuals. The Idéologues, in short, viewed equality as a long-term goal, not an immediate right.4 Antoine Destutt de Tracy’s allusion to “equality maintained to the extent that it is possible and useful” encapsulates their view at this time.5

  2 On the Directory, see Brown, Ending the French Revolution; Brown and Miller, eds, Taking Liberties; Baczko, Ending the Terror; Livesey, Making Democracy; Furet, Revolutionary France; Jones, Great Nation; Lyons, France under the Directory; and Woloch, New Regime.  3 Staum, Minerva’s Message, 10.  4 Bergeron, France under Napoleon, 92. See also Lyons, France under the Directory, 116; and Israel, Revolutionary Ideas, 23. Israel shares the Idéologues’ interpretation of the Jacobin general will. Israel, Revolutionary Ideas, 702.   5 Destutt de Tracy, Quels sont les moyens, 27.

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The Constitution of Year III (1795) – of which Pierre-Claude-François Daunou was one of the principal authors – was largely an expression of this Idéologue political philosophy. Its framers sought to restore the values of the early Revolution while protecting against a return of Jacobin tyranny by balancing the ideals of social equality and d ­ emocracy with a defence of property and representational government, all ­underwritten by the rule of law. The Idéologues’ political philosophy ­conceptualized the Constitution as a transitional document whose purpose was to produce a civil order that would end the upheavals of the Revolution and further the spread of enlightened reason. Moreover, although the Idéologues envisioned the Constitution and the institutions that it established as embodying a moderate republican and secular order as the proper outcome of the Revolution, they were well aware that this order did not yet have deep roots among the French people. “The Revolution began,” wrote Dominique-Joseph de Garat, “when the wisdom [lumières] of the philosophers became that of the legislators; the Revolution will be completed only when the wisdom of the legislators becomes that of the people.”6 The mission of the Directory, conceived by the Idéologues to be as much moral as p ­ olitical, was to instill in the nation as a whole the enlightened self-interest that is the foundation of both individual happiness and collective well-being. The Idéologues accordingly undertook, through their direct and indirect influence on the Directory, to further the spread of ­enlightened reason into society and the state by creating institutions designed to instill moderate and secular republican values.7 The most significant of these institutions were those for education, research and scholarship, and public instruction. The structural centrepieces of the Directory’s national educational system were the system of écoles centrales (one planned for each of the new départements) and the École normale supérieure. The écoles centrales were intended to train an elite of professionals and administrators who would embody the secular, republican values of the Directory regime and act as a vanguard in the spread of these values within society as a whole, and the École normale supérieure in Paris, an elite tertiary-level institution, would train schoolteachers to staff   6 Quoted in Gusdorf, La conscience révolutionnaire, 306.   7 Garnham, “Raison et superstition,” 167; Gusdorf, La conscience révolutionnaire, 43, 305–6.

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the écoles centrales. Idéologues were deeply involved in all elements of the Directory’s education program.8 Daunou had belonged to the Convention’s committee on education in 1793, and Destutt de Tracy was appointed by the minister of the interior to a new Council on Public Instruction in 1799. Idéologues were similarly front and centre at the creation and operation of the École normale supérieure, as Garat and Constantin-François Volney were appointed to teaching positions and, beyond their specific subjects – history for Volney and the very Idéologic-sounding “Analyse de l’entendement” (analysis of the understanding) for Garat – sought to ensure that all graduates were trained in idéologie.9 The Institut national des sciences et arts was established in 1795 as the successor to the various Old Regime academies abolished by the Convention. The Institut was to embody an official intellectual elite who would accelerate and direct the spread of enlightened ­reason throughout the nation. Its founders, who included Daunou, divided the Institut into three classes: the natural sciences and ­mathematics, the moral and political sciences, and literature and the arts. Idéologue representation was most prominent in the second class, and, in fact, the very conception of moral and political sciences ­represented an institutionalization of the Idéologues’ epistemological reorganization of the study of humankind.10 Volney, Destutt de Tracy, Garat, and Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis all belonged to this class, with Destutt de Tracy and Cabanis taking particularly active roles in the Institut’s activities.11 Adult education – or public instruction12 – was also a subject of keen interest among the Idéologues. Their most important statement on it was Daunou’s Essai sur l’instruction publique (1793), where he declared that public institutions must edify not only children but also adults (especially artisans and manual labourers) because all generations

  8 On this program, which represented a step back from the early Revolution’s democratic vision of a single, universal education system, see Palmer, Improvement of Humanity, 275. See also Livesey, Making Democracy, 167–97.  9 Palmer, Improvement of Humanity, 45; Lyons, France under the Directory, 122. 10 See Gusdorf, La conscience révolutionnaire, 395. 11 Staum, Minerva’s Message, 3–4; Jainchill, Reimagining Politics, 77. 12 Daunou distinguished between instruction publique, or adult education, and éducation publique, or children’s education. Daunou, Essai sur l’instruction publique, 2.

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suffer from prejudices and vicious habits and are equally in need of enlightened values. The adult education that he envisioned ­encompassed the promotion of enlightened moral philosophy, the dissemination of useful industrial, agricultural, and commercial skills, and the staging of annual national festivals. Of the three, Daunou considered festivals to be the most effective means of public instruction. The problem ­facing France, he wrote, was that although the institutions of the Old Regime had been overthrown, its moral creations – that is, its values and ways of thinking – had not. Only when republican values and ways of thinking had been implanted in the hearts and minds of the French people could the Republic be said to be truly established. And with their emotional and social power, national festivals were uniquely able to effect this outcome.13 A second important statement of the Idéologues’ approach to inculcating republican morality was Destutt de Tracy’s Quels sont les moyens de fonder la morale chez un peuple? (1798). Two foundational principles underlie the treatise’s arguments. First, morals are not innate; they have to be taught. Second, as framed by Idéologue moral philosophy (see chapter 1), people make moral errors because they are ignorant of the empirical law of enlightened self-interest, or the relation of cause and effect in moral life.14 One might think from these principles that education would be the most important means of improving the ­morality of the people, but, in fact, Destutt de Tracy considered education to be much less effective than legislation because most people have neither the time nor the capacity to learn moral philosophy and because, in any case, there is no need for them to do so. Just as artisans, in order to practise their trade, need to know only a few tried and true rules, not the science that underlies them, so too do the majority of people need to know only the practical directives of morality, not moral philosophy itself. These practical directives, in turn, can be shaped by legislation. “Legislators and governments,” Destutt de Tracy concluded, “are the true teachers of the mass of the human race, the only ones whose lessons are efficacious.”15 Destutt de Tracy, consequently, was less enthusiastic about festivals than was Daunou. Festivals, like schools, he said, presupposed a happy and prosperous people rather than 13 Ibid., 3–6. 14 Destutt de Tracy, Quels sont les moyens, 17–18. 15 Ibid., 20–1 (quotation at 22), 24–6.

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making them. Once wise legislation had created a truly republican people, such a people would naturally manifest its values in schools and festivals. Nevertheless, if legislation makes citizens, it is the legislators who make the laws. It was therefore critical to Destutt de Tracy’s project that legislators should receive the rigorous moral education that he said is unnecessary for the majority.16 This education, in turn, completes the institutional circle by returning us to the Idéologues’ program for a system of elite schools to train legislators, administrators, and schoolteachers.

The Second Directory a n d t h e C o n s u l at e The Directory was a constitutionally based regime committed to the rule of law. It was also a revolutionary regime facing both Catholic and royalist opponents at home and military threats from abroad, all against a backdrop of social and economic chaos. Time and again, the Directory faced the dilemma of whether to respond to resistance and disorder within the limits of constitutionalism and the rule of law or to take recourse to extra-constitutional means. Even before the directorial regime took office, coercive force had been required when an armed royalist insurrection against the Thermidorian Convention had to be suppressed by military units under the command of Napoleon Bonaparte. In the early years of the Directory itself, Catholics and royalists used constitutional means to challenge the regime, culminating in a strong royalist showing in the elections of 1797. In response, fearing that the values of the Revolution were under threat from the right, three of the directors called in the army to stage a coup d’état on 18 Fructidor, Year V (4 September 1797), that purged royalist sympathizers from the legislature and government and expanded the Directory’s arbitrary powers.17 The electoral successes of the royalists were a sobering reminder to the directorial regime that secular, ­republican values had not yet taken root in the nation as a whole. The post-Fructidor Directory, known as the Second Directory, accordingly followed a twofold strategy. First, exercising its new extra-constitutional

16 Ibid., 29–30. 17 Brown, Ending the French Revolution, 22; Brown, “Search for Stability,” 25.

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powers, it attempted to suppress opposition through a further series of anti-clerical and anti-royalist measures. Second, it intensified enforcement of the republican calendar and systematized and expanded the national festivals under the leadership of the minister of the interior, François de Neufchâteau. The indefatigable Neufchâteau also strove to ensure that schools promoted enlightened republican values, and he sent departmental prefects copies of the radical Enlightenment’s texts, including Paul-Henri Thiry d’Holbach’s Contagion sacrée (1768), as a reminder of the wiles and perfidy of the Catholic enemy.18 However, even as the Second Directory drew on increasingly dictatorial methods in its campaign against Catholics and royalists, it faced revived ­opposition from the left. And when a new round of elections demonstrated renewed Jacobin strength, the Directory immediately carried out another legislative purge – the coup d’état of 22 Floréal, Year VI (11 May 1798) – and proscribed Jacobinism. The Directory’s repeated recourse to coups d’état and legislative purges amounted to a militarization of politics and demonstrated the inability of the regime to achieve its objective of a stable post-­ revolutionary order within its constitutional framework.19 A powerful group of Directory politicians and theorists  – including many Idéologues – under the leadership of the abbé Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès concluded that a new political order was necessary if the moderate revolutionary values that they stood for were finally to triumph over royalism and Jacobinism. In particular, they sought to strengthen the executive power, whose calculated weakness they diagnosed as the Directory’s fatal structural flaw. The end of the Directory came – as a culmination of its own extra-constitutional measures – in the coup d’état of 18–19 Brumaire, Year VIII (9–10 November 1799), in which the Sieyès cabal was backed by armed forces loyal to Bonaparte. The new regime – the Consulate – took its name from the three consuls who replaced the five directors. A new constitution – the Constitution of Year VIII (promulgated 12 December 1799)  – established its ­principal institutions: a three-person executive, three legislative ­assemblies (i.e., the Conseil d’état, the Tribunat, and the Corps législatif), and a Senate. Bonaparte’s skilful manoeuvring and support from 18 Brown, “Search for Stability,” 25; Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, 122–4; Woloch, “Republican Institutions,” 383; Israel, Revolutionary Ideas, 683, 678. 19 Lyons, France under the Directory, 215; Brown, Ending the French Revolution, 119.

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the army ensured that he became first consul and that the first consul alone possessed real authority, with the other two playing merely ­advisory roles. Elections served in this system only to produce lists of notables from which the regime selected its office holders, and the occasional highly orchestrated plebiscite was conducted to ratify an element of the first consul’s program.20 The Brumairians maintained in large measure the Directory’s p ­ rogram of bringing the Revolution to an end by repressing both royalism and Jacobinism while firmly establishing the principal civil achievements of the Revolution’s early years. Their goal remained representative ­democracy under the rule of law, not military dictatorship, despite the seeds of authoritarianism planted in the Constitution of Year VIII.21 The Idéologues supported the coup d’état and accepted its bargain of increased executive authority in return for securing an enlightened republic against royalism and Jacobinism. In fact, the Idéologues had become steadily more conservative, particularly after Fructidor, as order had become central to their social thought, bringing with it a degree of backtracking on their commitments to both representation and constitutionalism. In return, the Idéologues were well represented in the early Consulate: Daunou, Pierre-Louis Ginguené, and Jean-Baptiste Say sat in the Tribunate; Daunou was the first president of the Legislative Body; and Destutt de Tracy, Garat, Cabanis, and Volney received appointments to the Senate. Volney, who had been absent for much of the Directory’s lifespan travelling in the United States,22 reconnected with

20 On the Consulate, see Brown, Ending the French Revolution; Brown and Miller, eds, Taking Liberties; Bergeron, France under Napoleon; Jones, Great Nation; Furet, Revolutionary France; Broers, Europe under Napoleon; and Lyons, Napoleon Bonaparte. 21 Brown and Miller, “New Paths,” 12; Bergeron, France under Napoleon, 91. 22 Volney made careful observations of both the physical environment of North America and the political and social customs of the American people. He was cordially received by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson but quarrelled with John Adams (then president of the Republic), engaged in an extended polemic with Joseph Priestly, and was suspected of being an agent of the French government. See Bossange, “Notice sur la vie,” xxx–xxxiii. Despite anticipation of a book on the scale of Voyage en Syrie et en Egypte, Volney eventually published only a physical description of America under the title of Tableau du climat et du sol des États-Unis d’Amérique (1803). This work, however, included seventy pages of “Observations générales sur les Indiens ou Sauvages de l’Amérique du Nord.” Georges Gusdorf sees this work as an important contribution to an emerging discipline of cultural anthropology, and Michel Despland

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Bonaparte upon his return to France in 1798 and, as a confident of the first consul in the two years following Brumaire, was a significant ­personage during the early Consulate.23

Religious Policy Just as the critique of religion was at the heart of idéologie, as we saw in the previous chapter, so too was religious policy central to the Idéologues’ conception of the Directory and its successor post-revolutionary regimes as instruments to produce a civil order imbued with secular, republican values. Targeting the Catholic Church first and foremost, but also the various revolutionary cults, the Idéologues’ religious policy was a statist, dirigiste attempt to put into practice the elimination of the civil effects of religion called for by their critique of religion. The influence of their program on government policy was powerful under the Thermidorians and the Directory but waned over the course of the Consulate. Thermidorian legislation, including the Constitution of Year III, which provided the legal framework for the Directory, laid the foundation for its policy of qualified state neutrality in religion. Landmark elements of this policy included ending all subsidies to the Constitutional Church and granting the freedom to worship privately – although this freedom was hedged around by many restrictions. The Constitution of Year III confirmed the separation of church and state but did not guarantee religious freedom. Further legislation passed in the weeks before the Directory took office codified the anti-clericalism that was foundational to both the Thermidorian Convention and the Directory: clergy were required to swear hatred of royalism, in addition to loyalty to the republic; and external manifestations of religion were forbidden, including wearing clerical dress, outdoor processions and services, and bell ringing.24

regards the methodological reciprocity of Volney’s discussions with Petite-Tortue (Michikinikwa, the war chief of the Miamis), whom he met in Washington, DC, as an improvement on Volney’s lack of dialogue with Muslims in Les ruines, where the literary conceit of the Phantom stands for the Enlightenment faith in the pure gaze of the Western scholar. Gusdorf, La conscience révolutionnaire, 489–4; Despland, Comparatisme et christianisme, 70–2, 76. 23 Bergeron, France under Napoleon, 92–3; Gaulmier, Un grand témoin, 248. 24 Aston, Religion and Revolution, 279–81; Kselman, Conscience and Conversion, 38.

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This legal framework corresponds to the Idéologues’ critique of religion and their call for the elimination of the civil effects of religion. Destutt de Tracy argued in his Analyse de l’origine de tous les cultes (1799) that religion should not be taught in public schools because teaching only one religion “would do violence to all citizens who, believing in another religion or in none of them, do not want their children imbued with ideas contrary to their own.”25 The words “or none of them” in this passage are significant; the Idéologues  – and with them the Directory – not only rejected the idea of a Constitutional Church but also insisted on a secular state that tolerated even skeptics and atheists. This Thermidorian-Directory policy on religion marked a significant break with eighteenth-century understandings of toleration. Catholics, Protestants, and the moderate Enlightenment’s critics of Christianity had all accepted the social utility of religion and consequently agreed on the need for a dominant confession within each state. The ­exceptions to this consensus were the radical Enlightenment’s thinkers, who denied the social utility of religion. During the Revolution – in a good example of Dale K. Van Kley’s argument that the Revolution refracted existing Old Regime divisions in new ways26 – Maximilien Robespierre accepted the social utility of religion, whereas the Idéologues denied it. It is critical to recognize, however, that for the Idéologues freedom of religion was not a positive value to be defended but a provisional state pending the republicanization and secularization of the populace. This point is made crystal clear in the continuation of the above passage from Destutt de Tracy: “If a religion must be taught to children, it can be done only at home. There, each citizen, as he wishes, imbibes the errors that please him. The law ought to concern only his actions. It is up to general good sense to regulate his opinions and to do justice to them if it cannot reform them. This is why it is so important to improve public reason.”27 Destutt de Tracy distinguished here between actions and opinions: the law regulates the former, whereas the latter are the province of “public reason” (la raison publique). But this distinction does not mean that the government cannot influence public reason;

25 Destutt de Tracy, Analyse raisonnée, 149. 26 See Van Kley, “Christianity as Casualty,” 1100–1. 27 Destutt de Tracy, Analyse raisonnée, 149.

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indeed, Destutt de Tracy’s sense that it was particularly important at this ­historical moment to do so underlay the Directory’s attempt to inculcate secular, republican values in the populace. The Idéologues and the directorial regime accordingly not only wholeheartedly embraced the revolutionaries’ principle that minds and imaginations, as well as institutions, must be revolutionized but also retained the revolutionary calendar and national festivals.28 Daunou himself was one of the organizers and theorizers of the Thermidorian-Directory festivals as public rituals designed to inculcate secular, republican ­values in the populace and to root out Catholic and royalist ones.29 Bernard Plongeron has spoken of the various revolutionary governments as still manifesting the “reflexes of Christendom,” by which he means that even as they rejected Catholicism, they were unable to conceive of a political order that did not draw on religious doctrine and ritual to support its values.30 Our question concerns the status of the Idéologues in this process; that is, to what extent did they manifest the “reflexes of Christendom”? Could they conceive of a political order where revolutionary values did not solicit the support of religious ­doctrine and ritual? The Jacobins unquestionably had promoted the Cult of Reason and the Cult of the Supreme Being as religious alternatives to Christianity.31 Robespierre joined the moderate Enlightenment’s deistic beliefs in a divinity behind the natural order and the immortality of the soul with the moderate Enlightenment’s conviction that only the hopes and fears accompanying faith in an afterlife could compel the masses to behave morally. He accordingly replaced the worship of reason with the w ­ orship of the Supreme Being. This new revolutionary cult, which drew heavily on Jean-Jacques Rousseau and on a solar symbolism inspired by CharlesFrançois Dupuis, was designed to link faith in a divinity and in the immortality of the soul with republican virtues. Robespierre himself

28 Rosanvallon, Demands of Liberty, 21. On the calendar, see Shusterman, Religion and the Politics of Time, 132–3; Shaw, Time and the French Revolution; and Perovic, Calendar in Revolutionary France. 29 Jones, Great Nation, 525; Brown, Ending the French Revolution, 7. On the national fêtes under the Directory, see Aston, Religion and Revolution, 290–1. On the Directory’s cultural program more broadly, see Livesey, Making Democracy, 198–233. 30 Plongeron, “L’impossible laïcité,” 432. 31 Aston, Religion and Revolution, 262.

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presided over the inaugural festival of the new state cult on 20 Prairial, Year II (8 June 1794).32 Under the Directory, Theophilanthropy – a deistic worship of science and nature characterized by moral instruction and ritual austerity – served a similar function; indeed, it was sponsored by the director Louis Marie de La Révellière-Lépeaux in the conviction that Catholicism would revive unless a religious substitute for it could be established. La Révellière-Lépeaux, moreover, adhered to the ­moderate Enlightenment’s principle that although educated people are capable of behaving morally without religion, the multitude is not.33 The Idéologues, however, strenuously opposed the revolutionary cults and Theophilanthropy. Their goal was to replace religion with enlightened reason; the last thing that they wanted was to invent new religions. A critical and telling difference between the Idéologues and the various revolutionary promoters of religious alternatives to Christianity concerns their use of Dupuis’s solar theory of religion. Whereas the designers of the Cult of Reason, the Cult of the Supreme Being, and Theophilanthropy all drew heavily on Dupuis in their attempts to construct a purified religion appropriate to the new republican political order, the Idéologues used Dupuis’s theory to explain the origin of religion as an intellectually false and socially detrimental historical phenomenon. The Jacobin cults and Theophilanthropy clearly manifested the “reflexes of Christianity”: their doctrines and  ­rituals were specifically designed to support revolutionary ­values and to embody their designers’ acceptance of the social utility of religion. Equally clearly, the Idéologues, in keeping with their antitheological philosophy and their repudiation of the social utility of religion, refused to draw on religious doctrine and ritual to support 32 Jones, Great Nation, 488–9, 496. On the Cult of the Supreme Being, see also Aston, Religion and Revolution, 270–3; and Edelstein, Terror of Natural Right, 24–5, 2 ­ 20–1. Edelstein argues that the Cult of the Supreme Being and the Jacobin law on ­revolutionary tribunals, which suspended many of the rights in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789), complemented each other: the former provided internal surveillance of behaviour – he speaks of the Cult of the Supreme Being as a “metaphysical panopticon” – and the latter provided external enforcement. 33 Jainchill, Reimaging Politics, 84–96; Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, 267, 270–1. Although Theophilanthropy enjoyed some success in Paris and a few provincial cities between 1796 and 1799, it became closely associated with the Jacobins and was banned by the Consulate in 1800. Brown, “Search for Stability,” 46. On Theophilanthropy, see Mathiez, La théophilanthropie.

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their revolutionary values. The Idéologues, nevertheless, unquestionably sought means to support the revolutionary values that they ­championed. Indeed, as they conceived it, their primary task was to complete the transvaluation of values begun with the Revolution by instilling them in the nation as a whole. Educational institutions, ­festivals, and the calendar all served as instruments, or cultural infrastructure, for this task. The key distinction here is between revolutionary values replacing religion and revolutionary values as religion. The Idéologues were unique among their contemporaries in their c­ onviction that there was no place for religion in the new social order emerging from the Revolution. If the Idéologues rejected theological dogma and ritual, it is important to recognize that their new science of morality took over many of the roles traditionally filled by religion. (We recall that “morality” includes the social realm as well as personal ethics.) The Idéologues’ religious policy exemplifies the way that, long noted for the French revolutionaries in general, many of the former roles of religion were appropriated to the realm of political culture.34 Noah Shusterman has extended this thesis by arguing that the revolutionaries’ attempt to take over the church’s role was the motor for a significant expansion of the role of the state in French society.35 In the course of his ­argument, Shusterman also offers a perceptive analysis of the difficulties encountered by the Directory’s religious policies without simply attributing them, as does a historian sympathetic to Catholicism, to an inability to conceive that Catholics could come to accept a republican government and that, conversely, a republican government might have nothing to fear from its Catholic citizens.36 It is certainly true that the Idéologues viewed Catholicism and republicanism as mutually incompatible; after all, for the Idéologues, the elimination of the civil effects of religion was at the heart of their program for a political order based on enlightened reason. But Shusterman’s more subtle argument is that the Directory’s critical failure was its inability to distinguish between the Catholic Church as a hierarchical authority and the traditional beliefs of the populace. Ever since the Council of Trent, he notes, the Catholic hierarchy had attempted to suppress popular beliefs that it, 34 Desan, Reclaiming the Sacred, 2. 35 Shusterman, Religion and the Politics of Time, 121. 36 Aston, Religion and Revolution, 279.

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no less than Enlightenment philosophes and the revolutionaries themselves, considered to be superstitious and immoral. (Other scholars have also noted this common ground between Catholic Reformers and libertins érudits.)37 The Directory, however, denounced both official Catholic theology and popular piety as superstition and then, failing to recognize popular piety as the source of grassroots resistance, ­attributed any opposition to, or even lack of enthusiasm for, their values and policies to the machinations of Catholic priests.38 We may add to this analysis the observation that the centrality of priestcraft to the Idéologues’ critique of religion predisposed them to overestimate the influence of the clergy over the populace.

Idéologues in Opposition Napoleon Bonaparte proclaimed himself consul for life in August 1802. The Life Consulate, in which security and order openly replaced ­representation as the legitimization for the state, marked the true end of the French Revolution and the culmination of the drift toward authoritarianism inaugurated by the Fructidor coup d’état. The authoritarian measures permitted by the Constitution of Year X (technically, the s­enatus consultum of 16 Thermidor) suspended representative democracy along with many political and legal rights and generally depoliticized French society and centralized state power. Bonaparte’s program for a post-revolutionary order depended on accommodations with property owners and the Catholic Church. He created a landed elite loyal to his regime by fusing holders of property, offices, and professions acquired during the revolutionary years with the nobility of the Old Regime, many of whom now returned to France after Bonaparte amnestied all but the most intractable émigrés in October 1802. The new elite provided him with the political notables who filled the assemblies and administrative offices of the regime.39

37 See Dew, Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France, 147. 38 Shusterman, Religion and the Politics of Time, 148–9, 186. Shusterman concludes that the Directory’s overestimation of priestly influence in opposing its religious policies ultimately led to a clearer understanding of the practical limits of government intervention. Ibid., 164. 39 Brown, Ending the French Revolution, 347–8; Brown, “Search for Stability,” 28–30, 49.

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In  religion, Bonaparte, while himself lacking personal faith and ­disdaining popular religious culture, adhered to the moderate Enlightenment’s conviction that only the supernatural sanctions offered by religion are capable of imposing a moral order on the masses so as to permit social and political stability. To this general view of the social utility of religion, Bonaparte added a particular analysis of the French situation. In brief, the main threat to his regime came from royalism, which in turn derived most of its strength from the opposition of clergy and pious Catholics to the Revolution. If, then, Bonaparte could ­reconcile at least the moderates among the Catholic hierarchy and laity to his regime, he would severely weaken royalist opposition to it.40 Bonaparte’s religious policy followed from this analysis. Having already begun to relax the restrictions on Catholic worship, returned some seized church property that had remained unsold, and replaced the oath of loyalty required of clergy with a less provocative one, Bonaparte contracted a concordat with the Papacy. The Concordat of 1801 (signed in July of that year and promulgated on Easter Day in 1802) recognized Catholicism as the “religion of the majority of Frenchmen” and lifted restrictions on the church while establishing state control over it. On the one hand, public worship was again allowed, and churches were restored to the parish clergy; on the other, the state funded and administered the clergy through a newly created Ministry of Religion and required the clergy to swear an oath of loyalty to the state, pray for the Republic, and read government proclamations at mass. The Concordat, then, although it terminated the period of revolutionary anti-clericalism, was in no way a return to order of things of the Old Regime. It strengthened state power over the church, formalized the Revolution’s confiscation and sale of church property, and preserved the principle of religious toleration. The Organic Articles unilaterally imposed by Bonaparte along with the Concordat strengthened still further the power of the state over the church. Soon after the promulgation of the Concordat, Bonaparte made Jean-Étienne-Marie Portalis his minister of religious affairs. The ascendency of Portalis, who embodied the regime’s pragmatic approach to the state’s relationship to the church, signalled the decline of the Idéologues’ influence over religious policy.41 40 Brown, “Search for Stability,” 47. 41 Broers, Europe under Napoleon, 81–2; Shusterman, Religion and the Politics of Time, 210.

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Bonaparte’s pragmatic accommodations with royalists and particularly with the Catholic Church alarmed the Idéologues. Privately, Volney used his access to Bonaparte to protest against the return of the mal sacerdotal and the first consul’s willingness to use religion for political ends.42 Publicly, the Idéologues in the Tribunate and the Senate, ­supported by Décade philosophique, littéraire et politique and in concert with Liberals and republicans, attempted to use legislative means to protect the civil gains made in the Revolution. Bonaparte quickly showed that he would no longer tolerate any opposition. In 1802, with support from Catholics and royalists, he purged the Tribunate and neutralized the Senate by swamping dissenters with new appointees loyal to him and by reducing its independence. These measures largely eliminated ­political opposition, but Bonaparte further punished the Idéologues by abolishing the Second Class of the Institut national des sciences et arts a few months later.43 The proclamation of the Napoleonic Empire in 1804 marked the total rupture between Bonaparte and the Idéologues. Whereas the Idéologues had once claimed General Bonaparte as one of their own – or, in Georges Gusdorf’s apposite phrase, as an Idéologue “in partibus infidelium”  – Emperor Napoleon now openly vilified the Idéologues as philosophically deluded obstructionists and set about dismantling their legislative and administrative achievements and silencing their remaining public voices.44 Décade philosophique, for example, was forced to merge with the pro-imperial literary magazine Mercure de France in 1807, and religion was added to the curriculum of the écoles centrales, which themselves were eventually replaced by the Napoleonic lycées.45 Bonaparte’s educational policy, in fact, was closely linked to his religious policy. Although religion was to provide his regime with a moral, docile populace, it was equally necessary that the national elite be committed to the regime and its values rather than to those of the church. Bonaparte therefore conceived of a state monopoly on higher

42 Gaulmier, Un grand témoin, 250–1. 43 Bergeron, France under Napoleon, 90; Welch, Liberty and Utility, 39–40; Leopold, “Nineteenth-Century Linguistic,” 43. 44 The term “Idéologue” seems to have been invented by Bonaparte at this time as a term of abuse. The Idéologues called themselves “Idéologistes.” Gusdorf, La ­conscience révolutionnaire, 317 (quotation), 361. 45 E.A. Williams, Physical and the Moral, 112; Welch, Liberty and Utility, 39–40.

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education that would ensure the formation and perpetuation of a ­secular and ideologically reliable intellectual and administrative elite. Thus, while permitting the church a role in the limited education received by the masses and by girls of higher classes, Bonaparte established the French “Imperial University” between 1806 and 1808 as a state-­supervised monopoly over the education of the male elite – a teaching corporation headed by a grand master and consisting of the entire body of teachers in the lycées and in the professional faculties, such as law and medicine, rather than a university in the modern-day sense of an individual institution.46 The consolidation of Bonaparte’s power and the marginalization of the Idéologues spelled the end of their influence over public policy. Excluded from public life and lacking popular support, the Idéologues continued to promote their program as best they could by publishing further collections of their lectures, undertaking new studies, and ­participating in opposition salons. They even continued to criticize Bonaparte, albeit necessarily indirectly. Thus Destutt de Tracy responded to the Concordat of 1801 by reissuing his Analyse de l’origine de tous les cultes in 1804, together with a new Discours préliminaire and a Post-scriptum, under the title Analyse raisonnée de l’origine de tous les cultes. In the postscript, where he characterized the present moment as a period in which the critique of religion was more urgent than ever, he insisted once again that the deficiencies of religion demanded that it be eliminated rather than reformed and argued against the Concordat that theologians should have absolutely no privileged social standing as magistrates or teachers.47 Similarly, Destutt de Tracy’s remark in his Commentaire sur “L’esprit des lois” de Montesquieu (1806) that “any government which wants to oppress, is attached to priests and works to make them powerful enough to serve it”48 implicated Bonaparte in the alliance of religious and political despotism that was the fundamental target of the Idéologues’ critique of religion. Volney’s activities during the Napoleonic Empire are representative of the situation in which the Idéologues now found themselves. The Concordat of 1801 terminated Volney’s period of closeness to Bonaparte. As an opponent of slavery and a founder of the Amis des noirs, he was 46 Anderson, European Universities, 43. 47 Destutt de Tracy, Analyse raisonnée, 151, 156–8. 48 Quoted in Head, Ideology and Social Science, 58.

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pushed further into opposition by Bonaparte’s decision to send troops to Saint-Domingue in order to crush Toussaint Louverture’s rebellion and reclaim the territory as a French colony.49 The proclamation of the empire in 1804, which Volney regarded as a betrayal of constitutional government, finalized the rupture with his former friend. Bonaparte, however, refused to allow him a public expression of dissent. Along with others, Volney had attempted to resign his Senate seat in 1801, but Bonaparte refused to accept the resignations. Then, in 1803, he forced Volney to accept appointment by decree as vice-president of the Senate and as commander of the Legion of Honour and, in 1808, the title of comte.50 Volney’s participation in the imperial regime, however, was purely nominal, as he in effect withdrew into private life and devoted his remaining years to scholarship in ancient history, Orientalism, and comparative linguistics.51

49 For a refutation of Edward Said’s association of Volney with Bonaparte’s Egyptian imperialist adventure (Said, Orientalism, 81), see Leopold, “NineteenthCentury Linguistic,” 10–12; Irwin, Dangerous Knowledge, 136; and Stroumsa, New Science, 144. Volney opposed imperialism in Les ruines, and he urged investment in and trade with the territories of the Ottoman Empire in place of colonization in a tract written during the Russo-Turkey War of 1787–91. Volney, Considérations sur la guerre, 387–8. 50 Gaulmier, Un grand témoin, 253–6; Bossange, “Notice sur la vie,” xliii; Leopold, “Nineteenth-Century Linguistic,” 24. 51 Volney both promoted Oriental studies and earned recognition as an Orientalist himself, notably including election to membership in the Asiatic Society of Bengal. He also belonged to the Société des observateurs de l’homme, helped to found the Académie celtique (which became the Société des antiquaires), and advocated for government support of ethnographic studies. When Alexander Hamilton, the foremost Sanskritist of the day, was detained in Paris in 1802, Volney encouraged him to catalogue the Indic manuscripts in the Bibliothèque nationale and even began to learn Sanskrit under his guidance. Volney, in fact, studied a wide range of Indic, Semitic, and African languages as part of a project for a universal alphabet that would dominate his later years and culminated in his L’alfabet europeén appliqué aux langues asiatiques (1819). His idea was that the establishment of a uniform convention for transcription of the diverse languages of the globe would aid comparative linguistics by preventing confusion in the comparison of languages and by allowing relationships and similarities or disparities among them to be fully comprehended. Leopold, “Nineteenth-Century Linguistic,” 20–4.

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P art T wo Sociological Traditionalism: Louis de Bonald Part 2 examines the construction of Louis de Bonald’s sociological Traditionalism as a form of Catholic Traditionalism conceived as a refutation of the ideas of the Idéologues and their eighteenthcentury forerunners. Its intransigent insistence that social and individual flourishing depends on total submission to revealed truth is one of the foundational expressions of political theology in the modern world. Chapter 4 opens with a brief biographical sketch of Bonald before analyzing in detail his science of society, which identifies God as the source and principle of society and posits the social order of pre-revolutionary France as the sole legitimate social application of this principle. Bonald built his science of society not only out of an epistemology that contends that the human mind passively receives ideas, language, and specific doctrines from an external revelation, a view of authority according to which it is never permissible for individual reason to set itself against tradition or society, but also out of a teleological conception of history, which he buttressed with a critique of philosophy and of the individualism that he considered to be its fundamental error. Chapter 5 shows how Bonald’s conceptualization of religion emerges from his accounts of the proper unfolding of what he called the three ages of monotheism and from his assessments of idolatry, paganism, and atheism as deviations from this trajectory. It concludes by examining how Bonald’s history of religions, as a utilitarian approach to apologetics, relates to various strands of Catholic Enlightenment and by considering the status of his science of society in the eyes of the French church. Chapter 6, after examining the fundamental divide in Restoration political and religious life between moderate

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constitutional monarchists and ultra-royalists, locates Bonald’s prescriptions for a new socio-religious order within these currents and discusses his attempts to push the Restoration regime toward enacting legislation consonant with this theorizing.

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Bonald’s Science of Society

Louis de Bonald Louis-Gabriel-Amboise, vicomte de Bonald, was born in 1754 at the chateau of le Monna a few kilometres from the town of Millau in the province of Rouergue (largely coterminous with the Department of Aveyron) in south-central France. The Bonalds were an old family of the provincial nobility with a long tradition of public service. After a Catholic education at the Oratorian Collège de Juilly, followed by a period of military service, Bonald served as mayor of Millau in the years immediately before the French Revolution. During the Estates General period, he advocated for strengthening the provincial states and the nobility against centralized royal power, and in July 1790 he was elected to the Departmental Assembly of Aveyron and served as its president. Bonald attempted to work with the new regime and initially supported the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (1790), although without ever accepting the democratic principle that locates sovereignty in the people rather than in the king. The breaking point came when the church hierarchy condemned the Civil Constitution and forbade clergy to take the oath of loyalty to the revolutionary regime. Recognizing that he could no longer reconcile his principles with those of the Revolution, Bonald resigned his offices in January 1791 and joined the emigration that October. After a short, largely uneventful campaign in the Army of Condé, Bonald settled for a time in Heidelberg. In this centre of royalist opposition, he wrote Théorie du pouvoir politique et  religieux dans la société civile, démontrée par le raisonnement et par l’histoire, his first attempt to work out a systematic response to the revolutionary ideas and principles. In 1795, Bonald moved to Constance,

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in Switzerland, where he polished his manuscript and arranged for its publication in France. Théorie du pouvoir appeared the next year, but most of the press run was confiscated by the Directory, and the few copies that escaped the vigilance of the government had little impact. In early 1797, Bonald judged it possible to return to France in the expectation that a strong royalist showing in the upcoming elections would change political conditions. He had reached Montpellier when, in the aftermath of the Fructidor coup d’état, the Directory decreed that all émigrés must leave the country or face death. Bonald instead travelled on to Paris, where he lived in hiding for the next two years. During this dangerous period, he read extensively and wrote three of his principal works: Essai analytique sur les lois naturelles de l’ordre social (1800), Du divorce, considéré au XIXè siècle, relativement à l’état domestique et à l’état publique (1801), and the three-volume Législation primitive, considérée dans les derniers temps par les seules lumières de la raison (1802). These works, unpublishable until after the fall of the Directory, both systematized the intellectual framework of Théorie du pouvoir and extended it by adding new ideas on language and the structure of power. Du divorce, although tied to the renewed debates over divorce in the context of the drafting of the Napoleonic Civil Code, summarized Bonald’s counter-revolutionary thought as set out in Essai analytique and Législation primitive. It was Bonald’s most successful book and ­established him as a major voice of the counter-revolutionary right. These three works together constitute the core of Bonald’s Catholic Traditionalist opposition to the revolutionary order.1 Bonald’s civil position was regularized by the amnesty that Napoleon Bonaparte offered to émigrés in 1802. Bonald took the oath of loyalty because, like many royalists, he considered Bonaparte to represent the best chance of order and protection against the return of revolutionary conditions, but he remained loyal to the Bourbons and ­recognized that the Consulate and the Napoleonic Empire retained elements of the revolutionary order. Bonaparte, for his part, admired Bonald’s emphasis on order and, eager to rally the old nobility to his

 1 On Bonald’s life and political career, see Moulinié, De Bonald, 1–144; and Klinck, French Counterrevolutionary Theorist, 13–44, passim.

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regime, invited him to serve in his administration.2 Bonald, however, turned down the offer and returned to Millau and private life. He continued to write, contributing a number of articles to Mercure de France and Journal des débats, the leading journals of right-wing opinion, which sought to counter the influence of the Idéologues’ Décade philosophique, littéraire et politique. It soon became apparent, however, that Bonald’s version of counter-revolutionary thought was at odds with the journals’ editorial programs, and he found himself intellectually isolated. Bonald ­re-entered public service in 1810, a time when many Old Regime nobles joined Bonaparte’s service after his marriage to Princess Marie-Louise of Austria. He accepted a position on the Council of the Imperial University, the body overseeing the reorganized system of public ­education. Bonald, however, was not deeply involved in the imperial administration; his University duties required him to be in Paris only a few days a year, and he spent most of his time in Aveyron serving as a local notable and writing. He continued to publish articles in ­conservative journals and between 1811 and 1813 laboured on what he regarded as a purely philosophical refutation of the principles underlying revolutionary and Idéologue thought, which appeared as Recherches philosophiques sur les premiers objets des connaissances morales (1818). His remaining major publications also date from the early Restoration. Pensées sur divers sujets (1817) offers a summary of his thought in nearaphoristic form, and his Observations sur l’ouvrage de Madame La Baronne de Staël, ayant pour titre: Considérations sur les principaux événements de la Révolution française (1818) contrasts his interpretation of the Revolution and constitutional history with that set out in the Liberal theorist Staël’s posthumous Considérations sur les principaux événements de la Révolution française (1818). Finally, Mélanges littéraires, politiques et philosophiques (1819) collects Bonald’s articles published in conservative journals over the years. Bonald’s joy at the Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1814 was tempered by his conviction that the regime had calamitously ­compromised with the Revolution by accepting a division of powers between the king and the legislative assemblies. Bonald withdrew to   2 Darrin M. McMahon notes that Bonaparte for a time overlooked the royalist sympathies of anti-philosophes like Bonald in return for their support but, in the end, recognized that they could not be wholly reconciled to his regime. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment, 149–50.

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Le Monna during the Hundred Days but following the Battle of Waterloo represented the Aveyron in the Chamber of Deputies from 1815 to 1823 and was twice elected vice-president of the Chamber. His  writings and political offices made Bonald a leader of the ­ultra-royalists, or Ultras, the counter-revolutionary party agitating for the restoration of noble privilege and the overthrow of the constitutional restrictions imposed on the monarchy by the Constitutional Charter of 1814, which established the legal basis of the Restoration regime. As the influence of the Ultras rose, particularly during Joseph de Villèle’s ministry ­(1821–28), which spanned the last years of King Louis XVIII’s reign and the first years under King Charles X, Bonald ­supported legislation that would restrain or eliminate individual ­liberties granted during the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods and more openly attacked the Charter. During this time, Bonald held important (if not the highest) offices in the Restoration regime. Louis XVIII appointed him a minister of state and a member of the Privy Council in 1823; he served as a member of the Royal Council of Public Instruction, which replaced the Council of the Imperial University; and he was named to the Académie française. In late 1823, a royal ordinance granted Bonald the title of viscount and appointed him to the Chamber of Peers, where he continued to serve diligently the Ultra cause as a parliamentarian and polemicist. In 1827, Charles X named Bonald president of the committee responsible for censorship of newspapers and the periodic press. After the fall of the Villèle ­ministry, however, Bonald became disillusioned with Charles X and withdrew to Le Monna. Not even the king’s appointment of the Ultra ministry of Jean-Baptiste Gay, Viscount of Martignac, reconciled Bonald with the Restoration regime. The time had come, he urged in several political pieces written in 1829, to renounce the Charter’s fatal ­compromise with the principles of the Revolution and replace parliamentary monarchy with royal absolutism. When the July Revolution of 1830 instead replaced the Bourbons with the Orleanist King LouisPhilippe, Bonald decried the agents of the new regime as usurpers and refused to take his seat in the Chamber of Peers. He retired once more to Le Monna, where he died ten years later at the age of eighty-six.

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Bonald’s Science of Society François Furet has called Bonald “the evil genius of the ultras,” by which he means that Bonald more than any other writer converted nostalgia for the royalism and Catholicism of the Old Regime into a reasoned doctrine.3 This judgment is sound but must be accompanied by the recognition that Bonald’s counter-revolutionary “science of society,” as he called his version of Traditionalism,4 was informed by an attitude toward reason and science that sharply distinguished his doctrine from the literary and aesthetic programs of the conservative journals and equally from the biblical and patristic arguments of other conservative Catholics such as the early Félicité de Lamennais. The idea of a science of society had deep roots in French Enlightenment culture. From Montesquieu through Nicolas de Condorcet to the Idéologues, philosophes sought to identify rationally and empirically demonstrable laws underlying and structuring social order. Bonald stood against the general turn away from reason and science among the enemies of the Revolution in his conviction that a science of society could be constructed on counter-revolutionary principles that would at once refute false versions of a science of society and demonstrate why the social order emerging from the Revolution could not endure.5 Bonald was not absolutely alone in this conviction, but only he devoted himself entirely to the task of constructing a counter-revolutionary science of society.6 Bonald’s science of society rests on three basic ideas first set out in Théorie du pouvoir politique et religieux (1796) and restated in all subsequent writings: there are two types of societies, one of human beings with God, or religious society, and one of human beings among themselves, or civil society; each of these societies has only one natural  3 Furet, Revolutionary France, 296.  4 In the preface to Théorie du pouvoir, vol. 13, 4–5, Bonald uses the phrases “la ­science de la société” and “la science de la société publique.”  5 Klinck, French Counterrevolutionary Theorist, 56–8. W. Jay Reedy suggests that Bonald’s Oratorian schooling instilled in him both a mathematico-mechanistic rationalism and the conviction that it could be used to defend religion. Reedy, “Language, Counter-Revolution,” 587.   6 In this respect, at least, Isaiah Berlin’s claim that Bonald “fits the stereotyped image of the ultramontane theocrat at almost every point” is untenable. Berlin, “Joseph de Maistre,” 100.

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constitution, namely Christianity for religious society and monarchy for civil society; and social stability results, and can result only, from the union of Christianity and monarchy.7 The sociological Traditionalism that Bonald developed to support these claims took the form of a ­theology of social, hierarchical, and ternary power, supported by an epistemology of primitive revelation transmitted by language and a teleological conception of development. A Theology of Power The being of God, Bonald asserted, is power; inversely, power reveals God. Since power informs social organization, God is the source and principle of society, and for its part, society is necessarily hierarchical because it reproduces the relationship of God to creation.8 Nevertheless, hierarchy, for Bonald, does not consist simply of the binary relation of subordinator and subordinated; there is always a third, intermediate element, resulting in a universal ternary. As stated on the first page of Essai analytique, the abstract form of Bonald’s universal ternary runs cause-means-effect, and it is reproduced analogically in all areas of human existence: in politics as power-minister-subject, in theology as God-mediator-humanity, in the family as father-mother-child, in the social order as king-nobility-people, in grammar as noun-verb-object, and so on.9 No order, in any aspect of life, can for Bonald exhibit any other form than this ternary structure. Bonald’s semiotic triadism, as a changeless syntax that classifies and orders all diversity according to an a priori form, nullifies individuality by assigning every phenomenon its one and only place in his system of hierarchies and by conceiving of his system as the instantiation of a functional and metaphysical essence.10 Bonald presented this process as one of scientific classification, but it is, as has often been noted, a classificatory project designed to eliminate all orders alternative to his own.11 Most urgently, it ­legitimates and promotes the social order of pre-revolutionary France

 7 Foucher, La philosophie catholique, 22.  8 Gengembre, La Contre-Révolution, 127.  9 Bonald, Essai analytique, 1. 10 Reedy, “Historical Imaginary,” 5. 11 Macherey, “Bonald et la philosophie,” 17.

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by identifying this order, and only this order, as the social application of the universal ternary.12 Bonald proclaimed, in one of the numerous methodological statements scattered throughout his works, “I reject the authority of theology and the certitude of faith; I invoke only the authority of history and the witness of our senses.”13 Bonald here was in no way rejecting the truth of revelation; instead, by appealing to history, he was proposing to demonstrate the truth of Christianity to those who did not accept the authority of revelation. He practised, in short, a sociological approach to apologetics that argued that the Christian doctrines are true because they are necessary to the preservation of civil society.14 Bonald conceived of his science of society as an analytical method analogous to algebra: “From this simple theory, of which history offers on all its pages a proper and vast application, one will deduce, like algebraic formulas, general maxims by which one will resolve the problems that past and even future social events present. That is because the moral world is governed like the sensible world by general and constant laws, which, in any given time period, reproduce similar effects because they act by similar causes and with similar means.”15 Bonald’s analytical method purports to discover the general principles of ­society and the relations that constitute order, thereby revealing the general and constant laws of the moral world and the social necessity of what ­humankind must believe and accept. Correspondingly, as he conceived of it, rigorous demonstration requires first deducing general maxims or principles and then demonstrating their necessary existence by citing empirical historical data. That is what he meant by writing from the authority of reason and history, and such is the declared structure of both Théorie du pouvoir and Législation primitive.16 Bonald’s often cited claim that he proved religion by history17 hinges on his

12 Reedy, “From Enlightenment,” 68. 13 Bonald, Théorie du pouvoir, vol. 14, 204–5. 14 Bonald’s sociological approach parallels René de Chateaubriand’s aesthetic approach to apologetics in Génie du christianisme (1802), in which Christianity is true because of its beneficial effect on the artistic and emotional life of the West. See Klinck, French Counterrevolutionary Theorist, 80. 15 Bonald, Essai analytique, 12–13. See also Bonald, Du traité de Westphalie, 341–2. 16 Bonald, Théorie du pouvoir, vol. 14, 233; Législation primitive, vol. 2, 1. 17 Bonald, Théorie du pouvoir, vol. 14, 9.

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conception of history as the demonstration of previously deduced principles. The mercenary nature of Bonald’s use of history has often been noted.18 Bonald himself freely and proudly acknowledged his subordination of empirical facts to general principles: “Even the most numerous facts, and classified in the most methodical order, are only collections of scattered anecdotes if one does not relate them all to a small number of general principles that indicate their cause and predict their results.”19 Bonald’s approach saved him from the messiness of actual history. He noted that those who are able to see the facts in the principles that precede them need not expend their time and mental energy in memorizing insignificant, contested, and sometimes contradictory details.20 True to his principle, Bonald largely ignored the historical and ethnographic literature of his day.21 Bonald’s subordination of the messiness of history to principles and laws by means of a deductive model produced, in W. Jay Reedy’s phrase, a “historical imaginary” – that is, an anti-historical, anti-relativist ­representation of history that uses scientized language to suppress the ­plasticity of the past and to eliminate subversive readings of history of the sort exploited by the enemies of the Old Regime.22 But it is not simply Bonald’s language that has been “scientized”; Bonald’s historical imaginary subdues the unruliness of temporality by imposing on it the atemporal viewpoint of early modern mechanistic science, according to which the inviolate natural order manifests the will of its Creator. For Bonald, to reinscribe society under the divine law is at one and the same time to institute it as a science.23 Conversely, true science manifests the divinely established order. Bonald, in fact, used his science of society less to argue for his desired social order (which had already been deduced a priori) than to demonstrate that any departure from it brings disaster. Predicting and retrodicting events based on the correct or

18 Gengembre, La Contre-Révolution, 173; Reedy, “Language, Counter-Revolution,” 590; Bastier, “Linguistique et politique,” 559. 19 Bonald, “De la manière d’écrire l’histoire,” 107. 20 Ibid., 108. 21 Derré, Lamennais, ses amis, 18; Macherey, “Bonald et la philosophie,” 9. 22 Reedy, “Historical Imaginary,” 2–4. 23 Ibid., 19. See also Reedy, “From Enlightenment,” 88–9; and Hocédez, Histoire de la théologie, vol. 1, 80.

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corrupted arrangement of a given society’s political grammar are ­precisely what Bonald claimed his science of society made possible and, indeed, what established it as a science.24 Language Bonald’s sociological Traditionalism is supported by interdependent theories of language and primitive revelation. His linguistic theory did not appear in Théorie du pouvoir. Bonald worked it out beginning around 1800, heavily indebted to the article “Langage” in the Encyclopédie and to other contemporary authors,25 with elements of the theory appearing in Essai analytique of that year, before its full d ­ evelopment and central placement in Législation primitive. Bonald’s theory of ­language is reducible to two key elements: ideas are received through ­language, and language is not a human invention but instead revealed by God. Bonald discussed these ideas at length first in “Discours préliminaire,” which prefaces Législation primitive, and again, this time in explicit engagement with Idéologue thought, in Recherches ­philosophiques. Bonald, in fact, read Antoine Destutt de Tracy and Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis carefully in the late 1790s, and whereas he utterly rejected their enlightened principles and program, he engaged constructively not only with aspects of their sensationalist epistemology, including their insistence that sensations and ideas have a close relationship and that physiology plays a role in thought, but also with their practice of analysis to discover an order underlying empirical history. In short, from early on, Bonald defined his science of society against the Idéologues’ rival conception of the human sciences.26 Bonald’s examination of the origin of ideas, which took the fight to the Idéologues’ home turf, as it were, begins by rejecting the claim that ideas are innate and then dismisses in turn Nicolas Malebranche’s supernatural account and Étienne Bonnot de Condillac’s natural account of the origin of ideas; Bonald’s arguments were directed as

24 Reedy, “Historical Imaginary,” 7. 25 Bastier, “Linguistique et politique,” 541. 26 Klinck, French Counterrevolutionary Theorist, 87, 115–16. This observation underscores the historiographical point made in the Introduction about the entangled, dialogic nature of the processes by which the various post-revolutionary conceptualizations of religion mutually created and transformed each other.

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much against the defence of innate ideas by Cartesian theologians as against the empirical theories of the philosophes and Idéologues.27 But if Bonald ultimately rejected a naturalistic account of the origin of ideas, he was nevertheless indebted to sensationalist epistemology. Bonald, like many educated Catholics of his generation, accepted that words, or public verbal signs, correspond directly to ideas and that knowledge of verbal signs is acquired through sensory experience.28 Bonald praised modern sensationalist metaphysics – he defined metaphysics as “the science of causes and the knowledge of the laws of their action”29 – for having proven that human beings require signs in order to think as well as to speak, insisting that one “thinks his speech before speaking his thought.”30 Where Bonald departed from the Idéologues was over their insistence that the science of ideas is a purely human science. The Idéologues – Bonald was thinking particularly of Destutt de Tracy at this time – denied the existence of any intelligent beings in the universe other than humans and so attempted to derive the origin of ideas from sensations and reflection on them. The Idéologues erred critically, according to Bonald, in attempting to explain ideas by the operation of the human mind alone – that is, without recourse to an external perspective. Bonald likened the Idéologues’ introspective psychology to attempting to see one’s own eye without a mirror or to raise one’s body without using an external fixed point for leverage. The result was a science that he ­condemned as incomplete in its object, as false in its method, and as leading to materialism in doctrine, to egoism in morality, and to isolation in politics.31 Bonald argued that what the Idéologues misunderstood as operations of the mind are in fact aspects of language largely independent of the mind, and he proposed that instead of attempting to study human thought in what he called the impenetrable sanctuary of pure intellect, as the Idéologues purported to do, it must be studied in the vestibule, as it were, of language. Bonald, in short, proposed to

27 Bonald, Législation primitive, vol. 2, 43–5, 49–50. 28 Klinck, French Counterrevolutionary Theorist, 73, 92. 29 Bonald, Essai analytique, 18. 30 Ibid., 49. 31 Ibid., 17–18; Législation primitive, vol. 2, 97.

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explain the thinking being by the speaking being. And although Bonald concurred with Idéologue physiology on the necessity of the senses for thought, that was because the senses of sight and hearing in particular are necessary for social communication through language. He ­distinguished carefully between the expression of thought, which is transmitted by the sense of sight and hearing, and thought itself, which he maintained is distinct from its expression and precedes it.32 In Recherches philosophiques, Bonald again took up the Idéologues’ attempt – this time focusing on Cabanis – to assimilate thought to physical sensibility through the claim that “to think is to feel [sentir].” Once again, their fundamental error was to have failed to distinguish between thought and its expression.33 Bonald next, in a key step in his argument, turned to confuting the empiricist claim that we invent our ideas ourselves. Truth, he insisted, is not found by human reason but received in reason through the mediation of language. “The faculty of thinking is native in us ... but the art of speaking is acquired and comes to us from others.”34 Bonald’s ­principal argument here is that what he called interior speech is indispensable in order to think explicitly the truths that reason knows, and so we would not be able to think any particular thought without the assistance of the created word communicated from the uncreated divine Word. The divine Word, that is, realizes in human beings the created word, which in turn engenders the thought that it signifies. For Bonald, then, thought depends on something exterior to itself, but this something is not sensible experience, as for John Locke and Condillac, but the divine revelation of language.35 The question of the origin of ideas thus becomes the question of the origin of language. This view  ­further means that for Bonald a word does not need to be linked to the idea that it expresses by a natural, necessary relationship. As Henri Moulinié points out, Bonald retained the arbitrariness of the

32 Bonald, Législation primitive, vol. 2, 326–7. See Klinck, French Counterrevolutionary Theorist, 94. 33 Bonald, Recherches philosophiques, vol. 8, 340 (quotation), 401–2. See Néry, “Bonald et les idéologues,” 260. 34 Bonald, Législation primitive, vol. 2, 56–7. 35 Ibid., vol. 2, 54–5; see also Bonald, Du divorce, 85–6. See Foucher, La philosophie catholique, 23–4.

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conventional relationship between word and idea characteristic of naturalistic theories of language but transferred the origin of this arbitrariness from humankind to God, whose sovereign will alone had elected to attach a particular root word to a particular idea.36 Bonald, then, regarded language as a direct gift from God to the first humans, although he declined to offer an account of how this divine gift was transmitted. It is sufficient, he said, to demonstrate the physical and moral impossibility of the invention of language by human beings, either individually or collectively, in order to prove that it was given to humankind by a superior being.37 In rejecting the naturalistic theory that linguistic signs are acquired through sense experience, Bonald insisted on the passive nature of the human role in the origin of language and therefore in the acquisitions of the ideas that it transmits. Just as a child’s reason is contained in the father’s language because a father forms the thought of his child through his use of language, which transmits ideas hitherto unknown to the child, so too is human reason contained in divine language.38 Bonald’s position was that although our rational nature is innate, no specific truths are innate; all knowledge is mediated by language, which in turn God primitively revealed to the first humans and which ever since has been transmitted by society. Ideas, in a sense, are innate to society rather than to human beings.39 Bonald regarded his linguistic theory, which he offered as a gloss on the Pauline tag fides ex auditu (faith comes from hearing),40 as a fundamental discovery: in identifying language and thought, and in making thought known only by the speech that expresses it, his linguistic theory subordinated humankind to an exterior authority. It thereby provided support and confirmation, from an entirely separate realm of human experience, for the assertion that the social order is divinely established and ordered. “Language,” as Gérard Gengembre notes, “secures the politics.”41 Bonald’s linguistic theory represented the last major change in his thinking; henceforth, his core thought underwent remarkably little further development.

36 Moulinié, De Bonald, 222. 37 Ibid., 240–1. 38 Bonald, Du divorce, 76, 86. 39 Bonald, Législation primitive, vol. 2, 49–50. 40 Bonald, Recherches philosophiques, vol. 8, 405. 41 Gengembre, La Contre-Révolution, 160.

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Traditionalism Bonald incorporated Traditionalism into his science of society at the same time as, and by means of, his incorporation of his theory of ­language. Before Bonald’s day, Traditionalism had been linked to “proof by evidence” apologetics, whose practitioners sought to demonstrate the truth of Christianity by means of historical evidence rather than rational proofs. Authors of the seventeenth and early eighteenth ­centuries, including Pierre-Daniel Huet and Claude-François Houtteville, various Jansenists, and the Protestant Jacques Abbadie, argued against deists and biblical critics that the evidence provided by the fulfillment of the Bible’s prophecies and the performance of miracles, themselves guaranteed by the testimony of numerous sincere and reliable witnesses, constitutes overwhelming historical proof of the supernatural status of the Bible and therefore of the truth of its content.42 The principal French Catholic apologist in the second half of the eighteenth century, the abbé Nicolas-Sylvestre Bergier, defended the claims of revelation against not only deists but also freethinkers promoting naturalistic theories of religion. In so doing, however, Bergier shifted the focus of Traditionalism away from miracles and the fulfillment of prophecy and toward the idea of a primitive revelation made by God to Adam and the early patriarchs that transmitted both language and fundamental religious and moral knowledge. Bergier’s Traditionalism, in denying, against both philosophes and Catholic ­rationalists, that unaided human reason can discover truth, asserted that humankind receives knowledge passively by accepting the authority of tradition as it has been transmitted down the ages. Bergier countered eighteenth-century naturalistic theories of the origin of religion – ­particularly those such as David Hume’s that proposed a crude ­polytheism as the earliest form of religion – by arguing that thanks to the primitive revelation, a sophisticated monotheism had existed from earliest times, was preserved in the institutions of ancient societies, and had never entirely vanished (although it suffered corruption in various parts of the world). Further, the truths of primitive monotheism are fully preserved and developed in the Catholic Church, which in turn is the guarantor of religious truth and moral certitude because it alone

42 Laplanche, La Bible en France, 84–5.

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can point to an uninterrupted chain of witnesses.43 Bergier thereby shifted the focus of Traditionalism away from regarding history as a reservoir of prophecies fulfilled and miracles attested and toward regarding all history – not just the history of the Chosen People n ­ arrated in the Bible – as sacred in that revealed truths have been present throughout history. François Laplanche has identified Bergier’s Traité historique et dogmatique de la vraie religion (1780) as a critical transitional text between the “proof by evidence” apologetics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the Catholic Traditionalism of the early nineteenth ­century.44 Traditionalism served Bonald first and foremost as a means to further subordinate the individual to society. As such, Traditionalism was not an entirely new discovery for Bonald but instead confirmed and supported his own ideas. Three Traditionalist themes are particularly prominent in his science of society: its conception of authority, the subordination of individuals and their opinions to society, and universality as a guarantee of truth. Bonald held, as we have seen, that our reason does not lead us to discover truth but instead is formed by the truths that we receive from outside. Or, to put it another way, we receive our reason from the reason of another: from other human beings via language and society but ultimately from God since language and society were primitively revealed to the first human beings. God, then, is the author of reason, and knowledge comes to us from and with the authority of tradition and is received by faith.45 Bonald’s conception of authority spells out the proper relationship between individuals and society: since revelation forms our reason, it is never permissible to question tradition in the name of individual reason; similarly, since revelation establishes the structure of social order, it is never permissible to challenge this structure in the name of individual reason or artificial constitutions. The individual, in short, does not need to seek out truth because it is already to hand in society – that is, in the body of beliefs communally admitted by all humankind since time immemorial. Bonald spoke in Recherches philosophiques of the common fund of ideas and sentiments as common

43 On Bergier, see ibid., 87–106. 44 Ibid., 88–9. 45 Bonald, Législation primitive, vol. 2, 354–5.

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sense (le bon sens) in its proper meaning. Common sense, for Bonald, is expressed in sentiments, or the general opinions that, because they reflect revealed social and religious truths, at once unify societies and, owing to their very universality, serve as the criterion of truth. Dissenting individual opinions, he said, cannot prevail against such powerful ­testimony and so must fall silent in the face of tradition.46 This point brings us to the third theme. Bonald offered universal reason or universal consent – that is, the reason of all peoples and all societies, of all times and all places – as the sole criterion of certainty. The history of philosophy, where system after system refutes its predecessor, demonstrates the inability of unaided human reason to attain certainty. We are left, Bonald concluded, with the universal consent of the human race as the only valid criterion of truth and certitude. Universal consent served Bonald as the infallible sign attesting that a given belief or ­doctrine is not the erroneous conclusion of aberrant individual reason but truly derives from the primitive revelation transmitted by tradition.47 Bonald, then, was a Traditionalist in precisely the sense defined by his contemporary, the essayist Joseph Joubert: someone who combats the ideas of a particular age with the help of those of all ages.48 Teleological Development and Providence Charles Taylor has noted that a link between hierarchy and organic metaphor characterizes a type of social imaginary that was dominant in pre-modern Europe and persisted (and persists) in various forms in subsequent history. In systems where hierarchical differentiation is seen as part of the normative order of things, and where any attempt to ­deviate from it is thought to turn reality against itself, organic metaphors have tremendous power as the paradigmatic expressions of the idea that the hierarchical distribution of functions is not contingent but natural and necessary.49 Organic metaphor in precisely this sense was central to Ultra political and religious thought in general and to Bonald’s science of society in particular. Further, the link between 46 Bonald, Recherches philosophiques, vol. 9, 116; Moulinié, De Bonald, 198, 251–2. 47 Bonald, Recherches philosophiques, vol. 8, 59, 114. See Moulinié, De Bonald, 251; and McCool, Catholic Theology, 41–2. 48 Cited in Douailler, Droit, and Vermeren, eds, Philosophie, France, 216. 49 Taylor, Secular Age, 164–5.

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hierarchical order and organic metaphor is key to understanding how a concept of development played an important role in Bonald’s science of society. The particular version of organic metaphor favoured by Bonald derives from biological preformationism: “Truth, like humanity and like society, is a seed that develops by the succession of time and ­generations, always old in its beginnings, always new in its successive developments.”50 A seed, in this view, can develop only in the way ­intrinsically determined by its final cause. Applied to social order, the result is a developmental schema, or what we may call a social p ­ reformationism: just as the oak is in the acorn according to preformationist natural history, so too did the civil institutions present in germ in primitive society unfold over time, attaining their maturity only in the era of Christian monarchies. More concretely, society had developed from a state of imperfect social integration characterized by isolated families or clans, through more advanced states of social integration characterized by absolutism, ­aristocracy, and the corporative society of the Old Regime, to the public state that Bonald anticipated would soon appear in France.51 Despite, therefore, the permanence of power, Bonald’s science of society does not imply social immobilism. Stasis, in his view, is possible only at the culmination of the process of development.52 The successive unfolding of social institutions according to the ­pattern imposed by the divine will was customarily referred to by Bonald using the eighteenth-century term “perfectibility.” He noted that ­eighteenth-century proponents of social progress (perfectibilité sociale) such as Condorcet were correct to proclaim it but misunderstood its true nature. Given the lamentable consequences of the falsified 50 Bonald, Législation primitive, vol. 2, 412–13; see also vol. 3, 242–3. On biological preformationism, see F. Jacob, Logic of Life, 52–66. 51 Gengembre, La Contre-Révolution, 222; Klinck, French Counterrevolutionary Theorist, 102. Reedy has observed that Bonald preferred mechanistic to organic metaphors in speaking about society because of the link between contemporary physiology and Idéologue political philosophy legitimizing change. Reedy, “Language, CounterRevolution,” 595. It is crucial to recognize in this respect that Bonald’s utilization of preformationism rather than the new biology being developed by contemporaries such as Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus, and Lorenz Oken ensured that his organic metaphor of the development of a seed was subsumed within a mechanistic worldview. 52 Macherey, “Bonald et la philosophie,” 17; Bonald, Législation primitive, vol. 3, 4.

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enlightened idea of progress, Bonald continued, it was understandable that Catholics had opposed any doctrine of progress.53 Nevertheless, perfectibility, properly understood, both distinguishes humankind from animals and establishes the necessity of a socially mediated tradition by which individuals become mature human beings.54 Bonald’s concept of development is closely linked to his teleological definition of the term “nature” and its cognates: “The nature or the essence of each being is that which constitutes it such that it is, and without which it would not be this being.”55 In Législation primitive, Bonald buttressed this teleological definition with a philological ­argument: “Nature comes from naître, natura, from nasci: a being is born for an end, and with the means of attaining it; this end and these means comprise its nature. The nature thus supposes the created being, and it is the condition, not the cause, of its existence.”56 This etymological analysis of “nature” not only maintains the teleology of development toward an end but further implies an original state, distinct from the developed or natural state. Bonald called this original state the newly born or natal (natif) state: “The acorn, the child is the natal state; the oak, the grown man is the natural state.”57 Bonald characterized the natal state as one of weakness and imperfection, whereas the natural state is one of development, fulfillment, and perfection.58 Analogically, the natal-natural distinction applies to social orders: the natal, original social order, which Bonald designated the domestic state, is weak because it needs to be preserved, whereas the public state, or the fulfilled, natural state, is strong because it preserves.59 Bonald’s distinction between natal and natural, as applied to humankind, carries with it a view of history as a process of humanization, or the gradual attainment of our pre-existent essence. As a specific application of the general principle that “truth, always ancient and always new, sown at the beginning of time,

53 Bonald, Essai analytique, 36–7. 54 Bonald, Recherches philosophiques, vol. 9, 323; see also 360–1, 327–8, and Bonald, Législation primitive, vol. 4, 3. 55 Bonald, Théorie du pouvoir, vol. 13, 44–5. 56 Bonald, Législation primitive, vol. 2, 229. 57 Ibid., vol. 3, 214. 58 Ibid., vol. 3, 215; see also 216. 59 Bonald, Essai analytique, 124–5.

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develops and matures through every age,” history is the realization of both a potentiality and a divine intention.60 The philosophes, Bonald charged, in a parallel error to their falsification of “perfectibility,” disastrously confused “natal” and “natural.” A proper, teleological understanding of “natural” enables one to see that their celebration of the noble savage mistook a natal being for a natural being and that they were similarly mistaken in declaring that no legislation is as perfect as natural law and no religion as perfect as natural religion.61 In fact, Bonald asserted, natural men are not to be found in North American forests but in French academies because the most natural society is the most civilized society and the most natural man is the most perfected man.62 Bonald did not, we should note, regard modern ­savages as natal beings, properly speaking, because in his view they had fallen into and become stranded in a state of savagery outside of the proper pattern of development from natal to natural.63 Bonald, finally, cautioned against equating civilized with urbane. To the extent that a society ­rebels against the divinely established social order, it becomes savage, regardless of its material or cultural accomplishments.64 The natal-natural distinction provided Bonald with his ultimate ­explanation for the French Revolution. It was a “variation” from the divinely established teleological development of history. Bonald used the term “variation” polemically after the fashion of Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet’s Histoire des variations des Églises protestantes (1688). And just as Bossuet argued that theological variations cannot endure, so too did Bonald insist that all departures from the invariant divine model for social order must inevitably fail.65 Because of his teleological developmentalism, however, Bonald presented the Revolution as a variation of a ­particular sort: it was a degeneration, or a fall, of a particular society

60 Bonald, Législation primitive, vol. 3, 242–3. See Gengembre, La ContreRévolution, 68. 61 Bonald, Législation primitive, vol. 2, 231–4. 62 Ibid., vol. 3, 217–18. 63 Bonald, Recherches philosophiques, vol. 8, 137–8. 64 Bonald, Législation primitive, vol. 3, 217–18. Bonald expanded on this theme in a short piece dating from 1810, whose final sentence sums up the situation of contemporary France: “In the final reckoning, we have lost in civilization what we have gained in urbanity.” Bonald, “Des nations polies,” 325. 65 Reedy, “Historical Imaginary,” 6.

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from the state appropriate to its stage of development. Under the influence of the modern individualist spirit, France regressed from maturity toward infancy, from civilization toward savagery.66 Identifying the revolutionaries as savages was a counter-revolutionary commonplace, of course, but for Bonald “savagery” was not simply a term of opprobrium; it corresponded to his teleological developmentalism. If we switch metaphors from theological polemic to natural history, from thinking of the Revolution as a variation to thinking of it as a social monster, we see how once again Bonald’s social science corresponds to (although does not derive from) preformationist natural history. The preformationists held that monstrosity resulted from errors in the unfolding of the preformed animicules according to a divinely established pattern.67 Just as teratology, the study of monsters, became an important tool of analysis for the study of generation, so too is Bonald’s analysis of the Revolution an example of social teratology in which the monstrous error illuminates by contrast the correct developmental process. For this reason, Bonald rejected all talk of the excesses of the Revolution, insisting that its crimes and moral outrages were only its inevitable natural consequences, just as convulsions and delirium are not excesses but the natural consequences of certain illnesses.68 Finally, for natural historians of the late eighteenth century, monsters were unviable and would inevitably die off.69 This view not only paralleled and undergirded Bonald’s faith that the social monster that was the revolutionary order could not endure but also corresponded to Bossuet’s conviction that all theological variations must fail. Bonald’s developmentalism may appear to sit awkwardly with his analytical method, by which he attempted to rule out historical change by identifying one particular social order as divinely established. Gengembre similarly notes that “the tension between the horror of history and its faith in a science of History irremediably rends the Counter-Revolution.”70 We must, however, be precise as to the nature of the history that horrified Bonald. It is a horror of contingent, ­radical, individualistic change rather than an unfolding according to 66 See Gengembre, La Contre-Révolution, 68. 67 F. Jacob, Logic of Life, 27, 72, 78. 68 Bonald, Observations sur l’ouvrage, 493–4. 69 F. Jacob, Logic of Life, 175. 70 Gengembre, La Contre-Révolution, 213.

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teleological law. The key is the manner (and implications) of change; not change itself.71 Bonald’s view of the Revolution as a degeneration caused by French society having strayed from its appropriate stage of development ­distinguishes his explanation of the Revolution from those of other counter-revolutionaries in an important respect: by attributing the Revolution to human action, Bonald rendered it intelligible in rational terms rather than locating its cause in the mystery of supernatural providence.72 This is not to say, however, that Bonald dispensed with providence altogether. Bonald’s conception of himself as a social scientist meant that he largely avoided theological language, but his system does not, as has been asserted,73 avoid explicit recourse to ­providence. Rather, development for Bonald is always providentially directed in the sense that it follows a pattern externally imposed by the transcendent God: In political society, a general and collective being, the general will is this will or this tendency that every being has of attaining the end for which it has been created, a will or tendency that, joined to the means of reaching the end, constitutes the nature of this being. But this will and these means, which constitute the nature of a being, have been given to it by the Creator, who created beings for an end, and consequently with the will and the means of attaining it. Therefore, the general will of society has been given to the society by God himself: this will is the will of God ... It is the effect of this preserving general will that men who believe in the existence of God call Providence.74

Bonald’s providence, then, is law-like, not an arbitrary divine intervention. Reedy calls it a “scientized or ‘naturalized’ gloss on Providence.”75 Yet it is naturalized only up to a point; there is an order to social development only because the divine will has imposed this particular order on the system. Bonald here closely approximates the view of nature

71 For a discussion that locates Bonald’s attempt to reconcile historical-­mindedness and an eternal ontological order amid other early-nineteenth-century metaphysical philosophies of history, see McCalla, “Structure of French.” 72 Gengembre, La Contre-Révolution, 67. 73 Ibid., 222. 74 Bonald, Théorie du pouvoir, vol. 14, 126. 75 Reedy, “Historical Imaginary,” 6.

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underlying early seventeenth-century natural philosophy. Isaac Newton and Johannes Kepler, for example, conceived of the Book of Nature as a text that God had written in a contingent mathematical or empirical language. The order of nature has been imposed by God, but the fact that it is this particular order instead of another is the result of a free choice of the all-powerful deity. Reedy notes that Bonald self-consciously modelled his science of society on the early modern natural science of Kepler and Newton.76 David Klinck, for his part, argues that scholars (notably Reedy and Gengembre) have been wrong to present Bonald as a Christian metaphysician and believer in a transcendent deity on the grounds that this view cannot explain either the attraction of the French positivists to Bonald or “how a man living in the era around 1800, who was clearly a part of the intellectual and cultural world of his time, could also have adopted the thinking of an earlier age.”77 Klinck’s revisionary position is, first, that Bonald discarded the sense of transcendence that had underlain the metaphysics and theology of earlier centuries and replaced it with an immanent this-wordliness incompatible with any sort of Christian spiritualism and, second, that he “combined an idea of the relational nature of the world, derived from mathematics and physical science, with contemporary organicism and vitalism to create a very original view of human life as an autonomous, self-regulating, structuring process ... For Bonald, God had become inseparable from the ­structuring process and its systems.”78 Concluding that Bonald located human life in the external world of society, history, and language rather than identifying it with the inner world of the mind or the soul, Klinck identifies him as a precursor not only of Henri de Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte but also of twentieth-century French sociology and structuralism.79 It is certainly true that Bonald eliminated scholastic causes, and Klinck is correct to emphasize Bonald’s anti-subjectivism. But Bonald did not assert the autonomy of social life; on the contrary, he insisted that order is imposed from outside the system by God. That does not mean, however, that Bonald adopted the thinking of an earlier age. The 76 Ibid., 4. 77 Klinck, French Counterrevolutionary Theorist, 10. 78 Ibid., 11–12; see also 62. 79 Ibid., 12.

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anachronism is rather in attributing to Bonald a later nineteenth-century view. Bonald countered the subjectivism and materialism of modern philosophy by claiming to have discovered, in his science of society, the general and constant laws established by the Creator to govern the social order, exactly as Kepler and Newton had discovered the general and constant laws established by the Creator to govern the physical universe. Amos Funkenstein has studied what he calls “secular theology,” or a seventeenth-century discourse whose theological concerns were expressed in terms of secular knowledge and whose stress on the selfsufficiency of the world and the autonomy of humankind eventually led to the rejection of theology and even of religion by new generations of savants.80 But this historical outcome must not be confused with the position of the secular theologians themselves. Klinck has perhaps done something analogous, substituting Bonald for the seventeenth-century secular theologians and the French positivists for the new generations of savants. Bonald truly was a Christian metaphysician and a believer in a transcendent God. What Klinck identifies as Bonald’s immanentism and autonomy are only relatively so within the system; that is, the transcendent God established the social system to run henceforth on its own, just as God so established the celestial mechanics. To absolutize immanence and autonomy, thereby making Bonald into a precursor of nineteenth-century positivist sociology, is to decontextualize his thought. A more nuanced position would balance Bonald’s genuine influence on positivist sociology with his radically nonpositivist epistemology and metaphysics.81 Critique of Philosophy Bonald’s critique of philosophy further developed his reflections on what he considered to be the fundamental issue of the day, namely the rights of the individual in relation to society, or as he posed the question: will humankind submit to the divine order or rebel against it? There are two phases to Bonald’s engagement with what he designates 80 Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 346. 81 Auguste Comte read Bonald carefully and dedicated a day in the Positivist calendar to his memory. Reedy discusses the complex relationship between Bonald and the Positivists in “Language, Counter-Revolution,” 591; “Traditionalist Critique,” 51; and particularly “Historical Imaginary,” passim.

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as the philosophy of free examination and individual reason. In his earlier works, he principally confronted “thinkers of the eighteenth century” or “philosophes,” notably Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Montesquieu, and, a distant third, Condorcet; in works written during the Consulate and the Napoleonic Empire, he turned his attention to the Idéologues, particularly Destutt de Tracy and Cabanis. In both phases, however, he saw himself as dealing with a single phenomenon, and his opposing arguments are of a piece. Bonald reduced the common traits that he identified in Rousseau’s Du contract social (1762), Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois (1748), and Condorcet’s Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (1795) – the artificial character of societies, the subordination of society to individual reason, and the substitution of theories and arbitrary systems for the constitutions of nature – to a single error: the individualism that he identified as the principal form of rebellion against the divine order in contemporary Europe.82 Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Condorcet placed the individual above society, and the calamitous corollary of this error is to maintain that individuals have the right to criticize and even overthrow the social order. All the evils of the Revolution, Bonald assured his readers, derived from this error.83 Bonald explicitly linked the Revolution to the fall as rebellions against divine order: “‘You will be gods,’ said to the first men, made the first revolution in the world. ‘You will be kings,’ said to the people, made the last. And always pride!”84 Society, Bonald insisted, is the product 82 Bonald, Théorie du pouvoir, vol. 13, 500; vol. 14, 463, 471, 488. Reedy notes that the term “individualisme” does not appear in Bonald’s writing until the mid1820s, about the time the Saint-Simonians introduced the term into French. Before that, Bonald used the phrase “l’homme particulier.” Reedy, “Traditionalist Critique,” 51n10. Reedy further notes that although it was Auguste Comte who coined the term “maladie occidentale” for the socially corrosive individualism unleashed by the Revolution, Bonald had already theorized the condition that it expresses. Reedy, “Historical Imaginary,” 3. 83 Bonald, Théorie du pouvoir, vol. 14, 382–3. Bonald, like the Catholic Traditionalists generally, contributed early and importantly to the creation of the enduring and ­powerful historiographical idea that treating the Enlightenment as first and foremost the origin and genesis of the French Revolution “denies the historical world of the Enlightenment its own autonomous and specific identity.” This political myth has ­possessed enduring power because it has served the ideological programs of revolutionaries and reactionaries alike. See Ferrone, Enlightenment, 79–80 (quotation at 79), 170. 84 Bonald, Pensées sur divers sujets, vol. 6, 137; see also 200–1.

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of the natural order of things, working over long stretches of time and according to natural laws – nature alone is the true legislator – and the substitution of an artificial social order for the natural social order was the cause of the upheavals that were devastating Europe. Philosophy, then, is the immediate source of the individualist error. And philosophy, as “the art of explaining everything, of ordering everything without the co-operation of the Divinity,”85 is nothing other than atheism, either openly so or disguised as deism.86 Bonald traced this lamentable philosophy to René Descartes. Descartes erred, he asserted, in holding that thought contains ideas anterior to language, which led to the further error of the universal, methodical doubt that he placed at the base of all scientific knowledge, both physical and moral. The philosophes then raised Descartes’s generalized doubt and his principle of intellectual autonomy to the status of first principles of the critical philosophy, yielding the predictable fruit of skepticism and the destruction of the great human beliefs.87 Bonald therefore identified Descartes as the philosophical source of the critical individualism that was the mother error of the eighteenth century. Not only is this identification at the root of Bonald’s conviction that contemporary Catholic thought must free itself from Cartesian theology, but it also marks the beginning of a robust tradition in nineteenth-century France of considering one’s attitude toward Descartes to be a litmus test for opposition or allegiance to the intellectual and social heritage of the Enlightenment and the Revolution.88 If, however, Descartes is the source of philosophical individualism, he was not for Bonald the ultimate source of the individualist error. Echoing a long line of Catholic polemicists,89 Bonald identified the ­ur-source of individualism as the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther and John Calvin, in his view, carried out a religious revolution by setting individual judgment (sens privé) over the authority of the church.90 The Protestant principle of establishing individual reason as

85 Bonald, “De la philosophie morale et politique,” 86. 86 Ibid., 87. Bonald remarked that a deist is someone who in his short existence has not yet had the time to become an atheist. Bonald, Pensées sur divers sujets, vol. 6, 252. 87 Bonald, Législation primitive, vol. 2, 31–40. 88 Azouvi, Descartes et la France, 145–6. 89 See Rosenblatt, “Madame de Staël,” 146–7. 90 Bonald, Essai analytique, 57.

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judge over beliefs and observances led to the multiplicity of sects, to the disintegration of all the dogmas that guaranteed the infallible authority of the church, and finally, through the intermediary of rationalist philosophy, to atheism and political disorder.91 Although the notion of the parallelism of the Revolution with the Reformation was a standard Ultra topos – the Ultras, as Louis Girard has noted, c­ onsidered the Constitutional Charter to be a new Edict of Nantes guaranteeing the interests born of the Revolution92 – Bonald infused the parallel with a particular content. Descartes and then Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Condorcet serve in his analysis as intermediaries between the religious revolution and the socio-political revolution. The sequence Reformation–philosophes–French Revolution is at once a genealogy of error and yet another Bonaldian ternary, an application of the abstract formulation cause-means-effect to modern history. In the second phase of his engagement with philosophy, Bonald’s focus shifted from the critique of individualism to natural philosophy. Bonald read widely in natural philosophy – that is, the early-nineteenthcentury natural sciences  – because he regarded it as one more ­battleground in the war between atheistic, materialist modern philosophy and the religious philosophy that recognizes a first cause and spiritual principle.93 Bonald’s discussion of physiologists and chemists who limit their observations to the physical nature of human beings and ignore or deny outright any nonmaterial component includes a key sentence: “These men look to find thought in the play of the organs that they dissect; and they believe that they know the master because they have questioned the valets in the antechamber.” 94 Bonald’s ­metaphor of master and valets should be understood in relation to his fundamental definition of a human being as “an intelligence served by organs.” This definition, which appeared as early as Du divorce (1801), serves as the title of chapter 5 of Recherches philosophiques. In both places, 91 Bonald was proud that his ancestors had zealously combated the spread of Calvinism in southern France. Moulinié, De Bonald, 2. 92 Girard, Les libéraux français, 59. Nor was the filiation of the Enlightenment to the Reformation the exclusive property of the counter-revolutionaries; it also served as the basis for co-operation between philosophes and Protestants in the second half of the eighteenth century. Rosenblatt, Liberal Values, 16–22. 93 For a more extensive discussion, see McCalla, “Louis de Bonald’s Traditionalist Science.” 94 Bonald, “Sur les éloges historiques,” 193–5 (quotation at 195).

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Bonald contrasted it to philosophy’s materialist definition of a human being as organized matter that acquires intelligence.95 The critical issue at hand is the relationship between the physical and spiritual aspects of human beings. At its most basic, Bonald said, it is a question of whether a human being is “a mind [esprit] that has received organs or organs that have received a mind.”96 In Bonald’s conception, material organs serve the intelligence, just as valets serve their master. That is how things are meant to be. Physical or mental disease, however, can disrupt this relationship, creating conditions where the organs subvert the intelligence by making it serve their own irregular movements instead of obeying its will. Bonald could not help but describe the results in political terms: “Such a sovereign, abused by corrupt ministers in the accounts that they send him and in the execution of the orders that they receive from him, seems to govern by himself when he is only obeying the passions of those who surround him.”97 The analogy that Bonald drew between human physiology and the political order was hardly casual. Bonald’s science of society is itself structured analogically because all aspects of human existence are naturally ­constituted by the universal ternary of cause-means-effect. As applied to the social order, it runs power-minister-subject, which in a properly constituted society is instantiated as king-nobility-people. In a properly constituted human being, the universal ternary manifests as intelligence-organs-body.98 The intelligence rules the body through the ministry of the organs, just as the king rules the people through the ministry of the nobility. Bonald concluded this line of thought by ­noting that the natural constitution of a human being, as of society, is a ­monarchy. Disorder results when the hierarchical functioning of the ternary is disrupted; in political society, it happens when ministers or

95 Bonald, Du divorce, 23; Bonald, Recherches philosophiques, vol. 8, 301. Note that “intelligence” here connotes a spiritual principle as well as intellectual capacity. Elsewhere, Bonald elaborated on the materialist definition of a human being: “an organized and sensible mass that receives mind from its surroundings and from its needs.” Bonald, Recherches philosophiques, vol. 8, 322. 96 Bonald, Recherches philosophiques, vol. 8, 325. 97 Ibid., vol. 8, 306. 98 Reedy notes that Bonald’s universal ternary that structures ontology and polity isomorphically repackages in a scientistic mode the old correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm. Reedy, “Language, Counter-Revolution,” 589.

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the people usurp the power of the king, and in a human being, it ­happens when the passions and physical urges usurp the power of the intelligence.99 Chapter 9 of Recherches philosophiques offers an extensive critique of the contention by Cabanis and other materialist physiologists that thought may be fully explained as a product of the brain as a material organ.100 For Bonald, of course, materialism was not only bad philosophy but also politically catastrophic, and he explicitly linked materialist ­science to the Revolution. Not only did he regard the Encyclopédie and the Revolution as two complementary volumes of the same work – the Encyclopédie being the text of the Revolution and the Revolution the ­illustrations of the Encyclopédie – but he also considered the revolutionary political slogan that all power comes from the people to be an atheist and materialist maxim because in placing the principle of power in numbers, which are a property of matter, this slogan corresponds to the materialist approach to science, where “knowledge is counted by head rather than by order; which is, in everything, an infallible means of confusion.”101

 99 Bonald, Recherches philosophiques, vol. 8, 311–14. 100 Ibid., vol. 9, 1–75. 101 Bonald, “Sur les éloges historiques,” 183–4, 191, 193, 194 (quotation).

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5

Bonald’s History of Religions

Louis de Bonald’s science of society incorporated a history of religions. This chapter extricates the conceptualization of religion that it tacitly contained by showing how it emerges from his accounts of the proper unfolding of religion from natural religion through the Jewish religion to Christianity in what he called the three ages of monotheism and  from his assessments of idolatry, paganism, and atheism as deviations from this trajectory. It concludes with an examination of how Bonald’s history of religion, as a utilitarian approach to apologetics according to which the fundamental religious sentiments are true because they are useful to the preservation of civil society, relates to various strands of Catholic Enlightenment and its status in the eyes of the French church.

The Three Ages of Monotheism Natural Religion The starting point of Bonald’s history of religions is a theory of natural religion. By natural religion – or the domestic or patriarchal religion, as he alternatively called it – Bonald meant, of course, something entirely different from eighteenth-century and Idéologue conceptions of natural religion as the original form of religion that arose from the psychological dispositions and environmental context of the first humans.1 Bonald  1 On eighteenth-century theories of religion, see Manuel, Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods; Manuel, Changing of the Gods; Despland, La religion en Occident; Preus, Explaining Religion; and P. Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the Religions.

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set out to undermine these conceptions by taking up a constellation of themes orbiting around the conception of natural religion: the ­meaning of the term “natural,” natural law, the alleged state of nature, and the claim that religion postdates humankind. Whereas Bonald’s p ­ rincipal target in his earlier writings was Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s depiction of natural religion as an interior faith arising from the innate goodness of human beings before their virtue is corrupted by society, he turned his attention in Recherches philosophiques sur les premiers objets des connaissances morales (1818) to Charles-François Dupuis and the Idéologues. Bonald began his counterattack with the gloss that we have noted in the previous chapter on the etymology of the term “nature” from the verb naître (to be born): “A being is born for an end, and with the means of reaching it; this end and these means comprise its nature.”2 In accord with this teleological definition of “nature,” Bonald’s natural religion is natural not because it arises from the innate capacities or environmental context of the first humans but because, as the force that raises humankind from a state of ignorance toward the fulfillment of its being, it is the religion appropriate to the earliest stage of human development: Here recurred the equivocality of this word nature and natural, which has produced such great errors and, as the inevitable result, such great ­disorders. Religion, no doubt, is supernatural if one is speaking of the nature of humanity, of its ignorance and native corruption, from which it cannot extricate i­tself by its own powers; in this sense, all knowledge of moral truth is supernatural to it. But, from the perspective of the true nature of the being – the plentitude of its being, the state of being fulfilled and perfected ... – ­religion is that which is most natural to humanity in order to form its reason and to regulate its ­actions ... One may even say that it is supernatural only to ignorant and corrupt humanity because it is natural to enlightened and p ­ erfected humanity.3

For Bonald, then, failure to perceive that what is “natural” varies with the stage of development lay at the root of contemporary misuse of the word.4 As we saw in the previous chapter, he thought that philosophes who claimed that natural laws and natural right (droit) exclude all  2 Bonald, Législation primitive, vol. 2, 229.   3 Ibid., vol. 2, 46–8.   4 See ibid., vol. 2, 234.

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positive laws and rights confused the natural state of humankind with its natal state. Parallel to, and a symptom of, this confusion over “natural” is confusion over “natural religion”: “From the fact that the domestic religion is exclusively called natural, it has been concluded that the revealed religion was not natural; and from the fact that the Christian religion is exclusively called the revealed religion, it has been concluded that the domestic religion was not revealed. Both religions, or rather these two states of religion, are natural, the one to the state of an isolated family, the other to the public or political state, and both are revealed, the one by speech, the other by writing.”5 Bonald was arguing here that natural religion had to come before revealed religion, just as the patriarchal family had to come before the public state or, for that ­matter, childhood before adulthood. In each case it is a matter of development over time from a state of ignorance and weakness to one of knowledge and strength. The proper understanding of natural religion, then, recognizes it as the natal or original state of religion, the religion of the primitive family before all government, just as the family, or the domestic state, is the natal or original state of social order.6 The content of Bonald’s natural religion of the domestic state is the patriarchal religion depicted in the early chapters of Genesis.7 He identified its three principal elements as knowledge of the existence of the one God, the practice of sacrifice, and expectation of a mediator. As primitive monotheism, natural religion corresponds to monogamy because the union of a single man with a single woman in a civil society fulfills its end of the production of human beings, just as the end of natural religion is the production of knowledge of God in human thought. Indeed, Bonald remarked, the family and natural religion first appeared in history together. Next, the ritual focus of natural religion is sacrifice because in it God is conceived of as power, and the performance of sacrifices is the means by which the patriarch as the minister of this power exercises his ministry. Bonald noted that in this period the priestly and political roles of the patriarch coincide, which explains the historical fact of the priest-king characteristic of

 5 Bonald, Essai analytique, 123–4.   6 Ibid., 124–5; Bonald, Législation primitive, vol. 2, 403; Bonald, Théorie du p­ ouvoir, vol. 13, 38.  7 Bonald, Théorie du pouvoir, vol. 14, 18, 213.

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early political societies. Finally, the expectation of the mediator that was promised to the first family, according to Genesis, is retained in natural religion but obscurely. Bonald spoke of this promise, in a term derived from biological preformationism, as being “encased” (­enveloppé); it is the seed that will remain buried in the ground for a long time before it matures with the development of religious society.8 Bonald was adamant that a religion lacking any knowledge of a mediator is not a properly constituted religion. God is the most universal cause and humankind the most universal effect, but because the mediator is the means that unites the other two terms of the universal ternary, God and humankind are truly understood only through knowledge of the mediator. Any religion where the mediator is unknown will necessarily be a false and inhuman religion.9 Bonald further linked misunderstandings of natural religion to the epistemological error of positing the existence of innate ideas. Those, he suggested, who accept innate ideas are inclined to regard natural religion as innate to humankind. Rousseau, as the exemplary offender,10 notoriously declined to instruct his Emile in religion because he held that a child is innately equipped to recognize and know natural religion without external guidance.11 But, countered Bonald, rehearsing the standard Traditionalist line, without instruction there would be no religion. Knowledge of God and of our soul and its relations with God must be learned; hence, all religion is revealed. The difference between the natural religion of the patriarchal age and the revealed religion of later ages is that the former was transmitted by speech, which was ­natural to the isolated families of early times, whereas the latter is transmitted by Scripture, which is natural to public society.12 A related error is the claim that natural religion is an interior faith. In fact, Bonald countered, religion has always been a matter of external practices,

  8 Ibid., vol. 14, 47, 69, 149, 440.  9 Bonald, Législation primitive, vol. 2, 371–6. Bonald later remarked, “Deism, which is the wisest doctrine of the ancients and the least wise of the moderns, knows only the cause and the effect and denies the means or the mediator.” Ibid., vol. 2, 381. 10 See Rousseau, Emile, 259; and Rousseau, Social Contract, 303. 11 Contrast Emile with the views on the education of children in Bonald, Législation primitive, vol. 2, 410–11. 12 Ibid., vol. 2, 63–4.

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first and foremost sacrifice.13 He acknowledged that the mistaken belief that the natural law is interior has a long history, but argued that if one maintains that this natural law is written on the hearts of all people, one is put in the impossible position of having to explain why what is permitted or ordained by one version of natural law is regarded with horror by other versions.14 Revealed Religion Bonald’s teleological conception of development means that natural religion must develop over time. Natural religion, in other words, is the seed or rudiment of revealed religion, just as the domestic state is the seed or rudiment of public society.15 Bonald thus spoke of natural religion, the Jewish religion, and the Christian religion as the three ages of monotheism, the religion of the unity of God.16 Alternatively, he at times divided his three ages of monotheism into natural religion and revealed religion and then subdivided revealed religion into the Jewish and Christian religions.17 Either way, the three ages of monotheism correspond to the successive states of political society: natural religion to the religion of the family, the first state of political society; the Jewish religion to the particular political society of the ancient Jews; and the Christian religion to monarchic society, the third and fully developed state of political society.18 The Jewish religion, as Bonald’s second age of monotheism, corresponds to the social order of the ancient Jews, which he characterized as a union of families without general power under the leadership of despotic kings (not true monarchs). As such, the ancient Jewish state 13 Bonald, Théorie du pouvoir, vol. 14, 73. Sacrifice, particularly the role of expiatory sacrifice in history, figured prominently in what Ivan Strenski has identified as a Restoration style of French Catholic discourse. Strenski, Contesting Sacrifice, 12–13. 14 Bonald, Législation primitive, vol. 3, 218–24. 15 Bonald, Essai analytique, 127. 16 Bonald never spoke of “Judaism.” Use of this term to signify one of the “world religions” postdates Bonald’s day. See J.Z. Smith, “Matter of Class,” 169; and Masuzawa, Invention of World Religions, 118–29. 17 Michel Despland has noted that the concept of “revealed religion” as a neologism expressing the idea that God reveals a religion rather than himself or his will dates from the eighteenth century. Despland, La religion en Occident, 411. 18 Bonald, Théorie du pouvoir, vol. 14, 53–4.

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was a theocracy that served to show that a society lacking a general power or monarch can subsist independently only by the miraculous intervention of the divine power.19 The purpose of the Jewish religion, in turn, was to safeguard the unity of God at a time when all other peoples were falling into idolatry. Bonald concluded from the Book of Job that knowledge of the true God was preserved in Antiquity by a few isolated Gentile families but not in any society other than that of the Jews.20 Bonald’s acceptance of Job as a historical figure and of the Book of Job as a reliable historical document indicates his complete c­ onfidence in the Bible as an authoritative source for the history of religions (as for all civil and cosmological history that it treats). Having next established to his satisfaction that the Pentateuch is the oldest book known to humankind,21 Bonald turned to its content. He distinguished between the Decalogue and what he called the Levitical civil code. The Decalogue is “the primitive and general law” itself, the “perfect, natural, and divine (all synonymous words)” law whose simple, clear maxims constitute a universal primitive legislation that preceded all civil codes.22 The Levitical civil code, in contrast, was merely a ­particular civil code containing the ritual, ceremonial, and criminal laws of the Jewish people.23 The other notable feature of the Jewish religion, in Bonald’s analysis, is its promise of a mediator and its link to the practice of sacrifice. Whereas, he says, in natural religion the mediator had been promised, in the Jewish religion he is indicated and his s­acrifice figured in the lamb immolated at Passover and the scapegoat released at Yom Kippur. Nevertheless, because the mediator

19 Ibid., vol. 14, 54. This point is made specifically against Rousseau’s claim that Moses was merely a wise legislator. See also ibid., vol. 14, 92–3. 20 Ibid., vol. 14, 54, 120. 21 Bonald, Législation primitive, vol. 3, 5. 22 Ibid., vol. 3, 6–7. During the early Restoration, and in the context of debates over the Constitutional Charter of 1814, Bonald pointedly spoke of “the universal charter of the human race, the Decalogue, the divine text of civilization on which all human laws ought only to be the commentary.” Bonald, “Réponse aux objections,” 56. 23 Bonald, Législation primitive, vol. 2, 188. That Bonald’s distinction here is strongly reminiscent of Baruch Spinoza’s analysis of ancient Judaism in Tractatus TheologicoPoliticus (1670) lends support to Dmitri Levitin’s contention that ­seventeenth- and eighteenth-century orthodox and heterodox or anti-clerical writings on religion were variations on a single established narrative concerning ancient religious history. See Levitin, “From Sacred History,” 1138–40.

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was still only a promise, Judaism “was a religion of expectation and of fear – that is to say, of fear tempered by a love that desires, not by a love that enjoys.”24 The Christian religion, the third age of the religion of monotheism and the second stage of revealed religion, fulfills the Jewish religion, just as the Jewish religion was the development of natural religion.25 However, although Christianity represents an advance over Judaism in its universality,26 Bonald insisted that its fundamental truths were already contained in both Judaism and natural religion. Monotheism, the need for a mediator, sacrifice as the basis of the ritual order, as well as subsidiary doctrines deriving from these fundamental truths, were implicitly contained in natural religion and figured in Judaism.27 Bonald’s preferred expression of the teleological theory of development exemplified by his history of religions was, once again, the organic metaphor of the growth of a seed: “Natural religion is the seed of the Jewish religion, and the Christian or revealed religion is the development, the perfecting, the fulfillment of the Jewish religion.” 28 Christianity, then, does not bring new truths into the world but makes old truths explicit (and public). Of course, for Bonald, as for all Traditionalists, truths by definition must be old.29 Christianity, according to Bonald, also brought about important developments in the social sphere. In establishing in full the proper relations between human beings and God (i.e., religious society), Christianity also established the proper relations of human beings among themselves (i.e., civil society). Yet one must not conclude from

24 Bonald, Théorie du pouvoir, vol. 14, 116 (quotation), 150–1. Bonald devoted book 3 of Théorie du pouvoir to a discussion of the Jewish religion. 25 Ibid., vol. 14, 123–4. Bonald here offered a Traditionalist variation on what Despland identifies as the dual target of eighteenth-century Catholic apologetics: to defend, with the deists, natural religion against the atheists and to affirm, against the deists, the need for a supplementary and salvific revelation. Despland, La religion en Occident, 409. 26 Bonald, Théorie du pouvoir, vol. 14, 424–5. 27 Bonald, Législation primitive, vol. 2, 405–6; vol. 3, 47. In Théorie du pouvoir, Bonald explicitly discussed the three ages of monotheism in terms of their increasingly adequate practice of sacrifice. Bonald, Théorie du pouvoir, vol. 14, 18–19. 28 Bonald, Théorie du pouvoir, vol. 14, 55. 29 Traditionalists self-consciously adopted Tertullian’s dictum: “Truth always comes first, and error always comes later.” Quoted in Stroumsa, New Science, 83.

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this explanation that Bonald considered Christianity to have been complete at its first appearance. In a note that begins with a sentence that might have come from Nicolas de Condorcet’s pen, “The history of all sciences is only the history of their progress,” Bonald asserted that Christianity itself is “only a long development of the truth.” Although the Bible, then, contains the seeds of all moral and social truths, these truths had to develop through the apostolic age, the work of the Church Fathers, and the pronouncements of the church ­councils.30 The ­development of truth in Christianity, of course, represents the blossoming of the plant whose seeds were sown in the natural religion of earliest times. Bonald attributed various false theories of religion to their authors’ failure to grasp the teleological and developmentalist nature of religion. Thus eighteenth-century theorists, because they did not perceive the doctrines of monotheism, the immortality of the soul, and punishments and rewards in the next life to be clearly expressed in ancient religions, assumed that these were new doctrines that came into ­existence only with their proclamation by the early Christians, and consequently they identified these dogmas as human inventions.31 The Protestant Reformers, he thought, were guilty of an analogous error. Martin Luther and John Calvin claimed to be restoring the purity of early Christianity when they rejected doctrines and practices that they could not find stated expressly and textually in the Gospels. Bonald specifically traced this error, and its catastrophic consequences, to a failure to realize that Christ established not fully developed doctrines and practices but fundamental laws. (Christ, as it were, planted acorns, not oak trees.) All the specifics of Catholic belief and practice were contained in these fundamental laws, but the civil society of the early Christians was not yet able to allow them their mature development. The Christian Church, Bonald concluded, had received from its founder an internal and active principle that develops over time and to the extent that civil society, to which religious society must one day become joined, itself develops. Bonald here drew on the developmentalist principle of Traditionalism in order to refute the Reformers’ Biblicism: Luther, although aware of the progress of civil society, had

30 Bonald, Législation primitive, vol. 2, 418–19. 31 Ibid., vol. 2, 419.

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failed to grasp that religion, “always ancient and always new,” must develop along with civil society.32 Bonald similarly asserted, in a further application of the principle that deviation from the divinely ordained order leads to disaster, that the connection between religious and civil society in Christendom means that false theology inevitably leads to fanaticism, materialism, and ­ultimately anarchy. This outcome was most clearly demonstrated for Bonald by Calvinism, the dominant form of Protestantism in France. In repudiating the Eucharistic doctrine of real presence, which, he said, makes present the preserving power in the mutual love of God and human beings, Calvinism removes all liberty from religious society and tends necessarily to establish democracy, whereas the Catholic religion, as the true liberty of religious society, allies itself naturally with monarchy, in which is found true political liberty.33 Dangerous as they were, however, Bonald was confident that the Protestant sects would not last and that the natural laws of social order would eventually ­re-establish religious unity in Europe. In a parallel application of his argument that the French Revolution – Protestantism’s descendant – as a monstrous variation of proper social development could not endure, Bonald argued that the political toxicity of Protestantism rendered it unviable as a religion for the major states of Europe.34 In applying to the history of religions the conception of development as the unfolding of pre-existent truths, a conception fundamental to his science of society as a whole, Bonald went beyond received Catholic thought about how true religion might develop. Scholastic theologians had argued that a doctrine could develop only in the sense of its implicit

32 Bonald, Théorie du pouvoir, vol. 14, 178, 285 (quotation). 33 Ibid., vol. 14, 377, 383 (quotation). In fact, Bonald identified four different forms of government in Europe corresponding to Christian churches: constitutional monarchy corresponds to Roman Catholicism, hereditary aristocracy to Lutheranism, democratic government to Calvinism, and the mixed government of England to Anglicanism. Ibid., vol. 14, 301–4. In his critique of Germaine de Staël’s Considérations sur les principaux événements de la Révolution française (1818), Bonald extended the ­correspondence to the novelties of the revolutionary period: the anarchy of the Convention corresponded to atheism, the slightly less disordered government of the  Directory to Theophilanthropy, and the restored monarchy to the rebirth of Catholicism. Bonald, Observations sur l’ouvrage, 465–6. 34 Bonald, Du traité de Westphalie, 389.

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meaning becoming better understood through the efforts of theologians, and for Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet the only possible sense in which revelation might progress was in becoming more widely ­disseminated.35 Here, as elsewhere, the abbé Nicolas-Sylvestre Bergier – who held that revelation is progressive in the sense that a given form of religion represents the adaptation of primitively revealed dogma and ritual to a particular society and that Christianity is the full and final development of the primitive revelation – was the intermediary between Bossuet and Bonald.36

I d o l a t r y, P a g a n i s m , a n d A t h e i s m Natural religion, the Jewish religion, and the Christian religion represent the proper unfolding of the developmental process in Bonald’s history of religions. Deviations from this sequence  – principally idolatry, ­paganism, and atheism – represent corruptions of one or other of the three ages of monotheism. Idolatry Bonald’s writings contain both a Traditionalist theory of the origins and nature of idolatry and a critique of philosophe and Idéologue explanations of its origin and nature – and therefore often of religion itself since neither radical philosophes nor the Idéologues distinguished between idolatry and religion. The two undertakings are intimately connected and usually discussed together in both Théorie du pouvoir politique et religieux (1796) and Législation primitive, considérée dans les derniers temps par les seules lumières de la raison (1802) as well as, somewhat more systematically, in chapter 10 of Recherches philosophiques. For ­analytical clarity, I will separate them. Bonald specifically took up the fear, solar, and priestcraft theories of religion. Interestingly enough, he fully accepted that ancient peoples who had been traumatized by some great convulsion of nature or upheaval in the social order would have attributed the calamities with which they were struck to the power and will of an intelligent cause and

35 O. Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman, 17, 24–5. 36 Laplanche, La Bible en France, 105–6.

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sought to appease it.37 But then, drawing on one of the fundamental axioms of his science of society, he argued that neither physical or moral catastrophes nor the terror that accompanied them could have inspired in early humans the original idea of divinity because in order to seek to appease a divinity, they must already have had both the idea or ­sentiment of divinity in their minds and the word in their language.38 Bonald applied the same logic to Charles-François Dupuis’s theory that all religions originate in worship of the sun. If people worshipped the sun, he said, they believed in something worthy of being worshipped, and thus early humankind possessed the idea of divinity before falsely applying it to the sun.39 Bonald dramatized the error of the solar ­hypothesis by imagining a historian who, applying Dupuis’s principles to French history, writes an Origine des gouvernements in which the attributes and activities of French kings from Charlemagne to Louis XIV reveal them to have been not actual men but successive allegories of the sun.40 Bonald, finally, regarded the theory that ancient legislators had invented divinity to control peoples (as he rendered the priestcraft theory) as beset with difficulties. First, the very idea of inventing a being who would not represent any object and a word that would not express any idea is absurd. Second, the theory requires the unlikely supposition that ­legislators all over the ancient world independently came up with exactly the same invention, although in all other respects their law codes ­differed enormously from each other. Bonald countered that the ­universality of the idea of divinity is better explained by the primitive revelation of the sentiment of divinity to the first man and the descent of all peoples from the first family.41

37 As a contemporary aside, Bonald reflected that even in his own day, if a people should lose the belief in divinity, it would perhaps require an earthquake or a political revolution for them to recover it. Bonald, Recherches philosophiques, vol. 9, 127–8. 38 Ibid., vol. 9, 129. 39 Bonald, Législation primitive, vol. 2, 291–3; Bonald, Recherches philosophiques, vol. 9, 130. 40 Bonald, Législation primitive, vol. 2, 193–4. Bonald perhaps inaugurated here the line of solar hypothesis satires, which include Andrew Lang’s story about a fourthmillennium comparative mythologist who proves that William Ewart Gladstone was the solar deity of Victorian Britain and Richard Frederick Littledale’s demonstration that F. Max Müller was himself the sun. See Lang, “Great Gladstone Myth”; and Littledale, “Oxford Solar Myth.” 41 Bonald, Recherches philosophiques, vol. 9, 131–2.

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Whether it is the fear theory, the solar theory, or the priestcraft theory, Bonald’s critique followed the same structure: human beings did not –­ could not –­invent the idea of God but instead received the sentiment of divinity passively through the primitive revelation and its transmission by language.42 Bonald took the axiom that sentiments are received, not made, as the lynchpin of his Traditionalist refutation of naturalistic theories of religion; the key to all religious truths, he said, is the recognition that religion is a sentiment, not an opinion.43 As regards Bonald’s own explanation for the origin of idolatry, the key task for any Traditionalist theory is to explain the diversity of beliefs and practices of the various religions of the world given that all early peoples possessed the sentiment of divinity and were the heirs of the patriarchal natural religion. Bonald pointed to the progressive ­corruption of the patriarchal natural religion that began with the fall itself (which Bonald identified as the first revolution in human history and as arising from the same causes as all subsequent revolutions: weakness and pride). In natural religion, according to Bonald, the attitude of human beings to the God who preserved them was one of love mixed with fear. Humankind retained the sentiment of divinity, but outside the line of Hebrew patriarchs, fear of God replaced love of God in human hearts. Conversely, love without fear – profane human s­ exuality – also flourished. Since, Bonald continued, the human need to worship cannot be destroyed, the corruption of natural religion produced false gods as objects of worship. Specifically, fear without love produced barbaric and merciless gods of destruction, and love without fear ­produced impure and lascivious goddesses. Such were the first divinities of idolatry.44 Natural religion had been further corrupted, Bonald said, through the exercise of the human imagination among Gentile peoples, who were not subject to the Mosaic prohibition against making external representations of God. Not satisfied with a clear idea of the will of

42 Bonald, Théorie du pouvoir, vol. 14, 34; Bonald, Recherches philosophiques, vol. 9, 130–1. 43 Bonald, Théorie du pouvoir, vol. 14, 22. Benjamin Constant’s five-volume De la religion, considérée dans sa source, ses formes et ses développements (1824–31) (see part 5 herein) would render the idea of religion as sentiment anathema to later Catholic Traditionalists. 44 Bonald, Théorie du pouvoir, vol. 14, 72–3, 81–2, 85.

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God, early humans wanted to understand the manner of divine action. Observing that their own organs were the instruments of their own particular actions, they attributed organs to God in order to explain his actions. From there, it was a short step to transferring to divinity all manner of humans’ attributes, including their sexes, passions, and weaknesses. The absurdities of idolatry, in short, arose from the ­projection of corrupt human nature onto false gods.45 Bonald extended his analysis of the role of the imagination in idolatry in Recherches ­philosophiques. Noting that idolatry is nothing other than material figures and representations of divinity produced by the imagination, Bonald explained that for the first peoples, as for pagan peoples (a few philosophers aside) and for children, imagination preceded reason, and the faculty of thinking was exercised much more on images than on ideas.46 Once, therefore, it had created false gods, the imagination then spun for them names, characters and occupations, families, alliances and rivalries, conflicts, and adventures – all analogous with human nature and all further embellished by the poets of all nations. It was in this manner, not as conscious allegories of spiritual truths, that “these bizarre and monstrous theogonies, cosmogonies, mythologies, ridiculous travesties of the primitive truths” had been insensibly formed and spread.47 Accompanying the absurdities of idolatry, Bonald continued, were the abominations of its worship. The new false divinities required new cults, and these new cults reflected the corrupt nature of their ­divinities: lascivious goddesses demanded rituals of debauchery and prostitution, and bloodthirsty gods demanded human sacrifices.48 Bonald, who it is fair to say was somewhat obsessed with human sacrifice, considered the practice to have been widespread among idolatrous religions, although he did so on the basis of the logic of his system rather than ethnographical evidence. He reasoned that since sacrifice, properly understood and practised, is the fundamental ritual of true religion as

45 Bonald, Législation primitive, vol. 2, 365–6. For the stress on the Mosaic prohibition against images, see Bonald, Théorie du pouvoir, vol. 14, 116. 46 Bonald, Recherches philosophiques, vol. 8, 352; vol. 9, 105. 47 Ibid., vol. 8, 7–8 (quotation at 8). The reference to allegories of spiritual truths is an allusion to Friedrich Creuzer, who is otherwise little discussed by Bonald. It would be left to Ferdinand d’Eckstein to develop a Traditionalist critique of Creuzer’s mythography (see part 6 herein). 48 Bonald, Théorie du pouvoir, vol. 14, 81–2.

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it develops through the three ages of monotheism – and since human sacrifice errs in transforming God’s demand to receive the sacrifice of human wills into a demand for the sacrifice of human bodies  – ­corrupted sacrifice must occupy a comparable place in corrupted religion. Bonald further linked human sacrifice to the emergence of slavery and despotism; that is, just as Christianity brought with it developments in the social sphere, so too did corrupt religion bring about social consequences of its own. In substituting love of self (philosophe and Idéologue “self-interest”) for love of one’s neighbour, corrupt religion produced social conflict and a consequent sense of unhappiness and fearfulness. Under these social and psychological pressures, people offered the lives of their neighbours to the gods in hopes of turning away the evils that threatened them, and they gave up their liberty to the more powerful in return for security. In this way, Bonald concluded, idolatry, despotism, and slavery emerged together from the corruption of natural religion.49 In juxtaposing Bonald’s critique of philosophe and Idéologue theories of the origin of religion with his own account of the origin of idolatry, one is struck by how much of the former he incorporated into the ­latter. Bonald did not so much reject the fear theory, to start with, as deflect it; in his hands, given the Traditionalist conviction that there was never a time before religion, the Epicurean tag “fear first made the gods,” beloved by eighteenth-century theorists, is turned into “fear multiplied the gods.”50 Bonald similarly retained the rival theories’ emphasis on the psychological dispositions of early humankind but doubly subverted them by identifying the fall as the ultimate cause of these dispositions and, once again, by invoking them to explain not the origin of religion itself but its corruption into idolatry. Bonald’s account of the role of the imagination in the origin of idolatry, particularly his description of  how early humans came to project their attributes onto false ­divinities, almost directly follows Constantin-François Volney’s account in Les  ruines, ou Méditations sur les révolutions des empires (1791) (see ­chapter 2), except that Bonald used the projection theory to explain the proliferation of false gods rather than the origin of the idea of God. Similarly, Bonald’s conclusion that idolatry, despotism, and

49 Ibid., vol. 14, 19–21. 50 Ibid., vol. 14, 21.

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slavery emerged together retains the structure of Volney’s thesis but inverts it: instead of political despotism having emerged from religion, as in Les ruines, despotism and slavery now emerged from the corruption of natural religion. It is a matter, then, more of the co-optation of philosophe and Idéologue theories of religion than of their rejection. Consequently, Bonald’s relationship to these theorists of religion recalls, and was a specific instance of, his attempt to construct a counter-revolutionary science of society instead of abandoning the idea of a science of society to the enemies of Catholicism. In this undertaking, however, Bonald shifted the epistemological underpinnings of the psychological explanation for the origin of idolatry from a Lockean empiricism, which was widely shared by eighteenth-century Catholic, Protestant, and philosophic writers alike,51 to a Traditionalist epistemology that assimilates reason to revelation. Paganism All manner of idolatry, according to Bonald’s reconstruction, flourished in the later patriarchal age as the primitive revelation became increasingly corrupted and families multiplied, dispersed, and divided. But just as families that shared a certain territory banded together against common dangers, thereby advancing in social organization to form civil states, so too did religion pass from the domestic stage, where it varied from family to family, to state religions, where it became uniform and public, and therefore more concrete. In this way, multiple systems of polytheistic paganism, defined as a religion of the gods of many families worshipped in common, were born from the development of idolatry under the conditions of emerging public social order. Bonald, in fact, defined paganism in Recherches philosophiques as the idolatry of established peoples.52 He insisted that the imperfection of the ­polytheistic idea of God does not mean that it precedes, either logically or temporally, monotheism. Here, Bonald was countering, once again, the claim epochally made in David Hume’s The Natural History of Religion (1757) that polytheism was the original form of religion. Bonald 51 See Burson, Culture of Enlightening, 294–301. 52 Bonald, Législation primitive, vol. 2, 404–5; Bonald, Recherches philosophiques, vol. 9, 137.

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argued from his first principles for the precedence of monotheism over polytheism. Polytheism could not have preceded monotheism any more than hate can precede love, multiplicity can precede unity, or any negative sentiment whatsoever can precede the corresponding positive sentiment. Thus, he said, since true religion, or the religion of the unity of God, is love and since false religion, or the religion of several gods, is hate, monotheism preceded polytheism given that the positive must precede the negative. Alternatively, logic alone proclaims the precedence of monotheism over polytheism: given that there can be only one infinite being, God must necessarily be one; monotheism is therefore the true religion, and polytheism is an absurdity contrary to the nature of beings.53 Polytheistic systems, Bonald continued, despite their absurdity ­nevertheless impressed on their adherents some inkling of the power of God and the duties of human beings. It is this knowledge, all confused as it is, that maintained some sort of social order among pagan peoples. Bonald cited Bossuet to the effect that even an imperfect notion of the author of all order cannot exist in a society without ­producing order.54 The pagan religions of the world, moreover, despite their corruption and degeneration, retained some vestige of the ­doctrines transmitted to humankind in the primitive revelation and perfected in Christianity: everywhere, Bonald proclaimed, one ­discovers – corrupted to varying degrees – the sentiments of God and his principal attributes, the spirituality and immortality of the soul, sacrifice, belief in rewards and punishments in a future state, funerary rituals, and the expectation of a mediator.55 Bonald, in fact, interpreted pagan religions as negative proof of true religion on the grounds that the corruption of the truths transmitted by the primitive revelation among idolatrous peoples nevertheless testifies to the universality of the fundamental religious sentiments.56 Philosophical atheism, Bonald noted, does not count against this universal testimony since (as we shall see shortly) he considered it an elite reaction against idolatry. But what about the other end of the spectrum – that is, travellers’ reports of peoples who manifested no evidence of religion? Bonald addressed 53 Bonald, Théorie du pouvoir, vol. 14, 23, 207, 214. 54 Bonald, Législation primitive, vol. 2, 36–7. 55 Bonald, Théorie du pouvoir, vol. 14, 32, and bk 1, chs 2–4, passim. 56 Ibid., vol. 14, 34.

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such reports in the manner that David Chidester has taught us to expect: by discussing the Hottentots of South Africa’s Western Cape. Citing an unnamed traveller’s assertion that they had no religion,57 Bonald countered that the Hottentots in fact possessed the idolatrous religion of natural society, or idolatry in its first state. Those who claimed that there were peoples who manifested no sentiment of divinity were to be understood as saying that no one had searched properly for it. What such travellers had in fact observed were tribes in the domestic social state whose religion was correspondingly purely domestic – that is, enclosed in the interior of the family.58 The methodological conclusion that Bonald drew is that one must exercise caution when faced with travellers’ accounts of the religion of savage or barbarous peoples. Corrupted and confused vestiges of the primitive revelation are to be found everywhere, if one knows how to recognize them. Having observed that the primitive traditions are “a book of which scattered and half-torn sheets are found among even the most barbarous peoples,” Bonald added in a footnote that the researches of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta left no doubt about the identity of the Indian traditions and the Jewish traditions and that the discoveries made in the mythological antiquities of the northern peoples had established the same truth for the opposite end of the world.59 Bonald, however, did not depend on the accumulation of empirical evidence to clinch his argument. His point was rather that correct interpretation of the empirical evidence requires the guidance of theory (see chapter 4). Asserting that the Christian religion is universal because of the necessity of its principles, not because its truths are found everywhere, Bonald compared it to geometry, which would not cease to be universally true

57 Good possibilities for Bonald’s source are François Levaillant’s Second voyage dans l’intérieur de l’Afrique par le cap de Bonne-Espérance, dans les années 1783, 84 et 85 (1795) and Anders Sparrman’s A Voyage to the Cape of Good Hope, towards the Antarctic Circle, and round the World, but Chiefly into the Country of the Hottentots and Caffres, from the Year 1772 to 1776 (1786), a French translation of which appeared in 1787. Both of these works date from the last quarter of the eighteenth century, a period of renewed war between colonists and the Khoisan and consequently, according to David Chidester’s analysis, a period of the denial of a religion to the latter. Chidester, Savage Systems, 23, 58. 58 Bonald, Théorie du pouvoir, vol. 14, 30­­–1. 59 Bonald, Législation primitive, vol. 2, 266–7 (quotation), 267.

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even if there were not a single geometer in the world.60 Bonald was confident that empirical evidence does exist to support his theory of primitive revelation and its subsequent degeneration, but he did not feel any great need to exert himself in seeking it out. Atheism The inadequacies of idolatry provided Bonald with his explanation for the origin of philosophy. Thoughtful pagans, he said, dissatisfied with the vain mass of puerilities that was the religion of their society, turned instead to human reason in their quest for knowledge, and so philosophy came to be born among the peoples of the Orient as a parallel e­ ndeavour to religion.61 Philosophy, however, although retaining in confused form ideas derived from the primitive revelation, proved to be a dangerous enterprise. Bonald distinguished between erroneous opinions that are corruptions of some primitive truth and opinions that have no connection whatsoever to any anteriorly known truth. The doctrines and ­practices of idolatry are examples of the former, and those of atheism are instances of the latter. Where, then, did such a novelty as atheism come from? Bonald had no doubt who was to blame: the ancient Greeks – a degenerate, wicked people, Bonald called them – so ­completely disfigured the idea of divinity through their love of fables and allegories that their sages could no longer recognize it and consequently denied the very existence of divinity itself.62 In subsequently seeking wisdom entirely outside the paths of the primitive traditions, Greek philosophers inevitably discovered only corruption and lies.63 Atheism, Bonald affirmed, carries dire consequences, both individually and socially. The atheist is dominated by pride and self-centredness and thus is necessarily a vicious person. Were atheism to extend to an entire society, the result would be not only the ultimate state of religious

60 Ibid., vol. 2, 399. 61 Bonald, Recherches philosophiques, vol. 8, 8–9. 62 Bonald, Législation primitive, vol. 2, 366, 413. See also Bonald, Théorie du pouvoir, vol. 14, 120–1. 63 Bonald, Législation primitive, vol. 2, 17–18. Bonald allowed that the religious nature of Plato’s philosophy (itself derived, he said, from Moses) distinguishes it from the rest of Greek philosophy. He attacked Scholasticism as the importation into Christianity of the degenerate dialectics of Greek philosophy. Ibid., vol. 2, 24–5.

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depravity but also anarchy, the ultimate state of political depravity, because the idea of God provides the principle of both religious and political order.64 On the theoretical level, Bonald was adamant that a society of atheists cannot endure because, lacking a principle of order, it would be like a plant whose defective seed has rendered it infertile; hence, he remarked, Pierre Bayle’s hypothesis of the possible existence of societies of atheists was as philosophically inept as it was morally scandalous.65 Such a monstrosity might, however, subsist temporarily before succumbing to its internal contradictions. And such, of course, was the society of the French Revolution. But even here the result was not a society of atheists. Bonald made a point of observing that religion is so natural to human beings that the revolutionary regime’s attempt to destroy Christianity resulted instead in the proliferation of superstition.66

B o n a l d ’ s A p o l o g e t i c s i n R e l at i o n to C at h o l i c E n l i g h t e n m e n t and the French Church Bonald’s history of religions comprises an approach to apologetics that may be concisely summarized: true religion has beneficial social ­consequences, corrupt religion has harmful social consequences, and atheism has catastrophic social consequences. Bonald never wavered from his contention, first made in Théorie du pouvoir, that the fundamental religious sentiments – the doctrines of the existence and unity of God, the spirituality and immortality of the soul, and punishments and rewards in the other life – are true because they are useful to the preservation of civil society. Bonald reasoned as follows: since society, whose necessity arises from the nature of humankind, requires a means of preserving itself, everything useful to the preservation of society is 64 Bonald, Théorie du pouvoir, vol. 14, 29, 443. Bonald added that ancient Greek atheists had denied only a corrupt, disfigured notion of divinity, whereas modern atheists rejected its fully developed form. Bonald, Législation primitive, vol. 2, 27–8. 65 Bonald, Législation primitive, vol. 2, 52. 66 Bonald, Pensées sur divers sujets, vol. 6, 277–8. Bonald here anticipated and theorized the attempts by the Missions to the Interior movement under the Restoration to root out what it regarded as superstitious practices that had sprung up among the faithful during the Revolution’s suspension of clerical oversight. See Kroen, Politics and Theater, 95.

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necessary; further, since everything that is necessary is a truth, everything that is necessary to the preservation of society is a truth, and everything that endangers it is an error.67 Bonald here exemplifies Charles Taylor’s argument that defenders of social hierarchy in the modern period j­ustified it less by recourse to metaphysical claims that the orders of society reflect an ontological hierarchy and more by utilitarian ­arguments for its beneficial consequences in terms of the stability of the social order itself and respect for rightful authority.68 Although Bonald’s utilitarian approach to apologetics was an element of his overall strategy as a counter-revolutionary theorist to use ratio­ nality to defend revealed truths, it also echoed in a pious register the attitude of philosophes such as Voltaire who accepted the social utility of religion on the grounds that only the hopes and fears accompanying faith in an afterlife could compel the masses to behave morally. This approach is particularly clear with Montesquieu, who in De l’esprit des lois (1748) evaluated religions according to the criteria of their ­contribution to social well-being and their efficacy in making their adherents into good citizens. Montesquieu, like Bonald, asserted the sociological necessity and political utility of an established religion but with the important difference that for him these attributes do not demonstrate its truth or divine establishment since he regarded religion as an ­autonomous cultural reality independent of any necessary r­ elation to transcendence.69 Rousseau, for his part, came at the question of the political utility of religion from the opposite direction. In Du ­contract social (1762), in a discussion complementary to his views on the innate, interior religion of the heart, he argued that since religion is indispensable to the state, every polity needs a civil religion, to which all citizens must subscribe on pain of banishment.70 For Bonald, of course, acknowledging the social utility of religion without admitting the truth of the religious sentiments encapsulates the errors of eighteenth-­ century philosophy.71 Rationality in the service of revelation raises the question of Bonald’s relationship to the Catholic Enlightenments of the eighteenth century. 67 Bonald, Théorie du pouvoir, vol. 14, 45. 68 Taylor, Secular Age, 412–13. 69 Despland, La religion en Occident, 420–3. 70 Ibid., 430–1. 71 Bonald, “Réflexions philosophiques,” 200, 226–7.

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The concept of a Catholic Enlightenment is the product of the historiographical displacement of a singular Enlightenment, usually ­identified with French philosophes, in favour of a plurality of national and theological Enlightenments.72 Theological Enlightenments were characterized in general by apologetic intent and by the encouragement of, in Dale K. Van Kley’s nice phrase, “the advance of reason within the limits of religion alone,”73 and the Catholic Enlightenment was characterized in particular by a defence of the dogmas of Tridentine Catholicism combined with attempts to reform various aspects of church practice and polity through recourse to reason and historical e­ rudition.74 The notion of a single, coherent Catholic Enlightenment, ­however, has now been itself displaced by recent scholarship in favour of a ­plurality of Catholic Enlightenments.75 Didier Masseau has noted that after 1760 apologists increasingly drew on “scientific” discourse in their argumentation at the expense of  theology.76 In relation to traditional theology, many Catholic Enlightenments enlarged the domain of nature at the expense of that of grace, even as they rejected the claims of the philosophical Enlightenments that human reason transcends all epistemological limitation and, against the radical philosophes, that the mind is material.77 Nevertheless, although there are many obvious affinities between the ­various Catholic Enlightenments and Bonald’s science of society, we should heed scholars who warn against identifying CounterEnlightenment thinkers too closely with Catholic Enlighteners on the grounds that the latter for the most part supported the ideals and values of the moderate philosophes while attacking those of the more radical philosophical writers.78 This distinction, critically, has no place in Bonald’s thought; in its assimilation of reason to revelation, Bonald’s science of society – like all versions of Catholic Traditionalism – belongs to and is a constituent expression of anti-philosophy even as it retains 72 See Pocock, “Historiography and Enlightenment”; and Sorkin, Religious Enlightenment. 73 Van Kley, “Foreword,” x. 74 Lehner, “Introduction,” 2–3; Burson, “Catholic Enlightenment,” 79, 108–9. See also Lehner, Catholic Enlightenment. 75 See Burson, Culture of Enlightening, 14–20. 76 Masseau, Les ennemis des philosophes, 238. 77 Van Kley, “Foreword,” xiv; Burson, “Catholic Enlightenment,” 110. 78 Lehner, “Introduction,” 11–12; Burson, Rise and Fall, 9.

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its valorization of rationality in the service of religion. Masseau, in fact, has argued that the frontier between philosophy and anti-philosophy in the eighteenth century lay not between the Catholic clergy and civil society but within the church itself. Bonald demonstrated that this observation applies equally well to the post-revolutionary period. Bonald’s relationship to the French church of his day was similarly complex, as from early on tensions emerged over its response to ­elements of his science of society. The personally devout Bonald always saw himself as the defender of the doctrines and authority of the Catholic Church and considered his science of society to be fully orthodox. Nevertheless, his thought challenged received theological ideas in several areas. One significant point of tension was Bonald’s reconceptualization of revelation in his attempt to reconcile history and religious truth. Standard theological practice recognized primitive revelation, Mosaic revelation, and Christian revelation as the three stages of revelation but reduced primitive revelation to a divine promise made to Adam and his posterity after the fall. Bonald’s history of r­eligions effaced real distinctions among the stages by reconceptualizing primitive revelation (and the natural religion that derives from it) as containing all religious truths, which Christianity developed into their final form but to which it added nothing new. Bonald, we might say, sacrificed religious change as the cost of eliminating social change. Similarly, since the history of religions embodies the development of revelation, Bonald invested all of human religious history with theological meaning. His assimilation of revelation to natural religion, as his critics recognized, conflated profane history with sacred history and conflated natural religion with revealed religion.79 Bonald’s assimilation of natural religion and revealed Christianity, or more generically of the natural order and supernatural order, is closely related to his assimilation of reason to revelation. Bonald held as a fundamental principle, as we have seen repeatedly, that all objects of thought are revealed because thought is inseparable from language and because language exists only as a result of revelation. It follows from this principle that human reason is incapable of attaining truth by its own power and that the exercise of unaided human reason can lead only to error, anarchy, and revolution. According to Catholic

79 Foucher, La philosophie catholique, 25–6.

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teaching, however, unaided human reason is able to prove the existence of God and a number of other religious truths, thereby leading human beings from the natural to the supernatural.80 Bonald’s assimilation of reason to revelation particularly challenged the Cartesian theology still ­dominant in the seminaries of his day. Students at the influential Parisian seminary of Saint-Sulpice, for example, were taught that Bonald’s claims that human reason plays no role in the acquisition of knowledge and that all knowledge derives from the transmission of the primitive ­revelation are contrary to the teaching of the Bible and the Church Fathers.81 These criticisms would recur in relation to subsequent v­ ersions of Catholic Traditionalism and be major factors in the church’s ultimate condemnation of Traditionalism later in the nineteenth century. Beyond these broad matters, clerical critics (as far back as the first readers of Théorie du pouvoir in Heidelberg and Constance) targeted specific elements of Bonald’s science of society. His claims that the ternary structure of his science of society explicates the doctrine of the Trinity, that the power that maintains society may be identified with the love of God, and that the force that maintains what he called the inner society of God and the individual corresponds to grace all drew theological rebukes, as did the implication that since Christ’s role as mediator is carried out through society, it is only by means of ­participation in society that human beings encounter God. Finally, Bonald’s claim that he had proved the truth of Christianity by history rather than by theology led to the accusation that he had placed the authority of history above that of the church.82 Bonald regarded himself as an ­obedient son of the church, and although as such he professed to accept the church’s teaching, he took advantage of his status as a layman, which placed him outside the direct authority exercised by the church hierarchy over its clergy, to ignore the pronouncements of French clerics on the orthodoxy of his science of society.83

80 Bastier, “Linguistique et politique,” 546. 81 Klinck, French Counterrevolutionary Theorist, 130. 82 Ibid., 139–40, 177–80. See Bonald, Théorie du pouvoir, vol. 14, 188–9. 83 Bonald, Théorie du pouvoir, vol. 14, 446; Klinck, French Counterrevolutionary Theorist, 79–81.

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Bonald and Restoration Policy

If Louis de Bonald, as we have just seen, gave little heed to theological criticisms of his Traditionalist science of society, it was because applying its lessons to post-revolutionary France was his priority. Bonald’s attempts to influence policy during the Napoleonic Empire having met with little success, he looked to the Restoration with renewed hope that the Bourbons would take to heart his prescriptions for a new religio-social order. The biographical sketch at the beginning of c­hapter 4 outlined Bonald’s career during the Restoration. This chapter first examines in somewhat greater detail the political and religious currents within the Restoration and then locates Bonald’s political theology more fully within them.1

R e s to r at i o n M i n i s t r i e s a n d F ac t i o n s The legal basis of the Restoration, La charte constitutionnelle de la France, or Constitutional Charter, promulgated on 4 June 1814, was a hybrid document that re-established Legitimism while maintaining certain elements of the revolutionary heritage as the necessary price to be paid for essential support for the regime from empire notables and those who had bought property confiscated during the Revolution. The Charter’s compromise recognized the principles of equality, individual liberty and property, freedom of religion, the accountability of ministers before an elected parliament, and trial by jury, but it granted them

 1 On the Restoration, see Jardin and Tudesq, Restoration and Reaction, 3–69; Furet, Revolutionary France, 274–322; and Bertier de Sauvigny, La Restauration.

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only by royal fiat; that is, they were established not as natural rights flowing from the sovereignty of the nation but, in the words of its preamble, as privileges graciously bestowed by Louis XVIII. Further, the king, although governing through his ministers, was considered sacred and unaccountable in his person, and he held both executive authority and considerable legislative power since he both initiated and promulgated legislation. The Restoration’s initial spirit of compromise was overwhelmed by the trauma of the Hundred Days, which followed Napoleon’s return from Elba, and by a sharp shift to the right after the Battle of Waterloo. Elections for the 1815–16 session of the Chamber of Deputies returned a legislature dominated by men deeply hostile to the principles and personnel of the Revolution and the empire. The Chevaliers de la foi, a network of counter-revolutionary nobles established clandestinely under the empire, provided leadership and legislative focus for this bloc, which soon became known as the ultra-royalists. The Ultras agitated for harsh measures against their opponents, including suspension of some civil liberties, censorship, and a revised amnesty law that would exclude large numbers of people from its protection, and in religious affairs, they demanded the reimposition of ecclesiastical authority over the civil realm.2 Louis XVIII, however, was displeased with the Ultras’ intransigence and in September 1816 dissolved the Chamber of Deputies. The ensuing general election returned, as he had hoped, a more moderate Chamber, and from then until February 1820, France was governed by a constitutional monarchist bloc under a series of ministries in which Elie Decazes emerged as the leading figure. The moderates attempted to govern in the spirit of the Charter. They were royalist and Catholic, to be sure, but they recognized that there could be no return to the Old Regime and that elements of the revolutionary heritage had become permanent. To the left of but co-operating with the constitutional monarchists were the Restoration Liberals (see parts 4 and 5). Liberals had at first denounced the Charter on the grounds that its investiture of sovereignty in the person of the king betrayed the fundamental revolutionary ­principle of the sovereignty of the nation. They also feared that the Charter’s ambiguous wording on such crucial matters as the relations

 2 Kroen, Politics and Theater, 111–12.

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between church and state, censorship, and the voting rights of the Chamber disguised an attempt to reintroduce absolutism. Very soon, however, although still suspicious of the intentions of its framers, Liberals began to treat the Charter as the king’s official act of acceptance and institutionalization of the civil achievements of the revolutionary era. Interpreting the Charter as the institutionalization, rather than the repudiation, of the Revolution had the further advantage of allowing Liberals to defend the gains of the Revolution without appearing disloyal to the Restoration and even to turn the tables on the Ultras by exposing them, because of their rejection of the Charter, as the enemies of the king and the true revolutionaries.3 The Ultras, for their part, set themselves against both Liberals and constitutional monarchists. Their advice to the king was unequivocal: Louis must recognize that the interests of the monarchy were identical with those of the second estate, which he must support in every instance against the encroachments of the third estate or risk the fate of Louis XVI. The Ultra program, however, far from truly representing a return to the order of things under the Old Regime, was instead a new construction of relationships among the nobility, king, and church. Whereas under the Old Regime the nobility had resisted royal power as much as it had supported it, Ultras now proclaimed the nobility and the monarchy to be tightly linked by shared memories of suffering during the revolutionary period. Similarly, in marked contrast to the eighteenth century, the nobility flocked back to a church that it now recognized as a powerful ally against the revolutionary spirit and from which it sought expiation. Finally, the Ultras replaced the old ­juridico-political concept of the monarchy with an expiatory cult of the martyr king. These new relationships, which provided substance to the renewed alliance of throne and altar that was at the heart of the Ultra program, were as revolutionary in relation to the Old Regime as the Revolution itself.4 Ultras viewed the Charter as a shameful and unnecessary compromise with the Revolution and denounced its constitutionalism as a betrayal of royal sovereignty. The 1815 reprinting of Joseph de Maistre’s Considérations sur la France (overseen, somewhat disingenuously, by none

 3 Mellon, Political Uses of History, 47–50.  4 Furet, Revolutionary France, 179–80, 295–6.

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other than Bonald) was widely interpreted as a calculated attack against the king. Rallying around Artois, the king’s brother, Ultras scorned Louis XVIII as a Liberal dupe but were forced to watch with mounting fury, as constitutional monarchists seemed firmly in control of government. Everything changed, however, on 13 February 1820 with the assassination of Louis XVIII’s nephew, Charles Ferdinand, Duke of Berry. In the wave of reaction that followed, a former émigré, ArmandEmmanuel de Vignerot du Plessis, Duke of Richelieu, replaced Decazes, and the new government passed legislation suspending personal ­liberties, restricting freedom of the press, and promulgating an electoral law that reduced the franchise and increased the power of the richest section of the electorate. Richelieu, however, although his ministry included Ultras, was not himself an Ultra and, although far from adverse to repressive measures, did try to temper Ultra extremism. Then, in December 1821, having lost the support of the king, Richelieu was forced to resign, and an openly Ultra ministry was called to power. The ensuing government of Joseph de Villèle, which would remain in power until 1828, set about obliterating the conciliative program of the ­moderate constitutional monarchists through legislation that further suspended personal liberties, tightened press laws and reintroduced censorship for newspapers and periodicals, gave greater still electoral influence to the richest tranche of eligible voters, and compensated former émigrés for property confiscated during the Revolution. The Ultra program, however, did not result in a return to the Old Regime but instead led to the establishment of a new form of authoritarian and hierarchical society. It is significant in this respect that the Ultras, who sought to undo so many innovations of the revolutionary period, did not wish to dismantle the centralized bureaucracy created by Napoleon Bonaparte. Whereas constitutional monarchists like François-René de Chateaubriand warned of the dangers of retaining the professional bureaucracy of the empire under a constitutional regime, the Ultras, who despised constitutionalism, recognized the value of a centralized administrative state for the implementation of their program.5 Favourable results in the 1824 elections increased the Ultras’ power in the Chamber of Deputies, and when later that year

 5 Broers, Europe under Napoleon, 272; Furet, Revolutionary France, 297–8.

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Louis XVIII was succeeded by his brother Artois as Charles X, their program enjoyed the full support of the king. As well as being authoritarian and hierarchical, the society that the Ultras were attempting to create would be Catholic. We have noted the influence of the Chevaliers de la foi in the very early years of the Restoration. The Chevaliers were part of a broader group of laymen and clergy, known as the Congrégation, dedicated to restoring the influence of the Catholic Church over French society. The influence of the Congrégation quickly grew in tandem with Ultra power and by 1824, with the accession to the throne of one its most devoted members in Charles X, had become a powerful force in French society. Ultra efforts to re-Catholicize French society drew support from the revival of religion during the Restoration period and from the repudiation of the rationalist tradition to which broad sections of educated society attributed the catastrophe of the Revolution.6 Beyond the general religious revival, the Ultra version of the alliance of throne and altar required the elimination of the separation of church and state achieved by the revolutionary regimes. Accordingly, the Villèle government actively encouraged the revitalization of the church through measures such as indemnification for property confiscated during the Revolution, encouraging the return of religious orders, and placing members of the clergy in important administrative and ­government positions. This policy is particularly clear in the Ultras’ transformation of the Imperial University and its secular system of education. Early in the Restoration, Catholics had begun to construct an alternative Catholic school system, but once the Ultras gained power, they decided to clericalize the University itself. Under Denis de Frayssinous, from 1824 to 1828 minister of both public instruction and religious affairs, clergy took over leadership of the school system and introduced moral and religious instruction to the curriculum.7 However, the most striking expression of the Ultra attempt to fuse church and state was the law of sacrilege. This law, passed in 1825 in the face of intense opposition, prescribed the death penalty for theft of holy vessels containing the consecrated host and death preceded by the cutting off of one hand (the punishment for parricide) for  6 Bergeron, France under Napoleon, 195–7.  7 Jardin and Tudesq, Restoration and Reaction, 63–4; Klinck, French Counter­ revolutionary Theorist, 201.

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profanation of the host. The law was, and was intended to be, a ­repudiation in the most striking terms of the principle of separation between citizenship and sacramental conformity in post-revolutionary French society.8 The Ultras’ religious policies provoked widespread resistance. Idéologues and Liberals denounced the return of the mal sacerdotal as a violation of the civil liberties guaranteed by the Charter,9 and clergy and church property were targets of lower-class violence. Even moderate Catholic royalists, however, were troubled by the Ultras’ clericalization of society, a perspective powerfully expressed by a defender of the monarchy, François de Montlosier. His Mémoire à consulter sur un système religieux, politique (1826), in denouncing clericalism, the Congrégation, Jesuitism, and ultramontanism as calamitous for the country, p ­ recipitated intense debates and drove a wedge between the Ultras and more ­moderate Catholic royalists.10 The Ultra program suffered a setback in 1827 when Villèle lost his majority in the Chamber and a moderate ministry under Jean-Baptiste Gay, Viscount of Martignac, came to power. The Martignac administration rescinded the more oppressive Ultra legislation and placed checks on the clericalization of society and the University. Then in August 1829, the king overruled the Chamber and appointed an extreme Ultra government led by Jules de Polignac and François-Régis de La Bourdonnaye. In less than a year, the ineffectiveness of the government, electoral victory by the opposition, and an attempted coup by Charles X and his ministers precipitated the July Revolution of 1830 and the overthrow of the Restoration regime.

 8 Kroen, Politics and Theater, 113–14.  9 Constantin-François Volney, for example, responded to the Restoration’s revival of the ritual anointing of kings with oil as a sign of divine favour by publishing Histoire de Samuel, inventeur de sacre des rois (1819), a work where he rehearsed the ­lessons of Les ruines, ou Méditations sur les révolutions des empires (1791): religious claims to supernatural content are false; priests and prophets are motivated by ambition, self-interest, and greed; and the union of religion and political power inevitably brings despotism. His earlier works – proscribed by both the Catholic Church and the Bourbons’ police  – remained touchstones for the Restoration’s opponents. His funeral in 1820 occasioned an outpouring of anti-clerical and republican sentiment. Gaulmier, Un grand témoin, 315, 326. 10 Jardin and Tudesq, Restoration and Reaction, 65; Gaulmier, Un grand témoin, 127–8.

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B o n a l d a n d R e s to r at i o n Political Life Bonald had been a vocal supporter of the Ultra cause in the Chamber of Deputies even before the Ultra ascendancy. Under the Villèle ministry, during which, as noted in chapter 4, he held a number of government and administrative positions, he shared the Ultra conviction that the moment had come to settle scores with the ideas and people responsible for the Revolution. Central to Bonald’s thinking throughout this period was the contrast between legality and legitimacy that first appeared in his writings dating from the early Restoration. There is, he said, a legal state of society, which is established by human will alone, and a legitimate state, which is established by the will of God and is both the expression of the eternal order and the consequence of the primitive and fundamental laws of human society. Social progress consists in making legal all that is ­legitimate and in making legitimate all that is legal.11 Bonald, we may say, assigned to the Restoration the mission of making the legal coincide with the legitimate. In a general sense, this goal was shared by all Ultras, but Bonald gave it the particular form of re-establishing French political and social life on the properly constituted triadic order set out in his own science of society. Under the Restoration, then, in his writings, in his speeches to the Chamber of Deputies, and in his private advice to government, Bonald attempted to push the Restoration regime toward enacting legislation consonant with his theorizing. He was particularly outspoken on the subjects of the Charter, censorship and tolerance, family law, and religious policy. Bonald’s version of the Ultra interpretation of the Charter as a shameful capitulation to the principles of the Revolution identified many of its articles as incompatible with his conception of legitimacy – above all, its division of power between the king and the representatives of the nation. Such constitutionalism, and more generally the very idea of rights, contradicts Bonald’s conception of the nature of power, according to which all power, including public power, comes from God. Unity of power, then, is the legitimate state of political society, whereas

11 Bonald, Pensées sur divers sujets, vol. 6, 170–1; Observations sur l’ouvrage, 447.

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plurality (or separation) of powers had become its current legal state.12 Bonald characterized the Charter as a work of folly and darkness because it enshrined in law the revolutionary principle of the division of power between the king and the representatives of the nation. He was equally disapproving of the king himself. Drawing on the apocalyptic imagery of a comet presaging ruin, Bonald contrasted the fixed sun bringing life and illumination to all around it, which Louis XVIII ought to have been, with what he had become by his acceptance of the Charter: a wandering star whose irregular passage across the sky ­portended disaster.13 Bonald addressed the Liberal interpretation of the Charter most fully in his lengthy refutation of Germaine de Staël’s posthumous Considérations sur les principaux événements de la Révolution française (1818), a work in which the Liberal theorist presented French history as a story of the progress of liberty where the moderate 1789 phase of the Revolution continued and extended an ancient tradition of liberty embodied before the Revolution by the monarchy and the Estates General. By depicting the Restoration and the Charter as the heirs of both the monarchical and revolutionary elements of this tradition of liberty, her Considérations both offered a synthesis of French history and celebrated the Charter as the contemporary expression of this synthesis. She urged the Restoration regime to accept civil equality and modern society, to take note of bourgeois advancement, and to keep pace with the evolution of minds and customs.14 Bonald’s response, after opening with a few ad feminam slights, noted that Staël’s politics were built on the Reformation principle of acknowledging no authority beyond that of the individual conscience.15 He then came to the crux of his analysis: out of a hypothetical fear that the people might become oppressed (and Bonald was adamant that the French people were never oppressed under their kings), Liberals

12 Bonald, Pensées sur divers sujets, vol. 6, 171, 341. 13 Bonald to Maistre, 7 October 1814, in Maistre, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 14, 300; Bonald to Maistre, 10 July 1819, in ibid., vol. 14, 342, 344. 14 Furet, Revolutionary France, 285, 297. 15 Staël indeed insisted, not only in Considérations but also in De la littérature (1800) and De l’Allemagne (1813), on the value of the Protestant principle of individual judgment for historical progress in the modern period. See Rosenblatt, “Madame de Staël,” 153–4.

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declared the people sovereign without allowing for any opposing power in the – to Bonald’s mind, inevitable – event that the people became oppressors themselves. Bonald described this strategy as the legal ­establishment of disorder so as to prevent a hypothetical violation of order, comparing it the act of a madman who builds his house in the middle of a river so as to have water at hand in case of fire.16 Bonald similarly contested Liberal ideas of what constitutes public liberty. Such things as representative government, trial by jury, freedom of the press, and voting on taxes, he said, do not constitute public liberty because, aside from presenting grave dangers, they are insufficiently general. That is, their good is not universally felt, whereas true public liberty has only to show itself to be the object of the loyalty and assent of all. In this political version of universal consent, true public liberty lies in the opportunity for happiness and advancement through participation in the family and the state. It follows that the power exercised by the family and the state must not be compromised and that individuals must remain subordinate to them.17 Bonald left no room for a conception of rights as the Liberals conceived of them; or rather, he concluded that people have only one right, that of being governed, just as kings have only one duty, that of governing.18 Debates over censorship during the Restoration focused on “freedom of the press,” although at this time the phrase referred to the right to speak and publish opinions and so corresponded more to freedom of thought and expression in general than to specific protection for the Fifth Estate. Already under the empire Bonald had equated tolerance with skepticism. In 1806, responding to Idéologue calls for the ­continuation of religious and civil liberty, Bonald asserted that tolerance is equivalent to skepticism because by treating truth and error interchangeably, it considers opinions as indifferent in themselves and recognizes no certainties. He then argued against freedom of expression and for censorship on the grounds that a society in which people are free to decide what is right or true is unviable. Just as, that is, in the physical world anyone who attempts to construct a building without following the law of gravity will be crushed under its ruins, so too will

16 Bonald, Observations sur l’ouvrage, 391–2, 396, 445–6. 17 Ibid., 478–80. 18 Bonald, Pensées sur divers sujets, vol. 6, 12.

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society collapse if it is not constructed in accordance with the moral laws that are every bit as absolute as physical laws.19 Intolerance follows for Bonald from the absolute nature of the laws that govern both the social and the natural worlds. Since legitimate laws correspond to the divinely established order of things, they reflect the absolute nature of this order. Similarly, the sciences – natural as well as moral (by which Bonald meant his own science of society) – that describe this order should reflect their absolute nature. Bonald allowed that tolerance is permissible in matters on which certainty has yet to be reached, but the implication of this idea is that intolerance increases in tandem with human knowledge as the number of doubtful opinions that have to be tolerated steadily decreases.20 Bonald continued this line of thought under the Restoration in speeches to the Chamber. A characteristic speech from 1817 offered a rosy, paternalistic account of censorship and traced the furor over the liberty to think and write, which he said had seized all minds for the last 100 years, to the loss of certainty in religion, morals, and politics and even in literature and taste. In practical terms, Bonald advocated censorship for journals but not for books since he considered journals to pose a greater danger given that their wider circulation facilitates the rapid spread of false ideas. Nevertheless, he bemoaned the republication of irreligious works from the last ­century, particular in cheap editions.21 This last issue was particularly close to the hearts of Ultras for reasons that Bonald caught in a rare personal reflection: “It is difficult for the father of a family not to regard as a personal enemy the author of a bad book that will corrupt the hearts of his children.”22 Another key locus of Bonald’s distinction between the legal and the legitimate is family law. Power comes from God, he said, not only in the public sphere but also in the domestic sphere, where the universal ternary of power-minister-subject is instantiated as father-motherchild. Just as the corruption of this grammar in the public sphere brings anarchy and revolution, so too does its corruption in the domestic

19 Bonald, “Réflexions philosophiques,” 202, 207. 20 Ibid., 209–11. 21 Bonald, “Opinion sur le projet,” 291, 294–5, 298–9. 22 Bonald, Pensées sur divers sujets, vol. 6, 259; see also 278–9.

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sphere cause chaos in the family.23 Although this view is in line with his assertion in an early work that misery results if a husband obeys his wife,24 his principal concern in regard to family law during the Restoration was divorce. Building on the arguments of his book Du divorce, considéré au XIXè siècle, relativement à l’état domestique et à l’état publique (1801), Bonald now identified the indissolubility of marriage as the legitimate state of domestic society established by God from the beginning, whereas the dissolubility of the domestic bond is a legal state wherever governments have established it in law.25 Making the legal correspond to the legitimate in France now required the abolition of divorce, which Bonald repeatedly demanded in speeches to the Chamber. Divorce occupied a central place in Bonald’s thought because he did not regard it as simply a domestic issue. Laws permitting divorce, he maintained, alter the primitive constitution of society. In a properly constituted society – that is, one corresponding to the primitive and regular order of society – the family becomes the state and its moeurs become laws. But when the natural development of society is inverted and the state imposes illegitimate laws on the family, its moeurs become disordered and the family is destroyed. In such cases, Bonald warned, the disordered family becomes a force of social disorder that will in turn undermine the state. He insisted that the only power that the state has over the family is to affirm its bond and not to dissolve it.26 It is in this light that what Bonald presented as the decline of marriage since the Reformation must be seen. The Reformers, he said, declared marriage to be no longer a sacrament; the eighteenth century instituted civil marriage, failing to recognize that marriage is at once a domestic, civil, and religious act; and the Revolution legalized divorce in the name of liberty, equality, and the rights of man.27 Moreover, the law 23 Ibid., vol. 6, 341. This idea represents Bonald’s particular version of the widespread counter-revolutionary conviction that to assert the rights of wives and children against husbands and fathers was to undermine hierarchical authority in government and religion. See McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment, 40. 24 Bonald, Théorie du pouvoir, vol. 14, 71. 25 Bonald, Pensées sur divers sujets, vol. 6, 170–1; Bonald, Observations sur l’ouvrage, 447–8. 26 Bonald, “Proposition faite à la Chambre des Députés,” 57, 81. The Restoration did, in fact, outlaw divorce in 1815. 27 Ibid., 63, 66; Bonald, “Opinion sur la proposition de M. de La Chèze-Murel,” 203–5.

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legalizing divorce, which Bonald called the eldest daughter of the shameful philosophy that had overthrown the world and lost France, was not merely a by-product of the political revolution; it was a revolution in its own right. The monarchy, Bonald declared, had perished not only in the state but also in the family; France, that is, had undergone at once a revolution of laws and a revolution of moeurs. The Restoration would not be complete until the revolution of moeurs as well as the revolution of laws had been overthrown, and doing so required the restoration of absolute patriarchal authority in the family every bit as much as the restoration of absolute monarchical authority in the state.28 Many aspects of Restoration religious policy drew Bonald’s attention. A particular target of his ire was the secular University. Bonald was greatly heartened by the steps toward the clericalization of public education taken by the Restoration regime and correspondingly shaken by the reactions that they provoked and by the measures of the Martignac ministry to check the influence of religious orders and to bring independent preparatory schools for clergy (i.e., the petits ­séminaires) under the control of the University.29 On issues specifically concerning the church, Bonald advocated tirelessly for both the return of, or at least indemnification for, church property confiscated during the Revolution and a guarantee of the church’s right to own property, all on the grounds that owning property was necessary for its independence.30 Bonald opposed freedom of religion at every opportunity. If, as we have seen, tolerance in general is for Bonald equivalent to skepticism, then religious tolerance is equivalent to religious indifference, and thanks to the irreligious writings of the last century, it was now widespread in French society.31 Bonald adamantly opposed ­citizenship for French Jews on the religious grounds that because the Jews collectively are guilty of a terrible crime and lie under a terrible ­anathema, individual Jews can become citizens of a Christian state only 28 Bonald, “Proposition faite à la Chambre des Députés,” 80; Bonald, “Opinion sur les élections,” 231n1. Bonald’s campaign against divorce drew support beyond the ranks of out-and-out counter-revolutionaries because it addressed anxieties about social dissolution and the civil status of women that were felt across political lines in early-nineteenth-century France. See Rosanvallon, Le moment Guizot, 100–1. 29 Bonald, Pensées sur divers sujets, vol. 6, 286; Moulinié, De Bonald, 124, 130. 30 Bonald, “Opinion sur la proposition de M. le comte de Blangy,” 102. 31 Bonald, “Réflexions philosophiques,” 202; Bonald, “Opinion sur la proposition de M. de La Chèze-Murel,” 195.

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by becoming Christians.32 Bonald, finally, now sitting in the Chamber of Peers, was one of the most extreme supporters of the law of sacrilege and its harsh punishments.33 All the elements of Bonald’s campaign to make the legal state of the Restoration coincide with the legitimate state were specific instantiations of a single imperative: to terminate the separation between religion and the state effected by the Revolution. In an early speech to the Chamber of Deputies, Bonald declared the re-establishment of religion to be the most pressing need of the people and the first duty of its deputies.34 In another speech, he remarked that the Revolution, which had begun with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789), would end only with the declaration of the rights of God.35 Only in religion, he added in yet another speech, does society find the supreme reason of power and the ultimate justification of duty or obedience; outside of it and without it, one can no longer explain why one commands and the other obeys. He then went on to link his opposition to the separation of church and state to his fundamental definition of a human being: “If man is, as has been said, an intelligence served by organs, society is nothing other than religion served by politics ... One must consider politics from the point of view of religion, and religion from the point of view of politics. They have been separated too much, and it is henceforth necessary to unite them without confounding them.”36 Henri Moulinié, Bonald’s largely sympathetic biographer, defended Bonald from the charge of being a theocrat on the grounds that what Bonald wanted was not theocracy but an intimate alliance of mutual support where the church preserves the religio-social order by policing individual wills, whereas the government preserves the same order by repressing actions.37 David Klinck, for his part, concludes from his study that Bonald was not a theocrat, strictly speaking, but a modern 32 Bonald, “Sur les Juifs,” 130. 33 Moulinié, De Bonald, 125–6. 34 Bonald, “Proposition faite à la Chambre des Députés,” 65. 35 Bonald, “Opinion sur la proposition de M. le comte de Blangy,” 95. 36 Bonald, “Opinion sur la proposition de M. de La Chèze-Murel,” 192, 193 (quotation). 37 Moulinié, De Bonald, 319–21. This formulation strongly recalls Dan Edelstein’s analysis of the complementary relationship between the Jacobins’ Cult of the Supreme Being and their law on revolutionary tribunals (see chapter 3 herein). Edelstein, Terror of Natural Right.

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ideologue who wished to bring religion and the nation together under the domination of the state and laymen rather than of the church and its clergy.38 Bonald, it is true, maintained that clergy ought not to intervene in the temporal affairs of states, thereby distancing himself from the position of many Ultras as well as of Joseph de Maistre and the early Félicité de Lamennais. Moulinié had to admit, however, that in practice Bonald did not always observe the principle of separation between the political domain and the religious domain.39 Even this concession, however, does not go far enough because it is highly ­questionable that the distinction between the two domains was valid for Bonald in the first place. He distinguished, to be sure, between civil society and religious society, but the entire basis of his science of society is that society, no less than religion, is the expression of divinely ­established laws. No true separation between religion and the state is possible where religion is the basis of society. Bonald may not have confounded religion and the state, but he nevertheless united them in an unequal partnership. In defining society as “nothing other than religion served by politics,” Bonald declared religion to be the master and politics its valet. Klinck’s assessment, for its part, recognizes that for Bonald laymen and the state, rather than clergy and the church, were the ministers of divine law for society, but Klinck confuses ­clericalism  and theocracy. Bonald distanced himself to a degree from clericalism, but his science of society, in which divine law governs human life and the role of the state is to make civil life correspond to divine law, is a version of theocracy. Bonald is something rare in Western political theology: a theocrat suspicious of clericalism.

38 Klinck, French Counterrevolutionary Theorist, 201. 39 Moulinié, De Bonald, 325–6.

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P art Thr e e Theological Traditionalism: Félicité de Lamennais and the Mennaisians Part 3 traces the construction of the conceptualization of religion inherent in a variation on the Traditionalist project, namely the reinscription of modern society under the authority of revealed truth worked out by Félicité de Lammenais and the circle of young clerics and lay Catholics who gathered around him in the 1820s. Whereas Louis de Bonald’s sociological Traditionalism attempted to identify rationally and empirically identifiable laws underlying and structuring social order, Mennaisian theological Traditionalism is built on the general reason of humankind, or universal consent to the ideas contained in the primitive revelation. Chapter 7 sets out the epistemological and apologetic program of Lamennais’s four-volume Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de religion (1817–23), focusing on the critique of philosophy and on the alternative sensus communis epistemology of its first two volumes. It then discusses the Mennaisians’ concept of Catholic science, which subordinated intellectual inquiry to Catholic teaching about the origin and ultimate end of humankind, as the solution to the crisis of the separation of knowledge from belief, which they identified as the root cause of the ills of their day. Chapter 8 analyzes Lamennais’s theology of religions as set out in the third and fourth volumes of Essai sur l’indifférence, in which he attempted to prove that Christianity is the one true religion and that it has existed since the origin of the world, under the subheadings of the primitive religion and its corruption, Christianity as old as the world, and an encyclopedia of witnesses. It then examines the Catholic science of religions by which the Mennaisians sought to enhance the evidential basis of

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Lamennais’s history of religions by demonstrating that the knowledge produced by scholarly investigations of the religions of the world confirms and explains the truth of the Catholic religion. Chapter 9 discusses the political theology that the Mennaisians developed in the 1820s in parallel with their conception of Catholic science and its evolution into liberal-Catholicism around 1830. In now arguing that what they called the enigma of modern history – the correct relationship between God and liberty – would eventually be resolved in a new social order where material power was totally subordinated to the spiritual power represented by the Catholic Church, the Mennaisians worked out a model of modernity that adapted political theology to new historical realities. In so doing, they developed novel strategies of engagement with the administrative state – strategies that have persisted within Catholicism and, more recently, been taken up by conservative Protestants.

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Lamennais’s Theological Traditionalism

Lamennais Hugues-Félicité Robert de Lamennais, called Féli by his intimates, was born in Saint-Malo, Brittany, in 1782. His father, Pierre-Louis Robert, a merchant and shipowner, added “de la Mennais” to the family name upon being ennobled in 1788. Although not old nobility like the Bonalds, the family was royalist and Catholic and, during the Revolution, attended secret church services and hid nonjuring priests. Féli, a ­generation younger than Louis de Bonald, was seven years old at the outbreak of the French Revolution. He was a difficult child and often ill; after his mother died when he was six, his father, preoccupied with business concerns, sent him to live with his uncle, Robert des Saudrais, at La Chênaie, the small family estate near Saint-Malo. Wilful, temperamental, and unreceptive to formal schooling, Lamennais achieved his education by means of a concordat of sorts with his uncle, the terms of which gave Féli free run of his uncle’s excellent library on the condition that Féli think carefully about what he read. And, together with his elder brother, Jean-Marie, he read voraciously: theology and church history; classical authors; modern literature, including English and Italian works; science and mathematics; and modern philosophy. Not only did his uncle permit the brothers to read Enlightenment authors – including Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert, Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, and Paul-Henri Thiry d’Holbach – normally considered off-limits in pious Catholic households, but he also taught them to respond intellectually to the doubts that the impious authors

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raised in their minds. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, above all, alternately fascinated and repelled them.1 Once Lamennais was of age, the lack of any great family wealth made the question of a career unavoidable. His father asked him to join the family firm, but he had no taste for the business world, and his father did not insist. Over a decade of uncertainty followed, during  which Lamennais restlessly alternated among stints teaching ­mathematics at the Collège de Saint-Malo (a preparatory school for future seminarians founded in 1802 by his brother, among others), bouts of serious illness, and lengthy periods of study in the tranquility of his beloved La Chênaie. During these years, Lamennais collaborated with his brother on theological writings addressing the woeful state of religious life under the Napoleonic Empire. Réflexions sur l’état de l’église en France pendant le XVIIIè siècle, et son situation actuelle appeared in 1808, but its entire print run was confiscated by the police (with a second edition appearing in 1814 after Napoleon Bonaparte’s abdication), and ­publication of their three-volume Tradition de l’église sur l’institution des évêques, a critique of Gallicanism in the form of a history of the French Catholic Church, was delayed until 1814. During the Hundred Days, Lamennais fled to London, fearing – probably unwarrantedly – that Bonaparte planned to arrest him for his denunciations of ­despotism and irreligion. Meanwhile, there was still the problem of a career. Brother Jean had for some time been pushing for the obvious solution of a career in the church, and by 1807 the twenty-five-year-old Lamennais had acknowledged that the priesthood was the only profession appropriate to his intellectual interests and religious feelings. Even so, he began the steps toward ordination with some reluctance arising from a combination of intellectual and personal concerns. Intellectually, he considered the church outdated in certain ways; personally, he worried that his health would not stand up to the demands of clerical life, and he knew that

  1 The basic sources for Lamennais’s biography remain Maréchal, La jeunesse de Lamennais; and Le Guillou, L’évolution de la pensée religieuse. In English, there are Stearns, Priest and Revolutionary; Reardon, Religion in the Age of Romanticism, 176–206; and Vidler, Prophecy and Papacy. Thomas Kselman has noted that scholarly interest in Lamennais often accompanies periods of agitation for reform in the Catholic Church, including the modernist crisis and the Second Vatican Council. Kselman, Conscience and Conversion, 313n5.

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the discipline and obedience that it required would be a stumbling block. (In 1836, Pope Gregory XVI would refer to Lamennais’s “satanic pride”.)2 But Lamennais’s reservations must not be exaggerated; he was personally devout, and his loyalty to the church in this period was total. Louis Le Guillou suggests that Lamennais’s hesitations were more over the form than over the foundation of his religious engagement.3 Jean introduced him to clerics in Brittany and Paris who helped to assuage his doubts and guided him toward the priesthood. Finally, in March 1816 at thirty-five years of age, Lamennais entered the priesthood. He would never have a church of his own; his bishop, recognizing that he was not cut out to be a parish priest, encouraged Lamennais’s own sense that he was called to serve the church through intellectual work and writing. The French Catholic Church was in a sorry state by the end of the empire: many church buildings had been destroyed or were in poor repair; a shortage of priests left thousands of parishes without a priest; the outdated curricula of the few surviving seminaries did not ­adequately prepare their students for the intellectual challenges of the day; and the regular clergy, formerly responsible for much of the charitable and  educational work of the church, had been almost entirely ­disbanded. The Restoration unleashed an outburst of Catholic renewal: repairing and rebuilding churches, training new priests, improving the quality of seminary education, reintroducing religious orders (­particularly teaching orders) in France, and re-Christianizing the populace through the Missions to the Interior movement. Lamennais himself participated in internal missions in Brittany, earning a reputation as a terrifying and effective preacher, but it was his four-volume Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de religion that made Lamennais a leading light of Catholic renewal. Its first volume, which appeared in 1817 and served as a r­ allying cry for the Catholic revival of the early Restoration, particularly for the young clergy who were its vanguard, was an immediate and enormous success: its first print run of 1,500 copies was exhausted within two months, and by the end of the year, it had sold 13,000 ­copies. Volume 2 appeared in 1820, followed in 1821 by Défense de l’essai sur l’indifférence and in 1823 by the third and fourth volumes.

  2 Le Guillou, L’évolution de la pensée religieuse, 3.   3 Le Guillou, Lamennais, 18.

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An announced fifth volume never appeared. Essai sur l’indifférence, drawing on Lamennais’s deep familiarity with modern philosophy acquired in the course of his unusual education, attempted to refute the irreligion of the previous decades and to re-establish the intellectual dominance of the church over French society. Consequently, it was a contribution to the Traditionalist project of reinscribing modern society under the authority of revealed truth, but in the context of the French church, it struck a radically new tone in apologetics by rejecting the ­still-dominant Cartesian approach to theology as incapable of addressing adequately the intellectual challenges of the post-­revolutionary period. No conventionally educated priest could have written Essai sur l’indifférence. As volume 1 of Essai sur l’indifférence had instantly established Lamennais as a champion of the church, it was inevitable, given the close association of Catholicism with royalism in Restoration political life, that he would be drawn into conservative and ultra-royalist circles. Already, in 1815–16, Lamennais had published five articles in Ami de la religion. Over the next few years, he collaborated with a succession of right-wing journals: Le Conservateur in 1818–19, which brought him into regular contact with François-René de Chateaubriand and Louis de Bonald, among other lions of the right; Le Défenseur, which he helped to found in 1820 along with Bonald, J.M.B. Bins de Saint-Victor, and Antoine Eugène Genoude, among others; and the flagship journal of the Ultras, Le Drapeau blanc, in 1822–23. Differences, however, over Gallicanism and the proper relationship between the Restoration regime and the church soon led Lamennais to distance himself from the Ultras.

Theological Traditionalism The volumes of Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de religion set out Lamennais’s theological Traditionalism. Volume 1, sizing up the enemy, analyzes the various forms of religious indifference and their fatal effects on religion and society. Volume 2 and Défense de l’essai, the heart of Lamennais’s program, set out his critique of philosophy as incapable of reaching certainty and his alternative sensus communis epistemology. Volumes 3 and 4, to be discussed in the next chapter, develop a theology of religions as supporting evidence for his apologetic project.

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Religious Indifference The indifference toward religion that is the subject of Essai sur l’indifférence is not only the heedlessness or apathy toward religion that Lamennais saw flourishing in France after a generation of Revolution and empire but also the philosophical argument that since truth or certainty in religious matters is rationally unattainable, a social policy of religious tolerance is justified. Lamennais regarded the present age as worse than ages when heresy flourished but when people were at least passionate about religion. He proposed to demonstrate that indifference is absurd in its principles and fatal in its effects. It is absurd because it rests on the principles that we have no interest in assuring ourselves of the truths of religion and that it is impossible to discover truths that are important for us to know. It is fatal because it leads directly to all calamities and crimes by destroying the moral faculties and subverting social order.4 Lamennais distinguished among three classes of the religiously indifferent: those who consider religion to be a purely political institution that may be necessary to keep the populace in line but is philosophically false; those who deny the possibility of revelation but accept a rational natural religion; and those who accept revelation in principle but subject revealed truths to the scrutiny of human reason and retain only certain articles of faith. These three classes of the religiously indifferent ­correspond, respectively, to Enlightenment philosophes (or les lumières), deists, and Protestants.5 In attacking eighteenth-century thinkers such Voltaire, Raynal, and Diderot, as well as and above all Rousseau – there is no explicit discussion of the Idéologues in volume 1 – Lamennais argued, first, that their doctrine is destructive of society because it is destructive of religion, without which society cannot exist; and, second, that their doctrine is absurd and contradictory because it supposes not only that a society would be unable to exist without religion but also that religion had to be invented by an already existing society. Lamennais assured his readers that the purely political attitude of the philosophes toward religion can be overthrown by refuting the absolute ­indifference toward the truth of religion on which it rests.6 Deists, whom Lamennais defined as proponents of a natural religion – Rousseau of  4 Lamennais, Essai sur l’indifférence, vol. 1, xxvii, xxix–xxx.   5 Ibid., vol. 1, 19, 131.   6 Ibid., vol. 1, 60–1, 273.

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Emile (1762) figures prominently here, along with English authors – similarly accept the sovereignty of human reason. The distinctive characteristic of deism being its total rejection of revelation in favour of a natural religion constructed out of what individuals think it is rational to believe, Lamenais proposed to refute it by proving the necessity and existence of a revealed religion.7 The third category of the religiously indifferent includes Calvinist theologians, English Latitudinarians, American sectarians, and German biblical critics. Their common ­element – and the fatal defect of Protestantism itself – is that these Protestants purport to accept some revealed truths yet use human reason to pick and chose among them and so place human reason above ­revelation, whereas true Christians must accept all revealed truths since to deny any revealed truth is to overthrow the foundation of revelation itself. Protestantism leads inevitably not only to deism  – indeed, Lamennais regards it as worse than deism – but also to universal tolerance, which is to say, absolute indifference toward religious truth.8 Lamennais traced the intimate connections that he discerned among modern philosophy, deism, and Protestantism to their common acceptance of the sovereignty of individual reason. Since placing human reason above revelation and indifference toward religion are two sides of the same coin, Lamennais reasoned that all three systems may be refuted by refuting indifference. He proposed to proceed by comparing the foundation of faith with the foundation of unbelief.9 In fact, however, this essential work was put off until volume 2. What comes next is two chapters on the folly of unbelief and the importance of religion and then two more on the social importance of religion, where, citing Bonald, he argued that only religion can provide order to society because it alone gives the reason for power and duties alike and that all social truths necessarily flow from the first and great truth that all power comes from God. This reciprocity between religion and politics, according to which all social truths disappear if the supreme truth from which they emanate is lost, underpins Lamennais’s analysis of the Revolution as an instance of the irreligious principles of popular ­sovereignty and individual rights overthrowing an Old Regime France

  7 Ibid., vol. 1, 98, 125, 189.   8 Ibid., vol. 1, 66–9.   9 Ibid., vol. 1, 197–8.

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that Lamennais idealized as having been devoted to its faith and to its kings.10 Elsewhere in volume 1, Lamennais defined the revolutionary value of liberty as “only the absence of the general power of society, or the more or less free reign of all the individual powers,” and he defined the revolutionary value of democracy as “the absence of all order and all law, or the government of passions.”11 Lamennais, in short, presented the Revolution as the catastrophic culmination of Protestantism, deism, and philosophy: their rejection of revelation in favour of human reason carried the political implications of individual rights and the sovereignty of the people, in the name of which the revolutionaries overthrew Christianity and destroyed the basis of social order. Lamennais labelled the execution of King Louis XVI as the greatest crime since the deicide of the Jews because it was the murder not only of a virtuous man but also of power itself as the living image of the ­divinity from which it emanates. Lamennais’s explanation for the Revolution, unlike Bonald’s, is ultimately supernatural: it was a terrible lesson from God on the religious nature of society.12 Volume 1 concludes by placing the contemporary crisis of indifference in a cosmic context. Heresy, deism, and modern philosophy are at once three great crimes against the truth and the three general systems of error. Heresy, by which Lamennais meant Protestantism and which is exemplified by John Calvin, rejects the authority and witness of the church by not accepting the totality of the revealed truths that it teaches; deism, exemplified by Rousseau, rejects all revelation and the authority of Christ as the mediator between God and humankind; modern ­philosophy, which is the equivalent of atheism and is exemplified by Diderot, rejects God himself. All three systems rest on the principle of the sovereignty of human reason, and underlying the principle of the sovereignty of human reason is pride. It is pride, the father of lies and eternal enemy of authority, Lamennais said, that leads heretics, deists, and atheists to set up human reason as the judge of revelation; it is pride that flatters human weakness by making an idol out of human reason – a form of idolatry literally realized in worship of the goddess Reason

10 Ibid., vol. 1, 149–50, 304–5, 366. 11 Ibid., vol. 1, 287, 289. 12 Ibid., vol. 1, 294–5, 329–36. Elsewhere, Lamennais cited the Revolution as proof that an atheist nation cannot endure. Ibid., vol. 1, 22.

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during the Revolution.13 The ultimate origin of pride, however, as Lamennais clearly stated early on in Essai sur l’indifférence, is the fall: only our primitive degradation and the resulting perpetual battle of the senses against the spirit could explain how religion had become for many an object of hatred and in turn of indifference.14 Indifference, in Lamennais’s final analysis, is sin. The enormous success of volume 1 of Essai sur l’indifférence was due to the electrifying impact on French Catholics, especially the younger clergy, of its intransigent and confident opposition to all enemies of the church and due to its demonstration of the satanic nature of the Revolution and the society issuing from it. The real intellectual work of redeeming the promises made in volume 1 was taken up only in volume 2, where Lamennais set out his critique of philosophy as ­incapable of reaching certainty and his alternative sensus communis epistemology. Défense de l’essai sur l’indifférence (1821) restated these core elements of his theological Traditionalism and extended his critique of René Descartes and Cartesianism in response to criticisms from theologians. Sensus Communis Lamennais considered the second volume of Essai sur l’indifférence to contain its most novel and most important ideas because it was here that he set out a new defence of Christianity against unbelievers and heretics.15 A new sort of apologetics was necessary, he thought, because error progresses, making new arguments necessary to defend the old truths. The approach to apologetics in which the truth of Christianity is proved by biblical evidence and authority – exemplified by ClaudeFrançois Houtteville’s La religion chrétienne prouvée par les faits (1722), which was still widely taught in French seminaries – had been effective fifty years ago, Lamennais allowed, but it no longer spoke to the ­radically changed intellectual situation in which France now found itself.16

13 Ibid., vol. 1, 424–30; vol. 5, 97. 14 Ibid., vol. 1, 13. 15 See Félicité de Lamennais to Jean de Lamennais, 22 April 1817, and to Simon Bruté de Rémur, 22 February 1818, in Lamennais, Correspondance générale, vol.  1, 340, 398. 16 Lamennais, Défense de l’essai, xix, 5.

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Today, he told a correspondent, “since reason is declared sovereign, it is necessary to go right to it, to seize it on its throne, and to force it, under pain of death, to prostrate itself before the reason of God.”17 This declaration could serve as the mission statement for Lamennais’s theological Traditionalism as a new form of apologetics tailored to the post-revolutionary mind. Volume 2 of Essai sur l’indifférence focuses on modern philosophy because although Protestantism and deism share the elevation of human reason and individual judgment as the criterion of certain knowledge that Lamennais judged to be the underlying cause of indifference toward religion, it was philosophers who had most fully developed and defended this epistemological error. Lamennais began his analysis of modern philosophy by distinguishing between two senses of the word “reason.” The first sense, or the faculty of knowing, means to be capable of ­perceiving truth and is thus the foundation of our intelligent nature. The second sense, or the faculty of reasoning, refers to the intellectual operation by which we acquire knowledge of truth and draw out its consequences. These two senses of “reason,” he said, are fundamentally opposed inasmuch as the perfection of reason in the first sense, or the complete knowledge of truth, would exclude reason in the second sense because there would be no need to seek what one already possesses.18 At birth, according to Lamennais, we possess the faculty of knowing but know nothing innately; all knowledge, that is, must be acquired. In addition to the faculty of reasoning, humankind possesses within itself two other means of acquiring knowledge: the senses and sentiment (i.e., intuition or interior feeling). To these three means of knowing correspond the three, and according to Lamennais the only three, general systems of philosophy. Materialism (or empiricism), represented by John Locke, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, and the Idéologues, places the principle of certainty in the senses; idealism, represented by George Berkeley, Immanuel Kant, and the German critical school, places the principle of certainty in sentiment; rationalism, or modern dogmatism, of which the most influential form is Cartesianism,19 places the principle 17 Félicité de Lamennais to Joseph de Maistre, 2 January 1821, in Lamennais, Correspondance générale, vol. 2, 164. 18 Lamennais, Essai sur l’indifférence, vol. 2, 2–4. 19 On the shifting view of Descartes in Essai sur l’indifférence, see Haac, “Lamennais philosophe,” 11–12.

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of certainty in reasoning. Lamennais then summarily argued that none of these schools of philosophy (and therefore philosophy itself) yield certainty. Briefly, materialism is uncertain because the senses are notoriously unreliable; idealism is no better because the intensity of feeling that something is true is no guarantee of its objective truth; and the sophism of using reason to prove reason undermines all rationalist philosophies by trapping them in a vicious circle. Lamennais concluded that all attempts to arrive at truth by the power of unaided human reason demonstrate only the impotence of philosophy to discover truth.20 Having demonstrated that certainty cannot be found in ourselves, Lamennais next argued that it must be sought outside of ourselves “in the agreement of judgments and witnesses – that is to say, in a reason superior to that of the individual, in authority, outside of which exists only absolute, eternal doubt.”21 This superior reason is Lamennais’s fundamental Traditionalist concept of the general or social reason. Whereas philosophy’s first principle is that what the reason of each person perceives clearly and distinctly to be true is true, Lamennais’s counter-principle states that what all people believe to be true is true. Lamennais called the universal consent of the human race the sens commun or sensus communis and proclaimed it to be the sole means by which certain knowledge can be attained.22 It follows that in order to avoid the skepticism to which human reason alone necessarily leads, one must begin from what Lamennais called the fact of the insurmountable faith inherent in our nature, which compels us to admit as true that which all people invincibly believe. Lamennais considered it impossible not to believe in the principle of sensus communis; humans are so constituted as to recognize naturally as truth everything that is universally attested and as false everything that is universally denied.23 The first thing, according to Lamennais, that all people invincibly believe – and so the first truth testified to by the sensus communis – is 20 Lamennais, Essai sur l’indifférence, vol. 2, 4–19. Lamennais did cite the traditional philosophical proofs of the existence of God as a useful means of conveying the truth of God’s existence to individual reason but considered them incomplete as proofs because they assume the soundness of individual reason. Ibid., vol. 2, 57; Lamennais, Défense de l’essai, 116. 21 Lamennais, Essai sur l’indifférence, vol. 2, 35; see also 130. 22 Ibid., vol. 2, 21; Lamennais, Défense de l’essai, 128, 172. 23 Lamennais, Défense de l’essai, 131; Félicité de Lamennais to Louis de Bonald, 24 August 1820, in Lamennais, Correspondance générale, vol. 2, 110.

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that God exists. No tradition, Lamennais insisted, is more universal and thus no fact is more certain. Further, just as Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet had affirmed that the certainty of all truth depends on the existence of God, so too did Lamennais argue that knowledge of God’s existence as the first truth underlies not only all other truths but also the very possibility of certain knowledge.24 Saint Augustine had said that the natural order of things demands that authority precedes reason when we learn something; Lamennais raised Augustine’s dictum to the level of a general principle: authority is the only means that we have of discerning truth from error with certainty. This being the case, it follows that the certainty of our knowledge is proportionate to the authority of the one who communicates it to us or of the witnesses who attest to it; and it further follows that if the authority is infinite, the certainty is also infinite. Since, therefore, the authority on which revealed truths rest is God, they possess absolute certainty, whereas outside of God everything is contingent, and certainty cannot be found in a contingent being. Without knowledge of God, therefore, the universe is only an illusion, a dream, a vague manifestation of an infinite doubt.25 Lamennais was adamant that because Traditionalism rejects human authority for divine authority, it is not yet another school of philosophy but instead its repudiation.26 Commentators have recognized the epistemological weight carried by revelation in Lamennais’s Traditionalism: Essai sur l’indifférence located the only guarantor of certainty in God’s revelation to the first humans, thereby transforming revelation from a miraculous gift into the sole means of acquiring truths and values.27 The concept of primitive ­revelation, in fact, functioned for Lamennais as the obverse of the sensus communis in that universal agreement serves as the infallible sign of primitive revelation. This argument marks the key transitional step in

24 Lamennais, Essai sur l’indifférence, vol. 2, 47; Lamennais, Défense de l’essai, 69. 25 Lamennais, Essai sur l’indifférence, vol. 2, 76–7, 136, 151; Lamennais, Défense de l’essai, 43. 26 Lamennais, Essai sur l’indifférence, vol. 2, 21. The Scottish common sense philosophers (see part 4) were known to Lamennais but go largely unacknowledged in Essai sur l’indifférence because Lamennais at this date regarded all forms of philosophy as the enemy to be combated. Only after 1830 did he begin to acknowledge their influence on his thought. Haac, “Lamennais philosophe,” 9–10. 27 Le Guillou, L’évolution de la pensée religieuse, 71; Haac, “Lamennais philosophe,” 9; Viaene, Belgium and the Holy See, 419–20.

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Lamennais’s thought from the infinite authority of God to the authority of tradition. Echoing – at times citing – Bonald, Lamennais described how, with the preservation and transmission of the primitively revealed truths first within families and then within society, the social order becomes the depositary of the truths that humankind received from God at the beginning. Language – which Lamennais affirmed could not have been invented since it presupposes existing ideas – is the means by which the necessary truths and thought itself are revealed, preserved, and transmitted. To learn to speak, he said, is to learn to think, as to learn to think is to learn to believe: just as God spoke to the first father and Adam believed the testimony of God, so too does a father speak to his child and the child believes the testimony of the father. A child, Lamennais declared, is born into the physical world but is transported into the eternal society through language. And since he regarded authority as the general reason manifested by witness or by speech, Lamennais could affirm that the soul is created (so to speak) by assenting to the revealed truths through obedience to authority.28 Lamennais defined religion as the necessary relations between God and humankind, or conformity to the laws governing human nature established by the Creator. It follows that there can be only one true religion because the necessary relations between God and humankind are as invariable as the divine and human natures. The one true religion, in turn, can be known only by means of the authority of universal ­witness, or the general reason of humankind. To abandon the sensus communis and attempt to find truth individually by means of the senses, sentiment, or reasoning – or, in Lamennais’s phrase, to appeal from authority to reason – is to overthrow the moral world and cast all religious truths into the abyss of skepticism.29 Must we, then, Lamennais asked rhetorically, renounce the use of our reason as an instrument of error? We need not abandon our reason, he replied, but we must submit it to the authority of the general reason. Individual reason, he insisted, is formed and develops only with the help of the general reason; its first act is to believe, and as there exists nothing in it prior to its beliefs, if it tries to go back farther, it re-enters the darkness out of which it had been brought by faith.30 28 Lamennais, Essai sur l’indifférence, vol. 2, 78–81, 85, 135–6. 29 Ibid., vol. 2, 42, 116–18, 124. See also Lamennais, Défense de l’essai, 98. 30 Lamennais, Essai sur l’indifférence, vol. 2, 117, 159–60.

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The epistemological principle that human reason cannot create truths but instead receives, preserves, and transmits them underlies Lamennais’s distinction between opinions (which are the product of finite, fallible human individual reason) and dogmas (which belong to society). If, he said, society, which is the depositary of all the truths revealed to humankind by God, were to be dissolved, then – catastrophically – opinions would replace dogmas. The French Revolution was just such a catastrophe, and the political thought of Restoration Liberals continued to flirt with disaster by undermining dogmas with opinions. Lamennais echoed Bonald in specifically citing Gemaine de Stael’s Considérations sur les principaux événements de la Révolution française (1818) as a political application of the false Protestant principle that elevates interior sentiment above submission to revelation.31 Arguing that false opinions and false religions alike arise from the revolt of individual reason against the general reason, Lamennais urged the rebels to renounce their individual philosophy and return to the philosophy of the human race, to the sensus communis. Protestants, he noted, do not properly speaking have dogmas but only opinions because they justify their tenets by an appeal to human reason. As for atheism, Lamennais regarded it not as a doctrine or even an opinion but instead as a crime or mental disorder of such astonishing perversity that it can be explained only supernaturally as the action of Satan on a corrupted and degraded being.32 It is a short step from identifying the philosophy of one’s opponents as being outside the philosophy of the human race to identifying one’s opponents themselves as being outside the human race. Lamennais – the modern heresy hunter – took that short step. The infallible authority of the human race embodied in the general reason, he said, is to the ­individual person what the infallible authority of the church is to the Christian. Just as the heretic isolates himself from the church by renouncing its universal teaching, so too do all those who oppose their individual reason to the sensus communis isolate themselves from the human race. Philosophers, deists, and atheists are the heretics of the human race, as heretics are the unbelievers of the church.33 In placing

31 Ibid., vol. 2, 130–2, 140n2; Lamennais, Défense de l’essai, 2. 32 Lamennais, Défense de l’essai, 91–2; Lamennais, Essai sur l’indifférence, vol. 2, 68–9. 33 Lamennais, Défense de l’essai, 98n, 156–7, 161.

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unbelievers outside the human race, Lamennais displayed, as Gérard Gengembre remarks, the totalitarian nature of Restoration Catholicism.34 Essai sur l’indifférence is deeply Pascalian in its repeated interlinking of philosophy, doubt, and the psychological burden of uncertainty: philosophy is the science of doubt, its history is the history of doubt, and doubt is torment.35 Blaise Pascal, in fact, is cited and quoted at length throughout Essai sur l’indifférence, and Lamennais both publicly and privately noted the conformity between their doctrines.36 In Défense de l’essai, however, while acknowledging that he had said nothing in Essai sur l’indifférence about the weakness of human reason that Pascal had not already said, Lamennais pointed out that although Pascal ­correctly saw that human reason must begin with faith, he failed to provide a rule of belief, or rather, the rule that he provided was persuasive only to those who already accepted the truth of Christianity and recognized the authority of the church. The problem was that many people of his day rejected both, and so something more was needed. Further, Lamennais continued, because Pascal did not distinguish the faith inherent in our nature from the Christian faith, he allowed humankind no natural or reasonable means of escaping from uncertainty. Like Pascal, Lamennais insisted that philosophy is never able to produce anything other than doubt, but unlike Pascal, he showed that humankind possesses in its own nature a means of attaining certain knowledge of truth.37 Lamennais, in fact, regarded his demonstration that rational certainty is founded on the witness of God or on infinite reason, a ­witness rendered immediately to the first man and mediately to his descendants, as the most novel and most important part of Essai sur l’indifférence. Pascal, too, he said, had knocked down human reason, but whereas Pascal had left it on the ground, “I raise it up and place it on the unshakable base of the reason of God himself.”38

34 Gengembre, La Contra-Révolution, 131–2. 35 Lamennais, Essai sur l’indifférence, vol. 2, 35, 157–8; Lamennais, Défense de l’essai, 10. 36 Lamennais, Défense de l’essai, 56; Félicité de Lamennais to Jean de Lamennais, 22 April 1817, in Lamennais, Correspondance générale, vol. 1, 340. 37 Lamennais, Défense de l’essai, 66–8. See Le Guillou, L’évolution de la pensée ­religieuse, 57–8. 38 Félicité de Lamennais to Louis de Bonald, 24 August 1820, in Lamennais, Correspondance générale, vol. 2, 110.

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Lamennais’s apologetic innovation was thus to supplement Pascal with the Traditionalist concepts of primitive revelation, the sensus communis, and the general traditions. He was clearly influenced in this undertaking by Bonald. As far back as the works written with his brother under the empire, Lamennais had referred to Bonald as a man of genius who had opened a new path to defenders of Christianity.39 Bonald is similarly praised and echoed throughout Essai sur l’indifférence. When Bonald’s Recherches philosophiques sur les premiers objets des connaissances morales appeared in 1818 shortly after the publication of ­volume 1, Lamennais told his brother that he had found in it “several things that I have already said and others that I ought to say,” including the ­foundation of the first chapters of the second volume.40 In volume 2 itself, Lamennais noted that he and Bonald had been guided to the same truths by the same faith, and he hailed Bonald as the founder of hope for their disordered age. To Bonald himself, Lamennais wrote that his doctrine was “at bottom, [Bonald’s] own.”41 And Bonald, for his part, encouraged Lamennais through their correspondence and publicly defended volume 2 against its critics.42 The common ground between the two thinkers is extensive and obvious: a primitive revelation, society as the depository of the revealed truths, transmission of the revealed truths though language, language as revealed rather than invented, subordination of the individual to society, the religious basis of social order, and the filiation of the Revolution to philosophy and Protestantism. Nevertheless, Lamennais’s Traditionalism is not merely a restatement of Bonald’s thought. Whereas Bonald’s sociological Traditionalism attempts to identify the rationally and empirically demonstrable laws underlying and structuring social order and emphasizes the ternary nature of power, Lamennais’s Traditionalism is built on the general reason, or the universal consent of humankind to the idea of God and the primitively revealed truth, and on the Pascalian

39 Reardon, Religion in the Age of Romanticism, 286n15. According to Jean-René Derré, the intermediary between Lamennais and Bonald was the abbé Gérard Gley. Derré, Lamennais, ses amis, 62. 40 Félicité de Lamennais to Jean de Lamennais, 20 March 1818, in Lamennais, Correspondance générale, vol. 1, 406–7. 41 Lamennais, Essai sur l’indifférence, vol. 2, 67n1; Félicité de Lamennais to Louis de Bonald, 24 August 1820, in Lamennais, Correspondance générale, vol. 2, 110. 42 Bonald, “Sur un dernier ouvrage.”

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choice that humankind must make between submission to the sensus communis or absolute skepticism.43 Further, although Lamennais was a very unusual cleric, he was still a cleric, unlike Bonald. Essai sur l’indifférence is shot through with religious reflections, prolifically cites Church Fathers and Bossuet, and exudes a deep faith utterly unlike the political focus and instrumentalist use of Catholicism discernible, despite his protests, throughout Bonald’s work. Gengembre’s remark that Essai sur l’indifférence “was perhaps the true breviary of the CounterRevolution” could not have been made of any of Bonald’s books.44 It is in recognition of this difference between them that the doctrine of Essai sur l’indifférence has been called a “theological traditionalism” in order to distinguish it from Bonald’s “sociological traditionalism.”45

The Mennaisian School A Mennaisian school emerged in the early 1820s under the leadership of Louis-Antoine de Salinis and Olympe-Philippe Gerbet.46 These two young priests would go on to have illustrious careers in the church (Salinis as Bishop of Amiens and then Archbishop of Auch; Gerbet as Bishop of Perpignan), but in the 1820s Lamennais was the sun of their theological world. They gathered around themselves a group of likeminded young men of exceptional talent who, beginning in 1822, met weekly in Salinis’s rooms at the Lycée Henri IV, where he served as chaplain.47 Salinis and Gerbet soon decided that the group had something important to contribute to the church as a whole and proposed, with full co-operation from Lamennais – who participated in the group’s discussions whenever he was in Paris – the creation of a journal devoted to the Mennasian perspective on the situation of the church in relation to the principal religious and intellectual issues of the day. Mémorial catholique appeared for the first time in January 1824. Operating on the 43 This point was recognized long ago. See Hocédez, Histoire de la théologie, vol. 1, 112. 44 Gengembre, La Contra-Révolution, 131. 45 Foucher, La philosophie catholique, 50. 46 On the Mennaisians and their institutions, see Le Guillou, L’évolution de la pensée religieuse, 73–125; and Derré, Lamennais, ses amis, 169–225. 47 This group included Edmond de Cazalès, Louis de Carné, Franz de Champagny, Augustin Bonnetty, Théophile Foisset, the brothers Léon and Eugène Boré, and Melchior du Lac.

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principle that in order to act on the age, it was necessary to understand it, its editors made it their mission to pull Catholics out of their parochial mindset by educating them about modern intellectual and cultural life as a necessary preliminary to combating its errors. Mémorial catholique also set itself against certain elements within the church, notably Cartesian theology and Gallican ecclesiology, and tirelessly opposed the continuing anti-clericalism of the University even under the Restoration. “We defend,” its editors declared, looking back on the first year of their journal, “the principle of authority against the independence of opinions, under the various forms that it is presented; the general beliefs against individual judgments; the faith of all the centuries against the ephemeral systems of philosophy; the universal religious society against all the sects founded by the individual spirit.”48 Mémorial catholique served as the principal voice of the Mennaisian movement until August 1830 when in the aftermath of the July Revolution the editors retired it so that they could devote their energies to their new daily, L’Avenir. The Mennaisians were well aware that their Traditionalist approach to apologetics struck many Catholics as an alarming innovation. They responded to those who insisted that the theological manuals of the previous century adequately prepared Catholics to meet post-revolutionary intellectual challenges with an amusing but pointed anecdote: a certain German baron who had defeated the French in battle during the reign of Louis XIV was still living about fifty years later when a new war broke out. He immediately equipped his regiment and posted himself at the same spot where he had won the earlier battle. When an officer pointed out that the enemy was 100 leagues away, the baron dressed him down for presuming to know more than the illustrious generals of the past and declared, “It is here that the battle was fought; therefore, it is here that the battle will be again, and here I shall stay.”49 Well-intentioned Catholics, the Mennaisians were implying, who thought that the anti-religious philosophy of their day could be combated with the same arguments that François Fénelon and Bossuet had used against its early exponents, were as deluded as was the German baron.

48 Unsigned, “Du Mémorial catholique,” 302. 49 Unsigned, “Variétés,” 66–7.

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The Crisis of Dualism The editors programmatically declared, in the unsigned “Introduction” to Mémorial catholique, which also served as its prospectus, that society was at present “divided into two peoples, commingled still by material interests but divided on all that pertains to the moral order.”50 They identified this division of society into two peoples as the expression of an epistemological and moral crisis afflicting contemporary society. The root of the crisis, as the Mennaisians saw it, was the problem of dualism, or the separation of knowledge from belief. Gerbet spoke for his ­colleagues when he identified the common error of all philosophies and false theologies to be the supposition that faith and reason are irreconcilable.51 The Mennaisian idea of the division of society into two peoples was based on Lamennais’s Augustinian distinction in Défense de l’essai sur l’indifférence (1821) between two societies. Until the final restoration of all things, he wrote, There will exist two societies, a society of faith in order to preserve truth on the earth, and a society of knowledge [science] that will perpetuate error. And these two societies will always be at war like good and evil, like light and darkness. The one, immutable in its principles and infallible in its teaching, will always rest on an authority that goes back to God; and the other, lacking fixed principles, stability, and unity, will have no other base than the variable and uncertain reason of each man. Christianity, which is the source of all 50 Unsigned, “Introduction,” 5. The “Introduction,” which is bound and paginated at the beginning of volume 1, appeared in late 1823. It is immediately followed by a letter from Lamennais referring to it and dated 31 December 1823. 51 Gerbet, Des doctrines philosophiques, 6. Gerbet, primus inter pares among the Mennaisians, spent considerable time with Lamennais at La Chênaie and addressed his writings particularly to the Mennaisians’ critics among Cartesian theologians. In  his articles in Mémorial catholique and his major works of the 1820s, Des doctrines philo­sophiques sur le certitude, dans leurs rapports avec les fondements de la théologie (1826) and Considérations sur le dogme générateur de la piété catholique (1827), Gerbet supported and explicated Lamennais’s doctrines on the primitive revelation, the sensus communis epistemology, the one, perpetual, universal religion, the centrality of expiatory ­sacrifice from earliest times onward, and the catastrophic consequences of the philosophical principle, shared by unbelievers and Cartesian theologians, that places the principle of certainty in individual reason. See Gerbet, Des doctrines philosophiques, 17–18, 21–2, 32–3, 74–6.

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truth and of all order and which began with mankind, is the law of the first society; philosophy, which is the source of all error and of all disorder and which began at the moment when man succumbed for the first time to his temptation to know, is the law of the second.52

Over the course of the 1820s, Lamennais mitigated the stark opposition of this passage and began to speak instead of “two orders” – the order of faith and the order of conception – that complement each other when, and only when, they are in their proper relationship. (François Laplanche dates Lamennais’s earliest mention of the two orders to an October 1825 letter to Victor Cousin.53) At the end of the decade, in Des progrès de la Révolution et de la guerre contre l’église (1829), an extended philippic against the efforts by the Restoration regime to tighten the state monopoly on education and to suppress Catholic schools, Lamennais concisely stated the nature of the two orders in a passage lamenting the errors of modern skeptics and rationalists: The first error of these philosophers, as of those who preceded them, is to confuse two essentially different – although simultaneously existing – orders, the order of faith, primitive and fundamental, in which alone the principle of certainty resides, and the order of knowledge or of conception, subor­ dinate to the first by its nature, in which the activity of the mind is freely ­exercised. When they claim for themselves the liberty of investigation and examination, they are right in the sense that man should not limit himself to belief but should try to conceive or explain to himself that which he believes on certain grounds. But, by rejecting the order of faith, a necessary basis for any conception in science or philosophy, they overthrow the entire edifice of human knowledge and irrevocably condemn themselves to absolute doubt.54

Lammenais added in an appendix to this work that the general ­ urpose of the order of conception, and therefore of all human intelp lectual activity, is to explain the order of faith as much as is possible for us to understand. The order of conception is legitimate, that is, as

52 Lamennais, Défense de l’essai, 166–7. 53 Laplanche, La Bible en France, 114–15. 54 Lamennais, Des progrès de la Révolution, 273–4.

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long as it subordinates itself to the order of faith.55 The Mennaisians never tired of echoing the master on the limits within which human explanation may legitimately operate. Gerbet pronounced that philosophy “shows the reason of things that [theology] declares without explaining, such that the philosophical doctrine is at bottom only the theological doctrine itself, reduced to a rational theory.”56 For PierreSébastien Laurentie, an academic and journalist closely allied with the Mennaisians in the 1820s, philosophy “demonstrates to the reckless reasoner who rejects faith as an insult to his intelligence that faith is on the contrary the beginning of his reason, that it is the first foundation of knowledge, and that without this foundation every system of the human sciences collapses.”57 Finally, to cite only one more iteration of this fundamental Mennaisian view, the purpose of philosophy is “not to investigate or discover unknown truth but to develop the truth already known by other means, to explain it, to demonstrate it, to defend it against the sophisms of error.”58 The Mennaisian program was premised on the conviction that the crisis of dualism afflicting post-revolutionary society could be overcome only by re-establishing the proper relationship between the order of faith and the order of conception. The proper relationship between the two orders, in turn, formed the basis of their signature concept of Catholic science. A recent commentator has stated that the premise of Catholic science was that modern science was not a priori hostile to religion and that Catholics should not abandon it to unbelievers.59 This claim is true enough, as long as we recognize that by “science” the Mennaisians meant something very specific. As intellectual historians point out, science is not a fixed category that can be unreflectively applied to any period of history or to any civilization but is instead a concept with a complex history. Science, in the modern sense of the term as a discipline committed to thoroughgoing methodological ­naturalism, dates only from the mid to late nineteenth century. In the ­sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Aristotelian conception of

55 Lamennais, “Pièces justificatives XI,” 381. See also Derré, Lamennais, ses amis, 307–8. 56 Gerbet, Des doctrines philosophiques, 136. 57 Laurentie, Introduction à la philosophie, 5. 58 F., Professeur de Théologie, “‘De methodo philosophandi,’” 81. 59 C.E. Harrison, Romantic Catholics, 93.

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science as metaphysical knowledge of necessary being was overthrown by the new approaches to the study of nature that are known collectively as the Scientific Revolution. The resulting practices of natural philosophy and natural history, however, continued to incorporate theological elements into the study of nature. Further, throughout the early modern period, “science” meant systematic knowledge about a certain aspect of the world rather than being restricted to the study of nature, and the venerable principle of the unity of knowledge ensured that true knowledge about one aspect of the world could not be in conflict with other knowledge, including revealed truths.60 Unlike in England, however, where a broadly accepted synthesis of inductive reasoning and natural theology endured well into the nineteenth century, an anti-theological approach to science, still broadly conceived as systematic knowledge, emerged in France from the late eighteenth century as Enlightenment and Idéologue thinkers produced materialist studies of nature and irreligious studies of history and society. Then, in Paris in the first decades of the nineteenth century, a new conception of scientific knowledge as an autonomous process of ongoing disciplined empiricism began to take shape. This new conception – in modern terms, a methodological naturalism rather than the philosophical naturalism of Enlightenment materialists – led some early-nineteenth-century savants – among them Georges Cuvier in comparative anatomy, Eugène Burnouf in philology, and Jean-François Champollion in Egyptology – to conceive of knowledge no longer as something to be gathered but as something to be constructed. Science, in this conception, had become a method of investigation rather than a body of knowledge.61 The Mennaisian idea of Catholic science was contemporary with this new conception of science as disciplined empiricism but rejected it. In fact, the Mennaisians opposed no less than three conceptions of science that were afoot in the early nineteenth century: they of course ­condemned out of hand the rationalist and materialist conception held by radical philosophes and by the Idéologues; they rejected the old Aristotelian metaphysical conception of science, which still underlay the Cartesian theology favoured by the church hierarchy, on the grounds

60 P. Harrison, “‘Science’ and ‘Religion,’” 26–9; P. Harrison, Territories of Science and Religion, 146–7, 152. 61 Molendijk, “Introduction,” 5; Despland, L’émergence des sciences, 451–2.

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that it shared the fatal error of Cartesian metaphysics of isolating human reason from the authority of the general reason; and they denounced the new conception, which pushed further the old error by proposing the autonomy of science, for cutting human reason off altogether from certainty – precisely the shocking misuse of reason that had produced the contemporary crisis of dualism. Against all of these false conceptions of science, the Mennaisians insisted that the separation of knowledge from belief can be overcome only by reinscribing knowledge under the Traditionalist sensus communis epistemology. As Laplanche has authoritatively expressed their view, “a Catholicism exists, but it is not scientific; a science exists, but it is not Catholic. One must work on the content of Catholicism in order to confer on it a scientific status and on scientific declarations in order to manifest their latent Catholicism ... This ­program is consciously named ‘Catholic science.’”62 The Mennaisian program of Catholic science endorsed the order of conception while subordinating it to the order of faith. Specifically, it proposed to overcome the dualisms between revelation and reason, truth and history, and truth and certainty, which collectively comprised the crisis of the separation of knowledge from belief, by subordinating reason to revelation through the intermediary of ­tradition. By demonstrating the presence of truth in history through the general traditions and by equating the degree of truth with the degree of certainty through the epistemological principle of sensus communis, the Mennaisian concept of Catholic science at once upheld the old theological ideal of the unity of knowledge and offered a Traditionalist variation on nineteenth-century Catholic attempts to police the relationship between the natural and the supernatural by subordinating modern science and social science to revealed dogmas about the origin and ultimate end of humankind.63 Laplanche has observed that many young Catholics were drawn to Lamennais precisely

62 Laplanche, La Bible en France, 113. Laplanche notes that although the popular reception of the phrase “Catholic science” dates from an article that Lamennais published in L’Avenir on 30 June 1831, the phrase had already appeared in his Des progrès de la Révolution et de la guerre contre l’église (1829) and in Mémoire à Leon XII (c. ­1826–27), and he further observes that the idea, if not the phrase, had been sketched in Essai sur l’indifférence itself. Laplanche, La Bible en France, 112. 63 See Bernardi, Maurice Blondel, 36.

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because his program promised to reconcile natural knowledge and revealed truth.64 Lammenais had great hopes for what Catholic science might accomplish. In his view, the work of scientists and scholars over the last thirty years across a wide range of fields had produced results that upheld Catholic truth and furnished new weapons against materialism and irreligious hypotheses but whose impact had not yet been fully ­recognized. Catholic science promised to unify and systematize scientific knowledge so that the support that it so richly offered for revealed truth would be plain for all to see.65 The Mennaisians shared Lammenais’s optimism. A key text for their understanding of Catholic science was an unsigned 1827 article in Mémorial catholique on modern science education. The article opened with the observation that in recent decades various areas of study – notably astronomy, physics, and antiquities – had raised formidable arguments against faith. Moreover, because their explanatory theories contradicted each other, savants had ­concluded that science is incapable of attaining certain knowledge about nature and that therefore they should agree to restrict themselves to empirical observation and renounce the investigation of final causes. This new system, which the author identified as the final step in the revolt of the sciences against God, served as a specific instantiation of the Mennaisian conviction that the independent exercise of human reason inevitably ends in skepticism. The Mennaisian author  – ­diagnosing the cause of the reckless errors and materialist abjection of the modern study of nature to be its embrace of the philosophical method derived from Descartes (and behind him the Reformation) that had enshrined the sovereignty of human reason – proposed that its errors may be refuted, and the sciences given a moral direction, by subordinating them to religion. The absurd philosophical right of making systems based on human reason would be eliminated once and for all if the necessity of belief in the eternal truths was imposed on the study of nature. This, he concluded, was the Catholic method, the

64 Laplanche, La Bible en France, 126, 147. He further notes that the power of Mennaisianism derived from its ability to reroot religion in history, but the price to be paid was the humiliation of reason. Ibid., 213. 65 Lamennais, Des progrès de la Révolution, 278–80.

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method of common sense, the method of traditions, the method of authority.66 In accordance with this Catholic method, article after article in Mémorial catholique accepted the results of scientific investigation when they confirmed truths already known through revelation and rejected such results when they contradicted these truths.67 Although Lamennais and his followers conceived of Catholic science as an attempt to seize intellectual authority from unbelieving philosophers and scholars, they recognized that a new generation of French philosophers had emerged who, following the lead of PierrePaul Royer-Collard and Maine de Biran, rejected materialism and sensationalist epistemology. The principal representatives in the 1820s of this new philosophical tendency – known as rational spiritualism because it accepted spiritual evidence perceived immediately in our  consciousness  – were Victor Cousin and Théodore Jouffroy (see part 4). The Mennaisians freely conceded that the new spiritualist  philosophy  ­represented a significant improvement over the ­materialist p ­ hilosophy of the previous generation. Nevertheless, this mystical philosophy of sentiment, as a reviewer of works by Cousin and Jouffroy dubbed it, shared with materialism the errors of making individual human reason the judge of truth and seeking the invariable truth in variable ­phenomena. Thus it, too, produced nothing more than a succession of ­individual opinions that conflicted with other opinions. Only by attaching oneself to the general reason of the human race, the author concluded, can one escape from a relativism that ends in total ­skepticism.68 Lamennais, we recall, had earlier identified ­sentiment as a form of the sovereignty of human reason in his critique of Rousseau in Essai sur l’indifference. The Mennaisians, as here, applied the master’s refutation of Rousseau to these new sectarians of sentiment. The Mennaisians similarly identified Benjamin Constant’s five-volume De la religion, considérée dans sa source, ses formes et ses développements ­(1824–31) as another manifestation of the contemporary disposition to reduce religion to individual interior sentiment. The Mennaisian reviewer of the first volume, scornfully noting that the word “religiosity” had recently been coined to express the opinion that religion is not 66 Unsigned, “Quelques aperçues,” 37–8, 40–3, 48. 67 See, as a representative example, “W.,” “La physiologie.” 68 “X.,” “Fragments philosophiques,” 333, 336.

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something one reasons about but something one feels, lamented that the general tendency either to renounce all religion or to abandon beliefs for individual interior sentiment was yet another fatal ­consequence of the domination of the principle of the sovereignty of human reason over the present era. Constant’s distinction, he said, between sentiment as the essence of religion and dogmas as its variable forms (see part 5) had merely developed and systematized Rousseau’s error.69 The Mennaisians, who closely associated the religion of sentiment with the dangers of Protestantism and religious toleration, maintained an  ongoing polemic in Mémorial catholique on the true nature of Protestantism and pointed to Constant’s questioning (under the influence of German biblical criticism) of the divine inspiration of parts of the Bible as further evidence of Protestant perfidy.70

69 “X.,” “Réflexions sur la théorie philosophique,” 237–9, 244. 70 See “X.,” “Réponse à une assertion.”

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The Mennaisian Science of Religions

This chapter draws out the conceptualization of religion inherent in the Mennaisians’ sociological Traditionalism in two ways: first, it analyzes Félicité de Lamennais’s theology of religions as set out in the third and fourth volumes of Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de religion (1817–23) under the subheadings of the primitive religion and its corruption, Christianity as old as the world, and an encyclopedia of witnesses; and second, it analyzes the Catholic science of religions by which the Mennaisians sought to enhance the evidential basis of Lamennais’s theology of religions through their demonstration that the knowledge produced by scholarly investigations of the religions of the world ­confirms and explains the truth of the Catholic religion.

Lamennais’s Theology of Religions Lamennais argued in the first two volumes of Essai sur l’indifférence and in Défense de l’essai sur l’indifférence (1821) that there is one true religion and that authority is the means that God gave to humankind to distinguish it from false religions. His self-appointed task in the third and fourth volumes was to provide supporting evidence for his Traditionalist apologetic project by showing that Christianity is the one true religion and that it has existed since the origin of the world. His method is to take a particular Christian doctrine and show ­exhaustively that it was known throughout the world from earliest times, albeit often in corrupted form. The result is a theology of religions whose outlines are familiar to us from Louis de Bonald, but whereas Bonald articulated a history of religions that rested almost

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entirely on logical reasoning and was rarely supported with historical evidence, Lamennais ransacked the sources available to him in order to demonstrate universal consent. The Primitive Religion and Its Corruption Lamennais, as we saw in the previous chapter, asserted that the religious traditions of the world preserve and bear witness to a universal ­primitive revelation bestowed by God on the earliest peoples in conformity with their nature, needs, and faculties. This primitive revelation, he said, was transmitted as tradition during a happy first age of innocence and faith, such that all over the ancient world, the ancestors of the Gentile nations held a set of general beliefs that were everywhere the same because they derived from the primitive revelation. These general beliefs comprised the primitive religion, or the natural religion of early humankind in its proper sense (rather than the rational natural religion of deists and Jean-Jacques Rousseau).1 Applying his sensus communis epistemology to the history of religions, Lamennais asserted that the criterion of universal consent is the sole means of recognizing with certainty the truths composing the primitive religion and, conversely, that the voice of the entire human race will silence those who deny the evidence for a primitive revelation. Since it is axiomatic that “in the matter of religion, all that is universal is true, all that is only local is false,” that which can be demonstrated to be universal must therefore comprise the content of the primitive religion. Lamennais itemized these universals as a sole God, the immaterial, eternal, infinite, and all-powerful Creator of the universe; the necessity of worship, or of adoration, prayer, and sacrifice; the moral law; the existence of good and bad angels; the fall of degenerate humankind and its need for expiation; and finally, the immortality of the soul, together with the eternity of future punishments and rewards.2 The existence of the primitive religion having been established with certainty by the sensus communis, Lamennais could be sure that ­everywhere monotheism had preceded idolatry. In fact, he thought – and demonstrated at length from his sources – that the primitive

 1 Lamennais, Essai sur l’indifférence, vol. 3, 9–11, 131; vol. 4, 23.   2 Ibid., vol. 3, 17, 48, 351, 360 (quotation).

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monotheism had been preserved for a long time among various peoples all over the world and perhaps more purely and for a longer time in China than anywhere else. (Following the view of the China Jesuits, he suspected that it was only the introduction of Buddhism into China that had precipitated most of the population into idolatry.)3 As the Chinese example suggests, primitive monotheism survived the Flood; after all, Lamennais asked in a characteristic recourse to the Bible as an explanatory framework, how would people have dared to set up sacrilegious altars on an earth still moist from the waters of God’s ­vengeance? The general traditions of the human race, he continued, support the biblical narrative by attesting to a period of post-diluvial monotheism when Noah’s descendants preserved the traditions that he had received from his father, who had lived with Adam, and had passed down to them. Tradition, in the form of the law given to the Noachides and through them to the entire human race, had the p ­ urpose of preventing the corruption of worship by teaching all peoples to hate everything that was not transmitted by revelation.4 Eventually, however, the primitive religion became corrupted, and idolatry was born. Lamennais, in fact, defined idolatry as the corruption of true religion. Applying Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet’s principle that all error is founded on truths that have been abused, Lamennais ­identified all false religions as idolatrous cults founded on true beliefs more or less corrupted by the passions of desire and fear. More specifically, Lamennais reduced all idolatrous religions to the worship of good and evil spirits and honoured men, which he in turn identified as the corruption, respectively, of the veneration of angels and saints in the primitive religion.5 Using the specific case of Sabeism, or Babylonian star worship, Lamennais explained how first the celestial intelligences that presided over the stars and then the various spirits charged with watching over humankind and the natural world, who in the primitive religion were honoured simply as the ministers of God, had come to be worshiped as deities themselves by desirous and fearful peoples. Idolatrous rituals proliferated as people sought to calm the hate, to deflect the vengeance, or to assure themselves of the protection of

  3 Ibid., vol. 4, 19–29; vol. 3, 77.   4 Ibid., vol. 4, 11, 14–16.   5 Ibid., vol. 3, 31, 48, 68–82.

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these false gods by all the means that disordered imaginations could suggest to them.6 We see here, as we saw with Bonald, the co-optation of desire and fear, as explanatory devices in eighteenth-century psychological theories of religion, into the service of an apologetic project. Euhemerism ­similarly served Lamennais not as a naturalistic explanation for the origin of religion but as further evidence of the origin of idolatry in the corruption of elements of the primitively revealed true religion – in this case, veneration of saints. Lamennais’s fundamental principle that idolatry obscures but does not efface the doctrines of the one true religion allowed him to trace even the most appalling idolatrous p ­ ractices to corruptions of a religious truth. Thus he identified the practice of human sacrifice as at once a corruption of and a testament to the ­universality of sacrifice in the primitive religion. Citing Joseph de Maistre’s principle in “Éclaircissement sur les sacrifices” (1821) that all nations believe that the innocent must pay for the guilty, Lamennais declared that nothing proves better how the dogma of reversibility and of salvation by blood was deeply imprinted on the spirit of peoples than the execrable custom of human sacrifice.7 The origin of idolatry in the corruption of the primitive religion accounts for what Lamennais characterized as its hybrid nature: idolatry, he said, contains the highest truths and the most monstrous errors, the purest precepts and the most dissolute maxims, beliefs constitutive of social order and opinions destructive of social order. Such opposing doctrines cannot, Lamennais insisted, derive from the same source: the former come from tradition and are universal, whereas the latter come from human reason and vary. That which in paganism belongs to true religion is that which one finds everywhere and at all times because it ultimately derives from the primitive revelation. However, when people began to substitute human reason for the universal tradition, a multitude of sects appeared that successively denied all dogmas and all duties.8 Lamennais thus derived religious diversity from the abandonment of universal tradition. Over time, he said, the primitive religion underwent   6 Ibid., vol. 3, 60–1.   7 Ibid., vol. 3, 175–6, 230, 334–8. Sacrifice is for Lamennais the basis of society, which he directly opposed to the assertion that self-interest is the basis of society. Ibid., vol. 1, 38–2; Lamennais, Défense de l’essai, 130.  8 Lamennais, Essai sur l’indifférence, vol. 2, 156–7, 176; vol. 3, 365.

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successive alterations until, after several hundred years, a frightful chaos of incoherent and contradictory fables, gods, and rituals had come into existence.9 The precondition, however, for the corruption of the primitive religion into idolatry was the existence of perverted wills and ­rebellious minds. Idolatry, in fact, is for Lamennais only the external manifestation of an interior idolatry nurtured in each human heart. The ultimate cause of idolatry, then, is the fall and the continuing ­activities of Satan and his angels.10 That is why Lamennais described idolatry as being in its essence not the negation of a truth but the ­transgression of a commandment; it is not an error but a crime and logically comparable to homicide, theft, and adultery.11 We recognize here in Lamennais’s particular idiom the line of thought behind both the Ultras’ equation of citizenship with sacramental conformity and the sacrilege law of 1825. Whereas idolatry, which Lamennais called an error of the heart, ­corrupts the traditions and the social order that rests on them, ­rationalism and atheism, as errors of the mind that substitute individual judgment for faith and the sensus communis, destroy the traditions and with them all possibility of social order. The villains of this story, as for Bonald, are the Greek philosophers (although Lamennais acknowledged the existence of philosophical unbelievers in ancient China as well). The great errors of the mind, Lamennais maintained, were almost unknown in the world until Greek philosophy weakened respect for the traditions and substituted the principle of individual reason (l’examen particulier) for the principle of faith. By opposing the reason of individuals to the reason of all and to the reason of God himself, Greek philosophy broke the last bonds that restrained human pride and that kept it subordinate to the truth. However harmful idolatry may have been, it was nevertheless compatible with a certain degree of social order because in spite of the errors of their worship, pagan peoples everywhere believed in the primitively revealed religious truths – of divinity, of the necessity of worship based on sacrifice, and of punishments and rewards in another life – without which no society is possible. It took philosophy to unleash scorn for tradition, doubt,

  9 Ibid., vol. 3, 123, 131. 10 Ibid., vol. 3, 58–63, 136; vol. 4, 16, 23–4, 29. 11 Ibid., vol. 3, 262, 349; vol. 4, 79.

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incredulity, and ultimately atheism.12 Lamennais traced the origin of this tragedy back to an event lost in the mists of time: some individuals, he said, by events that are unknown to us, became separated from ancient society and were thrown onto the coasts of Greece, where, abandoned to themselves, they lost both contact with the traditions transmitted by the general reason and the habit of obedience to ­authority. Greek civilization henceforth developed solely on the basis of the sovereignty of human reason, producing rationalism and atheism (and democracy in political thought) as the poisoned fruit of a people cut off from the general reason of the human race.13 Christianity as Old as the World In ancient times, Lamennais said, when the threat to the universal traditions was not philosophy but the spread of idolatry, God miraculously preserved one people from corruption by making a second revelation calibrated to the problem at hand. This second revelation, the Mosaic revelation to the Hebrews, clarified the primitive revelation, outlawed idolatry, preserved the ancient traditions from corruption, and explicitly promised the coming of a mediator. Lamennais was adamant that the Mosaic revelation, therefore, did not constitute a new religion because the true religion is one. The Mosaic revelation, properly understood, was the figure of a more perfect law, conveyed in the third and final revelation, or the coming of Christ, which fulfills and perfects the one true religion preserved and transmitted in natural religion and the Mosaic law.14 Everything, Lamennais said, that was universally believed in the times preceding the birth of the Saviour was still and 12 Ibid., vol. 3, 45–6. The parallel between atheism and abuse of reason among the ancient Greeks and among eighteenth-century theorists and their successors – the real target of Essai sur l’indifférence – would not have been lost on Lamennais’s readers. 13 Lamennais, Défense de l’essai, 12–14. 14 Lamennais’s discussion, like Bonald’s, showed no awareness of rabbinic Judaism and rehearsed anti-Semitic commonplaces, including the charge of deicide. He equated contemporary Jews with deists because, having rebelliously rejected the third revelation but no longer following the Mosaic law, they lacked both the practice of sacrifice, which separated them from all ancient peoples, and a public authority, such that they had abandoned the interpretation of their law and prophecies to ­individual reason and thus could not be certain of the true meaning of Scripture. Lamennais, Essai sur l’indifférence, vol. 3, 39–44.

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would always be believed in the universal, or catholic, Christian society. The primitive revelation, the Mosaic revelation, and Christianity comprise the three ages of the one true religion; the true religion, in short, developed across the centuries without ever changing its essence.15 What, then, is the role of Christ for Lamennais? True worship before Jesus Christ, he said, consisted in the adoration of the sole God and in the sacrifices that were offered to him while confessing their insufficiency. “Salvation by blood” was a dogma of the human race, but the blood shed in sacrifices could neither purify humankind nor appease God because it was deprived of its efficacy until the appearance in ­history of the only victim acceptable to God and alone capable of ­satisfying his justice and expiating all the crimes of humankind. With the coming of Christ, all the figurative sacrifices disappeared, subsumed into the great, unique sacrifice that was the fulfillment of the ancient belief of the human race that it would be saved by blood. Christian worship, as the consummation of ancient worship that alone teaches how redemption is effectuated, shows the dogmatic unity and the immutable character of the true religion.16 Lamennais expanded this observation into a general principle: because the truths of religion were enclosed in the first revelation, all Christian dogmas derive from the primitive dogmas and thus belong, at least implicitly, to the primitive faith.17 Christianity, then, must ­necessarily be both as old as the world and the universal religion of humankind: “When we speak of Christianity, we must not restrict its spirit to the times that have unfolded since the incarnation of the Divine Word; rather, it is necessary to embrace the entire continuity of religion, before as well as after Jesus Christ ... Thus Christianity began with the world, it developed, according to the promises, without ever changing in its essence [au fond], without ever varying, and it remained in its diverse states and will remain perpetually the same, perpetually one, as in growing, a person remains the same person.”18 It should be clear that for Lamennais, as for Bonald, development meant the unfolding of an essence according to a preordained pattern: “As everything

15 16 17 18

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Ibid., vol. 3, 148–9; vol. 4, 96–7. Ibid., vol. 3, 158–9, 355. Ibid., vol. 1, 199–200; vol. 3, 151–2. Ibid., vol. 3, 28–9.

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develops simultaneously, unity remains unalterable; these are the same beings but more perfect. Thus the seed becomes a tree; thus man passes from infancy to the age of reason.”19 Lamennais claimed patristic authority for his assertion that Christianity is as old as the world by quoting from Saint Augustine’s Questiones expositae contra paganos VI (Exposition on Six Questions Raised by Pagans) ­(406–12 CE).20 Augustine, here and elsewhere, did indeed speak of true religion as having existed since the beginning of history, as did other Church Fathers, including Tatian, Tertullian, Lactantius, and Eusebius, in their efforts to refute pagan charges that Christianity was something new in the world. When, however, patristic authors spoke of “true religion,” they meant an inner disposition of godliness that guided the worship of the biblical patriarchs and perhaps some Gentiles. Beginning in the seventeenth century, however, the notion of religion as an inner disposition became objectified into a set of beliefs and practices, which, in the context of a confessionally divided Europe and increasing contact with the world beyond, gave rise to the idea of plural religions as rival sets of beliefs and practices. In this context, the patristic dispositional idea of “true religion” yielded to a new idea of “the true religion” as the one among the multiple religions whose ­doctrines were objectively correct.21 Lamennais, in citing Augustine in support of his assertion that the doctrines of the Catholic Church have been believed from earliest times, claimed patristic authority for the nonpatristic idea that the one true religion has existed from the beginning of the world. When Lamennais spoke of Christianity as the fulfillment of the one true religion, he meant of course the Roman Catholic Church. The announced but unwritten fifth volume of Essai sur l’indifférence was to have elaborated on Catholicism as the heir and sole depository of the primitive revelation and as the fulfillment of the one true religion.22 Protestants, whom Lamennais had equated with deists and philosophes in earlier volumes of Essai sur l’indifférence, were now in volumes 3

19 Ibid., vol. 3, 140. 20 Ibid., vol. 3, 163–4. 21 P. Harrison, Territories of Science and Religion, 8–10 (quotation at 9), 43–4, ­102–4. See also P. Harrison, “‘Science’ and ‘Religion,’” 30–5. 22 Lamennais, Essai sur l’indifférence, vol. 2, 203; vol. 3, 23–4. On volume 5, see the short discussion by Le Guillou, “Un chapitre inédit.”

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and 4 equated with idolaters on the grounds that both had ceased to obey legitimate authority. That is why, he said, one Protestant sect succeeds another, just as in ancient times one idolatrous cult succeeded another.23 Lamennais’s theology of religions, in sum, locates the meaning of ­history in the progressive fulfillment of humankind’s spiritual destiny, a destiny that culminates in the Catholic Christianity that subsumes within itself everything in the history of humankind that is truly religious.24 An Encyclopedia of Witnesses Lamennais, as noted above, drew on a wide variety of sources in ­constructing his theology of religions. They include – and the examples given in parentheses are a very partial list – classical authors (Herodotus, Plutarch, Cicero), Church Fathers (Irenaeus, Tertullian, Lactantius, Augustine), medieval theologians (Maimonides, Thomas Aquinas), missionaries and travellers (Jesuits and Danish, Dutch, and British Protestants), seventeenth- and eighteenth-century apologists (François Fénelon, Pierre-Daniel Huet, Bossuet), mythographers (Paul Ernst Jablonski, Jacob Bryant), and Orientalists (Athanasius Kircher, Barthélémy d’Herbelot, John Selden, Thomas Hyde, Humphrey Prideaux, Isaac de Beausobre, Abraham Roger, Charles Le Batteux, Joseph de Guignes, Guillaume de Saint-Croix, Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron), Enlightenment writers (Charles de Brosses, Voltaire, Edward Gibbon), and contemporary scholars (Alexander von Humboldt, William Jones, Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat). Lamennais, in short, read extensively – exhaustively even – in the sources available to him. His most important source, however, was the Bible. Lamennais, like the majority of French Catholic theologians of his day, never doubted that the Bible is older than all other books and that its narratives and chronology are reliable.25 Where he departed from them was in his Traditionalist assertion that the Bible postdates ­tradition. Among early humankind, Lamennais said, tradition preserved the

23 Ibid., vol. 3, 132–3; see also vol. 4, 29–30. 24 Laplanche, La Bible en France, 116; Le Guillou, L’évolution de la pensée religieuse, 70. See also Gengembre, La Contra-Révolution, 131, 213. 25 Lamennais, Essai sur l’indifférence, vol. 4, 121. On the authority of Bossuet’s Discours sur l’histoire universelle (1681), Lamennais dated creation to 4004 BCE, the Flood to 2348 BCE, and the Mosaic law to 1491 BCE. See Haac, “Lamennais philosophe,” 7–8.

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memory of the origin of humankind and the precepts taught by the primitive revelation. It was only when human lifespans became shorter and peoples multiplied that God decreed that the content of the traditions should be fixed by Scripture. However, Lamennais explained, to prevent the diversity of opinion and doubt that inevitably accompanies written texts, not everything was written down. Tradition, as embodied in the Catholic Church, both determines the true interpretation of the Bible, preserving it from the anarchy of contested individual interpretations, and confirms the truth of its narratives c­ oncerning the remotest times for which no other testimony exists. Reciprocally, the Bible proves the antiquity of tradition and fortifies its authority. To reject the ­narrative of Moses, Lamennais concluded, is to reject the tradition of the entire world, to deny the authority of witness, and to renounce the possibility of acquiring certainty about any fact concerning ancient history.26 Lamennais, with mainstream early-nineteenth-century French Catholic thought, abhorred the new currents of biblical criticism ­emanating from German Protestant universities, particularly their recognition of the historicity of the biblical texts.27 He categorically rejected the historicity of revelation in the modern sense and regarded German biblical criticism as yet another modern-day application of the calamitous philosophical principle that places human reason as judge over revelation. His argument that the traditions of the human race unanimously testify to the existence of the fundamental beliefs of Christianity in the primitive religion of earliest times, originally made against the claim by eighteenth-century thinkers that religion was invented by humans at a specific moment in history, was easily redirected to counter the biblical critics’ reconceptualization of revelation as progressive and their claims that the biblical texts reflect the times and places of their human authors. In Lamennais’s Traditionalism, all religious truths were originally revealed in the primitive revelation and transmitted as traditions. The dichotomy between truth and history that had so troubled the German biblical critics had no meaning for Lamennais because the only truths that he recognized were revealed truths.28 26 Lamennais, Essai sur l’indifférence, vol. 4, 126–7, 143–5. See also Laplanche, La Bible en France, 119–20. 27 See Howard, Religion and the Rise of Historicism, 35–6, 78–83. 28 Lamennais, Essai sur l’indifférence, vol. 3, 11. See Laplanche, La Bible en France, 119–21.

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Lamennais, moreover, was confident that modern science and s­ cholarship had confirmed the truth of the biblical accounts of the earliest history of humankind: geology had demonstrated the existence of the Flood and had confirmed the biblical dating of this great ­catastrophe; civil historians had exploded claims for the prodigious antiquity of the Egyptians, Babylonians, Indians, and Chinese; and the demonstration by scholars that neither the famous zodiac of Denderah (which had arrived in France to great fanfare around 1820) nor any of the other zodiacs discovered in Egypt predated the Roman period had similarly refuted the claims of a new generation of unbelievers that these star maps were proof of an Egyptian antiquity far beyond the limits of the biblical chronology. (Both Charles-François Dupuis and Constantin-François Volney had made much of the Denderah zodiac, and Dupuis had even appended a large fold-out illustration of it to his Abrégé de l’origine de tous les cultes of 1798.)29 Throughout the third and fourth volumes of Essai sur l’indifférence, Lamennais treated contemporary science and scholarship in exactly the same way that he treated the histories and cosmologies of pagan peoples: he cited them as evidence supporting the truth of the primitive revelation when they agreed with it and rejected them as false when they disagreed.30 Ultimately, therefore, the mountain of sources that Lamennais assiduously cited in support of the his theology of religions amounts to no more than, in Oscar Haac’s phrase,31 an “encyclopedia of witnesses” to the truths revealed in the primitive revelation and fulfilled in Catholic Christianity. Not only did he not engage critically with his sources, but he also rejected as a methodological error the very possibility of rational or empirical criticism of a revealed truth. This methodological approach ensured that Lamennais’s theology of religions served the Traditionalist project of reinscribing modern society under the authority of revealed truth.

T h e C at h o l i c S c i e n c e o f R e l i g i o n The Mennaisian concept of Catholic science, as discussed in the previous chapter, promised to overcome the separation of knowledge from belief by demonstrating that the knowledge produced by the various 29 Lamennais, Essai sur l’indifférence, vol. 4, 143–5, 148. 30 Laplanche, La Bible en France, 133. 31 Haac, “Lamennais philosophe,” 14.

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sciences, properly interpreted, confirms and explains truths about the world already known through revelation. What we may call the Catholic science of religion, for its part, purported to demonstrate how the knowledge produced by scholarly investigations of the religions of the world confirms and explains the truth of the Catholic religion. Lamennais and the Mennaisians came to regard the theology of religions set out in the third and fourth volumes of Essai sur l’indifférence as logically sound but only weakly supported by empirical evidence. Lamennais himself confided to an ally in 1827 that despite his genius, Bonald was now almost forgotten because he had failed to support his theories with concrete historical evidence.32 The Mennaisians, therefore, undertook to establish more systematically the evidential basis for the universal consent that provided the epistemological foundation for Lamennais’s history of religions. Lamennais’s correspondence from the mid-1820s shows him diligently pursuing Orientalists and other scholars whose work he hoped would provide further evidence for the primitive revelation and the universality of Christian doctrines. In 1823, he had assured the abbé René-François Rohrbacher, a Mennaisian who would publish Catéchisme du sens commun (1825), that the researches of distinguished scholars into the traditions of India and China were inaugurating a glorious new era in which error would be pushed back toward hell.33 Letters that Lamennais wrote between 1823 and 1826 to Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat, the pioneering Sinologist and an original member of the Société asiatique, and to the Orientalist Ferdinand d’Eckstein bear out this enthusiasm. Lamennais thanked Abel-Rémusat and especially Eckstein for making known to him their discoveries, in ancient Chinese and Indian texts respectively, of (in more or less distorted form) such eternal religious truths as the fall and the expectation of a Redeemer, and he repeatedly requested that they alert him to further Oriental analogues to fundamental

32 Derré, Lamennais, ses amis, 188; Félicité de Lamennais to Père Ventura, 28  November 1827, in Lamennais, Correspondance générale, vol. 3, 411. Gioacchino Ventura di Raulica, later general of the Théatins, published in the late 1820s translations and studies of Maistre, Bonald, and Lamennais’s Essai sur l’indifférence. 33 Félicité de Lamennais to René-François Rohrbacher, 22 August 1823, in Lamennais, Correspondance générale, vol. 2, 401.

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Christian doctrines.34 Lamennais’s library at La Chênaie, which OlympePhilippe Gerbet and other Mennaisians used freely, included an ­extensive collection of French and British Orientalist texts, including a set of Asiatic Researches. Jean-René Derré notes that the conviction of its editors that Orientalism was relevant and important for Catholics set Mémorial catholique apart from the rest of the Catholic press of its day.35 Eckstein himself mixed with the Mennaisians at this time, and although his relationship with them, particularly with Lamennais, was complex (see part 6), his writings and conversation were an important resource for the Mennaisians’ knowledge of German Orientalism, particularly with regard to works such as Friedrich von Schlegel’s Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians) (1808) that had yet to be translated into French.36 The Mennaisian Catholic science of religion self-consciously ­reconceptualized in light of the sensus communis epistemology the ­seventeenth- and eighteenth-century apologetic strategy of proving the truth of Christianity by means of historical evidence. Apologists such as Pierre-Daniel Huet, Claude-François Houtteville, and Jacques Abbadie, discussed in chapter 4, affirmed that belief in a sole deity is universally attested to by all peoples but also conceded that beyond this simple affirmation, Gentile religions were lawless frontiers of error and idolatry. Most such apologists would have endorsed the double explanation offered by Bossuet in Discours sur l’histoire universelle (1681) that the universality of belief in God derives from the primitive revelation made by the deity to the first humans, but other than God’s bare existence, all other truths contained in the primitive revelation had fallen victim over time to the weakness and corruption of humankind except where they had been restored by further revelations.37 In the second half of the eighteenth century, Nicolas-Sylvestre Bergier, who, as we have also seen, regarded all history as sacred in as much as 34 See Lamennais’s letters to Abel-Rémusat of 8 August 1823, 16 August 1823, and 5 August 1826 and to Eckstein of 4 February 1823, 5 November 1823, 21 November 1823, 16 January 1824, and 25 January 1826 in Lamennais, Correspondance générale, vols 2–3. The correspondence between Lamennais and Eckstein has been collected in Le Guillou, ed., Le “baron” d’Eckstein, 18–71. 35 Derré, Lamennais, ses amis, 184–5, 296. 36 Le Guillou, ed., Le “baron” d’Eckstein, 15; Laplanche, La Bible en France, 111–12. See part 6 herein for Eckstein’s critique of the Mennaisians’ historical method. 37 Kors, Atheism in France, 137; Bossuet, Discours sur l’histoire universelle, 51, 175.

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the revealed truths have been present throughout history, argued in Traité historique et dogmatique de la vraie religion (1780) that the history of religions constitutes the progressive adaptation of primitively revealed dogma and ritual to particular societies. Bergier’s developmentalism all but conflated profane history with sacred history and natural religion with revealed religion in its granting of theological meaning to all of human religious history. When Bergier turned, however, from his ­theoretical framework to the actual religions of the world, he emphasized not their similarities to Christianity but their differences. In ­language reminiscent of Bossuet, Bergier showed again and again how ancient and modern paganisms had cut themselves off from the primitive revelation and thereby degenerated into absurdity.38 The result was what Gerbet would identify as an internal contradiction in Bergier’s attitude toward pagan religions: although in theory they preserved the true monotheism under more or less degenerate forms, the available historical evidence persuaded him that true religion had been utterly lost over most of the world. For the Mennaisians, however, this conflict between theory and empirical evidence (a subset of the ­fundamental problem of the dualism of truth and history) was now to be overcome through the Catholic science of religion. Gerbet assured Catholics that researchers from the learned Jesuits of China and India to contemporary specialists had demonstrated that traces of the primitive revelation were universally present in the religions of the ancient world. It was only, he said, because the tenacious prejudices of conventional apologists had induced them to substitute reasonings for ­testimonies that they did not recognize that knowledge of the religions of the world could no longer be used to attack Christianity. Gerbet cited Bossuet himself as unwittingly demonstrating the obsolescence of the old approach to apologetics now that the evidence provided by Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron’s three-volume translation of Zend-Avesta (1771) had disproved his a priori insistence that the ancient Persian religion was not monotheistic.39 The Mennaisian conviction that the revealed truths are transmitted in the general reason of the human race, and therefore underlie all the religions of the world, further eroded the distinction between 38 Laplanche, La Bible en France, 87–8, 94–7, 105–6. 39 Gerbet, Coup d’oeil sur la controverse chrétienne, 176, 179–80; discussed in Laplanche, La Bible en France, 101–2, 110; and Derré, Lamennais, ses amis, 317–18.

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revealed and natural religion but at the same time demanded the provision of historical evidence demonstrating the identity between Catholic ­doctrine and the content of the general reason of humankind.40 Mémorial catholique undertook the task of demonstrating that the history of r­ eligions does indeed bear witness to the unity, universality, and ­perpetuity of the Christian doctrines through both negative and positive approaches. Negatively, contributors attacked the assumptions and conclusions of eighteenth-century and Idéologue theorists of religion; positively, they drew attention to discoveries of new supporting evidence. The Mennaisians’ campaign against impious theorists of religion was part of the broader Restoration crusade against subversive books (­mauvais livres) that figured prominently in the re-Christianization program of the Missions to the Interior movement between 1817 and 1829. Ritualized burnings of the works of the philosophical writers whom the church held responsible for the disaster of the French Revolution were performed all over France as public expiations for the unbelief of the revolutionary period. Church leaders also targeted the Restoration regime for permitting the continued circulation and even republication – often in cheap, easily accessible formats – of subversive books. Louis XVIII, however, upheld the freedom of publication guaranteed by the Constitutional Charter of 1814, and new editions of philosophical writers continued to flood France during the Restoration years, including eight editions of Dupuis’s Origine de tous les cultes, ou Religion universelle (1795) and eleven of Volney’s Les ruines, ou Méditations sur les révolutions des empires (1791).41 The Mennaisians, so often at odds with the Catholic hierarchy, were in full agreement on the matter of subversive books. Dupuis and Volney, in particular, drew sustained attention from Mémorial catholique. In June 1824, a contributor singled out Dupuis’s Origine de tous les cultes and Volney’s Les ruines for the harmful effects that their absurd systems inflicted on their distressingly many avid readers all over France.42 The tributes bestowed on Volney following his death in 1820 were particularly galling given the Mennaisians’ whole-hearted acceptance 40 Laplanche, La Bible en France, 110–11. 41 Lyons, “Fires of Expiation,” 243, 251–5, 261–3; Kroen, Politics and Theater, 99–101, 112. 42 “Y.,” “Réflexions sur les livres irréligieux,” 342–3, 348–9.

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of the venerable orthodox equation of impious views with immoral lives.43 Their response was to insist that Volney was a hypocrite and not at all the principled man whom he was widely praised as having been.44 More broadly, the Mennaisians lamented the appalling fact that more editions of impious authors had been published under the Restoration regime of throne and altar than during the previous fifty years combined; what greater proof could there be of the terrible consequences of the deplorable toleration permitted by the Charter’s guarantee of the freedom of publication?45 Mémorial catholique returned to the attack against Dupuis and Volney more systematically in early 1827 in the programmatic piece on education discussed in chapter 7. The renewal in recent years of the study of antiquities, the author observed, had shown that the extensive ­analogues between Christian doctrines and rituals and those of pagan religions are evidence for the existence of the primitive revelation as the common origin of all religions. Therefore, the author asserted, the Catholic method that shows God instructing all humankind throughout history by the voice of tradition is truer and more scientific than the opposing view. Even Dupuis and Volney, he added, lent support despite themselves to the true religion: “The more they will have shown the relations between Gentile superstition itself and our certain and consoling doctrines, the more they will have given us power to raise ourselves toward the first revelation, to this great origin of the common thoughts of all men.”46 Gerbet, a few years later, similarly converted deist efforts to establish the universality of core rational religious truths against the particularity of the Christian supernatural revelation into evidence for the existence of a single universal religion resting on the general ­traditions of the human race. He noted with a certain bemusement that proofs of religion were now more likely to be found in the books of unbelievers than in those of conventional theologians.47

43 See Kors, Atheism in France, 19–20. 44 H***, “De Volney.” 45 Unsigned, “De la publication des mauvais livres,” 305; Unsigned, “De la propagation des livres irréligieux,” 265. 46 Unsigned, “Quelques aperçues sur l’enseignement des sciences,” 47–8 (quotation at 48). 47 Gerbet, Coup d’oeil sur la controverse chrétienne, 182.

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Turning now to their positive approach, the editors of Mémorial catholique took seriously their commitment to publicize for educated Catholics discoveries of new evidence supporting the unity of the ­general traditions with Catholic doctrine. To this end, contributors to the journal discussed learned works by Orientialists and other scholars of literate civilizations as well as accounts of travellers to nonliterate peoples. Such articles employed one or both of two principal strategies. The first was to mine contemporary scholarship for instances of ­empirical confirmation of the universality of the truths already known through Catholic doctrine.48 The second strategy distinguished between “­traditions,” which were common to all Antiquity because they had faithfully descended from the primitive revelation, and the various “systems” invented by this or that people as they attempted to explain the content of the traditions by means of human reason alone.49 This distinction between “traditions” and “systems” is an application of Lamennais’s fundamental distinction in Essai sur l’indifférence between the two meanings of “reason” and between the “two orders” – the order of faith and the order of conception – that follow from it. Traditions are certain because their universality testifies to their source in truths primitively revealed by God, whereas systems, as the products of human reasoning, either corrupt the traditions that they attempt to explain or, when entirely cut off from the traditions, end in absolute skepticism. The distinction between traditions and systems also governs the Mennaisians’ use of the work of contemporary scholars of religion. In early 1828, Mémorial catholique reviewed favourably the Orientalist Charles Hyppolite de Paravey’s Essai sur l’origine unique et hiéroglyphique des chiffres et des lettres de tous les peuples (1826). This work represented 48 Examples include Unsigned, “Antiquités orientales,” 217–18, 222–3; Unsigned, “Preuve de la tradition,” 381; Unsigned, “Traditions des sauvages,” 269; and Unsigned, “Extraits d’une letter de M. Champollion,” 382. The belief in the transmigration of the soul is here, as in Catholic Traditionalist readings of Indian teachings generally, interpreted as a corruption of the primitively revealed doctrine of purgatory. 49 In an article on Indian religious traditions, for example, the author identified Vedic pantheism as a system invented by Brahmins in an effort to provide a rational explanation for the nature of creation. “X.,” “Accord des traditions de l’Inde,” 80, 88. This piece was largely borrowed from an article by Jean-Denis Lanjuinais in Journal de la Société asiatique on the Oupnek’hat (a selection from the Upanishads translated into Latin by Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron).

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Paravey’s preliminary report on a massive projected work in which he proposed to demonstrate his dual thesis of the unity of human cultures in their common descent from a single primitive revelation and of China as the original and radiating homeland of the ancient wisdom.50 Mémorial catholique paid particular attention to two points of method. First, the reviewer noted approvingly that Paravey had applied himself “solely to the material evidence, such as this so eminently positive century loves” and endorsed Paravey’s claim that “otherwise learned men” who had investigated this topic had gone astray because they had “abandoned, at least in their researches, the only thread that can guide them in the obscure labyrinth of ancient times, not wanting to rely on anything other than their sole and deceptive reason.”51 Second, the reviewer noted that the “otherwise learned men” alluded to above included not only eighteenth-century and Idéologue theorists but also eminent ­contemporary scholars such as Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat and Eugène Burnouf. Although Paravey always spoke of Abel-Rémusat with respect and cited his work frequently (most often Recherches sur les langues tartares of 1820), he was well aware that his fundamental ideas were in direct opposition to Abel-Rémusat’s.52 The nature of this opposition may best be illustrated by comparing Paravey’s goals and methods to those set out in a two-volume collection of Abel-Rémusat’s articles published within a few months of Paravey’s work under the title of Mélanges ­asiatiques (1825). Abel-Rémusat observed, in a piece on Tibetan Buddhism, that two groups of ideologically driven savants had provided inverse explanations for the parallels reported by missionaries and travellers between the monasteries, processions, pilgrimages, festivals, and ecclesiastical ­hierarchy of the Tibetans and those of Catholic Christianity. One group had explained the parallels by identifying “Lamaism” as a degenerated form of the Christianity brought to the region by non-Nicene churches. The other group had reversed the relationship by identifying the Himalayas as the homeland of ancient wisdom and the culture of  all other peoples as degenerate versions of Tibetan wisdom.53 50 See McCalla, “Mennaisian ‘Catholic Science of Religion,’” 301–3. 51 D***, “‘Essai sur l’origine unique et hiéroglyphique,’” 47–8; Paravey, Essai sur l’origine unique et hiéroglyphique, iii. 52 Paravey, Essai sur l’origine unique et hiéroglyphique, xvi. 53 Abel-Rémusat, “Discours sur l’origine de la hiérarchie lamaïque,” 131–2.

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Abel-Rémusat rejected both universalist views as being driven by “l’esprit de système” rather than by empirical evidence; the historian, he said, must renounce grand unitive visions. Nowhere in the articles collected in these volumes, let us note, did Abel-Rémusat even mention, let alone endorse, the idea of a primitive revelation or ancient wisdom as the fount of culture. This point leads to a second methodological principle. Abel-Rémusat, in marked contrast to the Catholic Traditionalists and other savants such as Paravey seeking doctrinal unity, was not primarily concerned with the content of the various religions and philosophies that he studied. He was instead interested in analogies among literary and linguistic artifacts for what they can tell us about the twists and turns of the course of history.54 The same commitment to philology as a disciplined empiricism characterized the work of the Sanskritist Eugène Burnouf.55 The philologically rigorous approach to Asian texts practised by these scholars provoked a controversy within the recently formed Société asiatique. Burnouf, along with Abel-Rémusat and some others, opposed another faction within the Société, whom they dubbed “Florists” because they valued aesthetic and literary effects rather than philological accuracy in their translations.56 The “Florist” controversy, however, involved more than matters of literary style. Burnouf, AbelRémusat, and their allies were attempting to purge the Société, with only partial success, of those like Paravey who treated Asian texts as reservoirs of timeless theological or esoteric truths.57 This methodological commitment to disciplined empiricism in philology and its concomitant rejection of any pretense of accommodating biblical themes or models marked a watershed in the development of the human sciences, by virtue of which Abel-Rémusat and Burnouf took their place among the pioneers of modern philology and ­cognate disciplines. There was no recognition of this watershed in Mémorial catholique; indeed, there could be no recognition of it given the Mennaisian conception of Catholic science. The Mennaisian ­epistemology of sensus communis locates certainty in what has been believed at all times and in all places. In Essai sur l’indifférence, as we have seen, Lamennais had asserted, “In the sciences, one must carefully 54 Abel-Rémusat, “Sur la vie et les opinions de Lao-tseu,” 91. 55 See Burnouf, Commentaire sur le Yaçna, vol. 1, iv–xxix. 56 On the Florist controversy, see McGetchin, “Wilting Florists.” 57 Despland, L’émergence des sciences, 251.

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distinguish that which rests on witness or authority from that which rests on simple reasoning.”58 In the practice of the Catholic science of religion, this distinction means that empirical investigation can serve only to illustrate and confirm truths already known, whereas any ­evidence that runs counter to established truth must be dismissed as false. Consequently, contributors to Mémorial catholique cited AbelRémusat and Burnouf when they offered support for some particular Oriental analogue to Christian doctrine but dismissed their disciplined empiricism as a specific example of the false method, which sets individual reason against the traditions and results in intellectual, moral, and social chaos. The Mennaisian responses to Abel-Rémusat and Burnouf, on the one hand, and to Paravey, on the other, reflect the nature of the Catholic science of religion as, in a phrase borrowed from Wiktor Stoczkowski, the “‘naturalization’ of old mythic themes.”59 Stoczkowski, noting that early European accounts of the “New World” were not new at all but were instead derived from venerable classical and biblical traditions, quotes Claude Kappler: “That other world is new only in the sense that it had never been visited before ... What was sought for was something ‘known’ that had never been seen.”60 He then comments that in instances such as the European encounter with the Americas, in which an existing conceptual tradition conditioned the observation of new phenomena, the result is not knowledge but a “‘naturalization’ of old mythical themes.” Lammenais and his followers similarly knew what they had not yet seen. The Catholic science of religion, like Catholic science in general, because its function is to confirm truths already known through revelation, suppresses difference by assimilating novel evidence to the primitive traditions and thereby naturalizes the old biblical models for thinking about religion. And this was precisely its intended function within the broader Traditionalist response to postrevolutionary French society: to assimilate historical evidence to ­tradition and reason to revelation in order to overcome the subversion of tradition and revelation by individual reason that Lammenais and his followers held to be the cause of the social and intellectual disaster 58 Lamennais, Essai sur l’indifférence, vol. 2, 24n1. 59 Stoczkowski, Explaining Human Origins, 32. 60 Kappler, Monstres, démons et merveilles, 54, quoted in Stoczkowski, Explaining Human Origins, 34.

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of the Revolution and its aftermath. A commentator has regretted that the Mennaisians’ explicitly apologetic intentions compromised the objectivity of their investigation of non-Christian religions.61 But of course their Catholic science of religion was explicitly designed to assimilate Asian religions into the framework of biblical history.62 It was precisely this aspect of it that around 1830 inspired young Catholics to immerse themselves in study of the languages and religious traditions of the world in search of the cornerstones on which to build a rejuvenated Catholic civilization.63

61 Derré, Lamennais, ses amis, 185–6. 62 In a striking image, a contributor to Mémorial catholique referred to the Bible as “the family papers” of the human race, which had been “entered into the hands of the eldest branch.” “W.,” “La physiologie,” 295. 63 C.E. Harrison, Romantic Catholics, 194–5.

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Mennaisian Political Theology

The Mennaisians considered the re-establishment of the proper relationship between the order of conception and the order of faith by means of Catholic science to be part of the broader return of French society to God. Olympe-Philippe Gerbet explicitly linked the theological nature of the sciences and the theocratic nature of society: “[Theology] occupies in the order of the sciences the place that God himself o ­ ccupies in the order of beings. All the sciences are theological in the same sense that all societies are theocratic. Societies are theocratic by their nature because in God alone is found the basis of power and of obedience and in the divine law the basis of rights and duties. All sciences are ­theological because God is the first principle of things and because in him resides the eternal type of the order realized by creation.”1 This chapter ­discusses the political theology that the Mennaisians developed in the 1820s in parallel with their conception of Catholic science and its evolution into liberal-Catholicism around 1830. It concludes with a sketch of the subsequent fortunes of the Catholic science of religion after Félicité de Lamennais’s embrace of radical populism and break with the church. I have borrowed two pairs of conceptual terms from Vincent Viaene’s study of political Catholicism in the early nineteenth century as historiographical aids to navigating this territory: “­ultramontanism” and “liberal-Catholicism” as well as “intransigence” and “­transigence.” The former refer, respectively, to hostility versus openness toward the modern civil and political liberties won in the revolutionary period and upheld in the Constitutional Charters of 1814

 1 Gerbet, Coup d’oeil sur la controverse chrétienne, 247.

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and 1830; the more general meaning of “ultramontanism” as referring to papal authority is also relevant here and will be discussed below. The latter hearken back to factions within Vatican politics: intransigence is a prophetic stance that proclaims that temporal matters and the ­prerogatives claimed by the modern state must necessarily be subordinated to the religious principle and the authority of the church, whereas transigence, although rejecting the secularization of society, acknowledges the independence of the temporal in limited areas and exercises a degree of pragmatism in its relations with the state.2

From Intransigent Ultramontanism to   I n t r a n s i g e n t L i b e r a l - C at h o l i c i s m During the period from the publication of the first volume of Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de religion in 1817 through the mid-1820s, Lamennais exemplified the intransigent ultramonanism that Viaene identifies as the original and most radical expression of political Catholicism.3 In the two-volume De la religion considérée dans ses rapports avec l’ordre politique et civil (1825–26) and elsewhere, Lamennais ­distinguished clearly between the interests of the church and those of the Restoration regime. On the theocratic principle that only the ­spiritual power can provide the final authority for social order, Lamennais maintained that the church, as the embodiment of spiritual power, is the sole legitimate source of social order. The great crime, consequently, of the revolutionary regimes was to sever civil society from religious authority in an attempt to establish society based on, in Lamennais’s view, either despotic force or anarchic passions. He ­similarly dismissed the constitutions that provided the legal basis for post-revolutionary regimes, including the Charter of 1814, as nothing more than attempts to disguise the illegitimate basis of civil power and to mask the absence of the religious authority that alone can legitimize it.4 Lamennais in this period accordingly regarded the Restoration regime as fatally undermined at its origin by King Louis  XVIII’s ­acceptance of the Charter and charged that by refusing to suppress ­anti-Catholic ideas and activities and by interfering in the church  2 Viaene, Belgium and the Holy See, 17–18, 37–8.   3 Ibid., 39–40.  4 Gengembre, La Contra-Révolution, 134.

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through the appointment of bishops, the suppression of religious orders, and the restriction Catholic education, it had further betrayed the principle that spiritual power must govern society. Paralleling his criticism of the Restoration regime, Lamennais repudiated the Gallican traditions of the French church for permitting only an indirect exercise of papal authority. His vocal criticisms of attempts by the hierarchy of the French church to restore some version of the traditional Gallican arrangement led to a public spat in 1823 with Denis de Frayssinous, vicar-general of the Archdiocese of Paris, grand master of the University, and between 1824 and 1828 minister for ecclesiastical affairs. Lamennais accused the French hierarchy of weakening the church by its acceptance of Gallicanism and demanded that it champion the theocratic ideal. Moreover, if the church is to exercise its authority over society it must itself have a final authority; that is, the pope as God’s vice-regent must have supreme authority over the church. Here, ultramontanism in the general ecclesiological sense merges with ­ultramontanism in Viaene’s political sense to produce the modern counter-revolutionary doctrine, of which Joseph de Maistre (whose Du pape had appeared in 1819) and Lamennais are the founders. Lamennais’s militant anti-Gallicanism and his claims for papal authority, which earned him the bitter hostility of French bishops and most Ultras, went well beyond what the papacy in practice claimed for itself. When Lamennais travelled to Rome in 1824 to seek papal support, Leo XII, although friendly toward Lamennais, declined to back him against the French hierarchy.5 Lamennais’s intransigent ultramontanism may be summed up in his conviction that religion ought to be everything and politics nothing. He denounced any compromise with the absolute authority of the church made in the name of Gallicanism or political pragmatism as an idolatry of temporal power no less detestable than the revolutionaries’ irreligious principle of civil liberties. By the mid-1820s, in short, Lamennais had renounced the Restoration alliance of throne and altar in the name of a religious counter-revolution that demanded the total subordination of society to the spiritual power. His break with royalism and the Ultras who had embraced him so warmly in 1817, it should

 5 Stearns, Priest and Revolutionary, 46; Viaene, Belgium and the Holy See, 46.

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be apparent, was driven by his intransigent ultramontanism and occurred completely independently of any properly Liberal inspiration.6 Lamennais’s writings and private letters from the mid to late 1820s interpret the period as a time of universal dissolution from which the church would eventually emerge triumphant but only after society endured a succession of revolutions, wars, and despotic governments. By the end of the decade, however, he had begun to consider another possibility: society might be reborn without undergoing further catastrophes if the political and civil liberties that seemed to be firmly entrenched in contemporary political life could be subordinated to the spiritual power.7 It was with this possibility in mind that Lamennais observed, “Liberalism scares people. So Catholicize it, and society will be reborn.”8 This remark encapsulates Lamennais’s shift from intransigent ultramontanism to intransigent liberal-Catholicism. Although the conceptual term “liberal-Catholicism” indicates a more open attitude toward political and civil liberties, the modifier “intransigent” means that Lamennais and the Mennaisians – some of whom had preceded the master in this shift – remained fully committed to the supremacy of the spiritual principle over society. Mennaisian liberal-Catholicism, then, as Viaene argues, was neither a Catholic form of liberalism nor a synthesis between Catholicism and liberalism but instead a form of political Catholicism resolutely opposed to the political and civil values derived from the revolutionary inheritance.9 The Mennaisians’ new liberal-Catholic orientation guided their initial welcome and theorization of the July Revolution of 1830, which overthrew King Charles X and the Restoration regime and replaced them with King Louis-Philippe and the July Monarchy. The Mennaisians carried out their political activity during the first years of the July Monarchy principally through two new institutions. The first was their daily newspaper, L’Avenir. Although Lamennais was its leading figure, L’Avenir, during its meteoric existence from 16 October 1830 to 15 November 1831, was a collaborative effort whose articles were

 6 Bénichou, Le temps des prophètes, 132, 137; Gengembre, La Contra-Révolution, 134–5.  7 Viaene, Belgium and the Holy See, 54–5.   8 Félicité de Lamennais to Mme la comtesse de Senfft, 24 December 1829, in Lamennais, Correspondance Générale, vol. 4, 222.  9 Viaene, Belgium and the Holy See, 71.

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largely written by two recent recruits to the Mennaisian cause, Charles de Montalembert and Henri Lacordaire; other contributors included Edmond de Cazalès, Louis de Carné, Léon and Eugène Boré, Charles de Coux, and Joseph d’Ortigue, as well as for a time Ferdinand d’Eckstein on political affairs. The second new Mennaisian institution was the Agence générale pour la défense de la liberté religieuse. This body, which was largely composed of the L’Avenir editorial team and in which Lacordaire and Montalembert again were particularly active, worked to pressure the government through court challenges and publicity to extend in full to the Catholic Church the liberties guaranteed in the Charter of 1830.10 In L’Avenir, the Mennaisians set out and theorizied their program of greater openness to toward political and civil liberties while retaining the intransigent conviction that society is theocratic by nature. Its key principle was their newly acquired convictions that God directs social transformation and that the Catholic Church is the driving force of social progress.11 Transposing the teleological developmentalism of the one true religion of Essai sur l’indifférence onto a conception of social progress by means of Christianity, the Mennaisians hailed the July Revolution itself as evidence of the continuing spiritual evolution of humankind. Lamennais, while acknowledging that Catholics had been taught to associate civil and political liberties with hatred of Christianity, now argued that whereas “bastard and degenerate” Gallicanism ­subjugated Catholicism to despotic rulers, true Catholicism is the basis of liberty.12 By true Catholicism, the Mennaisians of course meant their own conception of the absolute supremacy of the spiritual principle over society: if, as they proclaimed, only in liberty could the triumph of the church be complete, it was only as theocracy that liberty could survive. This conception of the interdependence of liberty and theocracy is the proper understanding of L’Avenir’s famous motto, “Dieu et liberté”: God and liberty, the two great needs of humankind, are inseparably linked; everywhere that God is worshipped, liberty reigns, and everywhere that liberty reigns, God is worshipped.13

10 11 12 13

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C.E. Harrison, Romantic Catholics, 126. Lamennais, “De l’avenir de la société, deuxième article,” 66–7. Lamennais, “Introduction,” 3–4. Coux, “De l’année 1830,” 185.

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The political mission of Christianity, according to the Mennaisians, had always been to free the world from oppression by proclaiming the supremacy of spirit over matter, of reason over power, and of right over action. Across the centuries, they maintained, the Catholic Church had gradually developed what they called the social intelligence of humankind, or a form of liberty that is inseparable from social order because it is grounded in the divine order. Now, the providentially directed development of liberty had reached a stage that necessitated a transition to a new social order commensurate with it.14 In the Mennaisians’ analysis, although periods of end and renewal are always difficult, the present one had been made more so by the policies that France’s kings had followed over the last 300 years. The Bourbons, substituting what the Mennaisians termed the religion of royalty for the religion of Jesus Christ, had alienated God from liberty and liberty from God, such that France by the late eighteenth century was divided into a faction that wanted God without liberty and a faction that wanted liberty without God. Ultimately, the Bourbons’ obdurate refusal to grant authority over society to the spiritual power had provoked divine anger, which manifested itself in the 1789 Revolution and their ­overthrow. The Mennaisians were now openly interpreting the French Revolution as a terrible and bloody but also necessary and providential victory for the church. In their view, under the Old Regime, Gallicanism and the idolatry of royalism were worse than revolutionary atheism because the revolutionaries’ persecution of Catholics, although ­traumatic, ultimately purified and strengthened the church in preparation for its coming triumph.15 The historical lesson that the Mennaisians drew from the French Revolution is that nothing produces more terrible calamities than resistance to that which God has proclaimed necessary.16 Moral power, however, will always win out over material power in the end; ­absolutists – whether royal or demagogue – can only momentarily obstruct this outcome. Confident that they had grasped the providential order governing history, the Mennaisians were certain that what they called the terrible enigma of modern history – the correct relationship between God and liberty – would eventually be resolved in a new social order 14 Lamennais, “De l’avenir de la société, deuxième article,” 64–5. 15 Coux, “De l’année 1830,” 184–7. 16 Lamennais, “De l’avenir de la société, première article,” 53–4.

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governed by the regenerative idea of Catholic liberty, or the total ­subordination of material power to the spiritual power.17 The Mennaisians conceptualized the July Revolution as a way station on the road to the new theocratic social order. On the one hand, it was a popular reaction against the principle of absolutism. On the other hand, its ultimate origins transcended human causes because it represented the latest phase in the providentially directed process of the realization in society – to the extent attainable on earth – of the spiritual ideal of Catholic liberty.18 Going forward, the Mennaisians judged the July Monarchy against this religio-social vision by drawing on a distinction between the legitimate order and the legal order in society (i.e., Bonald’s template, although the content is different). The l­ egitimate order is immutable, absolute, and divine; the legal order is the statuary regime of a given society and rests on convention or contract. When the two orders are in harmony, the legal order protects the legitimate order while receiving from it a legitimacy that it does not possess on its own, but if the legal order wields power in opposition to the spiritual power, it becomes the enemy of the legitimate order. The Mennaisians cautioned that confusion between the two orders is a source of immense calamities and that, at bottom, all false doctrines in religion, politics, and philosophy clothe the variable and relative with the characteristics of what is invariable, absolute, and divine, and vice versa.19 In the aftermath of the July Revolution, the Mennaisians set themselves the dual task of, on the one hand, convincing Catholics that the church had much to gain and nothing to lose from embracing the civil and political liberties enshrined in the Charter of 1830 and, on the other hand, of pressing the government to extend those liberties to the Catholic Church itself. The Mennaisians tirelessly advocated for a package of liberties – of publication, religion, association, and education – that they regarded as necessary to translate into the civil and political life of France the stage of the providentially directed development of social intelligence now attained. They sincerely embraced these liberties but conceived of them neither as rights in the Liberal sense of natural or inalienable individual rights nor as ends in themselves. Liberties, for the Mennaisians, were always God-given, were a product 17 Coux, “De l’année 1830,” 188–9. 18 Lamennais, “De l’avenir de la société, première article,” 54–5. 19 Gerbet, “De la légitimité et de la légalité,” 18–21.

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of and subordinate to the supremacy of the spiritual principle over society, and were a means through which the legal order of the July Monarchy would draw closer to the legitimate theocratic order that would be fully achieved only in God’s own time.20 The Mennaisians regarded freedom of publication – by which they meant freedom of thought and expression – as the most precious liberty because they considered it essential to their anticipated reunion of faith and knowledge; wherever there is freedom of thought and e­ xpression, Lamennais wrote, one discerns a tendency of faith toward knowledge and of knowledge toward faith, whereas elsewhere they become more and more separated.21 The Mennaisians’ demand that the July regime honour the freedom of religion guaranteed in the Charter of 1830 was not only a defence of the rights of Catholics but further implied freedom of association and education. Lamennais argued that if Catholics could not form associations, they were at the mercy of arbitrary government, and he regarded the right to provide a Catholic education for one’s children as the “family’s first liberty,” without which freedom of religion was a sham. The Mennaisians accordingly demanded that the ­government fulfill its pledge to liberate education from monopoly of the ­secular University.22 The Mennaisians’ defence of liberties culminated in their advocacy for the separation of church and state. It was abhorrent to them that the church – the spiritual power and sole source of legitimacy for the social order – should be subject to the state in any way. Accordingly, the  Mennaisians, keeping vigilant watch for signs of a return of Gallicanism under the July Monarchy, loudly protested any instances of government interference in the affairs of the church. This was the context for their bitter protest against the government’s order, over the objections of the Archbishop of Paris, that the abbé Henri Grégoire, the former conventionnel and Constitutional Church archbishop, be buried in consecrated ground upon his death in May 1831.23 The Mennaisians, in short, demanded the total “liberation” of the

20 Lamennais, “Des doctrines de L’Avenir,” 9–17; Viaene, Belgium and the Holy See, 66–7. 21 See Lamennais, “De l’avenir de la société, deuxième article,” 68. 22 Lamennais, “Des doctrines de L’Avenir,” 13–14; C.E. Harrison, Romantic Catholics, 125–6. 23 See Lacordaire, “Obsèques de M. Grégoire,” 421–6.

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church from state control, arguing that the government ought to exercise no spiritual power whatsoever.24 Critically, they defined spiritual power broadly, such that it included morality, conscience, education, and most intellectual activity. Thus, although the separation of church and state was a central Liberal principle, the Mennaisians invested it with an entirely different meaning and purpose. As Viaene expresses it, for Liberals, the separation of church and state was a weapon against the church, whereas for the liberal-Catholic Mennaisians, it was a weapon against the state.25 Indeed, the Mennaisian version of the separation of church and state was a corollary of their conception of history as the providentially directed progressive achievement of the supremacy of the spiritual principle over the temporal sphere. Ultimately, they envisaged a theocratic social order in which the church would exercise absolute authority over the religious, moral, and intellectual lives of the people while the state shrivelled to nothing more than a regulatory agent for a minimal administrative function.26 Viaene, underlining its prophetic-intransigent nature, characterizes the Mennaisians’ liberal-Catholic political program as a theocratic dream that was even more utopian than that of intransigent ultramontanes.27

Lamennais’s Break with Rome L’Avenir suspended publication in November 1831 in the face of intense opposition from the French ecclesiastical establishment.28 Lamennais, accompanied by Lacordaire and Montalembert, travelled to Rome to seek support from Pope Gregory XVI himself for their liberal-Catholic

24 Lamennais, “De l’avenir de la société, deuxième article,” 72. 25 Viaene, Belgium and the Holy See, 68. 26 Lamennais, “De l’avenir de la société, première article,” 56, 59–61. See also Lamennais, “De l’avenir de la société, deuxième article,” 73. 27 Viaene, Belgium and the Holy See, 67, 111. It is not, then, that Lamennais did not clearly perceive the boundaries between religion and politics, as Thomas Kselman asserts, so much as that he refused to acknowledge them. Kselman, Conscience and Conversion, 158. Kselman’s reading of Lamennais focuses on the issue of freedom of conscience in the context of the post-revolutionary Catholic revival and debates over religious liberty. 28 On the period in Lamennais’s life from the suspension of L’Avenir to his public break with Rome in Affaires de Rome (1836), see Derré, Lamennais, ses amis, 679–98; and Le Guillou, L’évolution de la pensée religieuse, 147–98.

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program. Gregory’s response was the August 1832 encyclical Mirari vos, in which he condemned the basic ecclesiastical and political positions of L’Avenir. Lamennais responded to the encyclical in Paroles d’un ­croyant (1834), bitterly denouncing the pope, along with the kings of Europe, for failing to live up to their Christian duties to the people and ­preaching a social gospel that, although still based on Christ, repudiated the church as irredeemably corrupt. Lamennais had always opposed the authority of the state in the name of the spiritual principle, but whereas he had formerly located the spiritual principle in the Catholic Church, he now located it in the mass of humankind, especially in the poor and suffering “People.” Having broken altogether with political Catholicism and concluded that the church was irrelevant to modern society, Lamennais was now advocating for a strict separation between religion and politics (in a truly Liberal sense rather than in the liberal-Catholic sense).29 Gregory XVI quickly condemned Paroles d’un croyant in the June 1834 encyclical Singulari nos as undermining the foundations of spiritual and temporal authority.30 Lamennais ­concluded from Singulari nos that social progress and Catholicism were incapable of reconciliation, although when he finally ceased to regard himself as a member of the church cannot be said with certainty. He was never formally excommunicated. From a purely political perspective, Lamennais’s evolution from intransigent ultramontanism through intransigent liberal-Catholicism to intransigent populism would seem to have taken him very far from his starting point. But his genuinely radical political transformation must not be allowed to obscure a more fundamental continuity: throughout Lamennais’s intellectual evolution, the centre of his thought was always the conviction that the spiritual power is the only legitimate source of social order and authority. In his intransigent ultramontane phase, Lamennais identified the spiritual power with the Church of Rome; as a liberal-Catholic, he identified it with the providential order that governs the direction of society; and as a populist, he identified it with the ideas of political equality and social justice. The challenge that his claims for the authority of the spiritual principle mounted against the authority of the state in all phases of his thought – or his 29 Viaene, Belgium and the Holy See, 74. 30 See the documents and commentary in Le Guillou and Le Guillou, La condemnation de Lamennais.

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continuously intransigent stance – means that Lamennais’s thought had always carried revolutionary potential.31 Indeed, Essai sur l’indifférence itself had harboured the seeds of populism: “What errors would be avoided if, in place of choosing one’s own reason for a guide, one allowed oneself to be led by common sense or the reason of all peoples! The people, in their ignorance, are wiser than the philosophers because the people have not shut their eyes to this truly natural light that shines in the midst of the world.”32 If the political disjunction between Lamennais’s ultramontanism and his populism is striking, there is intellectual continuity from the Traditionalist sensus communis ­epistemology of Essai sur l’indifférence to the populist vox populi, vox dei of Paroles d’un croyant.

The Subsequent Fortunes o f t h e C at h o l i c S c i e n c e o f R e l i g i o n Objections to the Traditionalism of Essai sur l’indifférence from Catholic theologians, especially the Cartesian theologians of Saint-Sulpice, had begun immediately after the publication of its first volume and intensified with the appearance of subsequent volumes. The theologians’ objections centred on the need to preserve clear distinctions between reason and faith and between nature and grace both against the sensus communis epistemology, which rejected any role for individual reason in adhering to the revealed truths, and against the idea of primitive revelation, which naturalized Christianity by conflating the truths ­discovered by general reason and transmitted by tradition with the revealed truths that the church had always taught are knowable only with the supernatural assistance of grace.33 Lamennais’s anti-Gallicanism further alienated the French hierarchy, and shortly after the July Revolution, theological opposition to his Traditionalism attained official expression in the “Censure of Toulouse” (1831). This document, signed by a majority of French bishops, censured fifty-six propositions taken from the writings of Lamennais and the Mennaisians, notably OlympePhilippe Gerbet’s Des doctrines philosophiques sur la certitude, dans leurs rapports avec les fondements de la théologie (1826). The document was sent 31 Bénichou, Le temps des prophètes, 123; Gengembre, La Contra-Révolution, 134. 32 Lamennais Essai sur l’indifférence, vol. 3, 14. 33 Foucher, La philosophie catholique, 42.

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to Pope Gregory XVI, but Mirari vos, which condemned the ecclesiastical and political program of L’Avenir, abstained from judgment on the sensus communis epistemology. Thus, although the encyclical stopped in its tracks the development of liberal-Catholicism among French clergy, it did not terminate theological Traditionalism. Singulari nos, two years later, completed the destruction of the Mennaisian school, as one after another, faced with the choice between abandoning Lamennais or cutting themselves off from the church, Lacordaire, Gerbet, Salinis, de Coux, and finally Montalembert submitted to Rome. Singulari nos, however, although it did censure the sensus communis epistemology on the grounds that it falsified the relationship between reason and faith, did so in general terms that were subject to interpretation and attenuation, such that even after the defection of Lamennais, some of his former colleagues and disciples were able to persevere in their theological Traditionalism and program of Catholic science.34 L’Avenir itself had wholeheartedly endorsed the concept of Catholic science developed in Mémorial catholique.35 Nevertheless, its focus on immediate political and ecclesiastical concerns precluded any investment in the further development of Catholic science in general or of the Catholic science of religion in particular. These projects, however, were taken up in other journals that the Mennaisians were actively involved in creating and directing, which continued on after the ­suppression of L’Avenir. One such journal is Le Correspondant. Not to be confused with a later Liberal journal of the same name, the first

34 Ibid., 60–1. See also Viaene, Belgium and the Holy See, 419–23. After Singulari nos, theological Traditionalism repudiated the criterion of sensus communis. Edgar Hocédez has called the result “mitigated traditionalism” because it denied to general reason as well as to individual reason certain knowledge of moral and religious truths. In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the mitigated traditionalism of the chastened Mennaisians – and of a group of theologians at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium – was only one of a number of more or less Traditionalist t­ heologies in which an Augustinian epistemology of divine illumination and/or a post-­Kantian philosophical idealist valorization of Vernunft (intuitive reason) over Verstand (discursive reason) replaced the sensus communis, including the fideism of Louis Bautain, the Tübingen theology of Johann Sebastian von Drey and Johann Adam Möhler and their students, the dualism of Anton Günther, and the ontologism of Antonio Rosmini and Vincenzo Gioberti. Hocédez, Histoire de la théologie, vol. 2, 87. 35 This endorsement is clear from Lamennais, “Ce que sera le Catholicisme,” 76–9.

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Le Correspondant was founded in 1829 by a group of young Catholics under the auspices of another of Lamennais’s political creations, the Association pour la défense de la religion catholique. Its leading e­ ditors, Louis de Carné and Edmond de Cazalès, were both veterans of Mémorial catholique and most of their collaborators – including Jean-BaptisteClaude Riambourg, Théodore Foisset, and for a time, Montalembert – were committed Mennaisians. In late August 1831, Le Correspondant was transformed into the monthly Revue européenne, which lasted, with the same editorial team and program, until October 1835. Le Correspondant endeavoured to defend Catholicism through a dual program of attacking rationalism and materialism in both its ancient and modern forms and by publicizing evidence for the agreement between knowledge and faith in all fields. As a subset of the latter project, the journal publicized the evidence for a primitive revelation containing the religious truths provided by Orientalist studies of Chinese, Indian, and Persian religious texts.36 Another journal deeply marked by Mennaisian ideas of Catholic science was Université catholique. Founded in early 1836 by Gerbet and the two directors of the Collège de Juilly, the abbés Louis-Antoine de Salinis and Casimir de Scorbiac, the journal was yet another front in the Mennaisians’ campaign against the University’s monopoly on ­education. Contributors to Université catholique (most of whom had previously collaborated on Mémorial catholique, L’Avenir, and/or Le Correspondant/Revue européenne) sought to demonstrate that contem­ porary science and scholarship had verified the truths taught by the Catholic Church.37 Université catholique was, in short, an organ of Catholic science, and as such it reproduced the methods and arguments of Mémorial catholique.38 Outside the pages of these journals, their contributors further developed (in scope, if not in intellectual rigour) the program of Catholic science. An exemplary instance is a work by Riambourg that not only takes its readers through the standard Mennaisian positions but also extends its critique of philosophy to encompass modern forms of

36 On the program of Le Correspondant, see Derré, Lamennais, ses amis, 217–25. 37 Gerbet, “Prospectus,” 1. The prospectus, dated July 1835, was bound and paginated at the beginning of volume 1 of Université catholique, published in 1836. 38 Despland, L’émergence des sciences, 137–8; Derré, Lamennais, ses amis, 715–16.

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rationalism, notably Eclecticism and that of the Saint-Simonians.39 What is particularly noteworthy in Riambourg’s book in relation to the Catholic science of religion is his criticism of what he regarded as the excessive Indophilia of some contemporary Orientalists, whom he called the “neopagans of the nineteenth century.”40 Although the Mennaisians had originally welcomed Orientalist scholarship for its usefulness in demonstrating the universality of the primitive traditions, Riambourg now, in 1834, found it necessary to warn young Catholics to beware of writers who championed India as the ancient homeland of the ­primitive traditions. The key question concerns the age and nature of the Indian traditions. Some Indophiles asserted that the Veda was contemporary with or even predated the Pentateuch, that India was the cradle of the primitive civilization for the entire world, and that the Indian religion explains the doctrines and symbols of the majority of the other peoples of the world. Riambourg, in arguing that all these claims are historically false and religiously dangerous, effected a double displacement of the Indophiles’ dearest convictions: so far from the Veda being a treasure-house of primitive wisdom, it is a compound of rationalism, superstition, and idolatry; and so far from India being the homeland of the primitive traditions, the Vedic doctrines are derivative of Egyptian idolatry.41 Above all, however, that the condemnation of Lamennais did not mark the end of the Catholic science of religion was due to the decadeslong labours of the lay Catholic founder of Annales de philosophie ­chrétienne, Augustin Bonnetty.42 Bonnetty had read Lamennais’s Essai sur l’indifférence in 1825 and henceforth devoted his life to the defence, development, and propagation of its theological Traditionalism, particularly its theology of religions. The unsigned prospectus that prefaces the first number of Annales de philosophie chrétienne attributed the ­contemporary crisis of incredulity to the fact that religious people were 39 Riambourg, Du rationalisme et de la tradition, 92–5. 40 Ibid., 55. 41 Ibid., 223–6. 42 On the life of Bonnetty, see Unsigned, “Augustin Bonnetty.” Bonnetty remained editor of Annales de philosophie chrétienne until his death in 1879. In 1905, the journal was secretly bought by Maurice Blondel, who installed Lucien Laberthonnière as editor and turned it into an organ of Catholic modernism. The journal’s existence came to an end in 1913 when it was placed on the Index as part of Rome’s crackdown on modernism. Bernardi, Maurice Blondel, 205.

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unaware that proofs of religion were contained in modern discoveries in all fields. What was needed, and what Annales de philosophie chrétienne proposed to provide, was to educate the clergy and religious persons generally in the latest intellectual advances and to show how each and every one of them supported the truths of Christianity. Bonnetty drew on a wide variety of contributors, including veterans of the Mennaisian journals,43 members of the Société asiatique, to which he himself belonged, and fellow travellers like Riambourg and Pierre-Sébastien Laurentie. The prospectus promised that its collaborators would examine every new publication and every announcement of a discovery in each discipline in order to provide a summary of all the historical, philosophical, and scientific proofs of Catholicism against the attacks of incredulity.44 In practice, because Bonnetty believed that the best defence of Christianity was the discovery of traces of the primitive ­revelation in the history and mythology of Antiquity, the Catholic ­science of religion became the centerpiece of this apologetic program. Annales de philosophie chrétienne, then, reproduced the approach to apologetics of Mémorial catholique but more narrowly focused on the Catholic ­science of religion. Consequently, it amounted to a massive expansion and near-mechanical application of the Mennaisian formula first sketched out in the third and fourth volumes of Essai sur l’indifférence. That Annales de philosophie chrétienne was able to operate as an organ of Traditionalism without being troubled by the ecclesiastical hierarchy testifies both to the ongoing strength of Traditionalism after 1834 and to Bonnetty’s skill in avoiding explicit philosophical statements of the relation between faith and reason. Bonnetty had loyally submitted to Rome in the aftermath of Singulari nos. He had never subscribed to the political program of the L’Avenir team, and he sincerely believed that Gregory XVI had not condemned theological Traditionalism itself, which Bonnetty had always considered to be fully compatible with orthodoxy.45 Eventually, however, the question of the relation between faith and reason caught up to Bonnetty. Neo-Thomist theologians, who

43 Bonnetty himself eventually took on much of the day-to-day running of Université catholique after the ascension of Gerbet, Salinis, and Scorbiac within the church hierarchy left them with little time for editorial work. 44 Unsigned, “Prospectus.” See also Bonnetty, “Aux anciens et aux nouveaux abonnés,” 8. 45 See Bonnetty, “Des prérogatives de la raison.”

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contended that only the scholastic theology of nature and grace could accurately determine the proper relationship between reason and faith, charged that Traditionalism, including Traditionalist theologies of ­religions, fatally confused the natural and supernatural orders in its treatment of revelation.46 On 11 June 1855, the Congregation of the Index submitted for Bonnetty’s signature four propositions renouncing the Traditionalist teaching on the impotence of reason to know moral and religious truths and on the relationship between reason and faith. Bonnetty signed them with full submission the next day, although he continued to maintain that Traditionalism, properly understood, had not been condemned.47 The action against Bonnetty was the first salvo in Rome’s offensive against the various Traditionalisms that had survived the condemnation of Lamennais. Between 1855 and 1866, French Traditionalism, Italian and Belgian ontologism, and the Tübingen ­theology in Germany were all condemned, and in 1870 the First Vatican Council clarified and reaffirmed the condemnation of Traditionalism, declaring that both God’s existence and a number of the divine attributes could be known with certainty by natural reason.

46 McCool, Catholic Theology, 14, 55, 132. 47 Hocédez, Histoire de la théologie, vol. 2, 95–7.

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P art F o u r Statist Liberalism: Doctrinaires and Globistes Liberals in early-nineteenth-century France defended a position of political moderation between ultra-royalism and Jacobinism. They sought to reconcile the rights and liberties of individuals with the legitimacy of the sovereign state but were divided into factions based on their various and rival theorizations of constitutionalism and on the question of the relationship between the individual and the state.1 Statist liberalism, predicated on the sovereignty of reason rather than on the sovereignty of the people, and pluralist liberalism, which defended the inviolability of the conscience and the rights of the individual subject, produced distinct conceptualizations of religion. Part 4 of this study traces the construction of the conceptualization of religion as the symbolic expression of truths whose proper and full comprehension requires their translation into rational concepts carried out by the Doctrinaires and a group of younger thinkers closely linked to them and associated with Le Globe journal. This conceptualization was an integral element of a model of modernity that devalued revelation but preserved a place for religion. Chapter 10 sets out the Doctrinaires’ critique of sensationalism, their alternative psychological method in philosophy as the epistemological basis for their philosophy of rational spiritualism, and their recognition of history as the progressive instantiation of reason and concomitant teleological conviction that the end point

 1 On Restoration liberalism, see Alexander, Re-writing the French Revolutionary Tradition; Jaume, L’individu effacé; Girard, Les libéraux français; and Harpaz, L’école libérale.

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of social and moral progress would be the realization of the precepts  of reason, truth, and justice. It then addresses the Globistes’ assessment of the method and contemporary status of philosophy. The Doctrinaires’ conceptualization of religion emerges from the relationship between philosophy and religion inherent in their rational spiritualism. Chapter 11 accordingly examines the philosophical status granted to religion by the Doctrinaires and Globistes by analyzing first the Doctrinaires’ conceptualization of the relationship between philosophy and religion and then the Globistes’ critique of Idéologue and Catholic Traditionalist conceptualizations of revelation and related concepts. Chapter 12 sets out the civil status of religion according to the Doctrinaires and Globistes in light of their efforts to replace Christianity with a laicized rational spiritualism, the former through a statist, dirigiste application to religious policy of the sovereignty of reason and the latter by advocating for state neutrality in religion and the separation of church and state.

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During the very years when young Catholics lionized Félicité de Lamennais, an equally rapturous reception by a rival faction of young France greeted the Sorbonne lectures of another prophet of a new intellectual and social order, the Liberal philosopher Victor Cousin. Cousin and the other Doctrinaires championed a rational spiritualism that featured an epistemology grounded in psychology and an ontology that recognized a spiritual reality distinct from the material world. This chapter, after introducing the Doctrinaires and the Globistes, ­discusses the Doctrinaire critique of sensationalism and then Cousin’s analysis of the facts of consciousness and his ideas on history before turning to the Globistes’ assessments of the method and contemporary status of philosophy.

D o c t r i n a i r e s a n d Globistes The group that became known as the Doctrinaires coalesced in opposition to the Ultras beginning in 1816. Its members, who met at the house of Louis de Beaupoil, comte de Sainte-Aulaire, and in the salon of Albertine de Staël-Holstein, duchesse de Broglie (Germaine de Staël’s daughter), included an older cohort of those who had personally ­participated in the revolutionary upheavals, notably Pierre-Paul RoyerCollard, Camille Jordan, and Pierre-François-Hercule de Serre, and a younger one comprising those who had reached adulthood only under the Napoleonic Empire or the Restoration itself, among them Prosper

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de Barante, Victor de Broglie, François Guizot, and Victor Cousin. Royer-Collard and Guizot were the recognized leaders of the group.1 Royer-Collard had been allied with the Girondins during the French Revolution and narrowly escaped execution at the hands of the Jacobins. Under the Consulate, he became a constitutional monarchist, but in the oppressive political climate of the empire, he turned his attention to philosophy, teaching first at the École normale supérieure and then from 1810 occupying the new chair in the history of philosophy in the Faculty of Letters at the Sorbonne. Guizot, a Protestant whose father had been executed during the Terror, had come to Paris in 1805 to study law but soon turned to literary, historical, and p ­ hilosophical ­interests. He became friendly with Royer-Collard and other Doctrinaires and made a name for himself as both a journalist and a scholar. He was appointed to the chair of modern history at the Sorbonne in 1812. The Doctrinaires became politically active during the Restoration, holding political and administrative positions under the moderate governments of Elie Decazes. Royer-Collard represented the Marne département in the Chamber of Deputies from 1815 onward and served as president of the Council of Public Instruction from 1815 to 1820. Guizot entered political life in the early years of the Restoration when he was appointed to a number of government posts in the Ministry of the Interior; he was too young to stand for election to the Chamber of Deputies. Meanwhile, Victor Cousin, the star pupil of the Doctrinaires at the École normale supérieure tapped to fill in for Royer-Collard – first at the École normale supérieure and then at the Sorbonne when the latter’s political duties prevented him from fulfilling his academic responsibilities – quickly established himself as a dynamic and popular lecturer. Trips to Germany during summer vacation in 1817 and 1818 furthered his intellectual formation: he met a wide range of philosophers, scholars, and theologians  – most notably G.W.F. Hegel at Heidelberg and Friedrich Schelling at Munich – and acquired a depth of knowledge of contemporary German metaphysical thought rare among French philosophers of the day. The period of Ultra ascendency during the ministry of Joseph de Villèle (1821–28), over the course of which Royer-Collard and Guizot

  1 On the Doctrinaires, see Craiutu, Liberalism under Siege; Jaume, L’individu effacé; Goldstein, Post-revolutionary Self; Rosanvallon, Le moment Guizot; and Johnson, Guizot.

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emerged as leaders of the Liberal opposition, both removed the Doctrinaires from office and interrupted their academic careers. Guizot, who had returned to his chair in history at the Sorbonne, had his l­ ectures suspended and then was dismissed from his professorship. Cousin’s lectures were also suspended, and for the next seven years, he carried out various intellectual projects – including publishing editions of the works of René Descartes and Proclus and the first volumes of his translation of Plato – and continued to develop his own thought. In 1824, having returned to Germany to visit Hegel, now his friend and mentor, Cousin was arrested in Berlin on suspicion of anti-government activities. He was released after six months, the incident further burnishing his status among the opponents of the Ultra regime. The return of the moderates to power in 1828 restored the Doctrinaires to positions of influence. Under the ministry of JeanBaptiste Gay, Viscount of Martignac (1828–29), Royer-Collard became president of the Chamber of Deputies, Guizot returned to his Sorbonne chair and was appointed to the Council of State, and Cousin regained his lectureship at the Sorbonne, where his lectures on the history of philosophy were enormously popular in the heady days following the fall of the Villèle ministry.2 The brief ministry of Jules de Polignac (1829–30) returned the Doctrinaires to the ranks of the opposition, but after the July Revolution of 1830, they not only held important positions but also exercised power directly. Guizot became minister of public instruction (1832–36) and then prime minister (1840–48), Victor Cousin became the grand master of the University, and still other Doctrinaires held influential governmental positions. Le Globe was founded in 1824 as the voice of a new generation of Liberals. Its editors and leading contributors were all born between 1793 and 1804, and the journal was directed primarily at the new ­generation that had come to maturity since 1815.3 Many of the key Globistes further shared a personal history marked by three defining elements: they were graduates of the École normale supérieure; they were academics who found their careers blocked by political reaction;

  2 On Cousin, see Vermeren, Victor Cousin; Jaume, L’individu effacé; Goldstein, Post-revolutionary Self; and Fauquet, ed., Victor Cousin.  3 On the Globistes, see Goblot, La jeune France libérale; and Jaume, L’individu effacé. See also Furet, Revolutionary France, 315–18.

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and they had dabbled in but quickly become disillusioned with political activism.4 At the heart of Le Globe was a core of friendships formed at the École normale supérieure. Paul-François Dubois, Théodore Jouffroy, and Jean-Philibert Damiron had become close friends as students of Victor Cousin. Dubois, Jouffroy, and Pierre Leroux, the future socialist, were principally responsible for the creation of Le Globe, and these three remained the most important members of its editorial team, although Damiron and Charles de Rémusat also contributed s­ ignificantly. Dubois was its indefatigable champion and effectively its editor-in-chief but without the official title; Leroux shouldered much of the day-to-day work of producing the journal; and even if Jouffroy was less directly involved in production, his philosophical articles contributed more than anything else to Le Globe’s intellectual cachet. Le Globe was founded on two pillars, one philosophical and one political. Politically, it provided a forum for Liberal opposition to the Ultra regime in a form that championed liberty within a political constitutionalism defined by the Constitutional Charter of 1814 (see ­chapter 12). Philosophically, it was an organ for the further development and ­dissemination of rational spiritualism. More broadly, the Globistes ­conceived of the mission of Le Globe as nothing less than the spiritual ­reconstruction of post-revolutionary society. They saw themselves as the r­ epresentatives of the esprit de siècle and their journal as the organ of the ideas of the age; conversely, they felt themselves called to combat all those who opposed the spirit of the age, whether in philosophy, politics, literature, or any other intellectual or artistic activity. In ­practice, that meant setting themselves against two opposing blocs: on the one side, the political reaction and theological reasoning of the Ultras and Catholic Traditionalists; and on the other side, the republicanism and the philosophical materialism of the Idéologues. Le Globe was widely perceived, not least by Ultras, to be a Doctrinaire journal. And although this perception, and its insinuation that their elders were pulling the strings, offended the Globistes, the ex-normalien members of Le Globe’s inner circle did have close ties to the Doctrinaires – Jouffroy was particularly close to Guizot, as was Damiron to Cousin – and relied on them for support and social and intellectual connections.

  4 Vermeren, “Les têtes rondes du Globe.”

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These elder statesmen of French liberalism, in turn, gave their blessing to the enterprise but did not take an active role in the journal. The Globistes jealously guarded their intellectual independence but nevertheless imposed extreme discretion on themselves when criticizing their elders. The Globistes remained united as long as the Ultras were in power. The Liberals’ electoral victory in late 1827 and the fall of the Villèle government in early 1828 were decisive turning points. Two measures passed by the new government were particularly significant: a less ­restrictive press law allowed Dubois – over Jouffroy’s objections – to give Le Globe a more overtly political orientation, and its educational reforms permitted Jouffroy and Damiron to regain academic positions. The reintegration of Jouffroy and Damiron (as well as Cousin) into the University eliminated one of the pillars on which Le Globe had been founded by restoring rational spiritualism to its academic home; ­markedly fewer articles appeared in Le Globe under the philosophy rubric from 1828 onward. Its second pillar – political opposition to the Ultra regime – collapsed soon after the first when in 1830 the July Revolution toppled the Bourbon regime. Its editors retired Le Globe later that year.5 The Globiste team dispersed, many of its members becoming important political and intellectual figures under the new regime, to the extent that their historian declared, “Retrospectively, it is apparent that the Restoration-era Le Globe was one of the most prestigious schools in which were formed the political and intellectual elites of the July Monarchy.”6

R at i o n a l S p i r i t ua l i s m The name “Doctrinaires” dates from the 1820s and was coined by the Ultras to slight their opponents as heirs of the abstract political reasoning of the eighteenth century. In fact, although they acquiesced to the name, the Doctrinaires considered abstract theorizing a dangerous distraction from the pragmatic task of reconstructing and stabilizing

  5 Or, rather, 1830 marked the end of the first or liberal iteration of Le Globe. Pierre Leroux joined the Saint-Simonians in 1830 and was instrumental in converting Le Globe into a Saint-Simonian journal.  6 Goblot, La jeune France libérale, 10.

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France in the aftermath of the Revolution.7 They did, however, hold that this task of reconstruction required policies grounded on sound philosophical principles. Royer-Collard and Guizot belonged to a private philosophical society that met on alternate Thursdays beginning in 1815. Other members of the group included the philosopher and public administrator Maine de Biran, the physicist André-Marie Ampère, the dissenting Idéologue Joseph-Marie Degérando, and the naturalist Georges Cuvier. Victor Cousin began attending in 1816. This informal society was the Restoration embodiment of an ongoing philosophical project dedicated to overthrowing the sensationalist psychology and philosophical materialism of the Idéologues, which had exerted a powerful influence over the intellectual life of the Directory and Consulate and which continued to be influential.8 Although, then, the Doctrinaires emerged into political prominence under the Restoration, their philosophical foundations had been laid during the empire in their dissention from Idéologue epistemology and ontology. Critique of Sensationalist Epistemology Philosophical critics of Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis and Antoine Destutt de Tracy, many of them former Idéologues like Pierre Laromiguière, Joseph-Marie Degérando, and above all Maine de Biran, argued that the Idéologues’ transformed sensationalist reading of Étienne Bonnot de Condillac was morally and socially dangerous because, by precluding an active mind or will, they made human beings into passive products of their environment. Laromiguière, for example, accepted Condillac’s basic principle that sensations are the origin of ideas but, denying that the mind passively receives sensations, came to recognize an active, nonmaterial principle in the mind that he designated the faculty of attention. By the late empire, lecturing on philosophy at the Sorbonne, Laromiguière was teaching that the soul is distinct from the body and that intellectual and moral ideas are produced by the intellectual and moral capacities inherent within it. Degérando followed a similar ­trajectory away from sensationalist psychology. He, too, came to insist   7 Den Boer, History as Profession, 135. An alternative explanation derives their name from the fact that some of the Doctrinaires were educated under the Frères de la doctrine chrétienne. Jaume, L’individu effacé, 124.  8 Goldstein, Post-revolutionary Self, 132–3.

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on the faculty of attention as an independent mental principle of ­activity while recognizing the soul as a thinking and willing principle distinct from the body and distinguishing a nonmaterial thinking ­principle from the material brain.9 These, and other, anti-materialist critics of sensationalist psychology drew support from German transcendental philosophy. Germaine de Staël’s De l’Allemagne (1813) ­explicitly p ­ resented the new German philosophy as a timely antidote to the materialism of eighteenth-century French philosophy. Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy, in particular, was introduced into France during the empire by the Idéologues’ philosophical opponents, who seized on his demonstration in Kritik der reinen Vernunft (The Critique of Pure Reason) (1781) that the mind contains active organizing principles that impose order on experience as evidence for the existence of nonmaterial faculties in the mind.10 The most important figure in the empire critique of sensationalist psychology was Marie-François-Pierre-Gonthier de Biran, called Maine de Biran.11 An old friend of Cabanis, Maine de Biran had begun his philosophical career as an Idéologue but had soon renounced ­sensationalist psychology. Between 1804 and 1812, Biran developed a philosophical program predicated on a sharp distinction between sense experience of the external world and the inward experience of willing and thinking. What was needed, he thought, and what he endeavoured to provide, was a rational psychology that, by addressing itself to the internal phenomena of consciousness and the ideas that can be deduced from them, would become both an “experimental physics” of the soul and a metaphysics of interior experience.12 Maine de Biran’s experimental physics of the soul turns on four interrelated concepts: willed effort, the active self, sens intime, and the fait primitif. Biran’s first step was to redirect an Idéologue concept. Destutt de Tracy, reflecting on Condillac’s analysis of sense experience, had coined the term motilité (motility) to capture the recognition that we come to understand external bodies through internally experienced, voluntary bodily movements. Biran seized on the concept but applied  9 Staum, Minerva’s Message, 97, 106–7; Goldstein, Post-revolutionary Self, 122. 10 Vermeren, Victor Cousin, 37–8. 11 On Maine de Biran, see Gouhier, Maine de Biran; Azouvi, Maine de Biran; and Devarieux, Maine de Biran. 12 Azouvi, Maine de Biran, 18, 209, 240.

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it to consciousness and renamed it effort voulu (willed effort). He insisted that willed effort was radically different from sensation: the difference between feeling and feeling that I feel, or between sensing and sensing that I sense, is the difference between passivity and activity.13 In this way, Biran recognized willed effort as an interior sentiment of the ­movement of consciousness, of which the self alone is the cause and which is therefore distinct from movements that are forced on one by external causes (including for Biran the emotions). In short, the sense of one’s own causality experienced in willed effort establishes the self as an active subject. This interior sentiment is Biran’s sens intime. And, since it cannot be denied without denying one’s own existence, interior sentiment serves as a new type of evidence against skepticism.14 The postulation of consciousness of the self is what Biran called the fait primitif. It is the primitive or originary fact not in a temporal sense but epistemologically in that the distinction between the self and the object, without which there can be no knowledge, is first posited in consciousness of the self. For Biran, finally, the self perceived by interior sentiment cannot be objectified or represented; it is sui generis. In fact, the fatal flaw of previous philosophies, according to Biran, was their refusal to recognize the irrepresentability of the self. Nevertheless, even though it cannot be objectified, Biran insisted that the interior fact is as much a positive fact as any fact about the external world, and so he considered his psychologically grounded metaphysics to be every bit as sound a science as the natural sciences.15 Maine de Biran’s critique of sensationalist psychology was taken up by Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard, whose most important contribution to the anti-materialist philosophical trajectory under the empire was to introduce into France the Scottish common sense philosophy of Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart. Not to be confused with the Mennaisian sensus communis, the Scottish philosophy argued against John Locke that the human mind is not a blank slate that becomes imprinted by sensory experience but is instead, independently of experience, already equipped with certain structures that form the basis of our reasoning processes. These structures, possessed by all people simply

13 Hallie, Maine de Biran, 12, 28. 14 Devarieux, Maine de Biran, 14–15; Vermeren, Victor Cousin, 43. 15 Azouvi, Maine de Biran, 212; Devarieux, Maine de Biran, 399, 407, 411.

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by virtue of being human, were what the Scots meant by common sense. Royer-Collard, who discovered Reid in 1804 through a French translation of Adam Smith, promoted the Scottish common sense philosophy as supporting and confirming the emerging French anti-materialist critique of sensationalist psychology as morally and politically dangerous. By falsely reducing individuals to sensations and minds to passive entities, he argued, sensationalism produces a moral relativism (e.g., the Idéologues’ enlightened self-interest) that destroys the rights and duties that constitute private morality while politically producing anarchy and tyranny, as instantiated by the Terror and by Napoleon Bonaparte’s oppression. Sensationalism, Royer-Collard concluded, deprives individuals of their moral compass and saps the foundations of social order and political institutions.16 The Doctrinaires’ introspective psychological method in philosophy yielded a new form of idealist metaphysics characterized by an ontology that recognizes a spiritual reality distinct from the material world and an epistemology that denies the applicability of a single scientific method to both natural and human subjects. They came to call their philosophical orientation rational spiritualism.17 Victor Cousin’s Eclecticism Victor Cousin further elaborated rational spiritualism under the name of Eclecticism in the 1820s. Cousin, formed philosophically by Laromiguière, Maine de Biran, and Royer-Collard, was an enthusiastic disciple of the Doctrinaires’ anti-materialist critique of the intellectual errors and moral consequences of sensationalism. He understood the mind as containing innate structural and organizational principles that give meaning to sense experience and constitute a unified self capable of moral responsibility. Nevertheless, although Cousin fully endorsed the anti-materialist thrust of the Scottish common-sense philosophy naturalized in France by his teachers, he considered the Scottish ­philosophy to be metaphysically deficient. Psychology – as, in his words,

16 Drolet, “Carrying the Banner,” 651–2, 674; Vermeren, Victor Cousin, 12, 50. 17 The Idéologues scorned the Doctrinaires’ “Kanto-platonic” obscurities and bemoaned the return of spiritualist metaphysics to French philosophy. See Vermeren, Victor Cousin, 96–100 (quotation at 98).

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“the antechamber [vestibule] of philosophy”18 – requires the supplement of idealism,19 hence his interest in Platonism and contemporary German philosophy.20 There is, he thought, an intelligible world, understood as a sphere of distinct ideas, that exists independently of the visible world and whose universal and necessary laws govern the visible world. Plato had glimpsed the intelligible world, and now modern psychology was rediscovering it in the depths of consciousness. A central element of Cousin’s elaboration of rational spiritualism – and one that in turn provided the philosophical context for his analysis of the relationship of religion to philosophy discussed in the next ­chapter – was his application of the psychological method to what he identified as the three classes of the facts of consciousness: facts of reason, facts of the will, and facts of sensation. Cousin identified reason and its laws as the immediate effect of the manifestation of the absolute substance and therefore asserted that the facts of reason derive from the intelligible world. It is, Cousin continued, to this impersonal reason that we owe our knowledge of the necessary and universal truths. Cousin boasted that he had recovered ontology through psychology by demonstrating through his analysis of the facts of reason the fundamental idealist position that rational laws are the laws of being and that reason is true existence.21

18 Cousin, “Préface,” 12. Cousin’s reputation was expanded by the publication of Fragments philosophiques (1828), a collection of articles from 1816 to 1819 that were based on Cousin’s lectures at the École normale supérieure and the Sorbonne. Through to the end of the Restoration, its content, especially as summarized in the fifty-page preface cited here, in which he provided an overview of the development of his thought, represented Cousin’s – and indeed Doctrinaire – philosophical thought for the educated public. 19 Conversely, however, Cousin thought that idealism needed a psychology because without a psychology to discipline it, philosophy becomes vaporous speculation instead of empirically grounded metaphysics. Indeed, Cousin later regarded the absolute systems of Schelling and Hegel as based on nothing more than hypothesis and abstraction. Goldstein, Post-revolutionary Self, 252–3. 20 Platonism and Neoplatonism, in fact, broadly served early-nineteenth-century France as resources against materialist philosophy. Cousin, for his part, openly drew on Friedrich Schleiermacher’s recent German translation of Plato, although his ­interest was in conveying to his contemporaries the idealist content of the Dialogues, not in exploring problems of philology and hermeneutics. Fauquet, “Cousin homo ­theologicus-politicus,” 14; Simon-Nahum, “Cousin et Schleiermacher,” 40, 43, 46. 21 Cousin, “Préface,” 18, 23–4, 38.

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Cousin defined the will as the internal causality that produces first internal effects (or volitions) and then external effects (or actions). He cautioned that we must not confuse the passive bodily instruments of external causality (properly the domain of physiology) with the immaterial will that is the true cause of internal and external effects alike. Cousin next identified the two, and the only two, modes of actions: spontaneity and reflection. Spontaneous actions are i­ mmediate, whereas reflective actions are willed, but Cousin insisted that reflection follows spontaneity and contains nothing that is not already in spontaneity. The cause of all actions, moreover, whether spontaneous or willed, resides uniquely in themselves; that is, actions are free. Cousin defined liberty, however, not as a form of activity but instead as a power revealed only by its acts; the self, in other words, participates in liberty, but liberty is an idea that transcends the empirical self and toward which the self ceaselessly strives without ever reaching it. He concluded that analysis of the facts of the will teaches us to recognize the existence of an absolute activity that is prior to, superior to, and survives all phenomenal activity, thereby at once providing us with the only true theory of liberty and deriving liberty from ontology.22 This relationship between idealism and liberty was at the heart of Cousin’s proposed alliance between philosophy and Liberal political theory that so excited the young auditors of his courses both before and after his suspension from the Sorbonne.23 Cousin linked his discussion of the facts of sensation to an analysis of eighteenth-century sensationalism. Instead of dismissing sensationalism as simple error, he placed it in historical perspective. The analytical and empirical spirit of the eighteenth century, as represented by Locke and Condillac, he said, reflected the historical fact that in the eighteenth century the general condition of understanding and believing was such that any philosophy that aspired to speak to its contemporaries had to be founded on observation. Cousin next distinguished between the method and the doctrines of sensationalist philosophy. Whereas its materialist doctrines were false and carried dangerous consequences, its empirical method of observation, as the product of the spirit of the age – which itself, Cousin said, was the work of the general spirit

22 Ibid., 26–33. 23 Vermeren, “Les têtes rondes du Globe,” 26.

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of the world (esprit générale du monde) – was intrinsically good. The ­failure of sensationalism was that it did not apply the empirical method ­rigorously enough. Encouraged by the success of the physical sciences and by its own anti-metaphysical prejudices, eighteenth-century ­philosophy limited itself to sensible facts, whereas in order to truly practice the empirical method in philosophy, and to truly satisfy the ­conditions of the spirit of the age, one must apply the empirical method to all the facts of the world, to the facts of consciousness as well as to the facts of sensation. Cousin in this way situated the psychological approach to philosophy as preserving what was legitimate and necessary in the philosophical revolution of the eighteenth century and offered the promise of uniting methodologically the metaphysical and physical sciences.24 Cousin’s summary of his analysis of the facts of consciousness asserted that every such fact is at once psychological and ontological; that is, the internal elements of reason, will, and sensations correspond, respectively, to the external elements of God, humankind, and nature. Cousin, however, emphasized that consciousness in its triplicity is one, such that a unity underlies the metaphysical, moral (or historical), and physical worlds and their corresponding human disciplines of metaphysics, ­history, and the physical sciences.25 This unity, finally, is directed and explained by the absolute intelligence that is at the centre of both existence and consciousness.26 Cousin’s proudest claim for his version of rational spiritualism is that it establishes universal harmony in human thought by overcoming the divorce of ontology from psychology, of speculation from observation, and of philosophical knowledge from common sense.27 This claim may be understood, in Mennaisian ­language, as Cousin’s version of resolving the crisis of the age by overcoming the dualism of knowledge and belief. As his discussion of sensationalism suggests, Cousin’s analysis of the facts of consciousness bears on the history of philosophy. By confronting the various philosophical systems with the facts of consciousness, Cousin said, he was able to show that, amid all their hypothetical speculations, what is true and enduring in them is what was discovered through 24 25 26 27

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Cousin, “Préface,” 3–11. Ibid., 37, 39. Ibid., 46–7. Ibid., 40–1.

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empirical observation. After noting that these same truths were now being rediscovered and more rigorously understood through observation of the facts of consciousness, Cousin identified each philosophical system as being the expression of a particular order of phenomena and ideas that is real, or truly present in consciousness, but only part of the totality of consciousness. These systems, however, claimed to be fully and exclusively true, and it was precisely this claim that made them systems. Cousin concluded that because the philosophical systems of the past were not false but instead incomplete, a philosophy adequate to the totality of consciousness could be attained by synthesizing the ­elements of truth that they contained.28 Cousin’s name for this new synthesis of the elements of truth discovered in the experience of the past was Eclecticism, which he had been using since 1818 for his version of rational spiritualism. Cousin’s Eclecticism, then, is not merely an aggregation of philosophical systems but instead the integration of the partial truths of each system into a perfected philosophy. In lectures on the history of philosophy delivered after his reinstatement at the Sorbonne, Cousin argued that close study shows that past philosophical systems may be reduced to the four – and only four – ways that the human mind had attempted to grasp reality: sensualism, ­idealism, skepticism, and mysticism. As before, Cousin noted that past philosophers had held their particular system to be fully and exclusively true when in fact each of these four archetypal systems represented a true but only partial and incomplete accounting of the facts of ­consciousness, and he again called for a new synthesis that would ­comprise a complete philosophy.29 Cousin also gave considerable attention to the philosophy of history. Although he systematically developed his views only in his later lectures on the philosophy of history, he had set out its basic principles in an early essay. Conventional history, Cousin asserted here, depicts events and attempts to explain their causes. The external history of the human race, however, is only the visible and sensible expression of the

28 Ibid., 7–8, 48–9. 29 Crossley, French Historians and Romanticism, 35–6. Cousin’s inclusion of Indian philosophies in his overview wrenched them out of their historical and religious contexts but also encouraged European students of philosophy to take them seriously. See Despland, L’émergence des sciences, 253–4; and Douailler, Droit, and Vermeren, eds, Philosophie, France, 379–80.

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progressive actualization of divine ideas; thus the meaning of history is to be found not in the transitory events themselves but in the rational principle or transcendental order that they manifest. Events, in short, are signs or symbols of the world of spirit. To the external history of conventional historians, therefore, Cousin opposed an inner h ­ istory that reconciles and truly explains the events of external history by ­discerning within them the successive moments of the manifestation of the divine idea. The philosophy of history is Cousin’s name for the historical ­science that grasps the inner history underlying external events.30 Another aspect of Cousin’s understanding of the philosophy of ­history relevant to his depiction of the relationship between religion and ­philosophy is a historical schema based on the spontaneity-reflection dyad. According to this schema, the powerful spontaneity of the Oriental world represents the first movement of the history of the human race, which furnished it with an indestructible base, whereas the pagan world and above all the Christian world represent the gradual and progressive development of reflection.31 In his later lecture courses, and directly influenced by Hegel, Cousin taught that the divine idea manifests itself progressively in both nature and history, achieving self-knowledge within human consciousness across three great epochs or moments. In the first moment, embodied by the Orient, humankind’s experience of the infinite as an oppressive force coloured all aspects of life, such that its religion was pantheism, its government despotic monarchy, and intellectually it lacked self-consciousness and so possessed no historical awareness. In the second moment, the epoch of the finite or the celebration of human values embodied by ancient Greece, a polytheism of human-like deities replaced pantheism, more democratic political forms replaced monarchical despotism, and the mind began to know itself through reflection. Finally, in the third epoch embodied by the Christian West, the progressive realization of the divine idea in history culminated in the acknowledgment of the presence of the infinite within the finite, as manifested by theism in religion, constitutionalism

30 Cousin, “De la philosophie de l’histoire,” 331–4. See also Crossley, French Historians and Romanticism, 36–7; and Vermeren, Victor Cousin, 132. Cousin’s essay was a landmark in the introduction of the philosophy of history into France. It inspired young intellectuals, including Jules Michelet, Edgar Quinet, and Théodore Jouffroy, to take a serious interest in it. 31 Cousin, “Préface,” 46.

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in politics, and the recognition by the human mind that it is subordinate to another power in the universe. Cousin asserted, again following Hegel, both that history can never regress because the ongoing realization of the divine idea cannot be thwarted and that history progresses by means of conflict. Each people or state believes that its way of life is best when it is in fact but one imperfect embodiment of the truth, and wars among peoples are in actuality battles between their ruling ideas. The winner will necessarily be the side whose ruling idea more fully embodies the spirit of its age.32

T h e Globistes The philosophical mission of Le Globe, as noted above, was to serve as an organ for the dissemination and further development of rational spiritualism. It would, in fact, become the primary vehicle for the popularization of rational spiritualism among the educated public. Articles appearing in Le Globe under the philosophy rubric were primarily by Jouffroy and Damiron, with a few contributions coming from Cousin. Damiron was above all a popularizer of Cousin’s version of rational spiritualism, whereas Jouffroy was a more original thinker.33 Damiron on the Method of Philosophy Jean-Philibert Damiron’s principal philosophical contribution to Le Globe was a series of seventeen articles on French philosophical thought since 1800. He republished these articles, with additional material, as Essai sur l’histoire de la philosophie en France au dix-­neuvième ­siècle (1828).34 Damiron classified French philosophical activity in the first three decades of the nineteenth century into three schools. The school of sensation, or sensualism, represented by the Idéologues and based 32 Crossley, French Historians and Romanticism, 36–8. Left-wing critics accused the Doctrinaires generally and Cousin in particular of teaching a historical fatalism that justified the established order. See Vermeren, Victor Cousin, 105–7. 33 There are no English translations of Damiron. Older but still useful translations of several of Jouffroy’s pieces may be found in Ripley, Philosophical Miscellanies. 34 The book enjoyed considerable success. A second edition appeared later in 1828, with the addition of an overview of the state of philosophy in France in the nineteenth century, and a third edition in two volumes, which included a 120-page supplement, appeared in 1834.

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on the principle of sensation, explains things by the operation of natural causes. The school of revelation, led by Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald, and Félicité de Lamennais and based on authority, explains things by the idea of God. The school of rational spiritualism, or Eclecticism, whose representatives include Royer-Collard, Maine de Biran, Cousin, and Jouffroy and which is based on psychological analysis, explains things through the operation of the human mind. Although sensualism, Damiron said, had dominated French intellectual life until the end of the empire, with the theological school, promoted by the clergy, becoming dominant during the Restoration, the former had lost its influence and the latter was now ebbing. Rational spiritualism, for its part, which like the school of revelation originated in the early years of the Restoration, was now coming into its full strength and was poised to dominate French philosophy.35 Damiron wrote, of course, not only as a historian but also as a partisan of rational spiritualism. His accounts of the other two schools were highly critical. Damiron identified Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis, Antoine Destutt de Tracy, and Constantin-François Volney as, respectively, the physio­ logist, metaphysician, and moralist of the sensualist school. Particularly ­dangerous, he said, was Volney, whose La loi naturelle, ou Catéchisme du citoyen français (1793) Damiron credited as having displaced the Catholic Church as the moral authority for the majority of his contemporaries.36 Although Volney’s moral philosophy, Damiron allowed, correctly identified vice as vice and virtue as virtue, it committed the fatal error of denying the soul and consequently making self-preservation and pleasure seeking the standard of morality. More broadly, all the Idéologues, who programatically derived not only morality but also sensibility and intelligence exclusively from the physiological organization of human beings, erred in confusing the material conditions of the exercise of human faculties with their immaterial principle. Noting that physiology explains the material nature of human beings but not human beings themselves, Damiron argued that the school of sensation knows nothing of consciousness or the spiritual because sensation has as its object 35 Damiron, Essai sur l’histoire de la philosophie, v, xi, xxix–xxx. 36 An anonymous contributor to Le Globe greeted a new edition of Volney’s works by remarking, “Although the majority of Volney’s works date from the end of the eighteenth century, they can be considered as belonging to the nineteenth century by the influence they have exercised on it.” Unsigned, “Annonces,” 496.

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only matter and the laws governing physical things. Consciousness or the soul, he concluded, can only be fully explained by a psychology that takes into account its passions, its wills, and its ideas.37 Damiron here approximated Bonald’s definition of a human being as “an intelligence served by organs.” And in fact, when he turned to the school of revelation, Damiron cited Bonald’s definition in praising the theological school for recognizing human beings as intellectual and spiritual beings. The problem here, however, was that the theological school’s mode of recognizing human beings as spiritual beings was “mystical” instead of rational. By “mystical,” Damiron meant that it was dogmatic or inaccessible to reason because the theological school’s understanding of humankind was mediated through Christian doctrines instead of being derived rationally through psychological observation.38 A further criticism that Damiron levelled against the theological school was that Traditionalism’s subordination of philosophy to the authority of the Catholic Church as the custodian of divine ­revelation sacrificed intellectual inquiry to theological authority. In times of ignorance and barbarism, Damiron allowed, the authority of dogma may usefully restrain passions and regulate conduct, but in more enlightened times, it impedes the march of civilization, and now it would have catastrophic consequences for modern society, in which intellectual freedom had been won.39 If the schools of sensualism and revelation were unable to provide an adequate philosophical account of humankind, Eclecticism’s psychological method of philosophical reasoning allowed it to mediate between the other two schools by completing and clarifying the partial truths that they possessed and refuting and rejecting their errors.40 Rational spiritualism, Damiron said, recognizes and values appropriately both sensation and revelation. In trusting the senses but not rejecting a world beyond what is knowable through the material senses, Eclecticism neither rejects nor accepts sensualism outright but limits it. It values sensualism’s researches into physiology, utility, and nature but knows that the body is not the whole person, that utility is not the whole of morality, and that nature is not the whole of divinity. Conversely, rational 37 Damiron, Essai sur l’histoire de la philosophie, xii–xvi, 6, 32–3, 49, 287. 38 Ibid., xviii 39 Ibid., xxvi–xxvii, 169–72. 40 Ibid., 167. See also Vermeren, Victor Cousin, 130–1.

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spiritualism acknowledges authority but only within limits. As a spiritual but not mystical school, rational spiritualism could accept the Catholic idea of a nonmaterial soul if it was to be grasped in consciousness and psychological experience rather than asserted from witness and ­tradition. Similarly, Damiron continued, it could accept the dogma of original sin provided that in place of a mystery that declares humankind to be guilty, wicked, and subject to expiation and punishment, it was reconceptualized as a rational account of early humankind as imperfect and weak but capable of progressive improvement. Rational spiritualism, that is, accepts evidence derived both from the senses and from authority but subordinates what Damiron called external truths to its own analysis of the laws of the mind. The inner (intime) truth, in Damiron’s words, of psychological analysis provides the criterion by which all external evidence must be judged. The proper method of the philosopher is therefore to know oneself through reflection on one’s mental operations, then to know sensible things, and finally to know past things.41 Jouffroy on the Contemporary Status of Philosophy Théodore Jouffroy defined materialism and spiritualism as philosophical opinions whose principles deny, respectively, the existence of spirit and of matter, and he declared that therefore they offer the world philosophically mutilated systems inasmuch as a materialist believes only in his senses and is deprived of his consciousness, whereas a spiritualist believes only in his consciousness and is deprived of his senses. In contrast to these opposed and partial systems, however, a complete philosophy must recognize both the senses and consciousness. The human race, he added, had always recognized that reality is double: common sense admits as true both what we feel within us and what we perceive outside us.42 Jouffroy was confident that the psychological method set out by the Scots – particularly Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart – and developed further by Royer-Collard and Cousin held great promise for the future of philosophy, but at present, he feared, unfamiliarity with the Scots threatened to impede the progress of

41 Damiron, Essai sur l’histoire de la philosophie, xxv–xxvi 42 Jouffroy, “Du spiritualisme et du matérialisme,” 174, 180, 191–2, 201–4.

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philosophy in France. He therefore set to work early in 1825 translating Dugald Stewart’s Outlines of Moral Philosophy (1793). To the resulting Esquisses de philosophie morale (1826) Jouffroy appended a long preface that quickly became the standard French exposition of the psycho­ logical method in philosophy.43 Jouffroy observed here that questions of philosophy not related to sensible reality cannot be resolved by sensible facts. Materialists mistake the reality that falls under our senses for entire reality when in truth there is a realm of facts that are imperceptible to our external senses but that are nevertheless capable of being observed and verified with an absolute authority. It is precisely to this realm of the facts of ­consciousness that the questions of philosophy relate. Philosophy, Jouffroy thought, is capable of becoming a science because the internal phenomena of consciousness are subject to constant, discoverable laws, although up to now philosophy had neither taken observation of these phenomena for its immediate end nor adopted the measures necessary for their verification.44 Philosophical questions, then, relate to the intellectual and moral world, and what we know of the intellectual and moral world comes from what we are able to observe of it. The only reality of this type that falls under our observation is the moral and intellectual principle that we feel thinking, willing, and acting in us; thus the existence, nature, and laws of the intellectual and moral world are revealed to us only within our own inner nature.45 Jouffroy ­accordingly urged philosophers to abandon the scalpel and the microscope and to become psychologists: only by observing the facts of consciousness in order to discover the laws that govern them would philosophy become a science. Psychology, however, was a science of the future. Before any conclusions could be drawn, philosophy had to be re-established on sound principles and method. Hitherto, Jouffroy said, philosophers had attempted to resolve philosophical questions without possessing the true manner of resolving them. The only way to resolve any philosophical question is to observe methodically and to record all the psychological facts, without considering the question at 43 Jouffroy, “Préface du traducteur.” See Goblot, “Jouffroy et Cousin,” 71. 44 Jouffroy, “Préface du traducteur,” v–x, lxvii–lxxii. See also Jouffroy, “De la philosophie et du sens commun,” 170–1, which first appeared in Revue européenne in August 1824. 45 Jouffroy, “De l’histoire de la philosophie,” 242–3.

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hand. Only when all the facts about the moral world had been gathered and verified would the psychological science be in a position to begin to answer philosophical questions with certainty. Current thought, however, was in the very first stages of applying the psychological method to philosophy. It was far too early, Jouffroy cautioned, to draw conclusions; the present task was to recommence philosophy by ­observing and verifying psychological facts.46 Could there have been any value for Jouffroy in the history of philosophy given the methodological inadequacy of all previous ­philosophical systems? Jouffroy said that what philosophy had always lacked is a knowledge of its own history. He noted that some philosophers – no names are mentioned, but Jouffroy was clearly thinking of Cousin and his disciples  – had recently proposed to re-establish ­philosophy by translating and publishing in the same philosophical language all previous philosophical systems in order to compare them so as to identify what is true in each system and what is false. Jouffroy appeared to acknowledge the validity of this historical approach to refounding philosophy when he said that both the historical and the psychological approach are needed because without psychology one will not understand history and without history one will mistrust ­psychology. But this statement is not as conciliatory as it seems. Jouffroy’s point was that the historical method implies and supposes the psychological method because to distinguish what is true from what is false in these systems requires knowledge of the true philosophy. If, then, the history of philosophy was not to be merely a reiteration of the partial systems of the past, it would have to be written anew in light of the true philosophy. That is, one could not properly do history of ­philosophy until the psychological method had established true philosophy, and so the history of philosophy remained to be done.47 Jouffroy, in fact, confessed in his inaugural lecture on the history of ancient philosophy in 1828 that he found his assignment difficult because it was not possible to do the history of philosophy given that philosophy itself had not been completed.48

46 Jouffroy, “Préface du traducteur,” cxxxv–cxxxvii; Jouffroy, “De l’histoire de la philosophie,” 244–8. 47 Jouffroy, “De l’histoire de la philosophie,” 251–3, 255, 258, 261–2. 48 Goblot, “Jouffroy et Cousin,” 79–80.

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Jouffroy’s understanding of philosophy, it is apparent, did not entirely concur with Damiron’s. All the Globistes agreed that philosophy must become a positive science of the facts of the soul, but for Damiron (­following Cousin) this objective had largely been accomplished by the development of rational spiritualism, whereas for Jouffroy the task of remaking philosophy on the basis of its true method was only in its preliminary stages. But we must not exaggerate the differences. Jouffroy and Damiron (and Cousin) are representatives of the same philosophical movement. Jouffroy may have been an Eclectic in his own manner, but he was still an Eclectic and described himself as such.49 Indeed, Jouffroy defined the constitutive principle of Eclecticism as “the ­profound conviction that the world of opinions is only the image of the world of realities and that accordingly opinions must be judged neither by themselves nor by their consequences, neither by the antiquity of their origin nor by the influence of their authors, neither by the ­character and numbers of their partisans nor by any standard whatever but by their conformity to reality ... The substitution of this genuine criterion, instead of the multitude of false criteria, which have hitherto been adopted, is the product of modern Eclecticism. This is its true spirit, its necessary and only result.”50

49 Goblot, La jeune France libérale, 244, 246, 250. For a full discussion of the differences separating Jouffroy from Damiron and Cousin, see Goblot, “Jouffroy et Cousin.” 50 Jouffroy, “De l’éclecticisme en morale,” 396–7.

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The Philosophical Status of Religion

This chapter shows how the Doctrinaire conceptualization of religion emerges from the relationship between philosophy and religion inherent in their rational spiritualism by examining the philosophical status accorded to religion by the Doctrinaires and the Globistes. It analyzes first the relationship between philosophy and religion worked out by Maine de Biran and Victor Cousin, then the Globistes’ critique of Idéologue and Catholic Traditionalist conceptualizations of revelation and tradition, and finally Théodore Jouffroy’s assimilation of religion into the philosophy of history in his landmark article “Comment les dogmes finissent” (1825).

T h e R e l at i o n s h i p b e t w e e n Philosophy and Religion Maine de Biran and Cousin were the most influential contributors to  the Doctrinaire understanding of the relationship between ­philosophy and religion, Biran through his explorations of the psychology of religious experience and Cousin through his hermeneutic of desymbolization. Maine de Biran’s Psychology of Religious Experience In 1813, Maine de Biran put aside the draft of the book that was to have been the synthesis of his experimental physics of the soul because he had become preoccupied with the problem of the relation of self to God or to the transcendent realm. Biran in this period carefully read Catholic authors – notably the Oratorian abbé Joseph-Adrien

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Lelarge de Lignac, whose Éléments de métaphysiques tirés de l’expérience (1753) invoked the self-evident testimony of the sens intime against John Locke – but he posed what he now called the first problem of philosophy in Kantian terms: how might it be possible to find a path from the p ­ henomenal world to the noumenal world without renouncing rational psychological method and falling back into faith or m ­ ystery? Maine de Biran’s ontological psychology (as this phase of this thought is known) equates the phenomenal self with the active self established by the primitive fact of consciousness and the noumenal self with the soul. He accepted that knowledge of the soul in itself eludes us because the noumenal cannot be perceived, even by the interior sense, but insisted that a sentiment of its presence can be observed and grasped in the primitive fact of consciousness. We infer, according to Biran, the soul from the primitive fact of consciousness without conceiving of it; the soul, that is, is an imperceptible noumenon that is manifested sensibly as the self. The self is not the soul – the phenomenon is not the noumenon – but they are not two independent realities either. In recognizing the self as the act of the soul and the soul as the noumenon of the self, Biran’s ontological psychology makes the absolute present to consciousness without illegitimately claiming direct experience of it.1 Maine de Biran’s philosophy underwent a further shift when in 1818 and as a result of his own mystical experiences – in which the self seemed to go out of itself and into contact with some higher reality – an interest in religious experience displaced the ontological psychology of 1 ­ 813–17. He now spoke of religious experience as the “third life” of a human being, in addition to the animal or physiological life and the moral life. In these years, Maine de Biran drew close to Catholicism but still did not abandon philosophy for theology. His attempt to ­reconcile religious experience with the psychology of the self treated the phenomena of religious experience as further evidence that must be studied if one is to achieve a complete understanding of the human mind. In other words, he now thought that the mind possesses faculties that remain unused – and are thus unknowable – outside of religious experience. His goal remained a rational psychology, or as he began

 1 Azouvi, Maine de Biran, 291, 323–35.

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to call it, an anthropology. Biran, in fact, carefully distinguished ­theology from philosophy: theology relates to the faculty of belief and addresses itself to what he called the “miraculous facts” revealed by divine signs, whereas philosophy relates to the faculty of reason and reflects on the “natural and primitive facts of the interior sentiment.” Biran correspondingly now recognized two sorts of revelations: an external and mediate supernatural revelation, transmitted to human beings through spoken or written signs; and an internal and immediate natural revelation, understood directly in the individual mind and heart through the experience of consciousness. Biran insisted that there can be no contradiction between the content of the two sorts of revelations; indeed, he regarded the task of philosophy in relation to theology as being precisely to convert theologoumena into philosophemes by establishing through rational reflection on the experience of consciousness the content of external revelation, including the existence of God, the law of duty, and the immortality and freedom of the soul. Nevertheless, philosophy for Biran does exercise a regulative function over theology because of the epistemological primacy of psychology over all forms of knowledge. Thus, although he considered theology to be legitimate as a discipline of faith, he cautioned that its beliefs must be ratified by reflection on natural revelation in order to prevent its degeneration into superstition.2 At the time of his death, Biran was working on an ambitious attempt to summarize his final philosophy under the title of Nouveaux essais d’anthropologie (1823–24). Maine de Biran presented his anthropology as a middle path – a spiritual juste milieu – between two inveterate human tendencies, the need to examine without believing and the need to believe without examining, instantiated respectively by the rationalist excesses of the Idéologues and by the theological excesses of the Catholic Traditionalists. Biran, in fact, worked out his elaboration of the relationship between philosophy and theology in response to the appearance in 1818 of Louis de Bonald’s Recherches philosophiques sur les premiers objets des ­connaissances morales. In a manuscript dated that same year entitled Examen critique des opinions de M. de Bonald, Biran reproached both

  2 Ibid., 376–9 (quotations at 376), 382, 431, 450.

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Bonald and Félicité de Lamennais for dismissing the primitive fact of consciousness  – that is, for focusing on external or supernatural ­revelation instead of natural revelation.3 Biran specifically criticized Bonald’s central thesis that humans could not have invented language and therefore that it must have been divinely revealed on the grounds that a language that was a divine gift to humankind would be unintelligible. Biran’s argument turns on the observation that the signs that comprise a language do not somehow contain the ideas conveyed by the language but instead merely record the results of the intellectual operations of abstraction and reflection within the mind. It is, he said, because human beings make language that they can understand it. Further, it is only because humans make language that they understand supernatural revelation since the possibility of the latter’s being ­understood depends on the psychological fact of consciousness as the capacity to signify. For language to be able to be a divine gift, he ­concluded, the signs of which it consists would have to possess the secret power of breathing into minds the ideas to which we believe them attached. Biran, in short, convicted Bonald of confusing the material letter of language with the mind that understands and ­conceives language.4 More broadly, Biran argued that the Catholic Traditionalists’ failure to understand the interior nature of thought had led them to misconstrue philosophy itself. Truth can be discovered only by drawing from within individual minds the capacities of the universal that they possess in themselves; truths, that is, are universal only to the extent that they are thought by individual minds. The Traditionalists’ demand that all minds subordinate their individual opinions to an externally received teaching substitutes blind faith for the exercise and development of reason.5 Biran’s late philosophical reflections – unpublished but known to his immediate circle – were selectively incorporated into the philosophical armoury of Victor Cousin.

  3 Ibid., 76, 394, 450.   4 Ibid., 379–82. The relationship between internal discernment and external revelation in the reception of divine truths would become the subject of considerable debate within the Catholic Church in the modernist period. See Bernardi, Maurice Blondel, 242.  5 Jaume, L’individu effacé, 511–12.

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Cousin’s Hermeneutic of Desymbolization Cousin’s account of the relationship between philosophical knowledge and common sense is key to his conceptualization of religion. He ­identified, in another instantiation of his fundamental spontaneityreflection dyad, the common sense (sens commun) of the human race as derived from the immediate givens of consciousness, and he identified philosophical knowledge as the product of rational reflection on these immediate givens. All people who have consciousness of themselves  – and Cousin noted that observation demonstrates that ­consciousness is universal to humankind  – necessarily possess all the ideas contained in the three classes of the facts of consciousness (i.e., the facts of reason, of the will, and of sensation, as discussed in ­chapter 10), and so everyone immediately knows God, humankind, and nature. Cousin’s deity, moreover – the deity of consciousness – is at once ­substance and cause, at once God, nature, and humankind. Although such declarations brought charges of pantheism,6 Cousin never wavered in his conviction that God is clearly discernible in the world that manifests him, in the soul that possesses him and feels him, and in the human consciousness through which God in some way returns to himself.7 For Cousin, then, humankind believes in God with an irresistible and unalterable belief. This universal belief, however, comes to be expressed in diverse forms because the common sense of the human race, governed by the principle of spontaneity, intuits truth and expresses it in symbols that vary according to time and place. The plurality of religious forms thus exists because humankind as a whole is spontaneous, not reflective; religions truly represent truth grasped through inspiration, but most people do not understand their beliefs. The function of philosophical reflection is to explain humankind to itself by translating into rational concepts the truths that religion intuits and expresses in symbols. Cousin, we can see, sharply distinguished truth from knowledge: truth is for all, whereas knowledge is for the few with the capacity for reflection.8   6 On accusations of pantheism levelled against Cousin by both Catholic and left-wing critics, see Douailler, Droit, and Vermeren, eds, Philosophie, France, 217–20.   7 Cousin, “Préface,” 41–2.   8 Ibid., 43–5.

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To say that philosophy translates religious symbols into rational c­ oncepts is to say that philosophy demythologizes or desymbolizes religion. A good example of such desymbolization is Cousin’s explication of reason as the true meaning of the doctrine of the Incarnation. After describing reason both as a bridge between psychology and ontology and as a guest who brings to consciousness news of an unknown world, Cousin said, adapting Nicene christological formulations, that if reason were personal, it would be merely subjective and without any authority beyond the individual self, whereas if it were to remain in the state of nonmanifested substance, it would be inaccessible to the self. Reason must, therefore, appear in consciousness both as the necessary manifestation of the intelligent substance that is accessible to all and literally as a revelation.9 Reason, then, as God’s interpreter and humankind’s teacher, is the true or desymbolized meaning of the Incarnation. Cousin insisted that none of his philosophical conclusions contradict the teachings of Christianity but instead faithfully summarize and develop them; reflection contains nothing that was not already in spontaneity.10 Despite Cousin’s pious language, it is clear that the process of desymbolization exposes the positive elements of Christianity – its doctrines, rituals, and institutions – as transitory forms and, ultimately, as empty shells whose true meaning lies elsewhere. Cousin’s rational spiritualism, in sum, replaces external revelation with philosophical reflection as the source of human knowledge of the divine truths.11 As early as 1821, Maine de Biran had observed to himself that Cousin “recognizes no other revelation than that of reason [and] denies the present influence of an intelligent, higher force on our soul.”12 An equally Biranian assessment, however, would be to identify Cousin’s

  9 Cousin’s ideas on common sense and the impersonal nature of reason suggest an affinity between the liberal philosopher and the Catholic Traditionalist enemies of liberalism. Cousin accepted the distinction between universal truth and the subjective individual mind that Maine de Biran had rejected (see above) and even told Lamennais in 1825 that he accepted the authority of “universal consent.” He derived the ­latter, however, from consciousness, not from external revelation. Jaume, L’individu effacé, 497. 10 Cousin, “Préface,” 42–5. 11 Jaume, L’individu effacé, 460; Despland, L’émergence des sciences, 384. On desymbolization, see Bowman, “Symbol and Desymbolizing,” 158–60. 12 Journal entry, quoted in Vermeren, Victor Cousin, 63.

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rational spiritualism as exemplifying the conception of an internal revelation that Biran himself opposed to the external revelation ­championed by the Catholic Traditionalists. Cousin’s idealist conception of reason undoubtedly qualifies as an intelligent, higher force acting on our soul.

T h e Globistes’ C r i t i q u e o f R e v e l at i o n   a n d   T r a d i t i o n The Globistes gave sustained attention to the philosophical status of religion, above all via their critiques of Idéologue and Catholic Traditionalist understandings of revelation and tradition. Théodore Jouffroy and Jean-Philibert Damiron concurred, albeit with differences in nuance and tone, on the inadequacy of the Idéologues’ conception of religion. Jouffroy identified it as resting on the principle of the exclusive authority of the senses, and Damiron similarly observed that it amounted to nothing more than a pantheist materialism lacking piety and confidence in a justice to come because, as sensationalists, the Idéologues knew nothing of consciousness or the spiritual.13 The Globistes’ parallel rejection of the Idéologues’ equation of religion with priestly imposture was most forcefully stated by Damiron. To C ­ onstantin-François Volney’s dismissal of the religious sentiments of faith and hope as virtues of dupes for the profit of rogues, he responded that sincerely held religious beliefs carry distinct benefits, not least the courage to practise virtue and being more at ease in one’s existence. It is true, he allowed, that unbelieving priests exist, but he insisted that they are both rare and soon unmasked. The real threat to religious sentiment, he thought, comes from the corruption of religious beliefs by fear and interest, as happened under the Napoleonic Empire and was now recurring under the Ultras. Damiron further argued that ­religious sentiments cannot be protected from corruption by laws because laws can be eluded, whereas a soul, possessing steadfast internal virtues, cannot be corrupted by self-interest, fear, or deception. Conversely, it is because unbelief deprives the soul of its defences against the corruption of its innate religious sentiments that unbelief is so

13 Jouffroy, “Du spiritualisme et du matérialisme,” 228; Damiron, Essai sur l’histoire de la philosophie, xii–xvi.

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dangerous. Sensualism, therefore, must be opposed and replaced. But with what? Society, he said, needed to return to the moral teaching of the church – but only once the latter had been transformed to give it a more philosophical character. What had been entirely about faith when it was addressed to simple and naive souls must now become rational in order to be persuasive and convincing for intelligences in  whom reasoning dominates. Damiron regarded the Gospel  – by which he meant the moral truths contained in Christianity – as a living, active thought and, as such, consonant with movement and progress. Philosophy, he said, applying Cousin’s principle that philosophy ­clarifies and explains religious truths through rational reflection, must ­necessarily lead to a moral theory that develops, makes precise, and systematizes the Gospel.14 However much the Globistes scolded the Idéologues for perpetuating the mocking tone of the anti-religious writers of the eighteenth century, they considered them a fading threat. A far greater danger to their minds was that posed by the Ultras and their Catholic Traditionalist allies. The Globistes ultimately believed that these political and theological reactionaries did not represent the spirit of the age, but they acknowledged their powerful influence over Restoration society and recognized in Lamennais an original writer who was infusing new life into theocratic doctrines and who, with the launch of Mémorial catholique in January 1824 (a few months before the debut of Le Globe), was now the charismatic leader of a school. Indeed, the Globistes and the Mennaisians – who for their part recognized the editors of Le Globe as the most important defenders of the doctrines of the French Revolution (see part 3 for the Mennaisian critique of rational spiritualism) – were direct and bitter rivals for the mantle of spiritual authorities for the new century. Jean-Jacques Goblot argues that the Globistes in part defined themselves in opposition to the Mennaisians. In August 1825, for example, Damiron declared that the Globistes were all Protestants in literature and philosophy. This was not the case, of course, in any strict sense, but his remark was a direct response to the Mennaisians’ filiation of modern philosophy to Protestant principles.15

14 Damiron, Essai sur l’histoire de la philosophie, 37–40, 51–3. 15 Goblot, La jeune France libérale, 185–6. See also Jaume, L’individu effacé, 186.

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Characteristically, however, whereas Jouffroy dismissed Traditionalism out of hand, Damiron attempted to integrate elements of Traditionalist theology into philosophy. He accepted as a universal human belief the recognition of an all-powerful supreme being whose law governs humankind first in the present life and then in another life that serves to complement and explain the first. The exact form taken by this belief, he said, varies from place to place and age to age, but at bottom it is always the same. This is Damiron’s version of universal or unanimous consent. The spontaneous reason of the common people ­produces a common fund of true ideas across the human race, subject to variations in form according to time and place and expressed as mysteries, obscure dogmas, and symbols.16 The question of whether revelation lies behind universal consent led Damiron to his critique of revelation and tradition based on the analysis of the operation of the mind. We ourselves, Damiron observed, sometimes have the experience of an idea suddenly hitting us with the mystery and force of a vision. Our ideas, moreover, truly are revelations in the sense that they come ultimately from God, who is the principle and cause of the intelligibility of the universe. The great movements of ideas, he continued, which occur at all critical eras of history, are collective revelations in this sense, and they must have been experienced with particular intensity in the first age of the world when earliest humankind, ignorant of everything and lacking both tradition and acquired wisdom, would have been incapable of composing for itself a philosophical system appropriate to the urgency of its situation and would have relied instead on a sort of intuitive knowledge of the vital ideas that were necessary to its preservation. This intuitive knowledge, he concluded, which seemed to come from outside of themselves, would have been experienced by earliest humankind as an external revelation.17 Damiron next showed how revelation transforms into tradition. The ideas that come by revelation are essentially true – as long as they are not altered or falsified by interpretation or analysis – because they are pure and simple expressions of the realities that give birth to them. Left to themselves, however, they inevitably expand their scope to become as great and vast as the world and in so doing fall into 16 Damiron, Essai sur l’histoire de la philosophie, 37–8, 384–5; see also vi–x. 17 Ibid., 386–8. Damiron here anticipated Julian Jaynes on the bicameral mind. See Jaynes, Origin of Consciousness, 75.

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imprecision. Such poetry – as the revealed ideas had now become – is not knowledge, properly speaking, although at bottom it retains truth. Elements of reflection then come to be mixed in with poetry, producing popular superstitions that are partly true and demonstrable and partly false and mysterious. The philosophical speculations of these early eras, finally, are rationalized versions of these popular s­ uperstitions. Revelation, then, according to Damiron, over time metamorphoses into the poetry, superstition, and philosophical speculation that together constitute tradition; conversely, tradition provides the only access later times have to the early thought of humankind. Currently, however, the status of tradition was doubly problematic because, first, over the intervening ages, traditions had been variously interpreted, modified, altered, and corrupted and, second, even when scholars had explained traditions with the help of erudition and criticism, it remained more poetry than knowledge. Whether simply received or interpreted by erudition, Damiron concluded, tradition cannot serve as the source from which reflective minds draw knowledge. The proper method of philosophy is direct observation and reasoning rather than the long path of erudition that indirectly studies an object of interest through the often defective expressions of tradition.18 Damiron explicitly applied his critique of tradition to the Catholic Traditionalists. The Traditionalists, he said, searched for human nature in traditions dating from remote times, but the human mind had developed over the centuries: at first, in the remotest ages, human minds explained the world and themselves through vague intuitions, then as mysteries, and later on by acquiescence to dogmas, before at long last attaining rational knowledge only in recent times. Two consequences follow from what Damiron called this psychological truth. First, human minds were now different from minds long ago, and they were different in such a way that the symbols and dogmas that had formerly charmed them no longer possessed the power to inspire belief or action. The Traditionalists’ attempt to rejuvenate the modern world by recovering the primitive traditions was therefore doomed to failure. Second, the truths possessed by ancient peoples corresponded to their times and levels of intellectual development. The “critical study of revelations” – Damiron’s phrase – teaches us to recognize the progress of thought

18 Damiron, Essai sur l’histoire de la philosophie, 388–92.

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over the course of the history of the human race, but it can be carried out only by those who already know the laws of the mind discovered by the application of the psychological method in philosophy. By this criterion, the Traditionalist approach to the study of ancient traditions amounted to poetry or mysticism rather than philosophy.19 Catholic Traditionalists, in sum, doubly erred: first, in making revelation the principle of philosophy, they drew from it an obscure system that ­contains only sentiment and intuition in place of knowledge; and ­second, in positing that knowledge must be received from remotest times, Traditionalists failed to grasp the natural development (marche) of human knowledge – interrupted, it is true, by long and frequent periods of degeneration – from the primitive inspiration (in which the first peoples perceived everything in the simplicity of their minds) to modern philosophy (in which truth is grasped not by inspiration but by experience and reflection).20 Damiron further criticized Bonald and Lamennais for rejecting reason as the foundation of philosophy in favour of a primitive revelation of language and ideas. His critique of Bonald largely rehearsed the arguments made by Maine de Biran and Cousin against the claim that ­language could not have been invented by human beings. Damiron also rejected Bonald’s historical evidence for the reality of a primitive revelation of language as depending on a literal reading of Moses’s narrative or on unwarranted assent to the inductions of scholars ­concerning a universal primitive language. He similarly dismissed Lamennais’s insistence that the only valid criterion of truth is the universal witness of Antiquity to the primitively revealed truths by noting that those witnesses could have recognized the truth of traditions passed down to them only if they had already discovered and grasped the truth in their own consciousness.21 Damiron allowed, however, that Lamennais’s history of religions in Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de religion (1817–23) contains valuable philosophical ideas. In particular, he thought that Lamennais’s assertion that there had ever been only one religion that had developed but not fundamentally changed across successive revelations (see chapter 7) was clearly saying that religion is better and better understood with each 19 Ibid., 184–5, 187–9 (quotation at 188). 20 Ibid., 403–5. 21 Ibid., 159–61, 165–7.

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successive revelation: the first revelation corresponded to the naive and fully sensible people of the first times; the second to the more serious, but still fairly simple, people of a more advanced age of the world; and the third to more philosophical intelligences. For Damiron, the implication was obvious, even though Lamennais had never proposed or even recognized it: a new era was dawning in which a new belief, heir and daughter of Christianity, would reproduce its dogmas but under forms more appropriate to the way that the world understood things now, such that what remained obscure and mysterious in the third revelation would appear clearer and more intelligible. Damiron here explicitly applied to Lamennais’s history of religions the hermeneutic set out in the late eighteenth century by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (The Education of the Human Race) (1780), according to which idolatry, Judaism, Catholicism, and Protestantism were all necessary stages in the religious and moral development of humankind but became successively obsolete and were left behind once they had fulfilled their role. Lessing’s schema, Damiron said, had been powerfully confirmed to the point that one no longer asked if but when this religious regeneration would occur and what would be its character and object. A new era of thought was about to begin in which religious truths would no longer be preached but rationally demonstrated. “In this religious regeneration,” he said, “we will be to the Christians what the Christians were to the Jews and what the Jews were to the patriarchs; we will be Christians plus something; we will believe in God but in another manner; we will understand him better because we will be ­better instructed about what he has made. Knowledge of God will come to us from knowledge of moral and physical nature; he will be discovered only in and by his works, of which we will have no longer a confused and mysterious notion but a more exact and truer knowledge.”22

Jouffroy on How Dogmas End Théodore Jouffroy, inspired by Victor Cousin, was one of the first Frenchmen to discuss systematically the philosophy of history. His ­reflections on history began with the observation that historians had hitherto devoted their attention to visible – what Cousin would call

22 Ibid., 140–6 (quotation at 146).

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external – history, whereas it was the intellectual development of ­humankind that really mattered because the true driving force of h ­ istory is the progression of ideas. Events such as battles, treaties, and the rise and fall of empires chronicled by the majority of historians were merely consequences and signs of the movement of ideas. The introduction of the history of moeurs and institutions by eighteenth-century philosophical historians had truly effected a historiographical revolution, but philosophical history, in Jouffroy’s view, penetrated only as far as secondary causes of historical change. What was needed was a ­historiography capable of grasping the necessary laws governing the development of human intelligence that are the underlying cause and true driving force of history. Jouffroy’s term for such a historiography is the philosophy of history. Its two central postulates are that humankind changes across the centuries (unlike the physical world, which does not change) and that its development proceeds according to fixed and immutable laws that govern the moral world no less than the ­physical world. History, he said, would pass beyond chronicle and philosophical history and would become a science only when it understood the necessary laws of intellectual development. This goal, however, had only recently been glimpsed and was far from being attained.23 In the meantime, historians must study the development of ideas in light of the laws govering their development. Jouffroy described human intelligence as being of a twofold nature and developing across three ­registers: it is spontaneous and reflective, and it develops across ­individuals, specific societies, and humankind as a whole. In the greater part of humankind, he said, intelligence develops spontaneously in a blind and involuntary manner, whereas in certain individuals capable of reflection, it develops more rapidly and more self-consciously. Philosophers accelerate the intellectual development of the masses by proclaiming to them truths that they would not have discovered for themselves until a later period. The reason of the masses, however, at first resists this new light and only gradually assimilates it by translating the abstract knowledge of philosophy into the practical forms of ­common sense. Philosophers, for their part, must devote themselves to teaching the masses, which slows or even temporarily stops their own

23 Jouffroy, “Réflexions sur la philosophie de l’histoire,” 57–9. See also Jouffroy, “De la philosophie et du sens commun,” 151–2.

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progress; by the same token, however, the masses exercise a moderating influence on philosophy that helps it to mature and prevents errors (an allusion to the Terror unmistakable to contemporaries). The ­development of society advances at the median rate of the development of intelligence among philosophers and the masses, although as civilization advances, the overall development of intelligence becomes ­increasingly rapid.24 Jouffroy called common sense the religion of the people and identified it as nothing other than a collection of solutions to the questions that philosophers ask. Religion is thus another philosophy, anterior to philosophy properly speaking, that is found ­spontaneously in the depths of all consciousnesses. Philosophers and the common people approach the same truths by different paths; after all, the goal of philosophy is to clarify by reflection the obscure intuitions that everyone receives in the presence of things.25 Jouffroy thereby assimilated religion into his philosophy of history by means of the spontaneous-reflective dyad. In Jouffroy’s further development of his philosophy of history, the development of intelligence within a society is merely one stage in the overall development of intelligence among humankind as a whole. The philosophy of history, that is, must grasp the progress of civilization itself. Jouffroy divided the human race into three distinct families of civilization  – the Christian nations, the Muslim nations, and the Brahmanic nations (which seem to include East Asia) – and, outside of them, savage tribes. Each civilization, he said, had been founded by a religion. A religion necessarily involves not only a certain mode of worship but also offers a total solution to the great questions of the destiny of humankind: its origin, its future condition, and its relations to God. A religion, Jouffroy concluded aphoristically, is a cause whose effect is a civilization.26 Historians, according to Jouffroy, had hitherto failed to understand the origin, connection, and development of these ­different degrees of civilization because they had paid too much ­attention to institutions, religions, and moeurs and not enough to the development of the human mind. Institutions, religions, and moeurs, as events in the history of civilization, are external things that are born, die, and are replaced by new versions of themselves, whereas civilization 24 Jouffroy, “Réflexions sur la philosophie de l’histoire,” 60–8. 25 Jouffroy, “De la philosophie et du sens commun,” 155, 158, 166–8. 26 Jouffroy, “De l’état actuel de l’humanité,” 103–9.

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itself, as the secret principle that connects all institutions, religions, and moeurs, never dies.27 The unfolding of the progress of civilization, the true subject of the philosophy of history, is nothing less than the panorama of humankind’s intellectual progress as guided by the divinely established law governing the moral world. This law – which, Jouffroy noted, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet called providence, others destiny, and still others the force of things – operates through secondary causes. Jouffroy was adamant that God does not intervene directly in history because without liberty the empire of ideas would be destroyed and replaced by that of sensual impulse.28 Jouffroy’s philosophy of history provided the deep context for his complementary analyses of the state of France’s intellectual life and the developmental sequence of religious ideas in a pair of articles that were widely discussed beyond the circle of Le Globe’s subscribers. Early in 1825, Jouffroy published “Le Sorbonne et les philosophes,” an article that he described upon its republication eight years later as a d ­ eclaration of both the principles and the philosophical manifesto of Le Globe.29 A  few months later, “Comment les dogmes finissent” appeared (although it had been written in 1823). These two articles were the most explicit statement of Jouffroy’s – and in general the Globistes’ – message to their contemporaries. In the title of the first article, “Le Sorbonne” stands for the orthodox Catholic theologians of past and present – Jouffroy, echoing François de Montlosier’s language in his warning of the influence of the Ultras over the Restoration regime, referred to such contemporary theologians as “Jesuits”30 – and “les philosophes” refers to eighteenth-century ­philosophes and Idéologues. These two dynasties, Jouffroy observed, after reigning exclusively one after another now battled for authority over the nineteenth century. They were equally intolerant, and each exposed the other’s internal contradictions, but – and this was his key point – the new generation was indifferent to both. A new age was dawning, Jouffroy proclaimed; the time of the theologians and

27 Ibid., 144–6. 28 Jouffroy, “Réflexions sur la philosophie de l’histoire,” 75–6. See also Jouffroy, “De l’état actuel de l’humanité,” 143. 29 Jouffroy, “Le Sorbonne et les philosophes,” 30. 30 On Restoration Liberals’ use of “Jesuitism” as a shorthand for theocratic conspiracies, see Alexander, Re-writing the French Revolutionary Tradition, 200.

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philosophers was passing away and could not be restored.31 In “Comment les dogmes finissent,” a landmark in Restoration Liberal thought, Jouffroy prophesized the emergence of a new intellectual order through an account of the life cycle of doctrines. “Dogmes” here, we must note, are not simply religious doctrines but intellectual and political ones as well, such that Jouffroy’s article discussed an epochal transformation that was spiritual, intellectual, and political at once. When a doctrine is born, he began, it is a living faith because it appears true to the understanding of the people of its day. As time passes, however, because people begin to accept the doctrine without verifying its claims or even understanding it, faith comes to rest on authority and habit in place of conviction. Jouffroy next observed, in a thinly veiled critique of tradition, that as a doctrine is transmitted from generation to generation, it becomes less and less understood in proportion to its distance from its source. Eventually, all understanding of the truth of a doctrine is lost, and faith becomes nothing more than a blind, ­indifferent routine. At this point, however, certain individuals, unable to tolerate blind faith, begin to examine the truth of the doctrine and discover that they no longer believe in it. From that moment, a new faith begins to arise in their minds on the ruins of the old, and society is thrown into terrible conflict.32 Jouffroy next charted the several stages of the conflict – a transparent depiction of recent French history. The first stage, in which the defenders of the old doctrine have authority but no arguments, whereas its critics have arguments but no authority, is a matter of physical force versus moral force as the old order attempts to crush the emerging new order. The people at first resist change, but soon their sense of justice is aroused in favour of the new doctrine. As greater numbers of people begin to feel the need for a new doctrine, the old doctrine begins to be threatened in its material existence. In response, its defenders argue their cause, inaugurating a period of intellectual debate. This stage is short-lived, however, because the old doctrine lacks sound intellectual grounding and so quickly becomes the object of ridicule, and the ­attitude of the people toward it passes from indignation to contempt. Enraged by such ridicule, the defenders of the old doctrine make an

31 Jouffroy, “Le Sorbonne et les philosophes,” 37–44, 48–50. 32 Jouffroy, “Comment les dogmes finissent,” 3–7.

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all-out push against incredulity, allying themselves with all those whose material interests benefit from the old doctrine and the order of things based on it. Hypocritical, cunning, and desperate, they gather their strength even as their opponents, the party of truth, turn to the task of constructing a positive doctrine. In every revolution of ideas, Jouffroy said, skepticism destroys the old ideas but cannot long survive them because human beings, knowing that there is such a thing as truth, cannot endure a state of doubt except temporarily as the negation of a false belief. The innate tendency to aspire after a new, true belief once error is destroyed gives rise not to one but to many new systems, and the party of truth becomes divided into factions. This factionalism confuses the mass of people, who become indifferent to everything but their own interests, and the champions of the old order, having slowly and secretly collected their forces, exploit this confusion and ­indifference. Jouffroy’s depiction of this counter-revolutionary phase is grim: the partisans of the old doctrine exact vengeance on their enemies, attempt to crush the spirit of inquiry, and train fanatical theocrats in their schools; the people, meanwhile, ruled by self-interest, abandon their intelligence and will to the reactionaries.33 The counter-revolutionary phase, however, is only a salutary and final crisis that necessarily precedes the recovery of the social body – or so Jouffroy perceived the contemporary period of Ultra ascendency ­during which he was writing. He assured his readers that the seeds of a new doctrine were already sprouting in the minds of the rising generation. Young people who had been educated by the early critics of the old order, who were themselves necessarily skeptics because their work was to destroy, not to construct, were immune to the reactionaries’ doctrines but equally felt the insufficiency of their teachers’ skepticism. The new generation, aware that doubt is only a preparation for a new and better faith, recognized that its mission was not to continue the worn-out quarrel between the old doctrine and skepticism but instead to seek truth and to discover the new doctrine to which every mind unconsciously aspires.34 Not only can we see clearly why Jouffroy’s optimism in “Comment les dogmes finissent” has been described as “a sort of heroic faith that

33 Ibid., 8–18. 34 Ibid., 19–23, 26.

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arms itself prophetically with the future against the miseries of the present,” but we can also perceive the corresponding “messianic allure” that the article held for young Liberals.35 Even the most seemingly unassailable human constructions, he assured his readers, can be ­levelled in a flash by the hidden causes of things, or what people call providence. When the time arrived, the secret voice that speaks of liberty, truth, and virtue in the consciousness of every person who is oppressed, blinded, or c­ orrupted would rapidly and unexpectedly produce mass adherence to a new doctrine that would reign over the new age as Christianity had reigned over the old one. The new ­philosophical faith, Jouffroy declared, had already been born and would inevitably take possession of society, although he did not hazard an account of precisely how this event would come about: “The man, the place, the time, the occasion are not ­important; the force of things inevitably brings about what it has prepared, the obstacles to which it has previously overthrown. Thus the ruin of the party of the old doctrine and the advent of the new one are completed. As to the old ­doctrine itself, it has been dead for a long time.”36

35 Goblot, La jeune France libérale, 183–4. 36 Jouffroy, “Comment les dogmes finissent,” 24–9 (quotation at 29).

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Théodore Jouffroy’s “Comment les dogmes finissent” (1825) captured the hope and expectation shared by Doctrinaires and Globistes alike that a new public belief based on a laicized, rational spiritualism would soon replace Christianity. Their views on the civil status of religion, however, diverged somewhat. This chapter sets out first the Doctrinaires’ statist, dirigiste approach to religious policy and then the Globistes’ commitment to state neutrality in religion.

Doctrinaires on the Sovereignty of Reason The Doctrinaires, we recall from chapter 10, presented their rational spiritualism as the necessary philosophical foundation for the task of reconstructing and stabilizing France in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Their moral philosophy, in turn, was predicated on their demonstration of the existence of a nonmaterial principle in the mind prior to all experience that frees human consciousness from the determinism of the external world. The more we understand the nonmaterial principles underlying the order of things, the Doctrinaires contended, the more we become aware of and conform our actions to the rational, providentially directed natural moral law. This conception of the ­natural moral law – influenced by Thomas Reid’s notion of “providential ­naturalism,” according to which the world is a coherent whole designed and overseen by an intelligent, purposeful directing mind1 – underlay

  1 Quoted in Drolet, “Carrying the Banner,” 676.

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their conception of moral freedom as the liberty to align our wills with the natural moral law that governs the universe. Conceiving of liberty as at once a metaphysical concept and the self’s most fundamental characteristic, the Doctrinaires proclaimed it to be the basis not only of private morality but also, since it is possessed by all people, of the moral and social consensus that would finally bring an end to the revolutionary period of crisis in French society.2 When applied to civil life, the Doctrinaires’ moral philosophy, p­articularly its conceptions of the natural moral law and liberty, yielded a political theory. The principles, they thought, that establish moral freedom also establish political responsibility. The aim of politics, in their view, is to represent the natural moral law, or reason itself. The Terror, which loomed over Doctrinaire political theorizing, had to their minds irrefutably demonstrated that the conception of the sovereignty of the people constituted a new form of despotism in which the majority or the general will endangered individual freedoms. Any form of ­political democracy that aims at representing the will of the people, they ­concluded, is inherently unstable and dangerously susceptible of ending in anarchy. The Doctrinaires made a key distinction, however, between political democracy and democracy as a social condition. Repudiating political democracy, or the sovereignty of the people, they judged that the Revolution had opened a new phase in the long ­evolution of society in the direction of greater equality. This new social order characterized by equality of conditions and equality before the law was what the Doctrinaires meant by democracy as a social condition. Indeed, Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard claimed that post-revolutionary society was now inherently democratic by virtue of its adherence to the principle of equality of rights. This being so, the Doctrinaires concluded, not only could post-revolutionary society no longer be governed by the institutions and principles of the Old Regime, but the process of the p ­ rogressive realization of the equality of conditions would also i­ nexorably continue. The challenge facing France, in their analysis, was to construct political institutions appropriate to the new democratic social condition ­inaugurated by the Revolution while protecting society from the dangers posed by political democracy.3   2 Drolet, “Carrying the Banner,” 668–9, 674–6, 686; Hallie, Maine de Biran, 105–6.  3 Craiutu, Liberalism under Siege, 104–7, 126.

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In positing that political power must reflect and derive from social conditions, the Doctrinaires staked out a middle path between d ­ emocrats and Ultras. Fearful that democrats, and behind them Jean-Jacques Rousseau, granted too much power to individual wills, the Doctrinaires set against the anarchic tendencies of the egalitarian idea of the ­sovereignty of the people a hierarchical concept of power designed to mitigate the individualism and social atomism that accompanies the inexorable increase in equality of conditions.4 To an extent, the Doctrinaires’ critique of the sovereignty of the people paralleled Ultra views, but their argument that the nature of power depends on social conditions explicitly repudiated the fundamental Ultra claim – theorized by Louis de Bonald and Félicité de Lamennais – that society is entirely constituted by power. Further, they categorically denounced any attempt to restore the bodies and privileges of the Old Regime – specifically the Ultras’ attempts after they came to power in 1820 to roll back the trend toward social uniformity and the equality of conditions – as doomed to failure because the irreversible direction of the “social facts” now demanded representative and constitutional government. Given that history, the Doctrinaires declared, had demonstrated in succession the illegitimacy of the divine right of kings and the will of the people as the principle of sovereignty, the only guarantee against despotism and anarchy is to place the principle of sovereignty in reason.5 If, as the Doctrinaires affirmed, reason is the true foundation of social order and the only source of political legitimacy, it follows that the best form of government will be that which most fully, in the given circumstances, instantiates the sovereignty of reason. There was some variation of opinion among the Doctrinaires, but they generally agreed that the appropriate political interpretation of the sovereignty of reason for post-revolutionary France was a form of representative government.

  4 The Ultra and Saint-Simonian corporativist critiques of individualism are well known, and the fear of social dissolution – accompanied by a concomitant critique of “individualism” (a new term) – was felt by Restoration thinkers across the ideological spectrum. On Restoration critiques of individualism, see Rosanvallon, Demands of Liberty, 94–101.  5 Jaume, L’individu effacé, 127, 135–6; Craiutu, Liberalism under Siege, 108, 126, 158–9, 167.

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The Doctrinaires, however, had a very specific understanding of ­representation. Since good government, they argued, depends on the application of the law of reason for the good of society as a whole, only those with the capacity to discern this law and to apply it in a d ­ isinterested manner ought to participate in government and in electing g ­ overnments. “Capacity” – the capacity to act according to reason, truth, and justice, as François Guizot defined it – is a keyword in the Doctrinaires’ political vocabulary. And since natural inequalities among human beings ensure that the intellectual, moral, and psychological capabilities on which this capacity depends are not evenly distributed among society, political rights cannot be universal rights. The Doctrinaires, in fact, distinguished between universal rights and ­particular rights. All ­universal, or permanent, rights protect individual liberties and are equal for all individuals. These natural or inalienable rights include freedom of conscience, protection by public authority against injustice and arbitrary power, property ownership, and the ­ability to live one’s life as one sees fit as long as one does not harm others in so doing. Certain other rights are not universal but particular, or v­ ariable, because they properly belong only to those with the capacity to exercise them responsibly and because their distribution evolves in response to changes in social conditions over time. The right to vote is the most important of these variable rights. The sign of capacity, finally, is wealth, specifically ownership of property. In practice, Doctrinaire political theory, which, as Lucien Jaume sardonically notes, assumes a “miracle of agreement” between the wealthiest stratum of society and the sovereign law of reason, identifies bourgeois notables as the true representatives of reason.6 In concrete terms, the Doctrinaires held that representative government  – reflecting the post-revolutionary social condition  – is ­characterized by the rule of law, civil equality, division of powers, elections, and freedom of publication and expression. They defended the moderate constitutional monarchy, defined by the Constitutional Charter of 1814, as the enshrinement of precisely these political ­principles. Victor Cousin, for his part, conceiving of the Charter as the political counterpart to rational spiritualism, went so far as to hail

 6 Johnson, Guizot, 53–4; Craiutu, Liberalism under Siege, 132, 223–4, 237; Jaume, L’individu effacé, 128 (quotation), 505.

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the constitutional monarchy that it established as marking the first time in history that reason itself was represented in a political system instead of one human power or another.7 In theory, a corollary of the Doctrinaires’ recognition of the ongoing progressive realization of the equality of conditions is that political institutions must be ­continually adjusted in tandem with the evolving social order through gradual reform and therefore that conflict between political power and social conditions would be mitigated under a representative regime ­governing in accord with the sovereignty of reason. In practice, ­however, when they wielded power during the July Monarchy and particularly in the  1840s, the Doctrinaires adamantly opposed electoral reform – a s­ignificant cause of the Revolution of 1848 – because they interpreted it not as a ­historically warranted extension of political capacity but as a dangerous ­recurrence of the anarchic potentialities of political democracy.8 The Doctrinaires supplemented the authority of reason in their political theory with the authority of history; that is, they saw in history the progressive instantiation of reason. The Doctrinaires, while ­acknowledging that the external events of the course of human history are often driven by struggles for power, identified the deeper meaning of history as the progressive extension of justice and reason in human societies. In the post-revolutionary moment, they thought, it was the middle classes, by which they meant the bourgeois notables, who embodied the progressive direction of the development of civilization. Consequently, opposing Ultra attempts to restore the privileges of the elites of the Old Regime and resisting the demands of the heirs of he Jacobins for immediate social equality and for full political rights among the masses, the Doctrinaires argued that the role of the middle classes, as a sort of sociological juste milieu, is to effect a reconciliation of society and the state. Guizot in particular, in his historical lectures and writings under the Restoration, traced the long development of the ideals of constitutional monarchy, representative government, and individual liberty from late Antiquity to the Revolution’s establishment of civil equality, which had ushered in political modernity. Parallel to this social and political progress, moreover, Guizot discerned moral

 7 Craiutu, Liberalism under Siege 130, 145; Jaume, L’individu effacé, 466; Craiutu, Virtue for Courageous Minds, 147.  8 Craiutu, Liberalism under Siege, 224; Manent, Intellectual History of Liberalism, 102.

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and religious progress in the Revolution’s embodiment of moral selfconsciousness and freedom of conscience.9 The Doctrinaires’ teleological conviction that the end point of the social and moral progress of civilization would be the full earthly ­realization of the precepts of reason, truth, and justice gave them ­confidence that no reactionary law or regime would ultimately prevail against the movement of history. Guizot further argued, in an application to history of Royer-Collard’s providential naturalism, that as his contemporaries grasped the progressive development embodied in history (and revealed through historical scholarship), they would acknowledge both the authority of the natural law of reason over society and the providential order governing the moral universe. Guizot consciously echoed Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet when he proclaimed that the progress of civilization follows a providential plan for humankind and criticized other historians for recounting historical facts instead of discerning their hidden meanings in terms of the unfolding of this plan. Cousin similarly praised Bossuet – in a phrase strikingly reminiscent of Bonald’s conception of history (see chapter 4) – for his approach to history, which traced “an inflexible advance toward a fixed goal, right through everything that deflects and distracts ordinary historians.”10 The Doctrinaires’ praise for Bossuet was not an endorsement of his theology, but it was a sign of their belief in a metaphysical dimension to history – a belief captured in Pierre Manent’s contention that people in the early nineteenth century felt that they were living in a “­metapolitical” element in the sense that political considerations became inseparable from religious ones because they interpreted political and social events in religious terms.11 Guizot, in fact, in precisely this metapolitical sense, hailed the revolutionary values of moral self-consciousness and freedom of conscience as the “religious idea of our time.”12 “Religious” here, of course, is to be understood in the Doctrinaires’ special sense of laicizied and

 9 Johnson, Guizot, 76; Jaume, L’individu effacé, 148; Drolet, “Carrying the Banner,” 685; Kelley, Fortunes of History, 147–8. 10 Craiutu, Liberalism under Siege, 62, 68; Drolet, “Carrying the Banner,” 676–7; Cousin, quoted in Den Boer, History as Profession, 128. 11 Manent, Intellectual History of Liberalism, 82. 12 Quoted in Crossley, French Historians and Romanticism, 71.

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metaphysical. In proposing to ground the new order of things in their rational spiritualism, Doctrinaires sought to subordinate post-­ revolutionary civil life to their particular metaphysics. In the civil order, this undertaking required that moral self-consciousness and freedom of conscience be understood as correlates of the sovereignty of reason. Freedom of conscience, in other words, was not absolute for the Doctrinaires because it must not be permitted to oppose the sovereignty of reason. Other freedoms, including freedom of religion, were subject to the same restriction. In their parlance, freedom of conscience is not a universal but a particular right, and so limits may legitimately be placed on its exercise. In granting the state, as the instantiation of the sovereignty of reason, the right to regulate religious expression and practice, the Doctrinaires subordinated the religious liberties of ­individuals and corporations – most notably, the Catholic Church – to the sovereignty of reason. The July Revolution gave the Doctrinaires the opportunity to apply their program. Cousin, in particular, as minister of education and with strong support from Guizot, took concrete steps to establish Eclecticism as the state philosophy. He set about turning the University into an instrument of a new lay spiritual power, an institution capable of ­producing a corporation of teachers trained in Eclecticism as the replacement for the clergy as the source of moral and spiritual ­authority for France. Thus, although Doctrinaire religious policy was part and parcel of attempts by Restoration Liberals to curtail the revitalized influence of the Catholic Church on French society in general and on education in particular, structurally it reproduced elements of the Idéologues’ efforts to secure the principles of the revolutionary social order and to oppose clerical authority by creating institutions of ­public education and teacher training supported by a centralized state ­bureaucracy.13 Rational spiritualism replaced idéologie, to be sure, but the Doctrinaires’ education program under the July Monarchy as operationalized under Cousin closely resembled the Idéologues’ statist, ­dirigiste approach to religious policy.

13 Goldstein, Post-revolutionary Self, 152–3; Vermeren, Victor Cousin, 11, 15, 152.

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T h e Globistes o n “the Religious Problem” The Globistes held varying attitudes toward religion. Jean-Philibert Damiron and others close to Cousin, who thought that revealed religion and theology contain philosophical truths capable of being integrated into rational spiritualism, were more conciliatory toward religion than were Jouffroy and his faction.14 Jouffroy, less convinced that religious dogmas contain philosophical truths, regarded any attempt at integrating philosophy and theology as premature. He was also – despite having programmatically announced the coming of a new doctrine in “Comment les dogmes finissent” (1825) – deeply suspicious of all prophets of new teachings. These differences notwithstanding, however, not only did the Globistes present a united front in their rejection of the doctrines and practices of what they called the positive religions and in their contempt for all mysticisms, but they were also unanimous in their recognition that religion continues to hold an important place in human life because it addresses supreme truths. Above all, they agreed that the question of the status of religion in post-revolutionary France – or what Jouffroy referred to as “the religious problem” – ­warranted respectful discussion.15 Religion accordingly received a prominent place in the pages of Le Globe. The Globistes regarded scholarship on religion as an important strand in contemporary debates over the status of religion. Unlike, then, the older Doctrinaires, who, with the exception of Victor Cousin, took little notice of scholarship on religion, the Globistes interested themselves in new knowledge about the religious traditions of ancient and distant peoples, took sides in scholarly disputes over interpretive frameworks applied to the data of religion, and felt an obligation to inform the educated public about this scholarship. Damiron spoke for his colleagues when in 1825 he lamented the absence of even a single course on religions in the higher reaches of the French public education system – as opposed to Catholic theology courses in the seminaries – at a time 14 Cousin was said to have been displeased with Jouffroy’s attack on the church in “Comment les dogmes finissent.” Goblot, “Jouffroy et Cousin,” 73. 15 Goblot, La jeune France libérale, 178, 241–2, 254. Goblot notes that Jouffroy used the term  “the religious problem” in his 1827 lectures on the philosophy of h ­ istory. Ibid., 618n81.

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when students in German universities were flocking to religion classes offered by learned professors.16 In fact, 1825 marks an important date in the French historiography of religion because in that year JosephDaniel Guigniaut published, under the title Religions de l’Antiquité, the first volume of his translation of Friedrich Creuzer’s four-volume Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, besonders der Griechen (Symbolism and Mythology of the Ancient Peoples, Particularly the Greek) (1810–12, revised edition 1819–21).17 Creuzer, a professor of philology and ancient ­history at the University of Heidelberg, was the leading light of a ­symbolic approach to mythography that had close affinities with the Platonism, Naturphilosophie, and religious speculation of German romanticism, particularly with Friedrich Schelling’s early philosophy. The significant influence that Guigniaut’s volume exerted on French discourse on religion warrants a brief account of Creuzer’s mythography. Symbol and myth, and the distinction between them, are central ­elements in Creuzer’s mythography. A symbol for Creuzer is a non­ discursive sign that offers the possibility of an intuitive grasp of the truth in its totality, whereas a myth is a poetic and narrative form that interprets a given symbol. Early humankind, according to Creuzer, received a revelation of divine truth in the form of a philosophic-religious symbolic wisdom. The ancient symbolic wisdom, as Creuzer conceived of it, originated in Mesopotamia in remotest Antiquity but was not itself a product of history. It was subsequently transmitted from era to era and people to people and in the process of its transmission underwent interpretation, thereby giving rise to the mythologies of the ancient world. Creuzer thus conceived of the various mythologies as a vast interpretive apparatus that at once explicates and conceals the ancient symbolic wisdom that is their common source. Myth, moreover, unlike the symbolic wisdom itself, does have a history – a history that must necessarily be one of variation and corruption inasmuch as myth is subject to decadence over time. Creuzer’s tale is therefore one of ­degeneration: as the primordial unity of the symbolic wisdom organically transformed into the multiplicity of myth, its primitively revealed content progressively diminished until, in the later development of Greek ­religion, it was lost altogether. Creuzer tantalizingly allowed,

16 Damiron [Ph.], “De la religion ... Deuxième volume (premier article),” 933. 17 Guigniaut’s translation was based on the second, revised edition of 1819–21.

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however, that the ancient priesthoods had retained, across the ages and in spite of the transformations of the original revelation in and by mythological traditions, at least some vague memory of its content.18 Methodologically, Creuzer proceeded by carefully comparing – in a display of erudition that drew the admiration of his contemporaries – all the mythologies of the ancient world in an attempt to reverse the ­historical transformations undergone by myth and ultimately to recover the primitive form of the symbol. Creuzer’s mythography has been characterized as an archaeology or a regressive critical analysis that employed reason and erudition as its scholarly instruments but whose goal was to recover the ancient symbolic wisdom and thereby to reaffirm the presence in history of a divine revelation that transcends it. Indeed, although Creuzer acknowledged that the primitive truths of religion can never be fully recovered, he envisioned modern scholars of religion as members of a latter-day priesthood whose efforts to recover and preserve the symbolic wisdom offered their contemporaries an escape from the decadence of history.19 Guigniaut, whose translation significantly adapted Creuzer’s work to French tastes, was a former student and teacher at the École normale supérieure. As such, he was a friend of the Globistes, but first and f­ oremost he was an intimate of Cousin, to whom he dedicated his translation. Cousin, for his part, greatly admired Creuzer and endorsed his ­mythographic project of recovering the ancient symbolic wisdom. Jouffroy and his faction of Globistes were already suspicious of Cousin’s growing interest in German transcendental philosophy, which they read as a betrayal of a philosophy of consciousness founded on internal observation. Creuzer’s contention, shared by Guigniaut and Cousin and ultimately derived from Schelling, that religious symbols represent the primitive form of intelligence was in private dismissed outright by 18 On Creuzer’s mythography, see Bravo, “Dieu et les dieux,” 399–403; Blok, “Quests for a Scientific Mythology”; and Kloocke, “Benjamin Constant, De la religion,” 108–12. Much of the content of the latter article is reproduced in the section on Creuzer in Kloocke’s long article on Constant’s intellectual relations with German thinkers: Kloocke, “Benjamin Constant et l’Allemagne.” On Creuzer’s broader context, see Williamson, Longing for Myth, 123–35; and Marchand, German Orientalism, 66–71. 19 Kloocke, “Benjamin Constant, De la religion,” 110–12. George Williamson notes that Creuzer recorded in his 1840 autobiography that he wrote Symbolik und Mythologie to show “how all moral and political edification of the human race was passed on and improved only through priestly institutions.” Williamson, Longing for Myth, 149.

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Jouffroy on the grounds that truth is grasped only in the mind of the philosopher who discovers it and that symbols are corruptions of truths anteriorly discovered and conceived by reason.20 Jouffroy alluded to Creuzer in an article written in 1825, but not published at the time, where he observed that all claims of a high primitive wisdom are to be rejected because ancient fables are not profound cosmogonies but instead expressions of the poetry by which the masses spontaneously expressed their indistinct thoughts. Those who see in them high wisdom are projecting the intellectual achievements of later times onto the infancy of humankind.21 Damiron, too, considered ancient traditions to be poetry instead of knowledge; his judgment, although less harsh than Jouffroy’s, was similar: one ought to value the work of scholars who study the ancient traditions for the nourishment that they give to the heart and to sentiment, but erudition applied to revelation cannot deliver the secret of religion and the key to knowledge.22 Le Globe’s public response to Guigniaut’s translation of Creuzer was entrusted to Paul- François Dubois. In May 1825, he heralded its impending publication by noting both the importance of studying Oriental religious systems – because the history of humankind can be clarified only by the study of the religions of India and the various modifications that its dogmas were subjected to in passing from the Orient to the Occident – and Creuzer’s pre-eminent scholarly status. After praising Guigniaut’s intention to make Creuzer’s work more accessible to French readers, however, the rest of the brief piece is a polemic against the recent closing of the École normale supérieure by the Ultra regime.23 Dubois came to grips with the content of Creuzer’s mythography a few months later in a lengthy two-part review that begins with a declaration of the importance of studying religions despite the discomfort that the subject holds for rational minds; he archly acknowledged the secret terror felt by secular moderns when scholarly mystagogues invited them into the sacred labyrinth whose vaults hold up the pantheon of the ancient world.24 Not only, he said, are religions perhaps the most c­ urious

20 Goblot, La jeune France libérale, 239–41; Goblot, “Jouffroy et Cousin,” 74–5. 21 Jouffroy, “Réflexions sur la philosophie de l’histoire,” 77–83. 22 Damiron, Essai sur l’histoire de la philosophie, 407–8. 23 Dubois [Unsigned], “Religions de l’Antiquité” (28 May 1825). 24 Dubois [Unsigned], “Religions de l’Antiquité” (24 December 1825), 3.

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and obscure order of facts encountered in the study of human culture, but the increasing knowledge of religious diversity acquired in recent times was also philosophically significant. Moreover, the intellectual revolution that had rendered eighteenth-century approaches to the study of religion obsolete provided an opportunity to recommence the study of religions on a sounder basis. Dubois identified two competing contemporary approaches: one seeks to discover in the diversity of religions a law of perfectibility, according to which each religion is good for its era and bad only when it becomes obsolete; the other regards Oriental religions as an inexhaustible treasury of doctrine and wisdom in which the limits of thought were achieved long before the systems of European philosophy were even conceived. Dubois described these two alternatives – the former clearly represented by Jouffroy’s “Comment les dogmes finissent” (1825) and the latter by Creuzer – as two open doors, one leading to hope and the other to memory.25 Dubois then turned to his critique of Creuzer’s symbolic mythography, first summarizing for his readers Creuzer’s understanding of a symbol as a sign that expresses a thought and contains it to the extent that something sensible can express and contain what is not sensible. Nature, according to this view, as the living form of the thought of its divine author, is a symbol, but so too are human beings inasmuch as they are thinking beings who participate in the intelligence of their author but have access to thought only under the veil of words and images. Dubois argued that the symbolist approach subsumes the history of the human mind into a vast unity in which all differences are effaced. If everything is a symbol, and if the meaning of symbols reflects the soul of the world, there can be nothing absolutely true nor absolutely false in symbols, and by extension in religions, but only a difference in degree of materiality between one symbol and another. Such an interpretive system, Dubois observed, “poorly accommodates itself to the sad realities here below, [and] above all it does not seem to accept human foolishness and the charlatanism of priests.” Further, by attributing to ancient priesthoods an infallible wisdom infinitely superior to that of the ­common people, Creuzer endorsed ancient systems of privilege and

25 Dubois [Unsigned], “Religions de l’Antiquité” (27 August 1825), 774.

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illiberalism.26 Dubois similarly contested Creuzer’s claim that the sacred books of India – discussed in Guigniaut’s first volume, whereas Creuzer himself had opened his work with Greece – preserve spiritual truths behind the veil of symbols, identifying their content as a poetry of symbols. His review concludes with a concise and damning summation of the consequences of the poetry of symbols and therefore of Indian religions: contemplative indolence, the abnegation of the human self expressed through ascetic practices, and pantheism.27 The broader context for the suspicion of priestcraft manifest in Dubois’s response to Creuzer was the Liberals’ campaign against the influence of the Catholic clergy on Restoration public life. The Globistes’ anti-clericalism, however, did not result in a religious policy of intolerance. Although in most respects the Globistes’ defence of the rule of law, civil equality, and the division of powers paralleled Doctrinaire positions, a distinguishing element of their liberalism was the emphasis that they placed on tolerance in the civil order as the natural and ­necessary ­corollary of individual judgment in philosophy and religion. The state, they held, should be neutral in matters of religion and thought. Jouffroy spoke for all the Globistes when he identified tolerance as a response to the needs of the age: “What is important in France today is not to teach some doctrine or religious form ... but to learn respect for all doctrines and all forms: it is to claim the right that all beliefs, negative or positive, have to live together and to be treated as equal under the protection of the same law.”28 The Globistes emphasized that state neutrality in religion was guaranteed by the Charter and repeatedly urged the Restoration regime to live up to its constitutional requirements. Further, taking it as ­axiomatic that one must grant to one’s adversary the same extent of liberty that one claims for oneself, they insisted that the Charter’s promise of equal protection for all beliefs ought to apply to Catholics, too. Lamennais’s trial in early 1825 for offending state religion in his attacks on Gallicanism provided a test case for the Globistes’ convictions. The Globistes, of course, steadfastly opposed the Mennaisians’ political theology for  subordinating civil society to the spiritual 26 Ibid., 775–6 (quotation at 775). 27 Dubois [Unsigned], “Religions de l’Antiquité” (24 December 1825). 28 Jouffroy [Unsigned], “De la liberté religieuse,” 706–7 (quotation at 707). See Goblot, La jeune France libérale, 188.

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principle,29 although, while dismissing it as intellectually false and ­politically dangerous, they noted that Lamennais was a useful adversary because he clearly posed the questions at issue between them.30 If, ­however, the Globistes opposed the Mennaisians root and branch, they defended the Mennaisians’ right to express their views, which the Globistes regarded as the political application of their own philosophical commitment to the sovereignty of individual judgment – the very thing most maligned by the Mennaisians! The Globistes therefore stoutly defended Lamennais’s right to his views and even praised his courage in standing up for the sacred rights of thought. These interventions were met with surprise by the Mennaisians and with disapproval by Guizot and many other Liberals. A few months later, in the course of defending a bookseller who had been charged with an offence against religious morals and the religion of the state for publishing an edition of the Gospels from which all miracles had been excised, the Globistes, by the pen of Dubois, chastised their fellow Liberals for having ­encouraged the state to suppress the rights of Catholics because by this undertaking they had forfeited their right to protest when the state suppressed Liberal critics of religion. The Globistes’ unwavering insistence on equal protection for the beliefs and expression of adversaries and allies alike was the corollary of their own claim to an absolute right to criticize established religions and doctrines.31 There is a clear difference in terms of the civil status of religion between the Globistes’ commitment to tolerance and state neutrality in religion and the Doctrinaires’ statist subordination of religious liberties to the sovereignty of reason. This stark difference in principle, however, was somewhat mitigated in practice. The Globistes’ support for government measures designed to restrict the influence of the church over Restoration society led Catholic critics to accuse the Globistes of betraying their professed commitment to liberty, equality, and toleration by

29 Cousin, on his return from Germany in 1825, exchanged a number of letters with Lamennais, in the course of which he praised Catholicism and declared that he knelt before it. Le Globe’s editors were appalled by this statement, particularly as it came shortly after the law on sacrilege and the consecration of King Charles  X, although they said nothing publicly. Goblot, “Jouffroy et Cousin,” 72–3. 30 Rémusat [C.R.], “De la religion considérée”; Rémusat [C.R.], “De la religion considérée ... (IIè article).” See also Jaume, L’individu effacé, 140. 31 Goblot, La jeune France libérale, 180, 200, 206.

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denying these liberties to Catholics and their religious communities (see chapter 18). The Globistes, in fact, held their commitment to state neutrality in religion in tension with a deep suspicion of the political danger represented by the illiberal forces of priestcraft, theocracy, and claims for an ancient symbolic wisdom.

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P art F iv e Pluralist Liberalism: Benjamin Constant The pluralist liberalism that dissented from statist liberalism in its defence of the inviolability of the conscience and the rights of the individual subject in the face of political and administrative power carried with it a distinct conceptualization of religion. Part 5 discusses Benjamin Constant’s conceptualization of religion as a supra-rational sentiment that, although not reducible to the historical religions, is encountered within them as a variation on the liberal model of modernity that preserves the centrality of religion by reconceiving its basis – a conceptualization that has close affinities with presentday discourse on tolerance and religious pluralism. Chapter 13, after outlining Constant’s life and political career, presents the philosophical foundation of his conceptualization of religion and his construction of categories of reflection on religion by tracing the history of the composition of his five-volume De la religion, considérée dans sa source, ses formes et ses développements (1824–31). Chapter 14 analyzes Constant’s conceptualization of religion itself by setting out the conceptual framework of De la religion, including his fundamental distinction between religious sentiment and religious forms, and then by discussing the key moments of its history of religions, notably the emergence of polytheism from fetishism and the differential developmental trajectories of sacerdotal and nonsacerdotal polytheisms. Chapter 15 discusses the grounds and consequences of Constant’s conviction that religion will be in harmony with liberal values if governments remain neutral toward religion, as well as his warnings about the threat to tolerance and social order posed by illiberal conceptualizations of religion.

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13

Benjamin Constant and De la religion

Of the principal figures discussed in this book, Benjamin Constant is by far the best known in the English-speaking world,1 in large part owing to the revival of interest in his political thought since the 1980s.2 More broadly, that Constant’s central place within post-revolutionary French debates over the new order of things is now widely recognized confirms Marcel Gauchet’s identification of Constant as “one of the very rare writers capable of enlightening us about the great and deeply mysterious transformation from which modern society arose.” 3 Constant was actively involved in the political life of France from the Directory through the Consulate, Napoleonic Empire, and Bourbon Restoration and into the first months of the July Monarchy. Moreover, politics and religion were intimately linked in Constant’s mind. As he reflected on the situation of France in the aftermath of the French Revolution, he concluded that political problems could not be thought about in isolation from religion and that the problem of the ­appropriate form of religion could not be considered independently of the question of the appropriate form of government. Constant, in fact, was one of the first to recognize that debates over religion were at the heart of the construction of a post-revolutionary social and political order.4  1 Holmes, Benjamin Constant; Fontana, Benjamin Constant; Wood, Benjamin Constant; Rosenblatt, Liberal Values; Vincent, Benjamin Constant; Craiutu, Virtue for Courageous Minds. Important studies in French include Kloocke, Benjamin Constant; Jaume, L’individu effacé, 63–117; Todorov, Benjamin Constant; and Deguise, Benjamin Constant méconnu.   2 For an overview of Constant’s reception, see Rosenblatt, “Eclipses and Revivals.”   3 Gauchet, “Liberalism’s Lucid Illusion,” 23.  4 See Kloocke Benjamin Constant, 264; Holmes, Benjamin Constant, 14; and Rosenblatt Liberal Values, 33.

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This chapter introduces Constant and then presents the philosophical foundation of his conceptualization of religion and his construction of categories of reflection on religion by tracing the long history of the composition of his five-volume De la religion, considérée dans sa source, ses formes et ses développements (1824–31).

Benjamin Constant Benjamin Constant was born in Lausanne into a family of minor nobility descended from an ancestor who had emigrated to Switzerland from northern France during the Reformation. His early education was a chaotic affair overseen, although that may be too generous a word, by a succession of tutors hired by his father, an officer in a Dutch regiment. The young Constant next attended the University of Erlangen in Bavaria between February 1782 and May 1783 and then the University of Edinburgh from July 1783 to March 1785. At Edinburgh, and ­particularly within the Speculative Society student club, he seems to have ­experienced for the first time true friendship and intellectual challenge. This happy time came to a sudden halt when debts arising from losses at the ­gaming table (a life-long addiction) compelled his return to Switzerland. His father then placed him in the household of Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Suard – a journalist and man of letters linked to the philosophes and a close friend of Nicolas de Condorcet – in Paris from May to August 1785 and again from November 1786 to June 1787. Next, resisting the prospect of returning to the family home in Switzerland, Constant fled to England for a few months of unauthorized freedom but was back in Lausanne by November 1787. Constant’s emotional life was no less unsettled. By this early date, his immoderate tendencies were already well established, such that one scholar has remarked on “the contrast between the thinker, who emphasized the importance of responsibility and morality in society, and the i­ ndividual[,] who, in his personal life, was always ready to take extreme risks and to engage in relationships which were, to say the least, spectacularly ­passionate and complicated.”5

 5 Craiutu, Virtue for Courageous Minds, 198. For corroborating details, see Wood, Benjamin Constant.

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A new period in Constant’s life began in 1788. In March of that year, he arrived in the German principality of Brunswick to take up a position arranged for him by his father as Gentleman of the Chamber to Charles William Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick. He found his duties, and court life in general, extremely tedious but discovered intellectual stimulation in the person of Jakob Mauvillon (see below). In March 1789, Constant married Wilhelmine (Minna) von Cramm, a lady-in-waiting to Augusta Frederica, Duchess of Brunswick. The marriage soon foundered, and the couple divorced in November 1795. Constant, meanwhile, had already begun a relationship with Charlotte von Marenholz (née von Hardenberg), whom he would eventually marry. Constant’s last period of residency in Brunswick lasted from April to July 1794, after which he returned to Switzerland. Constant met Germaine de Staël for the first time in September 1794, inaugurating what would become both an influential political alliance and tumultuous personal relationship.6 Their political views were not identical – Constant at this time was an ardent republican defender of the Revolution, although chastened by the Terror, whereas Staël favoured a constitutional monarchy – but together they would develop a pluralist liberalism that became an enduring, if minority, tradition within French liberalism. Constant accompanied Staël when she returned to Paris in May 1795 a few months after the end of the Terror and quickly became an active supporter of the early Directory and the liberal principles set out in the Constitution of 1795. Staël, however, was soon expelled from France because the Directory suspected her of political intrigue and royalist sympathies. Constant departed with Staël to Switzerland but returned to Paris by himself in April 1796. There, he wrote his first major publications – De la force du gouvernement actuel de la France et de la nécessité de s’y rallier (1796) and Des réactions politiques (1796) – in the context of the instability of the Directory and the ­vulnerability of its founding principles to attacks from both royalists and Jacobins. Des réactions politiques, in fact, contains the earliest use of the word libéral to define “a position of political moderation between royalism and Jacobinism.”7 Constant was starting to make a name for   6 On Germaine de Staël, see Fontana, Germaine de Staël.   7 Vincent, “Benjamin Constant, the French Revolution,” 622. Joseph de Maistre’s Considérations sur la France (1797) was conceived as a response to De la force du gouvernement actuel. De Luca, “Benjamin Constant and the Terror,” 97.

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himself in liberal circles, but in order to participate fully in French political life, he required both French citizenship and property ownership. He petitioned the government for the former on the basis of a new law extending citizenship to descendants of Huguenot exiles, and his request was granted in 1798. Meanwhile – benefiting from the devaluation of the French currency against his Swiss income – he had bought Hérivaux, a ruined abbey and estate near Luzarches, 30 kilometres north of Paris, thereby meeting the property qualification to stand for public office. The elections of May 1797 that turned the Legislative Body to the right provoked the Directory to purge royalists from the legislature and to expand the regime’s arbitrary powers. Constant and Staël, who had been permitted to return to Paris, responded to the election results by cofounding the Club de Salm  – soon to be renamed the Cercle ­constitutionnel – in June 1797 as a liberal counterweight to the royalist Club de Clichy. In a speech to the Cercle constitutionnel twelve days after the coup d’état, Constant regretted the Directory’s compromise of its principles but supported the measures as necessary for the survival of the republic and social order. Later that fall, Constant entered ­government service for the first time upon being elected president of the Luzarches municipal administration in November 1797. Constant took his duties seriously and strongly supported the Directory’s program of republicanizing the nation through education and festivals, for which he was locally responsible. Nevertheless, although Constant associated closely with the Idéologues during this period of their peak political influence, he was never an Idéologue himself and soon came to doubt that elites or governments could transform the values or political principles of the people.8 Constant’s response to the overthrow of the Directory in the Brumaire coup d’état of 1799 mirrored his response to the 1797 coup. His fear that a weak government would unleash social chaos led him to support, after a brief hesitation, the Consulate and Napoleon Bonaparte as first consul. Constant was soon actively involved in the new regime, as in December 1799 he was appointed to the Tribunat. He quickly, however, became a leading voice of opposition to the first consul, joining with

 8 For Constant’s views on the state and education, see Lotterie, “Benjamin Constant, l’éducation.”

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Idéologues like Pierre-Claude-François Daunou and Jean-Baptiste Say to defend civil liberties and the rule of law against Bonaparte’s i­ncreasing authoritarianism. Constant was duly expelled from the Tribunat in Bonaparte’s purge of dissenters in January 1802. The twelve years of forced political inactivity that followed would be years of immense intellectual accomplishment (see below), as well as emotional crisis. Constant alternated between periods of solitary research and writing and periods of intense social activity, often centred on the again-exiled Germaine de Staël’s estate of Coppet near Lausanne, which served as the de facto headquarters of liberal opposition to Bonaparte. Constant once again spent a considerable amount of time in Germany; in 1803 and 1804, he was intermittently at Weimar, both with and without Staël. Meanwhile, he had reconnected with Charlotte and in June 1808 secretly married her, provoking a crisis with Germaine. Constant and Charlotte eventually settled at Göttingen in Lower Saxony, where they remained on and off until the Restoration. Constant’s liberalism became more clearly articulated during the years of the empire as he reflected, often in discussion with Staël, on the political crises of the Directory and the Consulate. These reflections resulted in two very large manuscripts: Fragments d’un ouvrage abandonné sur la possibilité d’une constitution républicaine dans un grand pays (c. 1810, published 1991) and Principes de politique applicables à tous les gouvernements (1806, revised 1810, unpublished). Publication being impossible in the political conditions of the day, these manuscripts served as ­reservoirs from which Constant would draw for numerous works published during the Restoration. Constant returned to Paris in April 1814, almost simultaneously with the entry into the city of King Louis XVIII. He immediately published two pamphlets defending freedom of expression against the newly established Restoration regime’s press laws and more broadly defended liberal principles against Catholics and royalists. When Bonaparte escaped from Elba a year later, Constant briefly rallied to the Bourbon cause, publishing a harsh attack on Bonaparte in Journal des débats the day before the king fled and Bonaparte took power. Constant went into hiding but was soon invited to become a councillor of state and to ­collaborate on Acte additionnel aux constitutions de l’empire, intended to liberalize the imperial constitution. Constant accepted. Nothing in his eventful life more harmed his reputation than this decision. For hostile critics in his own day, it was the clinching evidence of a cynical

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political opportunism that they often linked to his personal moral ­failings – a perception that has persisted ever since. It is difficult to deny that Constant compromised his principles, but a strong argument can be made that he did so not out of opportunism but as a gamble on the possibility, weighed against a future under a reactionary Bourbon regime, that Bonaparte was sincere in his promise of a liberal empire.9 What Constant hoped for can be seen from a work that he conceived as a commentary on Acte additionnel and published during the Hundred Days under the title of Principes de politique (1815), which was not the entire manuscript written during the empire but rewritten excerpts from it. Here, Constant argued for a representative system of government, absolute freedom of the press, publicity of parliamentary debates, and the political responsibility of ministers, all conceived as specific instantiations of his general principle that the only effective precaution against the tyranny of absolute power is to divide sovereignty and to limit the authority of legislative bodies.10 After the Battle of Waterloo, under the Second Restoration, Constant was initially ordered into exile, but Louis XVIII cancelled the order as part of his program of reconciliation. Constant, however, left France for England, where he remained for over a year (and where in 1816 he published his novel Adolphe: Anecdote trouvée dans les papiers d’un inconnu, written a decade earlier). Having returned to Paris after Louis XVIII dissolved the extremist Chamber of Deputies in September 1816, Constant at first supported the ministerial party but soon broke with it over electoral and censorship laws. Constant ­henceforth became a leading figure of liberal constitutionalism and an effective critic of the successive Restoration governments both as an elected deputy in the Chamber and as a contributor to and organizer of opposition journals.11 Constant’s tireless and unconditional defence of basic ­liberties, including absolute freedom of the press and a widening of   9 This is the judgment of Kurt Kloocke, seconded by Stephen Holmes. Kloocke, Benjamin Constant, 206, 216; Holmes, Benjamin Constant, 17–18. 10 Holmes, Benjamin Constant, 18; Craiutu, Virtue for Courageous Minds, 219. 11 Constant was elected deputy for the Department of the Sarthe in 1819. He lost the seat in 1822 but was re-elected in 1824 as deputy for Paris. In 1827, although elected once more for Paris, he decided to represent instead the Liberal stronghold of Bas Rhin (Alsace), where he had been simultaneously chosen as deputy by electors drawn to his Protestantism and fluency in German. He held this seat until his death in 1830.

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the franchise, earned him the status of unofficial leader of Liberal deputies in the Chamber. Although often classified among the radical Liberals,12 Constant the politician – as opposed to Constant the political theorist – pragmatically attempted to achieve his ends through moderation and compromise.13 Constant intensified his defence of individual liberties against ­arbitrary power when the Restoration regime doubled down on its reactionary policies after 1828, and his status as an elite political figure who had the support of the popular classes earned him widespread recognition as the spiritual father of the July Revolution. In the early days of the July Monarchy, King Louis-Philippe appointed him to the Council of State and gave him the considerable sum of 200,000 francs to pay off his gambling debts. During the remaining months of his life, despite being very ill, Constant allied himself with the “party of movement,” which sought to push farther the program of political and social reform begun in the immediate aftermath of the July Days, and he opposed the Doctrinaire-led “party of resistance,” which sought to limit reform to that already achieved. Constant’s state funeral in December 1830 drew large crowds and was a major public event.

T h e C o m p o s i t i o n o f De la religion The one and only thing in Constant’s life to which his fickle heart remained true, as Pierre Deguise has remarked, was his book on religion, which he worked at, on and off, throughout his adult life – from at least 1787 to 1830.14 Over the decades, the book – which must not be seen as a withdrawal from political thought and engagement but instead as a second register in which his fundamental intellectual and political preoccupations found expression15 – went through many stages of

12 In Restoration usage, the term “radical” loosely connoted support for expansion of the franchise but rarely universal male suffrage. See Alexander, Re-writing the French Revolutionary Tradition, 28. 13 Rosenblatt, Liberal Values, 157; Alexander, Re-writing the French Revolutionary Tradition, 271–4. 14 Deguise, Benjamin Constant méconnu, 42. 15 On the artificiality of separating Constant’s texts into the categories of literary, political, and religious, see Hofmann, “Histoire, politique et religion,” 399.

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composition as Constant accumulated vast dossiers of research notes and struggled to find an adequate conceptual framework. It seems that although Constant had begun to think about the interdependence of religious doctrines and social orders at Edinburgh amid the discussions of the Speculative Society, it was only in 1787, stimulated by the philosophic environment around Suard in Paris, that he started to work on a book on the polytheistic religions of classical Antiquity. Constant originally modelled his Polythéisme, as he dubbed it, on the materialist critiques of religion produced by Paul-Henri Thiry d’Holbach and his circle and by Claude-Adrien Helvétius. He intended to demonstrate the superiority of tolerant, nondogmatic pagan religion over Christianity and anticipated the replacement, in the not too distant future, of revealed religion with a universal religion drawn from reason and nature.16 Constant worked quickly; by the time he moved to Brunswick in 1788, the Polythéisme manuscript weighed in at 500 pages. In Germany, ­however, his intellectual outlook underwent a radical reorientation thanks above all to the profound influence of Jakob Mauvillon, a professor of politics whose interests ranged from economics to military theory to philosophy and theology.17 The two men, despite a wide difference in age, very quickly became close friends, and under Mauvillon’s guidance, Constant immersed himself in serious study of German Enlightenment philosophers and the Liberal Protestant theologians known as the Neologians (i.e., the “new theologians”). German Aufklärer, unlike many French philosophes, sought not to crush Christianity but to reconcile it with reason. The notion of progressive revelation, as developed by Neologians like Johann Salomo Semler, was integral to this program of reconciliation. Progressive revelation recast the relationship of reason to revelation by positing that God dispenses his revelation in stages, tailoring each installment to the developing intellectual and moral faculties of its recipients. In this conception, encapsulated by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in the title of his famous short work Die Erziehung des

16 Kloocke, Benjamin Constant, 18–21. Nothing of this first version of Polythéisme survives, and Constant’s diaries, published as Journaux intimes (1952), do not begin until 1804. The only source for it is the mature Constant’s somewhat mocking account of his youthful self more than twenty years later in the autobiographical manuscript known as Cahier rouge, written in 1807. 17 On Mauvillon, see Kloocke, “Religion et société,” 122–3.

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Menschengeschlechts (The Education of the Human Race) (1780), history becomes the terrain of ongoing revelation, and the history of theology charts both the progressive attenuation of dogma and of external ritual and a corresponding expansion of interior spiritual liberty. New stages of revelation make earlier ones obsolete, but the Neologians were ­confident that Christianity was evolving and therefore remained relevant to their contemporaries.18 Constant’s encounter with German Enlightenment thought, particularly with the Neologians, convinced him that theology, which he had hitherto regarded with scorn, if at all, was relevant for the scholarly study of religion. This new conviction in no way constituted a conversion to the doctrines of any Christian church, but it did transform his intentions for his book on religion. In Brunswick, Constant definitively abandoned his original materialist and polemical conception and, adopting the Neologians’ idea of progressive revelation, now planned to use historical evidence to demonstrate a philosophico-theological thesis of the progressive purification of religious thought. Constant gave his reconceptualized study the new working title De l’esprit des religions.19 The allusion to Montesquieu was unmistakable, but methodologically the model of Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois (1748) – “I posited p ­ rinciples, and I observed that the particular cases conformed to them by themselves” – both inspired and haunted Constant. The history of the composition of his book on religion is in large part the  ­history of Constant’s indecision over the proper relationship between philosophical principles and historical evidence.20 Constant had completed a draft of the first part of his projected De l’esprit des religions by late summer 1794.21 His researches and reflections had yielded a coherent set of fundamental principles – individual liberty, civil tolerance, and the conviction that the inexorable direction of ­history was moving society toward their progressively greater

18 See Rosenblatt, “Christian Enlightenment,” 288; and Frei, Eclipse of the Biblical Narrative, 60–5. 19 Kloocke, “Les écrits de Benjamin Constant,” 396–7; Kloocke, “Transfert d’une culture à l’autre,” 249–50. 20 Hofmann, “Histoire de l’ouvrage,” 1113–14, quoting Montesquieu. 21 In his personal notes and correspondence, Constant continued for many more years – and over many more changes of title – to refer to his book as his Polythéisme as a kind of shorthand.

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realization – that would henceforth underlie his religious and political thought alike. When Constant encountered Germaine de Staël a few months after leaving Brunswick, they discussed religion and the Revolution in these terms. Staël encouraged her new friend to orient himself toward Paris, although Constant did not need much of a push in this direction, as he recognized in France a society where the very values that he had distilled from his reflections on religion were in the process of being realized on the political plane.22 Constant threw ­himself, as we have seen, into the political life of the Directory from 1795 onward and put aside his studies on religion. Constant’s forced return to private life after his purge from the Tribunat in 1802 inaugurated a decade plus of intensive re-engagement with his book on religion. During these years of intellectual renewal, he divided his time among Paris, Germaine de Staël’s estate at Coppet (a centre of Franco-German intellectual exchange as well as opposition to Bonaparte), and travels in Germany, notably extended stays in Weimar in 1803–04 and in Göttingen in 1811–13. The frequent changes to the plan and title for his book on religion recorded in his private journal during these years are signs of his deep and chronic indecision over method and content: was it to be a history of religions or a philosophy of religion, and was it to include both polytheism and theism or only the former? Meanwhile, he continued to amass research notes and to construct categories of reflection on religion. In Weimar and elsewhere in Germany, Constant met prominent ­intellectuals, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Christoph Martin Wieland, the brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich von Schlegel, and Friedrich Schelling, and he read extensively in German philosophy, theology, and erudition.23 But if Constant deepened his knowledge of German thought during these years, he did not entirely renounce his French Enlightenment intellectual formation. Jean Starobinski has drawn attention to the partnership of perfectibilité and liberté in the French Enlightenment. Animals, according to this line of thought, possess sensibilité, which together with instinct governs their existence. Humankind lacks such all-sufficing instinct but has received from nature the capacity to transform and improve itself as it meets and 22 Kloocke, Benjamin Constant, 52, 57–8. 23 On Constant and German thinkers, see Kloocke, “Benjamin Constant et l’Allemagne,” 127–71.

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overcomes challenges posed by the external world through intellectual ingenuity. This capacity for improvement – perfectibility – represents liberty from the necessity of nature.24 Constant always retained his allegiance to this pairing of perfectibility and liberty as well as to the idea that progress depends on our capacity to articulate and analyze new combinations of ideas.25 Further, Constant frequented Idéologue circles in these same years. He had worked closely with the Idéologues during the Consulate, and when in Paris during the early empire, he continued to see them socially (notably Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis), was received at Mme Sophie de Condorcet’s salon, and became friendly with a young Idéologue named Claude Charles Fauriel.26 In hindsight, it is apparent that Constant was groping his way toward a synthesis of the German and French Enlightenments. His intellectual relationships around 1804 with two close friends, Fauriel and Charles de Villers, dramatize this process. In the fall of 1803, Constant and Staël met Villers, a Frenchman long resident in Germany who had been corresponding with Staël since 1800. Constant and Villers formed a close and lasting friendship.27 Villers – whose own thought was deeply influenced by Immanuel Kant and the Neologians – had just completed a book on the Reformation, Essai sur l’esprit et l’influence de la Réformation de Luther (1804). In his work, which would be widely read in France, Villers linked – or, in reality, conflated – the Reformation’s alleged conquest of the right of individuals to think for themselves in matters of religion with Kant’s definition of enlightenment as intellectual freedom from authority.28 Here, of course, was an expression of the German Enlightenment thought that Constant had internalized in Brunswick. Fauriel, for his part, followed ConstantinFrançois Volney and Cabanis in developing the thesis of perfectibility by increase in enlightenment into a form of historicism according to 24 Starobinski, “Benjamin Constant,” 42. 25 This latter idea appears in Constant’s essay “De la perfectibilité de l’espèce humaine” (1829), a version of which had existed since 1805. Coleman, “Literature and Politics in Constant,” 233. 26 On Constant and the Idéologues around 1804, see Deguise, Benjamin Constant méconnu, 70–82. 27 On Constant’s friendship with Villers, see Staël, Villers, and Constant, Correspondance. 28 Crowley, Charles de Villers, 84. On Villers, see also Jainchill, Reimagining Politics, 267–75.

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which intellectual and moral progress are functions of an underlying directionality of social evolution. Fauriel accordingly reproached Villers for presenting the Reformation as the cause of subsequent developments in European history, including the progress of enlightenment, when in fact the Reformation ought to be seen as itself a manifestation of a deeper social evolution that is the true cause of all historical developments.29 Without renouncing what he had learned from the Neologians, Constant sided here with Fauriel, affirming in a manuscript of the time that the development of religion is determined by an underlying social evolution. Fauriel further convinced him both that one needed to provide rigorous historical demonstration of the progressive nature of the history of religions and that evidence from non-Western religions was of importance to this demonstration.30 Constant accordingly ­intensified his commitment to historical research and accepted that he could not limit his book to the Greek and Roman religions, which he knew so well. In his day, historical research in religion meant German erudition, and so from 1804 Constant threw himself into a massive program of reading primarily German scholarship on the ancient Egyptians, Zoroastrians, Hebrews, Scandinavians, Gauls, Mexicans, Scythians, and Africans. Meanwhile, the Schlegel brothers – August Wilhelm and Friedrich, who were fixtures at Coppet around 1804–05  – introduced Constant to India and Indian religions. 31 Constant’s commitment to German erudition was genuine and deep, but it was driven by the pursuit of historical evidence that would ­support the French idea of perfectibility. At the same time as he was embracing erudition, Constant encountered at Weimar – through reading Kant’s Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft (Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone) (1793) – the distinction between religious sentiment and religious forms, which henceforth became a fundamental category of analysis

29 Kloocke, Benjamin Constant, 125; Deguise, Benjamin Constant méconnu, 75, 81. 30 Fauriel, who would later become a founding member of both the Société ­asiatique and Journal asiatique, was one of the pioneers of Orientalism in France. Gusdorf, La conscience révolutionnaire, 526 31 Deguise, Benjamin Constant méconnu, 130–3.

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in his work.32 According to this distinction, religious sentiment is an anthropological constant because it is an inherent attribute of human beings, whereas religious forms are the external, secondary, and historically variable expressions of religious sentiment manifested in and as the positive religions. Kurt Kloocke regards Kant’s writings on religion as the context in which Constant’s thought must be placed and goes so far as to claim that the entire program of De la religion is to be found in germ in Kant. At the same time, however, he acknowledges that Constant conceived of his project independently of Kant and concludes, more broadly, that Constant’s ongoing engagement with German ­thinkers helped him to realize and develop ideas that he had arrived at on his own.33 Constant’s plunge into erudition and the distinction between religious sentiment and religious forms did not initially alter the philosophicotheological orientation that his book on religion had acquired in Brunswick. In the years 1803–05, Constant set about tracing the purification of religion through the progressive separation of a morality based on duty from dogma and ritual, using the philosophical categories of religious sentiment and religious forms to provide the organizing principle for this project and relegating history to the supporting role of providing examples of these categories. At the same time, he decided to limit the scope of his work to polytheistic religions, proposing in early 1805 a work to be titled Des rapports de la religion avec la morale chez les peuples de l’Antiquité.34 Two years later, however, the methodological pendulum swung the other way, as around 1807 Constant came up with a new plan to treat the religions of the ancient world solely from a historical perspective. This plan culminated in a manuscript of more than 600 pages, datable to between January and August 1809, to which

32 Kloocke, “Johann Gottfried Herder,” 70–1. Kurt Kloocke notes that the idea that religion was a matter of both sentiment and form was widely familiar from JeanJacques Rousseau, and Helena Rosenblatt adds that in France it had been taken up by the revolutionaries. Kloocke, “Religion et société,” 126; Rosenblatt, Liberal Values, ­107–8. One could argue that Maximilien Robespierre’s Cult of Reason was a conscious attempt to construct an appropriately modern form for religious sentiment. 33 Kloocke, “Benjamin Constant et l’Allemagne,” 139–40; Kloocke Benjamin Constant, 57, 135. 34 Kloocke, Benjamin Constant, 126–8; Deguise, Benjamin Constant méconnu, 58.

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Constant gave the title Recherches historiques sur les religions des principaux peuples de l’Antiquité.35 None of these plans, as Constant realized, resolved his longstanding problem of how to reconcile his two fundamental but apparently ­conflicting convictions: that the progress of enlightenment – or the principle of perfectibility – opposes all positive religions and that ­religious sentiment, nevertheless, is a permanent and precious attribute of human nature. He could not, in short, shirk the challenge of ­synthesizing progress and religion, history and philosophy.36 Over the next four and a half years, Constant took up this challenge. Between 1809 and the summer of 1811, he worked out a new conceptual framework, and then, during two and half years spent in Germany, above all at Göttingen where he secluded himself in its superb university library, he redrafted his book yet again. By the end of 1813, Constant had produced a manuscript of forty-four books that is known, from the colour of the cover of the notebooks in which it is written, as the blue copy of his Polythéisme.37 The methodological innovation of the blue copy was to use history to prove, instead of merely exemplify, the ­philosophico-­theological thesis. The thesis remained the claim that the evolution of religious thought results in the progressive ­purification of the ­religious sentiment across the succession of religious forms, but whereas formerly historical evidence merely exemplified pre-existent, atemporal ­philosophical categories, Constant now ­presented the philosophico-theological thesis as emerging from historical study of a wide range of societies and peoples.38 The 1813 draft, by granting real historicity to human thought in conceiving of the history of religious ideas as a function of the evolution of societies, reconciled the French Enlightenment idea of perfectibility by the progress of 35 Kloocke, Benjamin Constant, 128, 132; P. Thompson, Les écrits de Benjamin Constant, 36. 36 Deguise, Benjamin Constant méconnu, 113, 159. 37 P. Thompson, Les écrits de Benjamin Constant, 41–51; see also 53–106 for a detailed description of the contents of the blue copy. 38 Commentators have interpreted Constant’s comment in a letter to a friend that he had now suppressed “the remnants of the Enlightenment” in his thought to mean that in the blue copy Constant suppressed anti-religious passages. Deguise, however, has argued convincingly that such passages had long since disappeared from the drafts and that the suppression in question consisted of renouncing the method of analysis of ideas in favour of the exposition of facts. Deguise, Benjamin Constant méconnu, 182.

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reason with the German Enlightenment ideal of an evolution of religious thought through successive forms that are progressively purer and less dogmatic. Kloocke argues that this achievement made Constant the first writer in French to have attempted a mediation between historicism and idealism.39 Constant’s historicism, however, should not be mistaken for an anticipation of the historical practice of the later nineteenth century. History for Constant remains in the service of a teleological conception of human perfectibility. Étienne Hofmann points out that Constant’s use of history corresponds to what Nicolas de Condorcet in 1791–92 and Volney in 1795 had called philosophical history: scrupulous and ­methodical historical research whose justification is not found within itself but instead externally in a metahistory of human reason. Further, although Constant possessed an astonishingly vast erudition, he neither gave much thought to the authenticity of documents or to the verification of facts nor based his analysis directly on source ­documents. His usual practice was to cite sources at second or third hand when he did not know the languages in which they were written – that is, those not written in Greek or Latin. Hofmann further notes the striking contrast between the historigraphically modern ­sections on Greek and Roman religion and the sections on nonclassical religions. If Constant, in short, is to be identified, as he often is, as a historian of religions, it must be in the sense of historical erudition and philosophical history.40 Constant’s proposed title for the blue copy version of his Polythéisme was De la religion, depuis sa forme la plus grossière jusqu’ à la plus épurée. Yet Constant still hesitated to publish. His indecisions over method had seemingly been resolved but doubts about content lingered on two counts. First, Constant’s anxieties about measuring up to German standards of historical erudition resulted in a new manuscript, known as the “white copy,” in which he buttressed the text of the blue copy with additional notes from yet further reading. Second, Constant acknowledged to himself that to do justice to his materials, he would require two books, one on the evolution of polytheism to its apogee and the other on its decline and replacement by theism.41 39 Kloocke, Benjamin Constant, 176–80. 40 Hofmann, “Histoire, politique et religion,” 402–6. 41 Deguise, Benjamin Constant méconnu, 164, 166, 174.

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Constant re-entered public life after the fall of Bonaparte, but this time, despite intensive political engagement during the Restoration, he did not put aside his book on religion. The intimate connection between Constant’s political convictions and his thought about religion in this period can be seen, to give only one example, from the fact that passages in Principes de politique (1815) on the harm done to society by submitting political power to religious authority reproduce passages from the blue copy of his Polythéisme on the harm done to religion by submitting religious belief and practice to the authority of the state.42 Moreover, Constant began for the first time to air publicly some of his central ideas on religion, most notably around February 1818 in a series of lectures at the Athénée royale.43 Meanwhile, Constant kept abreast of new scholarship on religion and took notice of new books by opposing theorists, including the second volume, published in 1820, of Félicité de Lamennais’s Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de religion ­(1817–23) and Joseph de Maistre’s Soirées du Saint-Pétersbourg (1821). Throughout these years, finally, Constant drew up plan after plan for how to organize his materials for publication. In the midst of all this activity, perhaps as early as 1818 and by 1821 at the latest, Constant had settled on a title: De la religion, considérée dans sa source, ses formes et ses développements.44 The forced respite from public life between Constant’s electoral defeat in November 1822 and his return to the Chamber in February 1824 p ­ rovided the opportunity for another round of extensive revision of his manuscript that would – at last – produce a version that Constant would consent to publish. In these months of intense effort, Constant brought himself up to date with the very latest scholarship, reorganized the material of the blue copy, and reworked its content by drawing on multiple earlier drafts of the material, old and new research notes, and his Restoration publications. Kloocke argues that Constant achieved one final methodological breakthrough during these months of revision. The methodological premise of the 1813 edition was that the philosophico-theological thesis of the progressive improvement and purification of religion would 42 Kloocke, Benjamin Constant, 127. 43 P. Thompson, Les écrits de Benjamin Constant, 109. The lectures themselves are not extant, but Constant’s notes for them survive. Kloocke, Benjamin Constant, 220, 231–2; Rosenblatt, Liberal Values, 180–1. 44 P. Thompson, Les écrits de Benjamin Constant, 117.

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emerge from the historical evidence. Constant, however, had increasingly to acknowledge to himself that the historical evidence did not always support the hypothesis of the continual and unidirectional ­progression of history. In Montesquieu’s terms, the particular cases sometimes refused to conform by themselves to the posited principles. How, then, could Constant overcome the recalcitrance of the evidence without weakening the historical argument? His solution was a concept to which he gave the name combinaison, literally “combination” or “arrangement” but which I translate as “formation.” Formations – which Constant himself did not theorize – are abstractions supported by ­historical evidence. A formation such as fetishism or star worship ­possesses a stable core of fundamental characteristics that are ­recognizable across cultures despite differences of detail produced by ­contingencies of climate, national character, local situations, and chance. Kloocke explains that the conceptual tool of formation allowed Constant to filter out the noise of contingent history in order to isolate stages in the development of religious thought over the history of humankind from the confusing mass of accidental historical facts that almost completely obscure this pattern. The result is a deliberately simplified tableau of the general and universally applicable evolution of the religious sensibility of humankind such as it would have occurred if secondary causes had not acted on it, an evolution whose gaps in historical documentation are filled by hypothetical considerations drawn analogically from other cultural contexts.45 That Constant’s concept of formation, however, is entirely in keeping with the philosophical history that he had practised since around 1804 suggests that the greater prominence of this concept in the 1823 revision is perhaps not so much a methodological breakthrough as a refinement of his longstanding historiographical practice. Nevertheless, whether owing to the methodological resolution achieved by means of the concept of formation

45 Kloocke, Benjamin Constant, 264, 266–9; Hofmann, “Histoire de l’ouvrage,” 1113–14. Scholars have noted parallels between Constant’s combinaison and Max Weber’s notion of the Ideal-Type, and indeed they have argued that for this reason Constant deserves recognition as a pioneer of the social sciences. See Todorov, “Un chef-d’oeuvre oublié,” 12. Kloocke, however, distinguishes Constant’s structural and synthesizing “historical tableaux” from Weber’s conceptual tool for establishing ­categories of judgment. Kloocke, “Religion et société,” 128.

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or owing to satisfaction with the overall work of revision and reorganization, Constant was finally ready to publish. The first volume of the definitive version of De la religion, considérée dans sa source, ses formes et ses développements appeared in May 1824. Volume 2 followed in October 1825 and volume 3 in 1827. Volume 4, which was to have been published in July 1830, was delayed by the July Revolution and appeared posthumously along with volume 5 in April 1831. The publication of the first volume, however, by no means marked the end of Constant’s labours on De la religion because he continued to rework the material, making revisions up to the last moment before each successive volume went to press. These revisions fall into three categories: incorporation of additional research, notably on Indian religions;46 responses to critics of earlier volumes; and rewriting necessitated by changes in political climate and, after the July Revolution, in regime.47 The content of the first two categories will be discussed in subsequent chapters. As for the third, many passages in De la religion were read – and intended – as attacks on the resurgent Catholic Church and on the religious and political policies of the Restoration regime.48 As ideological and political reaction intensified after 1825 – particularly after censorship was re-established in 1827, with penalties for authors and publishers of works that transgressed political and religious b ­ oundaries – Constant found it increasingly prudent to adopt a number of strategies to protect himself and his publisher from prosecution. One such strategy was to add nuance or ambiguity to, or even to suppress outright, statements bearing directly or indirectly on Catholic doctrines. Another was to offer not only a purely historical explanation for a given phenomenon but also a religious explanation and then to purport not to choose between them. A third protective strategy was to praise theism in general or Christianity in particular in language sufficiently vague that it could pass for orthodoxy. Finally, beyond these subtleties, Constant explicitly

46 Constant drew heavily on the work of Friedrich Creuzer, Joseph Görres, and the early volumes of Ferdinand d’Eckstein’s journal Le Catholique  – authors whose interpretations of Indian religion he adamantly rejected (see chapter 15). 47 Hofmann, “Histoire de l’ouvrage,” 1120–1. 48 The Catholic Church maintained its condemnation of Constant’s De la religion throughout the nineteenth century. See Kloocke, “Échos de l’œuvre de Benjamin Constant.”

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assured readers of his respect for Christianity and, beginning with volume 4, identified himself with Protestantism. The claim to be a Protestant, albeit of a vague, nondogmatic sort, both afforded him some legal protection and complemented the final phase of his political career, during which he represented the heavily Protestant Alsace and defended the rights of French Protestants in the Chamber.49 In the mid-1820s, in addition to preparing the volumes of De la religion for publication, Constant published two articles on religion. “Christianisme,” appearing in Encyclopédie moderne in April 1825 – Le Globe reprinted long excerpts from it a month later50 – indicated his intentions for a continuation of De la religion. Here, reworking material from the blue copy, Constant sketched out an explanation for the decline of polytheism and the emergence of Christianity as a positive religion, eschewing any form of supernatural explanation, in terms of the religious and political historical context of the day and as a further application of his basic principle that the historical succession of ­religious forms is always in the direction of greater individual liberty and moral light.51 The second article, “Du développement progressif des idées religieuses,” published in Encyclopédie progressive in May 1826, sums up one of the principal themes of De la religion: the progressive development of religious ideas. Constant incorporated material from both of these articles into the later volumes of De la religion. Mention should also be made of the lecture “Coup d’oeil sur la tendance générale des esprits au XIXè siècle,” delivered by Constant in December 1825 at the Athénée royale and published the same month in Revue encyclopédique. In 1830, Constant would transcribe entire passages from this lecture into the closing sections of volume 5.52 After Constant’s death, the large section on Roman polytheism in the blue copy that he had omitted from De la religion was published in two volumes as Du polythéisme romain, considéré dans ses rapports avec la philosophie grecque et la religion chrétienne (1833) under the editorship

49 Deguise, Benjamin Constant méconnu, 208, 221–6, 251. 50 A slightly modified version was republished in the 1829 Mélanges de littérature et de politique under the title “Des causes humaines qui ont concouru à l’établissement du christianisme.” 51 Kloocke, Benjamin Constant, 269–71, 287; Rosenblatt, Liberal Values, 205–6. 52 P. Thompson, Les écrits de Benjamin Constant, 146.

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of Jacques Matter.53 Despite Matter’s claim in his preface that Constant had completed the manuscript shortly before his death,54 Du polythéisme romain is in fact an unrevised transcription from the 1813 manuscript. Constant had, as it happens, already drawn on this material – sometimes transcribing it directly, sometimes summarizing it, sometimes altering it – in De la religion itself and in his “Christianisme” article. There are two important points to be made here. First, Constant’s ideas on Roman polytheism continued to evolve after 1813. Patrice Thompson cites a note by Constant written in either 1821 or 1829 indicating that the view of Roman religion set out in the blue copy (and therefore in Du polythéisme romain) was no longer compatible with the opinions set out in De la religion. Second, Du polythéisme romain concludes with the fall of polytheism before the advent of theism but contains nothing about the origins of Christianity – a topic that Constant associated very closely with the decline of polytheism in Roman times – because in 1813 Constant had not yet addressed the emergence of Christianity. He still had not done so at the time of his death, although the “Christianisme” article indicates his intentions for how he would have continued De la religion if circumstances had permitted.55 In light of these two points, there is no justification to speak, as some commentators do, of the five volumes of De la religion and the two volumes of Du polythéisme romain as a continuous seven-volume work on religion.

Constant’s Personal Religious Beliefs Constant’s claim in the latter volumes of De la religion to be a Protestant warrants an aside on his personal religious beliefs.56 I suggested above that Constant’s claim to be a Protestant was primarily a protective strategy necessitated by the religious and political climate of the late 1820s, as were the passages in De la religion praising theism and Christianity.

53 Matter, a Protestant from Alsace, was an ecclesiastical and philosophical historian whom François Guizot in 1832 appointed inspector general of the Sorbonne. 54 Matter, “Préface de l’éditeur,” i. 55 P. Thompson, Les écrits de Benjamin Constant, 183–4; Hofmann, “Histoire de l’ouvrage,” 1121–2. 56 This section is based on Deguise, Benjamin Constant méconnu, 226–31; and Vincent, Benjamin Constant, 148–52.

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This judgment requires nuance. Constant genuinely regarded Christianity as superior to other religions but only in the sense that the succession of religious forms corresponds to the social and intellectual evolution of the human race. For Constant, Christianity was the religious form that corresponded to the most advanced stage of humankind’s social and intellectual development, and Protestantism, in turn, was the form of Christianity best suited to the contemporary moment. Constant praised the Reformers in “Du développement progressif des idées religieuses” (1826) for having recovered their intellectual ­independence and for having made the principle of free inquiry the basis of their schism from the Roman Catholic Church. He went on to laud this Protestant principle as “a doctrine contemporary with all eras” because it welcomes and adopts intellectual progress and thereby keeps pace with the development of civilization. In the same passage, however, Constant lamented that actual forms of Protestantism had not lived up to this ideal because they had refused to grant to others the intellectual independence on which they were founded. Tellingly, whereas Charles de Villers had praised the Protestant churches as saying, “Examine, and submit only to your convictions,” and whereas the Catholic Church told people, “Submit to authority without examination,”57 Constant depicted the Protestant churches as advising their faithful, “Think for yourself [Examinez] but believe as if you have never thought for yourself.”58 There is, then, a tension in Constant’s thought between Protestantism as simply one more historical form of religion and an ideal of Protestantism as a near synonym of religious sentiment. Some clarity may be achieved by recognizing that when Constant spoke of Protestantism as a doctrine for all eras, he meant the thoroughly ­subjectivized, nondogmatic interpretation of Protestantism that he shared with Germaine de Staël, in which, despite the efforts of some French Reformed theologians and pastors to loosen the hold of Calvinist orthodoxy,59 no Reformed Church of Constant’s day would have fully recognized itself. Protestantism here is less a historical form of religion than a shorthand expression for the set of values dear to 57 Quoted in Jainchill, Reimagining Politics, 270. 58 Constant, “Du développement progressif,” 106–7. 59 One example is Samuel Vincent’s Observations sur l’unité religieuse (1820), ­written in response to the first volume of Lamennais’s Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de religion. See Rosenblatt, Liberal Values, 182.

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Constant: interior religious sentiment, liberty, morality, anti-clericalism, and anti-dogmatism. Constant sincerely believed that in his day Protestantism embodied these values more fully than any other religious form, making it the most developed, most modern form of religion and thereby providing an environment conducive to further progress. Nevertheless, it is ultimately yet another religious form to be surpassed with the ongoing intellectual development of humankind; to say that its principle remains the same, is to say no more than that its principle is the same religious sentiment that drives all successive forms of ­religion. As Deguise has concisely put it, Protestantism, for Constant, “is not a revealed, absolute truth, where one finds refuge in order to clarify all obscurity; rather, it is simply a transitory form.” 60 All religious forms, then, including Christianity and Protestantism, are transitory. What alone is permanent, that which Constant truly valued, is religious sentiment. As early as 1805 – around the time that he discovered the distinction between religious sentiment and religious forms that became a central explanatory category in his thought about religion – Constant discerned religious sentiment in himself, noting that he could no longer think of himself as irreligious: “I have my corner of religion. But it is all about sentiment, about vague emotions: it c­ annot be reduced to a system.”61 Religious sentiment, as experienced and reflected on by Constant over the subsequent decades, encompassed a feeling of the insignificance of humankind before the infinity of the universe, an interior impulse toward sacrifice and generosity, confidence that the universe itself guarantees the progress of justice and liberty, and hope for a future life. Thus Constant’s religious sentiment corresponds more to an idealist spiritualism heavily inflected by morality than to any orthodox form of Christianity. And indeed, aside from an early and short-lived attraction to Theophilanthropy during the Directory and two brief episodes in which he sought consolation in pietism for romantic difficulties, Constant never affiliated himself to any practising sect.62 Tellingly, he rejected outright the fundamental

60 Deguise, Benjamin Constant méconnu, 149. 61 Constant, Journaux intimes, 19 February 1805, 435. 62 Bowman has definitively demonstrated that the quietist episode in Constant’s unfinished novel Cécile (1810) must not be read as a strictly autobiographical account of his experiences with the group Ames intérieures in Lausanne in 1807. Bowman, “L’épisode quiétiste dans Cécile.”

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Christian doctrines concerning the fall, the Incarnation, redemption, and grace, and denied the possibility of revelation in all but the vaguest sense. Constant does seem to have believed in an “infinite being,” but this entity was certainly not the God of the Bible or even of the deists; in Deguise’s apt characterization, Constant’s God “is an abstract phantom, a guardian of the ideal of justice and liberty, whose very existence is more desired than demonstrated.”63 Constant’s personal religious beliefs, in sum, reduce to two elements held in tension: even as he maintained an attitude of total skepticism toward the doctrines and practices of all positive religions, he experienced religious sentiment as an innate human disposition that connects us to a force superior to the natural world.64

63 Deguise, Benjamin Constant méconnu, 228. 64 Pierre Deguise, K. Steven Vincent, and Tzvetan Todorov all identify Constant as an agnostic. Deguise, Benjamin Constant méconnu, 208; Vincent, Benjamin Constant, 148; Todorov, Benjamin Constant, 144.

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Constant’s History of Religions

Early in book 1 of the first volume of De la religion, considérée dans sa source, ses formes et ses développements (1824–31), Benjamin Constant described religion as a vast country that had been tenaciously attacked and defended but that no disinterested traveller had yet visited or faithfully described. Constant, readers were to understand, was offering himself as the first disinterested traveller to this country and De la religion as the first faithful description of it. The moment, he continued, was favourable to discuss religion impartially because, on the one hand, civil society was no longer dominated by the intolerant Catholic Church and, on the other hand, the opposition to religion formerly inspired by this domination had disappeared along with it. (Constant, the habitué of gaming tables, observed that since there is no attraction where there is no peril, incredulity had now lost the charm of danger.) Society, in short, had reached the historical moment when religion could be judged as an empirical reality whose nature and history it was important to understand.1 This chapter presents Constant’s conceptualization of religion in De la religion first by setting out the conceptual framework underlying its history of religions and then by analyzing this history’s key moments, including the emergence of polytheism from fetishism and the differential developmental trajectories of sacerdotal and nonsacerdotal polytheisms.

 1 Constant, De la religion, 42–3.

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Conceptual Framework The principal elements of the conceptual framework of De la religion to be discussed in this section are the distinction between religious sentiment and religious forms, the opposition to religious sentiment posed by self-interest and priesthoods, the principle of progressive development, stadial theory, and methodology. Religious Sentiment and Religious Forms De la religion is premised on an anthropology that characterizes human beings as “double and enigmatic.”2 Although this phrase clearly echoes Blaise Pascal, it is not the biblical narrative of a fall within history that explains our double nature for Constant but instead the fundamental human condition of inhabiting the finite world yet being aware of and yearning for the infinite. However, although we yearn for the infinite simply by the fact that we are human, the infinite is never given to us objectively or externally. Instead, we gain access to it subjectively through “a voice that cries out from the depths of one’s being” and speaks to us of the invisible powers beyond the material world. Constant called this inner voice the religious sentiment and declared it to be an essential attribute or inherent disposition of human beings.3 Arising from the fact that human beings qua human beings experience the need to put themselves in communication with the spiritual powers, “religious sentiment is the response to this cry of the soul that cannot be silenced, to this drive toward the infinite that nothing can entirely subdue.”4 To deny or neglect the yearning for the infinite, Constant had earlier intimated, is to have an incomplete understanding of human beings.5

  2 Ibid., 50.   3 Ibid., 48 (quotation), 79; see also 52. Constant observed in a note that Lord Byron’s definition of religious sentiment in his recently published poem The Island (1823) agreed with his own. He quoted in English a passage (canto 2, stanza 16) that culminates, “Who thinks of self, when gazing on the sky?” Ibid., 601–2n1.   4 Ibid., 50.   5 Constant, “Lettre sur Julie,” 67.

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Constant’s religious sentiment is a pre-critical consciousness of a suprafinite order that may be reflected upon but is itself independent of rational thought.6 As such, it closely resembles Friedrich Schleiermacher’s claims in Über die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers) (1799) for religious feeling as an autonomous moment in human ­experience ­irreducible to reason or morality (although, unlike Schleiermacher, Constant never tried to evoke the experience of it in his readers).7 Constant’s definition of religion is secondary to this understanding of religious sentiment, and indeed a definition appeared, unheralded, only in the latter volumes of De la religion: “Religion ... is the relation of Divinity with man, with that which constitutes him as a moral and ­intelligent being – that is to say, with his soul, his thought, his will.” To this summation, Constant added, “Religion signifies the whole of the relations that exist between man and the invisible world.”8 Constant’s conviction that religious sentiment is innate to human nature meant that he rejected the central element of the radical French Enlightenment critique of religion as something secondary that had come into being in history through the interaction of human nature with external conditions – and therefore as something that may be eliminated.9 Constant considered religion, like language and society, to be a constituent element of humankind, not something whose origin in history needs to be explained. And whereas radical philosophes and Idéologues attributed the origin of religion to one cause or more, whether fear, natural catastrophes, dreams, or the desire to know the future, Constant declared that these factors may influence the course of religion but are powerless to explain the origin of religious sentiment itself: “Man is not religious because he is fearful; he is religious because he is man. To ask why he is religious, why sociable, is to seek the reason

  6 Kloocke, “Johann Gottfried Herder,” 71.  7 On Constant and Schleiermacher, see Kloocke, “Benjamin Constant et l’Allemagne,” 153–9.  8 Constant, De la religion, 513, 575. Constant similarly defined religion in Du polythéisme romain (1833) as “the relation of divinity with man, with that which constitutes him as a moral and intelligent being – that is to say, with his soul, his thought, his will.” Constant, Du polythéisme romain, vol. 1, 83.  9 Constant, De la religion, 40.

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for his physical structure and for that which constitutes his mode of existence.”10 Such questions are beyond the explanatory structure of De la religion. Since Constant regarded religious sentiment as innate, it follows that he would regard it as universal. And, indeed, he declared religious sentiment to be an empirical anthropological constant: no matter where we look in the history of humankind, we will never discover a society whose members do not yearn for the infinite and seek to communicate with the invisible world. However – and this is a momentous qualification – religious sentiment never appears in its pure state. Here, Constant introduced the second half of his fundamental conceptual pairing: whereas religious sentiment as the essence of religion is immutable and eternal, it manifests itself only in diverse and transitory forms of religion that arise naturally and inevitably from the need that human beings experience to give regular and enduring expression to the means of communication with the invisible powers that they believe themselves to have discovered. These forms necessarily vary because religious ­sentiment encounters in its expression different climatic, institutional, and historical circumstances. Religious forms, then, are specific compounds of beliefs, practices, and institutions that give expression to the universal religious sentiment but are historical in nature. There are no innate religious ideas for Constant; what is innate is the human disposition to conceive of religious ideas.11 Self-interest and Priesthoods Constant identified self-interest, by which he meant the “intérêt bien entendu” (enlightened self-interest) of Claude-Adrien Helvétius and the Idéologues,12 as a basic element of human nature that opposes religious sentiment. This opposition, in turn, underlies a second distinction fundamental to the explanatory structure of De la religion: that between sacerdotal and nonsacerdotal religions. Whereas, in its yearning for the infinite, humankind is raised above itself by religious sentiment, it is brought back down to its own level by self-interest, which can tell us only what is advantageous or harmful to us. Constant characterized 10 Ibid., 46. 11 Ibid., 47, 52, 582n6. 12 Ibid., 29, 579n1.

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the history of religions as an ongoing struggle between sentiment and self-interest.13 Self-interest, moreover, had found a powerful ally in the collective person of the priesthoods that had dominated many forms of religion over the course of history. Constant explained that the power of priesthoods derives from their ability to exploit certain natural ­tendencies of human beings, such as fear, the memory of natural catastrophes, dreams, and the desire to know the future.14 His depictions of religious forms dominated by priesthoods – a variation on the Enlightenment trope of “priestcraft” – are strongly reminiscent of Holbachian and Idéologue critiques of all religion, with the crucial difference that his analysis applies to the origin of sacerdotal forms of religion, not to the origin of religion itself: “Imposture and authority can abuse religion, but they were not able to create it. If it was not already found in the depths of human nature, power would not be able to make of it an instrument, nor ambitious castes a profession.”15 Constant here closely associated the abuse of religion with despotism, but once again he distanced himself from the equation of religion with despotism. It is equally false, he said, to equate religion with tyranny or to equate the rejection of religion with liberty; the correct view is that liberty is the universal correlate of religious sentiment and that tyranny is the universal correlate of the absence of religious sentiment.16 So correlated, liberty and tyranny became integral categories in Constant’s reflection on religion. Progressive Development Even aside from the corrupting influence of self-interest and the machinations of priesthoods, all religious forms, according to Constant, ­contain a seed of future opposition to religious sentiment. Inevitably, by the very fact of their duration, religious forms acquire a dogmatic and static character that resists the ongoing development of the human mind.17 Constant sketched a three-stage life cycle for religious forms.

13 14 15 16 17

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Ibid., 30, 106. Ibid., 129. Ibid., 41. See ibid., 61–2. Ibid., 53.

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In the first stage, a religious form expresses a specific social group’s understanding of the relations between humankind and the invisible powers at a certain stage of human intellectual development. Next, humankind’s ongoing development renders the content of the ­religious form disproportionate to the group’s improved intellectual, moral, and spiritual state, resulting in conflict between the established religious form and a human intelligence that now seeks a better, more satisfying representation of religious sentiment. In the third stage, the established form uses its power to crush its attackers, resulting, however, not in the re-establishment of the old form but in a crisis of complete ­incredulity from which eventually emerges an entirely new form of religion commensurate with the group’s current stage of intellectual development.18 As this life cycle of religious forms clearly implies, Constant’s history of religions is progressive. A foundational principle of De la religion is that “civilization being progressive, religious forms must feel the effects of this progression.”19 Each era truly has its inspired prophets and visionaries, Constant said, but each speaks the language of its era. Consequently, the idea that religion consists of traditions transmitted unaltered from age to age is completely false because all traditions reflect a certain stage of human intellectual development and must inevitably become obsolete. Constant programmatically concluded that “there is in religion, as in the idea of Divinity, nothing historical in its essence; but all is historical in its developments.”20 Religious sentiment, that is, transcends history, but all religious forms are historical. Constant thus subordinated the content of the various religious forms to what we may call the principle of proportionality. What is good or bad in the history of religions is not this or that belief, practice, or institution but the proportion or disproportion between beliefs, practices, and institutions and the intellectual, moral, and spiritual state of the society that holds them. “The true good is proportion,” Constant said, “and all disproportion is pernicious.”21 Constant, let us note, never defended

18 Ibid., 80. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 617n36. 21 Ibid., 138.

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or theorized this principle of proportionality; it functions, as Jean Starobinski notes, as an implicit postulate in his thought.22 In “De la perfectibilité de l’espèce humaine” (1829), an important essay whose content parallels that of De la religion, Constant proclaimed, “The perfectibility of the human race is nothing other than the tendency toward equality.”23 Constant’s identification of the historical process as moving from imperfection toward perfection, from hierarchy toward equality, and from submission to dogmas toward interior spiritual liberty underlay his opposition, across the various fields of his activities, to all attempts to obstruct the progressive movement of history. Constant’s political writings repeatedly warned of the dangers of submitting the present to the structures and values of a dead past.24 Adolphe: Anecdote trouvée dans les papiers d’un inconnu, his 1816 novel, dramatized the calamitous consequences of what we may call “affective reaction.” Adolphe once truly loved Ellénore, but his love for her has died. Ellénore demands that he be faithful to the old love that he no longer feels. Adolphe for a time acquiesces but eventually comes to understand that although his past love may live on in memory, it must not be allowed to paralyze the present.25 In De la religion, religious sentiment, of course, is the progressive element, whereas the reactionary element is r­ epresented by the entrenched religious forms that, through their priesthoods, resist the ongoing development of the human mind. The 22 Starobinski, “Benjamin Constant,” 51. Starobinski further notes that this ­ ostulate is structurally equivalent to the role that Montesquieu attributed to the p “­general spirit.” Tzvetan Todorov cites this principle of proportionality as evidence that Constant retained Montesquieu’s relativist and structuralist lessons. Todorov, Benjamin Constant, 55. 23 Constant, “De la perfectibilité,” 407. Constant, let us note, did not mean that everyone should be equal in society. Rather, it is the ideal of justice – that is, the sentiment that all people ought to be judged according to the same principles in relation to their merits – that is innate and universal. When he said that the perfectibility of the human race tends toward equality, he meant that, over the course of history, social orders had progressively drawn nearer to this ideal of justice. Todorov notes that equality in this sense as the meaning of history is an absolute value that transcends Constant’s general historicism. Todorov, Benjamin Constant, 58–60. 24 It was Constant, in fact, who in his tract Des réactions politiques (1796) fixed the meaning of the term “reaction” in political discourse to refer to attempts at restoration by partisans of an old (Constant would say obsolete) regime. Starobinski, “Benjamin Constant,” 47–8. 25 See Poulet, Studies in Human Time, 221–2.

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full significance of the distinction between sacerdotal and nonsacerdotal religions for the conceptual framework of De la religion now becomes clear: religions dominated by sacerdotal power embody the principle of stasis, whereas religions independent of sacerdotal power embody the principle of progress.26 Stadial Theory Constant structured his discussion of the history of religions in De la religion according to the stadial theory of history developed by ­eighteenth-century French and Scottish thinkers (although he did not himself theorize the concept). Stadial theory, as both a periodization of the entire sweep of human history and a progressivist, teleological narration of social development, was a form of philosophical history. Among its variant theories tracing the rise of humankind from savagery through barbarism to civilization, Adam Smith’s narrative of the progressive development of social institutions across the successive stages of hunting, herding, farming, and commerce was particularly influential.27 Constant, who had directly encountered the stadial history of the Scottish Enlightenment during his period of study in Edinburgh, took from it a framework for the historical development of humankind in which savagery corresponds to the stage of hunting, barbarism encompasses successively herding and then farming, and civilization is ­characterized by commerce. De la religion follows this framework: it begins with the religion of savages,28 then takes up – and devotes the majority of its pages to – the rise and development of polytheism in

26 Constant, De la religion, 95–6. 27 Kelley, Fortunes of History, 36, 83; Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 2, ­315–16. On stadial theory in eighteenth-century historical writing, see Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 4. 28 In stadial theory, as in eighteenth-century philosophical history more generally, the term “savage” designated peoples who lived in forests. Gusdorf, La conscience révolutionnaire, 493. Constant, we should note, declared himself agnostic over whether savagery was truly the primitive state of our species; he was not interested in the origin of religion but in its development. It is sufficient, he said, to begin from the state farthest removed from perfection in order to better contemplate how far humankind has progressed. Constant, De la religion, 84. Constant, that is, proposed a heuristic use of savagery in order to gauge the full extent of human development.

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barbarous societies, and culminates with the development of poly­ theism to its highest point during the transition from barbarism to civilization. Methodology The text of De la religion betrays no hint of the methodological struggles that lay behind the final form of the work (see chapter 13). The opening paragraphs of the introduction affirm Montesquieu’s dictu that “all beings have their laws” and identify religious sentiment as the fundamental law of human nature.29 Constant then observed that hitherto external religion had been studied but not interior religion because believers and unbelievers alike had sought the origin of religion in circumstances extraneous to humankind – devout Christians in a ­particular and local revelation and unbelieving philosophes in external factors. The history of religious sentiment, therefore, remained to be written. Of course, he noted, religious sentiment, properly speaking, does not have a history, but the religious forms through which it has received expression over the centuries do have a history, and moreover, this history is governed by laws that may be discerned.30 Further, although Constant acknowledged that we are unable to encounter religious sentiment in empirical reality because we cannot have any idea of religious sentiment independently of the forms that clothe it, he insisted that it is possible to conceive of religious sentiment by removing in thought all that varies according to time, place, and degree of civilization and reassembling everything that remains immutable in the most diverse situations and circumstances.31 As a consequence of this method of philosophical history, which Constant conceded departs from Montesquieu’s didactic method, De la religion shares the doubleness of human beings: it is at once a historical, sociological, and political analysis of the many historical religions and an account of religious sentiment as it exists independently of historical circumstances.32

29 Constant, De la religion, 39. 30 Ibid., 43–4. 31 Ibid., 47, 51. 32 Kloocke, “Benjamin Constant et l’Allemagne,” 146–7.

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The History of Religions This section discusses Constant’s history of religions in sufficient detail to identify its key moments and to convey the substance of his conceptualization of religion, but it attempts neither to summarize the entire contents of the five volumes into which Constant poured his vast knowledge derived from decades of reading nor to present Constant’s evidence for his arguments and conclusions.33 From Fetishism to the Emergence of Polytheism Constant’s history of religions begins with the religion of savages, or what he considered to have been the religion of the earliest stage of human intellectual and social development. Constant first noted that savages, like all human beings, possessed religious sentiment; they, too, experienced the need to put themselves in communication with the unknown forces that seemed to animate the nature that surrounded them. The means used in the savage age to establish this communication constituted the religious form characteristic of it, and these means, in turn, were not arbitrary but determined by the ideas and needs that corresponded to this early stage of social and intellectual development. Socially, this state, as Constant depicted it, ranged from bare subsistence in the forest to proto-societies centred on hunting and/or fishing, and intellectually it was characterized by weak powers of reasoning that favoured concrete thought over abstraction and generalization. So situated and constituted, early human minds imputed will and intention to objects and imputed life to anything that moved. And since human beings, Constant continued, always place their religious ideas in the unknown, it follows that among savages, for whom everything was

33 De la Religion is structured as follows: volume 1, introduction (bk 1) and the religion of savages (bk 2); volume 2, the emergence and nature of polytheism in the barbarous societies of Antiquity (bks 3–5); volume 3, the constitutive elements of sacerdotal polytheism (bk 6) and of nonsacerdotal polytheism (bk 7) and a digression on the Homeric poems (bk 8); volume 4, the contrast between the two forms of polytheism (bk 9), the doctrines and fundamental principle of sacerdotal religions (bks 10–11), and the development of nonsacerdotal polytheism to its highest point (bk 12); volume 5, the various Greek Mysteries (bk 13), Scandinavian polytheism (bk 14), and the results of the work (bk 15).

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unknown, religious sentiment would have addressed itself to whatever in their environment fortuitously struck their imagination. Such objects of worship, the trace of which soon disappeared, were always material objects – most often animals but sometimes plants or rocks. The first form of religion for Constant, then, as an expression of religious sentiment that was natural to the earliest stage of social and intellectual development, was the worship of material objects – that is to say, fetishism.34 Fetishism, however, did not exhaust the manifestation of religious sentiment among savages. Sometimes, Constant said, a mysterious idea of the infinite filled the soul of the savage worshipper. He pointed to the differences between the prayers addressed to the fetishes and those addressed to the Great Spirit in order to show that the struggle of religious sentiment to raise itself above existing religious forms was already underway in earliest times. Constant noted that some individuals seem to have been more adept than others at communicating with the fetish divinities. Such individuals, whom he called jongleurs (tricksters),35 represented the seed from which the sacerdotal order would emerge, and indeed early on they formed themselves into a corporation and, almost simultaneously, ­recognized that they had a corporate interest distinct from the general interest.36 Jongleurs gained power over their contemporaries by performing mysterious operations that purported to ensure the protection of their fetishes and to ward off harm from those of their enemies. Their power was further extended by external factors such as fear or the memory of natural catastrophes, dreams, and the desire to know the future. Sacrifice, which Constant axiomatically held to be inseparable from religion, had hardly been conceived before jongleurs began to corrupt it through the exploitation of interest, ultimately culminating in the deplorable rituals of human sacrifice and sacred prostitution.

34 Constant’s conception of fetishism, let us note, corresponds to what the later nineteenth century called animism. See Wilkinson, “Is There Such a Thing?” 295–6. 35 Constant identified a number of terms for such individuals used by contemporary tribes, including “shaman” for the Tartars, but he noted that travellers most ­commonly designated them by the generic name of jongleurs. Constant, De la religion, 127. Jongleurs was also the term used by Charles-François Dupuis. On the history of the term jongleur, see Mancall, “Illness and Health among Americans,” 278. 36 Constant later remarked that “a priest’s only country [patrie] is the sacerdotal order.” Constant, De la religion, 216.

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Constant nevertheless insisted that the institution of the priesthood did not originally arise from fraud, ambition, or imposture but is inseparable from religion itself. “Priests,” he said, “do not constitute themselves; they are constituted by the force of things.”37 Moreover, Constant judged the influence of jongleurs on the savage state to have been both limited and ultimately beneficial. It was limited thanks to the nature of fetishism, in which individuals carried their own fetishes with them in hunting or war and consulted these fetishes by themselves; and it was ultimately beneficial because jongleurs preserved medical knowledge and other useful skills without which Constant thought that people in savage times would have perished from despair. Constant concluded that whereas sacerdotal corporations of later ages obstructed the progress of the human race, the jongleurs of earliest times unwittingly advanced it. In his formulation, “one sees in them a little fraud and much superstition; one will see in [priestly corporations] of later times a little superstition and much fraud.”38 Constant made two final points about fetishism. First, although the crudest of all religious forms, fetishism contained the seeds of all subsequent religious ideas. Second, in accord with his principle of proportionality, Constant cautioned his readers against disdain for the religion of savages, noting that beliefs and institutions far less crude had done much more harm when, through ruse or tyranny, they had persisted among societies that had advanced to a yet higher stage of intellectual and moral development. In Constant’s stadial theory, early barbarism, as the first step upward from savagery toward civilization, represents the lowest level of the social state, properly speaking. Constant conceded that the passage from the savage state to the social state is an enigma because we lack the historical evidence that would allow us to reconstruct how it was achieved, but he insisted that we can demonstrate the one truth that matters: whenever a revolution occurs in the state of the human race, religion undergoes an analogous change. Early barbarism was ­characterized socially by the transition to agriculture, along with some artisanal skills such as metalwork, and intellectually by the acquisition of notions of ownership, law, and the division of labour, as well as by

37 Ibid., 127. 38 Ibid., 138.

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the beginnings of the development of morality.39 The fetish, as the god of an isolated individual, had to satisfy all the needs of its worshipper, and so all fetishes had the same functions and lacked particular names. However, as soon as human society took shape, with worshippers composing a people, their objects of worship formed a celestial society, such as the gods of Olympus, in which the new division of labour in human society was paralleled in religion as the gods, now collective rather than individual, divided power among themselves, held distinct functions, and received names. In this way, polytheism naturally succeeded fetishism as the religious form corresponding to the developmental stage of early barbarism (although fetishism did not entirely disappear). The emergence of polytheism brought with it an increase in sacerdotal authority. Constant enumerated and discussed various secondary causes of this increase, including climate, fertility of the soil, material works such as irrigation canals, surprising or terrifying natural phenomena, the character and habitual occupations of peoples, and political ­calamities. He also noted the importance of colonization in spreading ­sacerdotalism but cautioned that even if colonization had i­ntroduced sacerdotalism to regions in which it would not have been born naturally, this historical fact merely pushed back the real question of why priesthoods had acquired power among the colonizing peoples in the first place. The true cause of the increase in sacerdotal authority during the early barbarous age, according to Constant, is to be found in the particular forms of religion that corresponded to it, namely star worship and the worship of the elements of nature (which coalesced in solar religions since the sun is both a celestial body and fire). The key factor identified by Constant is the specialized knowledge that accrued to the priesthoods of these two religious formations. Priests in religions that worshipped celestial bodies or the elements of nature necessarily became careful observers of the physical world. They then systemized the knowledge gained from their observations into sciences such as astronomy, astrology, and techniques of divination, which in turn, since they ­interpreted natural phenomena as revealing the will of the gods, were c­ onsidered sacred sciences that held the key to governing human 39 Constant had earlier distinguished morality from religion: the relations of human beings with the gods constitute religion, whereas the relations of human beings with each other constitute morality. He added that the two things have no necessary relation between them. Ibid., 112–13.

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existence. Control of this sacred knowledge gave priesthoods enormous power, which they safeguarded by declaring their knowledge to be mysteries forbidden to the profane. Further, not content to guard their esoteric knowledge against the people whom they governed, priesthoods multiplied degrees of initiation so as conceal the most important secrets from their own subaltern ranks, thereby creating hierarchy within the sacerdotal order itself. Having acquired unlimited and exclusive authority over religion, the self-interest of priestly corporations next compelled them, Constant said, to seek political power and immunities. Everywhere their reasoning was the same: the human race exists to carry out the will of the gods, and priests alone know the will of the gods, so the people and civil leaders must submit to sacerdotal authority. Constant acknowledged that the power exercised among the various peoples of Antiquity by their priesthoods had varied in its forms, extent, and intensity owing to external factors that had mitigated, resisted, or modified it. But, true to his model of philosophical history, he regarded these variations as accidental and transitory nuances to the religious formation of sacerdotal polytheism that had characterized the barbarous period of human history. It was, he thought, in India and Egypt that sacerdotal polytheism was most fully exemplified because there, where the authority of priesthoods had been unlimited, natural divisions among human beings that would have been gradually overcome by the progress of civilization had been transformed by priesthoods into an immutable and tyrannical caste system. Indian and Egyptian religions therefore served Constant as the types of sacerdotal polytheism. China constituted for Constant a special case. Everywhere else among the priestly nations of Antiquity, he said, conflict between temporal and spiritual authority had resulted in the triumph of the priesthood. In China, however, the temporal sovereigns had destroyed the power of the priesthood. One might think that Constant would have applauded this check on sacerdotal authority, but quite the opposite is the case. Priesthoods, it is true, in following their corporate interests, obstruct and corrupt religious sentiment, but their power nevertheless depends on the persistence of religion. The destruction of the priesthood in China meant the total loss of religion and its replacement by magic as the instrument of state power. Constant defined magic as entirely given over to interest and as such bereft of religious sentiment, and he argued that the substitution of magic for religion had occasioned dire consequences for Chinese society because its temporal rulers inherited the

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despotic, static authoritarianism of the priesthood but left the people utterly degraded and without the consolation of belief.40 Constant recognized two additional exceptions in Antiquity to the sacerdotal polytheism typified by India and Egypt: the Hebrews and the Greeks. He conceded that the appearance and duration of Jewish theism, in a barbarous time and among a barbarous people equally incapable of conceiving or preserving the idea of theism, present an anomaly that must be somehow explained. In Constantian terms, there is a striking disproportion between the barbarous Israelites of Moses’s day and the sublime doctrine of theism. His solution was to accept that Moses received a revelation, although he quickly clarified that the only possible form of revelation is the progressive development of an intimate sentiment deposited in the human soul. In the particular case of Moses, revelation consisted solely of knowledge of the unity of God and the religious sanction that monotheism gives to the moral duties and obligations of human beings. The means that Moses otherwise used to govern his barbarous people and to preserve theism among them, like the rest of the history contained in the Old Testament, much of it revolting and cruel, belong to the sphere of human history and must be judged like all human things. Mosaic theism is one of two types of theism that Constant discerned in Antiquity; the other, which he said postdates it by twelve centuries, is Plato’s cosmogonic theism. Constant suggested that, just as the providential role of Platonic theism would be to ensure that Christianity did not become a Jewish sect, so too had Mosaic theism preserved the idea of theism until such a time as human intelligence became capable of conceiving it. The critical point here is that Mosaic theism is not structurally important to Constant’s history of religions. In pointing to the ultimate triumph of theism over polytheism, the historical anomaly of Mosaic theism is analogous to the fleeting sentiment of the infinite that sometimes fills the soul of the fetishworshipping savage. The Greeks, in contrast, are critically important to Constant’s history of religions because they represent the forking point between sacerdotal and nonsacerdotal polytheisms. Constant acknowledged that the earliest Greeks – known as Pelasgians – had, like other ancient peoples, been

40 Constant here countered Enlightenment Sinophilia. See Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 1, 98–119; and vol. 4.

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enslaved by their priests (whom he identified with the Titans). At some point and under mysterious circumstances, the Pelasgians overthrew theocratic authority in a historical uprising – the memory of which is preserved in their mythology as the expulsion of the Titans – after which they reverted to a savage fetishism. Constant turned next to the suggestion – influentially advocated by Friedrich Creuzer, among others – that Greek polytheism was not indigenous but was imported by Egyptian colonizers. Constant accepted that Egyptians had established colonies at Greece in this period, but he argued that the influence of Egyptian religion on Greek religion had been greatly exaggerated. Constant’s counter-argument begins with the assertion that the Egyptians feared the sea as an evil principle and that it would therefore have been unthinkable for members of the upper castes, particularly priests, to cross the Mediterranean. Consequently, the Egyptian colonizers must have been common people, to whom the esoteric knowledge at the heart of Egyptian sacerdotal polytheism was forbidden and who practised only its external forms. Constant hypothesized that if the Egyptian colonists had disembarked among a people already possessing an established religion, they would have adopted it without hesitation, but since the Pelasgians practised only fetishism, the Egyptians instead amalgamated their rituals and beliefs, as they understood them, with the indigenous ones. Pelasgian fetishism, in effect, furnished the majority of the materials for what became Greek polytheism, to which the colonizers added some myths and many rituals. That the resulting hybrid religion bore very little resemblance to Egyptian sacerdotal polytheism testifies to the limited influence of Egyptian religion on the formation of Greek polytheism. Constant concluded that the Egyptian colonizers “in no way gave a religion to the Greeks; they only placed them in a state of civilization that must modify the form of their religious ideas.”41 As with the emergence of sacerdotal polytheism elsewhere, the transition from savagery to barbarism, effected in Greece by the arrival of Egyptian colonizers, collectivized the fetish divinities and transformed them into national gods. In Greece, however, the transition from fetishism to polytheism was completed by the apotheoses of several leaders of the Egyptian colonies, such that a certain number of divinities were worshipped in human form. Over time, the old fetish divinities ceased

41 Constant, De la religion, 223.

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to be worshiped under the form of natural objects and also took on human form, and newly introduced deities displayed further anthropomorphic characteristics. This process of humanizing the gods, as a result of which the early Greeks worshipped partially humanized divinities rather than the stars or the elements of nature, was the great accomplishment of the Greeks of the early barbarous age and established the trajectory of subsequent Greek polytheism in what Constant alternatively called the heroic age or the age of Theseus.42 The form of the Greek divinities underwent further humanization in the heroic period, and even more importantly, their character was gradually transformed through the introduction of morality into religion, followed by the gradual expulsion from religion of everything that no longer agreed with the new ideas of justice commensurate with the ongoing social and intellectual development of the period. At the same time, the Greek mind, by inventing new meanings for the ceremonies and rituals ­originally brought from Egypt, eliminated any vestiges of priestly ­doctrines that remained in the actions or attributes of their divinities. The decisive factor permitting the emergence in heroic age Greece of a form of polytheism in which everything constitutive of sacerdotal polytheism either had never existed or had been eliminated was the absence of astrolatry and its concomitant sacerdotalism. Freedom from priestly authority allowed the Greeks of the barbarous age to transform what they received from Egypt in accord with their national spirit, and they enjoyed this freedom because priesthoods in barbarous times had very limited authority among peoples who worshipped neither the stars nor natural elements.43

42 Constant estimated that the Greeks of this period, which is that depicted in the Homeric poems, were about equally distant in their social and intellectual development from the savage state as they were from the civilized Greeks of the age of Pericles. 43 The Greek Mysteries, in Constant’s reading, were a late attempt by the Greek priesthood, which had continued to exist on the margins of Greek polytheism, to compensate for its lack of power over civil society by reintroducing the doctrines and rituals of sacerdotal polytheism in the form of strikingly dramatic initiations. As such, the Mysteries completely contradicted public religion, but as long as the nonsacerdotal public religion of Greece preserved its strength, it rejected the Mysteries’ retrogressive sacerdotalism. Constant argued that the true secret of the Mysteries was not the content of the esoteric traditions revealed to initiates but instead the idea of the secret itself – that there would be a progression of secrets to be progressively revealed in a manner that would dissipate objections and allay doubts. Constant was probably thinking of

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Greek polytheism, as an alternative trajectory out of fetishism to sacerdotal polytheism, not only served Constant as the type of nonsacerdotal religion but was also, he thought, its only historical exemplar in Antiquity.44 The Greeks’ unique creation of a nonsacerdotal poly­ theism, moreover, decided the lot of the human race. If the Greeks had not transformed what they received from Egypt, “the human race, immobile and petrified, would everywhere today be that which it formerly was in Egypt. In place of developing and purifying itself, religious sentiment, writhing under unnatural constraints, would have become disordered in the absence of progression and frenzied in the absence of liberty.”45 We owe to the Greeks, Constant concluded, the intellectual freedom that permits the soul its most sublime impulses and the mind its most noble developments. The Nature and Development of Sacerdotal Polytheisms The key point that emerges from Constant’s discussion of sacerdotal polytheism as a specific religious formation is that it fails to develop in a manner that reflects the progressive development of the human mind. In terms of the theoretical framework of De la religion, sacerdotal ­polytheism represents the victory of self-interest over sentiment, the ­suppression of liberty by tyranny, and an accelerating disproportionality with humankind’s intellectual progress. Doctrines that Constant identified as specific to, or at least prominent in, sacerdotal polytheism include a chief god who reigns over the other gods, maleficent divinities (i.e., a demonology), a dualism of beneficent and maleficent gods, the idea of a fall, a mediator god, triple or ternary divinities (i.e., a good god plus a bad god plus a mediator god), the dogma of the destruction of the world, and worship of the phallus and hermaphrodite deities. The supposition of one or several maleficent divinities, Constant observed, has important consequences for morality

Saint Augustine’s account of Faustus the Manichean in Confessions, although his argument bears an intriguing resemblance to Hugh Urban’s analysis of secrecy as a form of Bourdieuan social capital. Urban, Church of Scientology, 105. 44 Constant thought that Scandinavian polytheism was originally free from priestly authority but underwent a revolution that subjected it to sacerdotal control. Constant, De la religion, 552–61. 45 Ibid., 243.

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because, since individuals can never be sure that their thoughts and feelings are not the suggestions of a malign power, humankind’s noblest sentiments become sources of doubt and terror. He further noted that although traces of a notion of a primitive fall or transgression occur in all mythologies, only in sacerdotal religions does the hypothesis of an original sin transmitted to the human race by the first individual up to the present generation, justifying our present misery, acquire enduring importance. The priesthoods of sacerdotal polytheism, for their part, clung to the view that sacrifices have merit only by reason of what they cost those who offer them in wealth and suffering. Worse, with characteristic sacerdotal logic, they sullied sacrifice with cruelty and ­debauchery, introducing human sacrifice, asceticism (i.e., a sacrifice of nature), licentious rituals (i.e., a sacrifice of modesty), and the idea of the holiness of suffering. The priestly corruption of sacrifice, finally, generated additional doctrines specific to sacerdotal polytheism: ascetic hatred of the body gave rise to doctrines about the virgin or the otherwise miraculous birth of gods, and the idea of the holiness of suffering led to doctrines of suffering and even dying gods. Sacerdotal polytheism, in Constant’s account, developed over time into an increasingly complex system. Priesthoods responded to the ongoing advancement of human intelligence by further developing the sacred sciences based on observation of the physical world, as already mentioned, and by turning to philosophy in the form of metaphysical speculation about the forces or beings behind and responsible for the physical world. Such priestly metaphysical speculation not only ­produced a confusing mixture of cosmogonic doctrines – emanationism, dualism, mitigated dualism, determinism, and pantheism – but also transformed the nature of the divinities of sacerdotal polytheism into personified cosmogonic beings who were endowed with a will, life, and actions but whose attributes and mythologies were discordant because they reflected contradictory cosmogonic doctrines. Meanwhile, the self-interest of the common people, having found worship of the stars and the elements of nature to be too abstract and too insufficiently concerned with human needs, demanded that the gods descend to earth in order to protect and help them. The priesthoods of the day were only too happy to accommodate this demand, resulting in a new class of divinities in whom elements of abstract deities were combined with elements of material fetishes. A similar mixing occurred in the sacerdotal sacred sciences, in which fetishist images and myths were used to symbolize and explicate observed facts and their causes. Fetishism thus remained

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a part of sacerdotal polytheism at both the popular and priestly levels, and allegorical interpretations disguised the radical opposition between priestly doctrines and popular beliefs. Priestly cosmogonic speculation, Constant continued, inevitably culminated in pantheism, which he identified as a form of atheism because it was effectively an abstract theism that implied the uselessness of worship and the inefficacy of prayer. That atheism was the end result of the secret doctrines of the sacerdotal corporations, Constant concluded, had laid bare their true nature as consisting in calculation, ruse, and an instrumentalist use of religion. Themselves bereft of religious ­sentiment, priesthoods had single-mindedly devoted themselves to nourishing and exploiting the superstitions of the common people. The gods of sacerdotal polytheism, Constant noted, had failed to change with the times because their priesthoods anathematized any amelioration of divine forms as sacrilege. In particular, they resisted endowing the gods with a human appearance in order to maintain as much distance as possible between the worshippers and the ideal. And even when priesthoods sooner or later yielded to the natural impulse of the human mind and gave their divinities human form, they ensured that their gods preserved a few of their former deformities in order to terrify the people and serve as allegories for secret knowledge. The character of the gods similarly remained capricious, vindictive, and deceitful because their caprices, cruelty, and frauds allowed the priesthoods to better enslave the common people in their name. Gods so imperfect by their physical nature and so vicious by their moral nature, Constant added, could not inspire sincere veneration in their worshippers. Religious sentiment and ever-more-enlightened human reason alike struggled against these imperfections in the gods, but each did so in vain because priesthoods opposed every effort to render their ­attributes less incoherent or their conduct less scandalous. Their ­corporate interest, Constant explained, had compelled priesthoods to deny religious sentiment, rather than modifying even the most revolting tradition, and to snuff out reason, rather than sacrificing a single dogma to it. Sacerdotal polytheism, finally, because it did not permit the ­intelligence that it oppressed to follow its natural development and thereby to repudiate the heritage of the times of ignorance, became increasingly disproportionate to the advancing social and intellectual development of humankind. Constant underlined the point that even as human intelligence advanced, sacerdotal polytheism preserved doctrines and practices proper to minds still plunged in the ignorance of

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the savage state, whereas such doctrines and practices survived, if at all, in nonsacerdotal polytheism only vaguely as fleeting conjectures. He ­concluded that the care taken by priesthoods to prevent any beliefs or practices, even contradictory ones, from being forgotten had driven in large part the ever-increasing distance between the two types of polytheism. In the matter of morality, finally, priesthoods responded to the ­changing times by promulgating law codes sanctioned by religion, but having made religion static by preserving all the old doctrines and ­practices, these law codes maintained morality such as it was in barbarous times. Worse, in Constant’s view, the gods, in whose name sacerdotal moral codes were promulgated, were considered not only the enforcers of the moral law but also its creators on the grounds that their sovereign will decided what was evil and what was good. Constant concluded that since human actions took their value from the merit or displeasure that the gods attached to them, not from their intrinsic value, sacerdotal polytheism had perverted morality by declaring things without benefit to humankind to be virtues because they were said to please the gods and by transforming innocuous things into crimes, and then punishing them more severely than true crimes, because they were said to offend the gods. The constitutive elements of sacerdotal polytheism, in Constant’s summary, included an elaborate but contradictory metaphysics, superstitions in which fetishist images and myths survived alongside ­cosmogonic forces and abstract divinities, allegorical interpretation, priestly fraud and deception, and an instrumentalist use of religion. Once again, this religious formation was exemplified by the religions of Egypt and India, although Constant noted that variations of it could be found among other ancient peoples dominated by priests, including the Chaldaeans, Syrians, and Persians as well as northern peoples such as the Scandinavians, Germans, and Celts. The Development of Nonsacerdotal Polytheism Constant’s discussion of the development of nonsacerdotal polytheism, or polytheism independent of sacerdotal direction – independent polytheism for short – as he alternatively referred to it, is prefaced by an enumeration of its constitutive elements and their contrast with those of sacerdotal polytheism.

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Constant first noted that in nonsacerdotal polytheism, there had been no mixing of elements of abstract divinities and material fetishes, cosmogonic forces played no role, and allegories were rare and unimportant. In the absence of these elements, nonsacerdotal polytheism had correspondingly been free from privileged savants because there were no secret doctrines; from mystery because there were no priestly corporations whose self-interest compelled them to multiply secrets; from double and triple meanings that disoriented and confused the intelligence because nothing was enigmatic or contradictory; and from the subtleties of a metaphysics that culminated in pantheism or atheism. Most importantly, the doctrines and practices of nonsacerdotal polytheism were free to improve commensurately with the ongoing development of human intelligence. Constant demonstrated this critical claim by examining the depiction of the gods in the Homeric poems.46 The oldest Greek divinities, he began, were monstrous in appearance, but the progress of human intelligence moved the Greeks to humanize the form and to ennoble the inner nature of their gods, such that they came to embody justice, goodness, and other moral values. Even among the Greeks, however, self-interest obstructed this process of amelioration, as can be seen in the depiction of the gods in the Iliad as mercenary and bribable with gifts and offerings. In the epoch of Greek religion to which the Iliad corresponds, that is, the struggle of religious sentiment against self-interest produced a mythology full of contradictions: the approval of the gods was not a proof of merit, nor was obedience to their will a guarantee of virtue. In the interval that separates the Iliad from the Odyssey, society advanced, customs softened, and knowledge increased. The Odyssey itself, as the product of a more advanced civilization than the Iliad, demonstrates that Greek polytheism progressed commensurately with the Greeks’ social and intellectual advancement: the behaviour of the gods in the Odyssey on balance supports moral values rather than flouting them, it displays advances in ideas about destiny and the afterlife, and its mythology is troubled by fewer contradictions. Constant’s final point was that 46 Constant regarded Homer as a generic name and the Homeric poems as the work of several bards, each of whom was the organ and representative of his particular era. He noted that recognition of the fact that the Homeric poems reflect ­different eras within the heroic age is not only important for criticism but also decisive for the history of the human race. Ibid., 376, 380.

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Greek nonsacerdotal polytheism, improved by human beings, had contributed in turn to the Greeks’ ongoing improvement: once they had transformed their gods in light of human intellectual and moral progress, reflection on their transformed deities further improved the Greeks’ own morals. A further area where the two systems of polytheism became increasingly opposed was sacrifice. In nonsacerdotal polytheism, as material progress brought moral progress, sacrifice was no longer considered meritorious because of its intrinsic value and the number of offerings but instead because of its status as a witness to the interior disposition of those who made the offering.47 This shift in emphasis from ceremony to virtue and purity of heart, which Constant traced across the succession of Greek writers posterior to the Homeric era, did not occur in sacerdotal polytheism because its priesthoods clung to the view that sacrifices had merit only by reason of what they cost those who offered them in wealth and suffering. In accord with the fundamental principle of De la religion that each revolution in the situation of the human race produces one in religious ideas, nonsacerdotal polytheism achieved its highest level of development in the transition from the barbarous state to the civilized state. The progression away from a warrior state characteristic of the barbarous age and toward the civil societies of the civilized age, which in Greece corresponded to the age of Pericles, had brought about, Constant said, new sorts of needs and new, hitherto unknown institutions to satisfy these needs. As conquest yielded to exchange, work replaced the use of force; for work to have value, it required the existence of private property; and if property was to be protected, there must be security. Work, property, and security, as hallmarks of the civilized stage of social development, formed a public morality, and this morality, in turn, came to be protected by the force of law, which gradually suppressed the irregular violence of individuals. This revolution in ideas and institutions necessarily produced, in a people free from sacerdotal authority, a corresponding revolution in religious ideas. The gods had formerly protected their moral and immoral worshippers alike, but once society acquired a public morality represented by laws, judges, and tribunals,

47 Deguise notes that the idea of sacrifice as an individual moral value was a late development in Constant’s thought. Deguise, Benjamin Constant méconnu, 143.

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the gods became supernatural protectors of morality by presiding over the execution of laws, watching over the conduct of judges, and themselves comprising a supreme tribunal. This change in religious ideas, Constant noted, even when modified by interest, had further elevated and ennobled the character of the gods, making them more worthy of being honoured. Progress, however, was slow. Constant described the passage from the barbarous state to the civilized state as a moment of great ferment when justice struggled against violence, respect for property against the habit of plunder, and morality against brute force. The nature of the gods reflected this struggle: although they could no longer be bribed to do evil, the gods did not immediately become fully disinterested beings and for a time still had to be paid in order for them to do good. The new moral consciousness, meanwhile, gave rise to reflection on the fact that sometimes the virtuous suffered and iniquity triumphed. From such reflections, the idea emerged that sooner or later virtue would be rewarded and iniquity punished, and with this idea came the promise of a future heavenly rectification of earthly suffering and injustice. These developments represented a critical moment for Constant because the recognition that the gods punished immorality marked the era of the formal introduction of morality into religion. Again, progress was slow, as many vestiges of the old religious ideas persisted, contradicting and obstructing the new ideas. To the extent, however, that civilization progressed and morality came to be identified with religion, the contradictions and obstructions progressively disappeared as a feedback loop developed between morality and religion: morality, which found in religion a guarantee, purified and ameliorated the religion that sanctioned it. The gods now functioned as the guarantors rather than the creators of the moral law; they rewarded good and punished evil, but their will did not determine what was good and what was evil. Morality, in short, became the standard by which religious ideas were judged. To the extent, then, that civilization progressed and enlightenment spread among the Greeks, morality penetrated by degrees into their nonsacerdotal polytheism. Constant made two final points about the introduction of morality into religion. First, because nonsacerdotal polytheism had increasingly accepted beliefs only under the express condition that they protected morality, the Greeks were compelled to compare the teachings of religion with the new moral principles that it was called to sanction. When

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these teachings seemed contrary to these principles, people came to doubt the former, and so a rise in incredulity inevitably accompanied the introduction of morality into religion. Second, Constant set out what he considered to be the proper relationship between morality and religion. Here, he was no longer – it is apparent to the reader – speaking as a historian of ancient religions but as a Kantian moral philosopher. Both religious sentiment and morality, he declared, ­emanate from God and are placed in human hearts, but they are independent of each other and belong to separate spheres of human life. Morality concerns external actions, particularly those involving human beings’ relations with each other. Religion, for its part – as “the relation of Divinity with man, with that which constitutes him as a moral and intelligent being,”48 and it was only here, at the end of book 12 of ­volume 4, that Constant finally defined religion in distinguishing it from morality – concerns the interior nature of human beings. Its only legitimate function, for which religious sentiment is indispensable, is to change humans internally for the better; external actions concern it only as symptoms of inner dispositions. Two points follow from this analysis. The first is that religion, for Constant, is not the source of morality, nor can it change the merit of actions. The moral law unveils itself to all minds, to the extent that they are enlightened, and God can be neither served nor satisfied by any exception to this law. Conversely, religious sentiment can never harm morality. But here Constant’s fundamental distinction between religious forms and religious sentiment comes into play. Religious forms, even those with the purest doctrines, that claim jurisdiction over the external actions of their worshippers do harm if they weaken the moral law: “A religion whose divinities were cruel and corrupt but which left virtue to the tribunal of one’s own heart would be less pernicious than a religion whose god, clothed in the most admirable qualities, was able to change morality by an act of its will.”49 Constant bluntly asserted that ministers of religion can never, in the name of their divinity, decide the value of actions. The second point is that religion must not be treated as a penal code. Laws and punishments, Constant said, are sufficient to prevent and punish crimes. Any instrumental use of religion on behalf of law and order degrades it.

48 Constant, De la religion, 513. 49 Ibid..

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Constant’s Message to His Contemporaries The conclusion to De la religion sets out the results of the work and draws out its implications for contemporary France. Attacks on religion ­during the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, Constant said, had been manifestations of the incredulity that necessarily accompanies the critique of old religious ideas in light of intellectual and moral progress. Now, however, the desire to believe that he saw everywhere resurgent in Restoration France confirmed his conviction that a dogmatic incredulity is impossible for the mass of humankind.50 A new form of religion, then, must necessarily soon emerge in France. But what form would it take? French society faced a pivotal choice between a sacerdotal or nonsacerdotal religion – a choice, Constant proposed, that ought to be decided by the starkly contrasting historical effects, exhaustively chronicled in De la religion itself, of the two types of religion, the one corresponding to the principle of stasis and the other to the progressive principle. The examples of India, Egypt, and other ancient societies demonstrate that sacerdotal religion, at once corrupted and corrupting, obstructs the progress of intelligence, condemns all innovation as sacrilege, falsifies morality, and proscribes liberty. Ancient Greek polytheism, by contrast, demonstrates that nonsacerdotal religion progressively ennobles its doctrines and rituals and purifies its morality commensurately with the general progress of the human mind. Constant’s brief for a new form of nonsacerdotal religion as the appropriate religious form for post-revolutionary France then shifts from historical evidence to theoretical reflections on the static and progressive principles in religion. Religion is by nature necessarily progressive, he declared once again. Doctrines, as collections of ideas conceived by human beings about divinity, must change when these ideas are purified; rituals and observances, as practices considered necessary for communication between mortals and the gods whom they worship, must change when ideas about communication between humans and their gods change. By marching alongside ideas, by being enlightened with reason and purified with morality  – by, that is,

50 Constant was adamant that there is no historical or psychological evidence, ancient or modern, for the total absence of religion, which would be a third system in addition to sacerdotal and nonsacerdotal religion. Ibid., 564.

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remaining proportionate to the development of human intelligence – religion will sanction at each era that which is best in it. The most precious principle of the human race, Constant concluded, is that in order to sustain and truly honour religion, one must respect its progressive nature. Conversely, any obstacle to its progressive improvement harms religion. Constant went so far as to say that wherever the progressive modification of religious forms is obstructed or prevented, there is no longer religion, properly speaking, but only superstition and fanaticism. Purity of doctrine, he added, in no way diminishes the dangers of the principle of stasis in religion because the forced preservation of a religious doctrine declared to be fixed and immutable sets in motion the same calamitous consequences regardless of the content of the doctrine itself. Any attempt to preserve a doctrine or ritual characterized by the understanding of the physical world or by the moral standards of an earlier age, thereby extending it into a later age when the laws of nature are better understood and morals are ameliorated, inevitably brings first a struggle against and then a discrediting of the doctrine or ritual in question. Once again, we see that the principle of progressive development is more fundamental to Constant’s history of religions than the historical forms of religion. The theological correlate of the progressive nature of religion is the doctrine of progressive revelation. Constant in fact remarked, “The more one believes in a Providence that created man and that guides him, the more it is natural to admit that this benevolent Providence proportions its teachings according to the state of the intelligences destined to receive it.”51 The doctrine of progressive revelation, he continued, reconciles religion with the divinely endowed nature of the human mind to investigate and examine received ideas, whereas to renounce this innate inclination in the name of religion would be moral suicide. The concept of religious liberty, finally, served Constant as the guarantor of the progressive development of religion, whose consequence, in turn, is religious pluralism. Unlimited individual religious liberty, he promised, will multiply religious forms, and each new form

51 Ibid., 575. This passage was important enough to Constant that he repeated it, slightly altered, in “Du développement progressif des idées religieuses,” an article published in Encyclopédie progressive in May 1826. It was reprinted in Mélanges de littérature et de politique, where the passage in question appears on page 101.

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will be purer than the preceding one because every newborn sect aspires to moral excellence and the abandoned sect reforms its own morals. The final lines of De la religion proclaim the social benefits of total ­religious liberty: “A single sect is a redoubtable rival. Two enemy sects are two armed camps. Divide the torrent, or, better, allow it to divide itself into a thousand streams. They will fertilize the earth that the ­torrent would have devastated.”52

52 Constant, De la religion, 577.

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Benjamin Constant’s De la religion, considérée dans sa source, ses formes et ses développements (1824–31) has earned from modern scholars such accolades as “a forgotten masterpiece” and “one of the great intellectual adventures of the early nineteenth century.”1 His contemporaries, however, greeted it with puzzlement and hostility. Idéologues, Doctrinaires, and Globistes found its theory of religious sentiment ­incoherent or misguided, and Ultras, Catholic Traditionalists, and c­ onservative Catholics generally condemned it as an atheistical attack on the church. Tzvetan Todorov, in fact, argues that Constant’s masterpiece was forgotten precisely because it was unclassifiable in relation to the conflict between orthodox Catholics and anti-clericals that ­dominated discourse on religion in Constant’s day and for most of the next century.2 His analysis captures the distinctiveness of Constant’s liberalism, which not only opposed political reactionaries and the Catholic Church but also ­distanced him on some key points from other Liberals. This chapter examines Constant’s distinctiveness in two areas of ­contemporary discourse on religion: the relationship between religion and the state as well as the historiography of religion. Although to twenty-first-century minds these may seem to be largely unrelated areas, they were closely linked for Constant and show once again how his writings on politics and on religion constitute the two registers in which he gave expression to his fundamental intellectual and social preoccupations.

 1 Todorov, “Un chef-d’oeuvre oublié,” 9; Kloocke, “Les écrits de Benjamin Constant,” 402.  2 Todorov, “Un chef-d’oeuvre oublié,” 9.

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R e l i g i o n a n d t h e S tat e Constant’s inquiry in De la religion into the nature and history of religion concluded, as we saw at the end of the previous chapter, with a call for total religious liberty. This section further examines Constant’s ideas on religion and the state – or what he called in the 1806 version of Principes de politique “the proper role of the government with regard to religion”3  – under the subheadings of government neutrality toward ­religion, the morality of disinterest, and thin pluralism. Government Neutrality toward Religion Throughout the Napoleonic Empire and the Restoration, whether ostensibly writing about politics or religion, Constant unwaveringly argued for government neutrality toward religion: the state must not interfere in matters related to religion, whether to protect it, control it, or suppress it, as long as it does not disturb the social order.4 Reflecting the intimate connection between its successive drafts and Constant’s political writings, the concluding chapter of De la religion restates many of the positions taken by Principes de politique in the section “On Religious Liberty” (both book 8 of the 1806–10 edition and ­chapter 17 of the 1815 edition) or found in other political writings. Constant identified religion and the state in Principes de politique as “two perfectly distinct, perfectly separate things, the union of which can only denature both of them,” and he argued that whenever a ­government meddles with religion, it transforms an otherwise beneficent force into a menacing institution.5 He similarly rejected Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s argument for a form of civil intolerance (as opposed to religious intolerance, strictly speaking) that allowed the sovereign to ­banish anyone who did not subscribe to the civil profession of faith as furnishing “pretexts for all the claims of tyranny.” He added, “I know of no system of servitude that has sanctioned more nefarious errors

 3 Quoted in Rosenblatt, Liberal Values, 134.  4 For extensive discussion of this idea, see Rosenblatt, “On the Intellectual Sources of Laïcité”; and Jennings, “Constant’s Idea of Modern Liberty.”   5 Constant, “Principles of Politics,” 279, 288 (quotation).

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than the eternal metaphysics of the Social Contract.”6 In his Commentaire sur l’ouvrage de Filangieri (1822–24), to cite only one further example, where Constant used the then popular La scienza della legislazione (The Science of Legislation) (1780–85) by the late-eighteenth-century Italian jurist and philosopher Gaetano Filangieri as the framework for a restatement of his own political theory, Constant explained once again that it is a mistake for even an enlightened state to attempt to impose its moral values on its populace.7 Constant’s insistence on government neutrality toward religion was part and parcel of his understanding of the modern concept of liberty. Marcel Gauchet has argued that Constant’s fundamental message to his contemporaries was that modernity had not yet understood the extent of its novelty and originality in relation to earlier forms of society.8 This view, indeed, is at the heart of the work for which Constant is best known in the English-speaking world, “De la liberté des anciens comparée à celle des modernes” (1819). Constant argued in this essay that the French Revolution’s self-identification with the republican virtues of Antiquity had prevented it from developing a concept of civil and political liberty appropriate to the new conditions of modern Europe. In particular, the ancients did not recognize the rights of the individual conscience, above all in religion.9 Constant added in De la religion that whereas tolerance in Antiquity had been a public liberty that applied to cities or other political aggregations whose citizens had to conform to the religion of their polity, modern tolerance was the principle that all persons have the right to worship their god in the manner that seems

  6 Ibid., 275. Rousseau’s argument is presented in the chapter “Sur la religion civile” in Du contract social (1762). See also Rosenblatt, “On the Intellectual Sources of Laïcité,” 3–4; and Vincent, Benjamin Constant, 192. Rosenblatt, however, argues for a deep and sympathetic intellectual relationship between Constant and Rousseau, ­suggesting that Constant’s true target here was Rousseau’s so-called disciples during the revolutionary period who selectively appropriated elements of La profession de foi du vicaire savoyard (1762) and Du contract social in ways that distorted his thought. Rosenblatt, “On the Intellectual Sources of Laïcité,” 10, 14–15. In De la religion itself, Constant praised Rousseau for rejecting an instrumentalist view of religion but ­dismissed his ideas on religion as discordant and confused hypotheses. Constant, De la religion, 71.  7 Holmes, Benjamin Constant, 21–2; Kloocke, Benjamin Constant, 254.   8 Gauchet, “Liberalism’s Lucid Illusion,” 29–30.   9 Constant, “Liberty of the Ancients,” 311.

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best to them.10 Finally, thinking of Pierre Bayle and David Hume, Constant in a late essay chided philosophers who praised the tolerance practised in ancient polytheism for failing to recognize that ancient tolerance is irreconcilable with modern conceptions of liberty.11 The advocacy of government neutrality toward religion that was at the heart of Constant’s liberal pluralism was, of course, a red flag to the Ultras. Already infuriated by his depiction of sacerdotal religions in the earlier volumes of De la religion,12 they condemned his charge that the re-Christianization campaigns of the Restoration threatened the stability of the political order as a betrayal of both true religion and social order. For their part, other Liberals were hardly more welcoming of Constant’s advocacy of government neutrality toward religion than the Ultras. The Doctrinaires, whose statist liberalism denied the rights of individual conscience in religion (see chapter 12), dismissed Constant’s call for government neutrality toward religion as irreconcilable with responsible governance. The Morality of Disinterest Constant’s liberal pluralism established government neutrality toward religion as the necessary corollary of the inviolability of the individual conscience. His insistence on the absolute inviolability of the individual conscience, in turn, reflects the strong affinity between his liberalism and that of German thinkers, Immanuel Kant above all, for whom the autonomy of subjectivity was the hallmark of modernity. For Constant, as for Kant, the end of the liberal state is the self-development of ­individuals, and ultimately the improvement of the human race, through submission to moral duty. Legislation translates maxims anchored in the moral sentiment of individuals into laws, but since they emerge from our own sense of moral duty, such laws are  – in Kantian 10 Constant, De la religion, 974n2. 11 Constant, “Des causes humaines,” 381–2. 12 Indeed, it is hardly a stretch to see in a passage from book 4 of volume  2 Constant’s portrait of the Ultras’ program: “In the sacerdotal system, what is the goal of the world? The fulfillment of the divine will. What are political organizations? Means of assuring and accomplishing it. What are the leaders of societies? Depositaries of a subordinated authority, who have the right to demand obedience only because they themselves obey the authority that founded it. What, finally, is the natural organ of this only legitimate authority? The priesthood.” Constant, De la religion, 197.

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terms – nonheteronomous means of constraint.13 Constant explicitly linked modern liberty to self-development as the goal of a liberal society: “Moreover, Gentlemen, is it so evident that happiness, of whatever kind, is the only aim of mankind? ... No, Sirs, I bear witness to the better part of our nature, that noble disquiet which pursues and torments us, that desire to broaden our knowledge and develop our faculties. It is not to happiness alone, it is to self-development [perfectionnement] that our destiny calls us; and political liberty is the most powerful, the most effective means of self-development that heaven has given us.”14 The contrast between a moral system that identifies happiness of some kind as its highest value and one that proposes self-development as its goal is central to Constant’s critique in De la religion of the morality of enlightened self-interest that he said had reigned in Europe for the last twenty years and was currently receiving renewed support from the argument that the goal of state policies should be economic prosperity. Constant accepted that economic innovation and the progress of the exact sciences allow both the lower and the upper classes a shorter and easier road toward their moral improvement, but he insisted that they are to be valued only as a means to moral improvement and ­political liberty. If they become goals in themselves, being nothing more than a source of ease, then moral improvement and political liberty will soon become compromised.15 The problem that he discerned is that selfinterest isolates people from each other, which prevents action because isolated people, unwilling to sacrifice their own immediate interests for the greater good, cannot work together to defend liberty. And even if self-interest were to overthrow tyranny, the result would not be liberty but a scramble to share in the spoils of tyrants. Liberty, he concluded, is nourished by sacrifices.16 The solution that Constant proposed to the shortcomings of the morality of self-interest is a morality of disinterest. Human beings, he said, are capable of raising themselves by sacrifice and enthusiasm above the egotistical calculations that their momentary interests dictate to them. Noninterested actions, Constant explained, are possible because for human beings ideas are superior to sensations, as demonstrated 13 Kloocke, “Benjamin Constant et l’Allemagne,” 163–5, 170–1. 14 Constant, “Liberty of the Ancients,” 327. 15 Constant, De la religion, 711–12n22. 16 Ibid., 31–4.

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by the fact that everyone is ready to sacrifice a present sensation for “the hope of a future sensation,” and what is the hope of a future sensation other than an idea? Further, our dissatisfaction with the present moment takes into consideration our dependence on other people and on the world, which are not reducible to egoist interest alone. Constant called sacrifice “the indestructible seed of perfectibility” in the sense that sacrifice is the force that overthrows the present on behalf of the future. This capacity for disinterested actions makes human beings into “­sublime” creatures, in the Kantian sense of the word.17 And here moral sentiment is seconded for Constant by religious sentiment: religious sentiment, as an awareness of superior powers that counters our self-centredness, encourages us to sacrifice our interests for some higher ideal.18 The Globistes’ response to De la religion underlines how Constant’s critique of the morality of self-interest and the role of sentiment in the morality of disinterest distanced him from other Liberals. The Globistes welcomed what they considered Constant’s new interest in religion and fully endorsed his critique of “oriental priestcraft”19 but ultimately dismissed De la religion as an elegant interpretation of a common opinion of religious sentiment instead of a rigorous work of philosophical analysis. Constant, in their view, had shown the origin of religious sentiment but not its nature. He ought to have demonstrated, through the application of the psychological method in philosophy, that the religious sentiment proceeds in an entirely natural and rational manner from observable relations between the soul and the body. Further, they ­determined, Constant was confused as to whether the religious sentiment is an emotion or an idea and had failed to grasp the Doctrinaires’

17 Constant, “De la perfectibilité,” 398. See Hofmann, “Histoire, politique et religion,” 416; and Todorov, Benjamin Constant, 71. 18 See also Fontana, Benjamin Constant, 113. Although Constant’s conception of sacrifice is, as Michel Despland points out, a purely moral notion that he consciously opposes to a Maistrean notion of sacrifice, it adds further depth to Ivan Strenski’s ­historical argument that the French Revolution and its aftermath reshaped the Catholic model of sacrifice but did not eliminate it. Despland, L’émergence des sciences, 69; Strenski, Contesting Sacrifice, 28. 19 Dubois [Unsigned], “Religions de l’Antiquité”  (27 August 1825), 774, 776. Le Globe reprinted most of Constant’s “Christianisme” article in May 1825, the same month that Jouffroy’s “Comment les dogmes finissent” appeared.

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understanding of enlightened self-interest.20 Fundamentally, the Globistes maintained that neither a religion of the heart nor a morality of sentiment can replace the rational conviction of the mind. Thin Pluralism Bryan Garsten has noted that Constant’s advocacy of government neutrality toward religion must not be construed as neutrality toward the various religious forms themselves.21 This point is well taken. The final paragraph of De la religion cautioning against government interference in religion depends on Constant’s conviction that successful modern forms of religion will be those whose values correspond most closely to the values of modern society. Thus, although religious pluralism replaces for Constant the radical Enlightenment dream of a world without ­religion, his advocacy of tolerance and religious pluralism depends on his conviction that as long as governments do not interfere, new religious forms will be proportionate to the current stage of the development of civilization – that is, subjectivized, nondogmatic, and moral. Garsten nicely calls Constant’s conception of religious liberty “a relatively thin form of pluralism” because “it aimed to create beneath the veneer of diversity a shared style or spirit of religion.”22 Constant thought of religious pluralism as a means, as the mechanism by which contemporary society could further its intellectual and moral development. He regarded religious liberty as precious, then, because 20 Damiron [Ph.], “De la religion ... 1er volume (2e article)”; Damiron [Ph.], “De la religion ... Deuxième volume (premier article)”; Damiron [Ph.], “De la religion ... Deuxième volume (deuxième article).” See also Goblot, La jeune France libérale, 218. 21 Garsten, “Constant on the Religious Spirit,” 286–7. 22 Ibid., 308. Garsten has further suggested that Constant was arguing not only that liberal political institutions make possible the private enjoyment of subjectivized religion but also that only a “Romanticization of our religiosity” makes liberal political society possible because a liberal temper of mind can be brought about only by a transformation of religion toward sentiment and enthusiasm. Ibid., 303–5. But for Constant the liberal temper of mind is not brought about by a transformation of religion; rather, both the liberal temper of mind and the transformation of religion are brought about by the ongoing development of human intelligence. Garsten also suggests at times (e.g., ibid., 297) that Constant thought that direct access to religious sentiment is possible and that he hoped for a religion of pure sentiment; in fact, Constant always maintained that direct access to religious sentiment is not possible for human beings and that religious sentiment is therefore always mediated through religious forms.

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religious pluralism furthers the continuing perfectibility of humankind. This happy outcome, however, is guaranteed only because the providentially established directionality of history from imperfection toward perfection, from inequality toward equality, and from submission to dogma toward interior spiritual liberty ensures the ongoing proportionality between religious and socio-political forms. For the purposes of conceptual clarity, we may reframe Constant’s argument by means of the interpretive concepts of a “free-market in religion” and an “­invisible hand” that governs it.23 Freed from government regulation, religious forms compete among themselves for adherents, yet this process benefits society as a whole because it is guided by the invisible hand of the providentially established and underwritten directionality of history. Constant’s providentialism is not only immanent, as opposed to biblical and transcendent, but also nondeterministic because it leaves room for human liberty inasmuch as the course of perfectibility can be obstructed by human choices and actions. Nevertheless, because Constant located the meaning of history outside of history itself, in its directionality, and because this directionality is established and underwritten by an immanentist providentialism, Constant’s invisible hand is at bottom a ­metaphysical concept.24 Constant’s providentialism reads empirical history as the external manifestation of the hidden movement of a universal spirit that governs its directionality and explains it. Commentators have recognized the presence in Constant’s thought of what I am calling the metaphysical invisible hand. Garsten points out 23 There is some irony in this reframing in terms of concepts associated with Adam Smith, given Constant’s critique of economically focused self-interest. Constant  was familiar with Smith’s work: although little is known about the details of Constant’s ­studies at the University of Edinburgh, he was deeply involved in the intellectual life of this university at a time when Smith was one of its luminaries; further, Jean-BaptisteAntoine Suard, at whose Paris home Constant resided for a period in 1785 and another in 1786–87, was in communication with various members of the Scottish Enlightenment and translated pieces by Smith into French; most decisively, Constant’s writings on ­taxation and economic protectionism were directly indebted to Smith. See Rudler, La ­jeunesse de Benjamin Constant, 165, 175; and Jennings, “Constant’s Idea of Modern Liberty,” 81–2. 24 As a metaphysical concept, Constant’s invisible hand has affinities with Giambattista Vico’s “heterogeneity of ends” and with G.W.F. Hegel’s “the cunning of reason.” For a brief survey of scholarly debate over whether or not Adam Smith’s use of the invisible hand trope carries any theological explanatory weight, see C. Smith, Adam Smith’s Political Philosophy, 82–4.

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that Constant’s endorsement of a laissez-faire government stance toward religion cannot be understood without emphasizing his faith in history, and Todorov calls Constant’s faith in progress the most irrational ­element in his thought, noting that it corresponds to faith in God.25 Thus, although Constant maintained a skeptical attitude toward the doctrines and practices of all historical forms of religion (see c­ hapter 13), faith in an immanentist, debiblicized providentialism was at the heart of his personal religiosity and, more importantly for our purposes, was critical to his analysis of religion and the state because it imparts a direction and a meaning to history.

Historiography of Religion De la religion, Kloocke has noted, is as much a theory of religion as a history of religions.26 Over the course of its five volumes, Constant primarily engaged with the historiography of religion – aside from the first volume’s retrospective overview in book 1, chapter six (“on the ­manner in which religion has hitherto been envisaged”)27 – in the extensive notes to the text, where he discussed contemporary theorists at length and often polemically. And if Constant’s position on the proper role of government toward religion was unclassifiable in relation to the conflict between Catholics and anti-clericals, his theory of religions was similarly irreducible to any of the principal schools of the historiography of religion of his day. Constant himself, of course, recognized his ­historiographical isolation and set himself in De la religion against all previous and present-day writers on religion. Previous Historiography of Religion Constant divided earlier writers on religion into three parties: the orthodox, the unbelievers, and the partisans of natural religion. All of them, he said, erred grievously because they did not understand either religious sentiment or the progressive nature of religion. Orthodox writers, such as Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, considered religion to be something beyond human powers and intelligence that God had communicated 25 Garsten, “Constant on the Religious Spirit,” 288; Todorov, Benjamin Constant, 60. 26 Kloocke, “Benjamin Constant et l’Allemagne,” 152. 27 Constant, De la religion, 67–79.

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to humankind once and for all in the form of positive doctrines that must never be modified in any way. Unbelievers, for their part, regarded religion as harmful error. Constant thought that eighteenth-century critics of religion, exemplified by Voltaire and Edward Gibbon, were correct to oppose the evils that fanaticism and intolerance produced in their day but wrong to suppose that religion was no more than fanaticism and intolerance. Deists and other partisans of natural religion, finally, who reduced religion to the purest doctrines and simplest ideas, differed doctrinally from the orthodox but like them regarded religion as absolute and unchanging truth.28 Present-Day Historiography of Religion: Catholic Traditionalists The Catholic Traditionalists, of course, represented the orthodox party among present-day writers on religion. Joseph de Maistre, in Constant’s opinion, was by far the most distinguished of this school, followed by Félicité de Lamennais as the only disciple worthy of the master; he dismissed Louis de Bonald and Ferdinand d’Eckstein as intellectual nonentities.29 In De la religion, however, his main target, at least in the earlier volumes, is Lamennais; in the later volumes, his attention turns to Eckstein (see part 6). This is not surprising, given that in Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de religion (1817–23) and elsewhere, Lamennais bitterly attacked Constant’s pluralist liberalism in the course of his overall project of tracing the disasters of the Revolution and its aftermath to the principle of individual judgment (see part 3). Lamennais additionally responded directly to the early volumes of De la religion as they successively appeared. Constant’s account of sacerdotal religions in volume 2, for example, provoked a lengthy diatribe in De la religion considérée dans ses rapports avec l’ordre politique et civil (1825–26), where Lamennais once again laid out the catastrophic spiritual and social consequences of the principle of individual judgment and reasserted the fundamental Traditionalist position that religion and society must be founded on authority.30 Constant’s most concentrated critique of Lamennais, and of Traditionalists in general, is a long note to book 1, chapter 3, 28 Ibid., 67–76. 29 Ibid., 877n12. 30 See Rosenblatt, Liberal Values, 215–16.

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of  volume  1  – although there are numerous critical references ­throughout the five volumes – where Constant rejected their commonsense epistemology and the concept of primitive revelation, responded to their criticism of religious sentiment, and warned of the threat of tyranny inherent in the Traditionalist program. Constant argued that the common-sense epistemology is based on a false principle, from which Lamennais and the other Traditionalists had drawn false conclusions. This principle, he said, which states that it is necessary to discover an infallible reason, is doubly false. First, ­infallible reason is inaccessible to limited human minds and is possessed only by the infinite being. Second, because human intelligence is not only limited but also progressive, nothing derived from the exercise of human reason can be infallible or immutable. Our material sensations, Constant granted, are always the same in the same circumstances, and our moral sentiments are always the same when the same questions present themselves, but everything that comes from reasoning is, by its essence, variable and contestable. 31 This being so, the Traditionalists’ claim that their discovery of an infallible reason had yielded immutable doctrines must be rejected out of hand. Indeed, that the progressive development of religious ideas necessarily follows from the progressive nature of human intelligence is the guiding theme of De la religion. Constant rejected, as a further corollary of progressive development, the Traditionalist concept of a universal primitive revelation, or indeed any form of ancient wisdom that purports to embody immutable ­religious truths. Constant raised multiple objections to the Traditionalists’ assertion of a universal primitive revelation, including the certainty that memories would have been garbled in the historical discontinuities between destroyed ancient peoples and their successors and the observation that the most universal traditions are not those of a sublime theism but instead of a licentious and bloody idolatry.32 His most serious criticism targeted the Traditionalists’ method of demonstrating the existence of a primitive revelation by pointing to widespread conformities in religions across the world in support of the idea of a universal primitive revelation. He cited the third volume of Lamennais’s Essai

31 Constant, De la religion, 591–2n1. 32 Ibid., 84–5, 593n1.

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sur l’indifférence as a particularly egregious example of the Traditionalists’ characteristic practice of citing ancient authors with no attention to their date or place and seizing at random a few expressions from each of them in order to conclude that they professed the same doctrine. Underlying this uncritical method that conflates authors of different periods is a failure to understand historical development (a failure that Catholic Traditionalists shared with other mythographers who ­emphasized unity of doctrine). Traditionalists, he said, were able to discover monotheism in ancient peoples whose stage of intellectual and social development was not yet sufficiently advanced to allow the emergence of theism only by reversing the order of ideas and the ­succession of facts so as to present the most recent opinions as the most ancient and the most ancient opinions as degenerations of still more ancient opinions.33 Turning to Traditionalist criticisms of religious sentiment, Constant accepted Lamennais’s dictum that religion must be based on reasoning, sentiment, or authority, and he further agreed with Lamennais that reasoning, whose sphere is fully material, will lead us only to skepticism about objects that are not material. Their critical difference of opinion was, of course, over sentiment and authority. Constant insisted that although sentiment, like all human faculties, is susceptible to error and abuse, it always preserves something that will protest against these corruptions and is therefore our surest guide. Authority, in contrast, will always and inevitably deliver us to all the calculations of tyranny, cupidity, and interest.34 Constant, citing the second volume of Essai sur l’indifférence, elaborated on this last point by adding that Traditionalists maintained that authority is the general reason of the human race as manifested by the witness of language. This claim both returns us to the problem of infallible reason and raises the spectre of tyranny. What distinguishes, Constant asked, whether authority is usurped or legitimate? It cannot be the general reason because it is manifested only by witness or language, both of which, under a persecuting religion or an oppressing government, will testify in favour of that religion or government. Only individual reason can distinguish usurpation from legitimacy, and individual reason will be able to manifest itself only by isolating

33 Ibid., 86–7, 274, 607n2. 34 Ibid., 587­­–9n1, 594n1.

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itself from the general reason. To place, as the Traditionalists did, infallible reason in authority is analogous to placing unlimited sovereignty in the people: the former results in intolerance and the horrors of persecution for opinions, and the latter gives rise to tyrannical laws and all the excesses of popular furors. Constant concluded that there is no infallible reason, just as there is no unlimited sovereignty; authority can be deceived as much as an individual, and the people en masse can err like each individual citizen.35 Present-Day Historiography of Religion: Idéologues Constant subjected the Idéologues to a twofold critique that historicized their irreligiosity and refuted their critique of religion. Constant, as noted above, judged that Enlightenment irreligiosity had served a ­progressive critical function in a time of fanaticism and intolerance. Under the conditions of the despotic Napoleonic state, however, in which the church was no longer a primary source of oppression and injustice, irreligiosity lost its critical function and became little more than a servile hedonism – just as the Idéologues themselves were ­co-opted by Napoleon Bonaparte. Constant suggested that under such conditions religion – but only a subjective, nondogmatic form of religion, of course – can assume the progressive function that irreligiosity had fulfilled under the Old Regime.36 While acknowledging that Ultra attempts to restore the authority of the Catholic Church during the Restoration had brought renewed danger from fanaticism and intolerance, Constant remained adamant that the answer to such retrogression is not an equally retrogressive recourse to irreligiosity. The notes to De la religion offer pointed criticisms of Idéologue critiques of religion, particularly Charles-François Dupuis’s Origines de tous les cultes, ou Religion universelle (1795) and Constantin-François Volney’s Les ruines, ou Méditations sur les révolutions des empires (1791). Constant’s principal objection to Dupuis was his allegorizing approach to ancient religion. In arguing that all religions are allegories of the movement of the sun through the zodiac, Dupuis, like all allegorizers 35 Ibid., 592–3n1. 36 This is Markus Winkler’s argument, based on Constant’s published and unpublished writings during the Napoleonic Empire. See Winkler, “Irreligiosité et utilization,” 53–4.

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past and present, interpreted religious symbols as representations of some form of elite knowledge. Allegorizers, Constant charged, commit an error analogous to that of the proponents of primitive revelation or ancient wisdom: they read advanced ideas, whether about agriculture, astronomy, history, or something else, into ancient times in violation of the principle of historical development. The historian of religions, Constant insisted, must attend to the literal meaning of mythologies because it is the religion of the common people that changes from age to age as the progressive development of human intelligence modifies religious and moral ideas and then the doctrines and rituals that express them. Allegorizing scholars err in placing the scientific meaning that they attribute to religion before the popular or literal sense, thereby transforming religion into an idea instead of a sentiment and attributing to the earliest humans metaphysical and cosmological notions ­preposterously out of proportion to their social and intellectual condition.37 What made Dupuis particularly dangerous, to Constant’s mind, is that Dupuis’s theory of ancient astrolatry, which, he lamented, had for twenty years misled the French on the nature and history of religion, reverses the order of religious ideas and thereby denies the progressive development of religion; Dupuis, in fact, went so far as to assert that the ancient religion of the world was still the modern religion. Nothing is more false, Constant said, than the claim that the ancient religion was still the modern religion.38 Constant identified the source of Dupuis’s error as his conflation of notions with sensations. Although Dupuis correctly acknowledged that metaphysical hypotheses were late developments, his system also depended on early humankind drawing scientific ideas from sensations. Not so, said Constant. Whereas the earliest human beings at the very beginning of social and intellectual development would, unquestionably, have noticed the daily transition from light to darkness, the ­succession of days and nights, and the order of the seasons, they could not, plunged in ignorance as they were, have added to these direct observations complex ideas about the revolutions of the stars, their direct or retrograde motion, their temporary positions in relation to the earth, and the variations in the positions of the stars relative to the

37 Constant, De la religion, 89, 92. 38 Ibid., 90, 601n9, 611n19, 736n22.

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earth “over a long sequence of centuries.”39 Constant pounced on this last phrase, italicized in the original: by Dupuis’s own logic, early humans could not have had any religion at all during the centuries when they were accumulating the astronomical data that they would use to create the gods, but historical evidence refutes this supposition given that ­denizens of the savage age did not need to be savants and astronomers in order to prostrate themselves before a fetish. Dupuis, Constant said, had failed to recognize that religion precedes physical science as well as metaphysical speculation because scientific ideas about the physical universe are as foreign to the empire of the senses as are metaphysical abstractions. Dupuis based himself on learning and books, Constant concluded, but religion, in its crude form, preceded all learning and all books.40 Astrolatry, finally, could not have been the ur-religion, as Dupuis and his school proclaimed, for two reasons: first, the historical evidence shows that astrolatry was not universally practised; and ­second, even where it did flourish, there was always, beneath the scientific religion, a purely popular religion based not on science but on universal human passions and interests.41 Volney, to whose theory of religion all of the above considerations apply in equal measure, in addition served Constant as the prime exemplar of another fault in the Idéologues’ historiography of religion: the  total conflation of religion with priestcraft. Volney’s claim in Les ruines that the goal of all religions had been to deceive, mislead, and enslave the people puts too much emphasis on imposture and calumniates religion out of hatred of priests. For Constant, of course, this analysis accurately describes sacerdotal religions but misconstrues nonsacerdotal religions because it fails to take into account the religious sentiment that they express. Constant added that Volney’s concluding proposal that we should demarcate the verifiable objects of the real world from the unverifiable objects of the fantastic world of religion and give our attention solely to the former transgresses human nature because we experience an irresistible impulsion away from verifiable objects and toward objects that cannot be verified as well as away from the world of realities and toward the so-called fantastic world.42 39 Dupuis, quoted in ibid., 612. 40 Constant, De la religion, 612–13n19. 41 Ibid., 645n1. 42 Ibid., 614–15n19.

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Present-Day Historiography of Religion: The New German School A new school of the historiography of religion, Constant noted, had recently arisen in Germany. Its partisans identified religion as the expression, through varying dogmas, symbols, and rituals, of the universal language of nature spoken by all peoples, or at least their priesthoods, and they dismissed any diversities encountered in the study of religion as transient anomalies that must be brushed aside in order to reach a real and mysterious unity.43 Constant here characterized – accurately enough  – the approach to the study of religion whose leading ­representative was Friedrich Creuzer, author of the four-volume Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, besonders der Griechen (Symbolism and Mythology of the Ancient Peoples, Particularly the Greek) (1810–12, revised ­edition 1819–21). Creuzer’s mythography, as we saw in chapter 12, sought to recover the vestiges of a primitively revealed philosophicoreligious symbolic wisdom from the mythologies of the ancient world. Constant deeply respected many aspects of Creuzer’s work.44 His extant research dossiers demonstrate that he read Symbolik und Mythologie very attentively, and the notes to De la religion itself acknowledge his extensive indebtedness to Creuzer’s erudition.45 More broadly, Constant considered the new German historiography of religion to have made important discoveries about the mutual relationships among religions and to have deepened modern knowledge of Antiquity. If, however, Constant admired Creuzer’s erudition, he denied the validity of his historiography of religion because he judged that Creuzer and the other partisans of the new German school had made the same critical error as the Traditionalists and Idéologues: they had failed to perceive the progressive nature of religious ideas and consequently had reversed the order of ideas. Their positing of a pristine philosophicoreligious symbolic wisdom as the starting point of the history of religions

43 Ibid., 77. 44 Constant similarly respected Joseph-Daniel Guigniaut’s reformulation of Symbolik und Mythologie in his four-volume translation, titled Religions de l’Antiquité, considerées principalement dans leurs formes symboliques et mythologiques (1825–51). In De la religion, noting the imminent publication of its first volume, Constant praised Guigniaut for clarifying Creuzer’s language and organization and observed that the work both supports and in places opposes Constant’s own ideas. Constant, De la religion, 601n9. 45 Kloocke, “Benjamin Constant, De la religion,” 108.

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places the purest doctrine, which can be the result only of the long moral and intellectual development of the human race, in an era when human beings were incapable of conceiving of it. Religion, Constant agreed, is a language in which nature speaks to humankind, but this language had not been the same in all eras because religion undergoes a progressive development from cruder to purer forms, a development that the mystifications of priesthoods can obscure or slow but whose inevitable triumph is determined by fixed laws that have their origin in the human heart.46 Constant explicitly endorsed on this point the views of one of Creuzer’s German critics, the Leipzig classicist and philologist Gottfried Hermann: “Mythology, says M. Creuzer, is the ­science that teaches us how the universal language of nature is expressed by this or that symbol. Mythology, says M. Hermann, is the science that informs us what notions and what ideas this or that people conceive and represent by this or that symbol, image, or myth. One sees instantly how the first definition is vague and inapplicable and how the second is precise and conforms to reason.”47 As early as 1804, Constant had noted in his journal that “the new German Platonists” attempted to explain away the crudeness of the religious ideas of earliest humankind by supposing them to be symbols or allegories, despite the fact that symbols and allegories are like clouds: one may see in them whatever one wishes.48 In De la religion, speaking 46 Constant, De la religion, 77–8. 47 Ibid., 818–19n6. 48 Constant, Journaux intimes, 25 May 1804, 273–4. Constant’s reference to the “the new German Platonists” casts doubt on Laurence Dickey’s attempt to Platonize Constant. See Dickey, “Constant and Religion.” Dickey’s account correctly emphasizes Constant’s deep affinities with Liberal Protestant values, his Kantianism, and the teleological nature of his thought, but it ignores Constant’s allegiance to the French Enlightenment idea of perfectibility, overemphasizes the place of transcendence in his thought, and obfuscates Constant’s insistence that the moral sentiment and the religious sentiment are independent of each other. As with scholars who exaggerate the extent of Constant’s Protestantism (see chapter 13), Dickey’s attempt to Platonize Constant conflates his Kantian idealism with theistic traditions whose transcendentalism went beyond anything that Constant could accept. Dickey (ibid., 340), finally, asserts that Constant’s choice of a passage from Plato’s Timaeus as the epigraph for De la religion was intended to signal his agreement with Plato’s metaphysics. In fact, the passage in question – “remembering that both I who speak and you who judge are but human beings” (29d) – is Timaeus’s plea, to which Socrates assents, that in discussing matters as difficult as the gods and the generation of the universe, we should

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specifically of Creuzer and his school, he elaborated on this point: “To want to make of religion an immutable unity that is only veiled to the profane, to flatter oneself that one has uncovered this unique language and that the worship, the dogmas, the symbols of all nations are revealed to our eyes as a portion of this sacred language is to cherish a chimerical hope. It is neither in symbols nor in doctrines that this unity can be found. But penetrate the nature of man, and you will perceive there the unique source of all religions and the seed of all the modifications that they undergo.”49 Threats to Liberal Pluralism from the Historiography of Religion Constant’s opposition to those whom he identified as obstructing the progressive movement of history, which we have previously noted across the various fields of his activities, extended to the historiography of religion. The Catholic Traditionalists, of course, were a primary target. Their celebration of the primitive legislation of the primordial era and their admiration for the sacerdotal castes of Antiquity had inspired, he said, their dream of resuscitating theocracy and suppressing modern liberties.50 The Traditionalists’ theocratic dream, however, received support from an unexpected quarter. Enlightenment philosophes exalted the religion and priesthoods of ancient India and Egypt, which they only superficially understood, as part of their wide-ranging attack on Christianity. The result was what Constant called a dangerous alliance between two opposed fanaticisms in which the philosophical panegyrists of ancient theocracies found themselves drafted into the service of modern theocrats.51 Constant further noted that enthusiasm for China was similarly common both to philosophes like Voltaire, who praised China for making religion an instrument of the state, and to Restoration reactionaries such as Antoine-François-Claude Ferrand, who praised China for reducing the state to an instrument of religion. In both cases,

be content to give accounts that are the most likely rather than in all respects self-­ consistent and perfectly exact. This is clearly a reference to the project of writing about religion, not an endorsement of Platonism. 49 Constant, De la religion, 79. 50 Ibid., 572–3, 758n13. 51 Ibid., 245–6.

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opponents of Constant’s liberal principle of government neutrality toward religion drew inspiration from the Chinese example.52 The new German symbolic school, for its part, also posed a threat to Constant’s liberal values. Constant cited Johann Heinrich Voss’s warning – in his Anti-symbolique (1824–26), written in response to the second edition of Creuzer’s work – that the ultimate goal of Creuzer and his followers was the re-establishment of theocracy in Europe.53 Although Constant elsewhere noted that Voss’s own interpretation of mythology was sometimes overly materialistic,54 and although he judged that Voss went too far in his indictment of Creuzer and Joseph Görres, he thought that the theocratic threat identified by Voss was real.55 It was critical to the future, he said, that human beings’ present moral and intellectual status be recognized as resulting from the development of their own faculties, not from the tutelage of sacerdotal corporations.56 All scholars, Constant allowed, were free to dream in their own manner about Antiquity: “Nothing is more innocent so far; but when one wishes to apply these dreams to modern times and when one falsely cites old works in order to forge, in the name of the symbol, fetters for all peoples for the benefit of the caste that oppressed them for four thousand years, it then becomes a little less innocent.”57 If Constant did not consider Creuzer himself to be a theocrat in the same sense as the Traditionalists, he was nevertheless troubled by any historiography that identified an immutable dogma as the core of all religion. It is important to recognize that the key issue for Constant was not the content of this or that dogma but instead the claim for a final, once-and-for-all truth: any defence of immutable doctrine is a denial of the progressive nature of religion – and of humankind itself – and as such threatens our moral autonomy and political liberty.58 Worse, Creuzer’s attempted recovery of the primitive truths behind the symbols 52 Ibid., 706–8n14. See also Winkler, “Irreligiosité et utilization,” 58–9. 53 On Voss’s denunciation of Creuzer as an agent of political reaction and attribution of his “Indomania” to his desire to impose theocracy on Europe, see Williamson, Longing for Myth, 142. 54 Constant, De la religion, 746n79. 55 Constant here reproduces the broader Liberal response to Voss’s charges. See Williamson, Longing for Myth, 143. 56 Constant, De la religion, 245, 759–61n15. 57 Ibid., 819n8. 58 Kloocke, “Benjamin Constant et l’Allemagne,” 150.

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of the various religions and mythologies of Antiquity served as both an inspiration and a valuable resource for certain writers who were explicitly conspiring to envelop humankind anew in an unchanging, ­implacable theocratic order.59 Constant was alluding here, of course, to the Catholic Traditionalists. The penultimate chapter of De la religion reproduces a number of egregious attacks on modern liberties drawn from the writings of various Traditionalists.60 The name most prominent in these pages is that of Ferdinand d’Eckstein, the Catholic Traditionalist whom Constant most closely associated with Creuzer – and to whom we turn in part 6 of this study.

59 Constant, De la religion, 760–1n15. 60 Ibid., 572–3, 977nn4–5, 977n7.

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P art S ix Orientalist Traditionalism: Ferdinand d’Eckstein Ferdinand d’Eckstein’s Orientalist Traditionalism, a third variant of Traditionalism incorporating a new archive of source material in the form of newly accessible Asian religious and philosophical texts, opens a window onto both the flow of ideas from Germany to France and the incorporation of Asian texts into European thought. Distinguished by his German intellectual formation as well as by his refusal to align himself fully with the Ultras in Restoration politics, Eckstein is indicative of the complexity of Catholic Traditionalism itself and of Restoration religious and political thought more broadly. Chapter 16 introduces Eckstein, stressing his German intellectual formation, and then presents his Traditionalism – as set out in Le Catholique (1826–29), a journal of which Eckstein was the editor and preponderant contributor – in terms of his contrast between religious and abstractive philosophies and his ideas on primitive revelation, cosmogonic history, and the philosophy of history. It concludes with a brief reflection on the internal complexity of Catholic Traditionalism. Chapter 17 opens with an account of Friedrich von Schlegel’s Orientalism, which massively impacted Eckstein, and then analyzes Eckstein’s conceptualization of religion in light of the Orientalist inflection of his Traditionalism under the subheadings of Catholicism before Catholicism and paganism as a corruption of primitive revelation. It next analyzes Eckstein’s mythography and his critique of rival mythographers before concluding with some reflections on Eckstein’s Orientalist Traditionalism as a Catholic science. Chapter 18 analyzes Eckstein’s liberal-Catholic political theology in terms of his prescriptions for the proper relationship

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between the social order and the spiritual order and places it in a dialogic relationship with the liberalism of the Doctrinaires, the Globistes, and Benjamin Constant.

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Ferdinand d’Eckstein – scholar, editor, translator, journalist, literary critic, Catholic convert, Indophile, conduit of German scholarship and literature into France, indefatigable salon conversationalist, and gobetween of scholars and poets – is the least known of the Catholic Traditionalists. He is rarely discussed in scholarship on Restoration historical and religious thought,1 and the situation has not changed with the recent outpouring of interest in German Orientalism.2 Eckstein, however, is worthy of historians’ attention because he is not only the least known of the Catholic Traditionalists but also the least typical of them, which may in part account for his marginalization in the historiography of the period.3 Eckstein’s inclusion among the  1 Eckstein receives no mention in McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment; Gengembre, La Contra-Révolution; or Reardon, Religion in the Age of Romanticism. And he is mentioned only in passing in Reardon, Liberalism and Tradition.   2 Eckstein’s name does not appear in Cowan, Indo-German Identification; Marchand, German Orientalism; Kontje, German Orientalisms; Williamson, Longing for Myth; or Murti, India. And he is mentioned only in passing in McGetchin, Indology, Indomania, and Orientalism; Arvidsson, Aryan Idols; and Herling, German Gita.   3 The foundation for all subsequent study of Eckstein is the one monograph that has been devoted to him, Nicolas Burtin’s Le baron d’Eckstein: Une semeur des idées au temps de la Restauration. Part 1 of Burtin’s 1931 book is biographical; its six chapters are based on access to key archives of Eckstein’s long-term correspondents, plus archival and other research in Denmark and France for his early and later years. These chapters are highly valuable for establishing the chronology of Eckstein’s life (and are the source for most subsequent biographical sketches), even if Burtin seems at times to take Eckstein’s reminiscences of his past (e.g., in his letters to the comtesse Valérie de Menthon) too much at face value as historical evidence. Part 2 consists of three substantial chapters on philosophy, politics, and literature based on the ideas set out in Le Catholique. The

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Catholic Traditionalists is warranted by his religious convictions, his intellectual orientation against rationalism and materialism, and his political rejection of individual rights and constitutionalism, yet his intellectual formation set him somewhat apart. Eckstein, in fact, has been described as “a curious mixture of Oriental symbolism and German idealism crossed with Lamennais’s theocratic Catholicism.”4 The key to Eckstein’s status within Traditionalism is his German education.

E c k s t e i n ’ s I n t e l l e c t ua l F o r m at i o n Eckstein’s father belonged to a family of German-speaking Jews who lived in a region near Hamburg that in the late eighteenth century belonged to Denmark. His father was a successful merchant who had converted to Lutheranism as a condition of his marriage. At age sixteen, young Ferdinand was sent to university in Germany. The critical years for his intellectual formation were those between 1807 and about 1814, during which he was intermittently enrolled at the University of Heidelberg and encountered leading figures of German romanticism. limitations of these chapters derive less from Burtin’s theological commitments as a priest of the Dominican Frères prêcheurs than, aside from the progress of scholarship in the intervening decades, from their scope. Burtin presents himself as a pioneer or explorer who is beginning the mapping of an uncharted region by disengaging Eckstein’s principal ideas from the hodgepodge (fratras) that is Le Catholique and presenting them in an orderly fashion rather than analyzing them critically. Two books from the mid-twentieth century contain extended and useful discussions of Eckstein. Raymond Schwab’s The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East 1680–1860, although literary in focus, contains many references and a sustained discussion of Eckstein. Jean-René Derré’s Lamennais, ses amis, et le mouvement des idées à l’époque romantique includes a lengthy chapter that, while focusing on Eckstein’s relationship with Lamennais, offers an extensive and often acute analysis of aspects of his thought. More recently, Louis Le Guillou has edited two collections of Eckstein’s letters, to which he has appended short biographies (largely the same in both volumes) that provide a sound outline of what is reliably known (and what is not) about Eckstein’s life: Le “baron” d’Eckstein et ses contemporains and Lettres inédites du baron  d’Eckstein. Finally, there is François Berthiot’s 1998 Sorbonne dissertation, Le baron d’Eckstein: Journaliste et critique littéraire, which explores Eckstein’s doubleness as a figure of both journalism and erudition. Although focusing exclusively on literature  – Berthiot explicitly excludes Eckstein the philosopher and Eckstein the Orientalist – the work very usefully sorts out Eckstein’s publishing history in a dizzying array of French- and German-language periodicals.  4 Azouvi, Descartes et la France, 154.

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At Heidelberg, Eckstein immersed himself in the new historical sciences of philology, the history of religions, and linguistics, studying with, among other professors, the Orientalists Friedrich Wilken and Friedrich Creuzer during the very years when the latter was writing his four-volume Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, besonders der Griechen (Symbolism and Mythology of the Ancient Peoples, Particularly the Greek) (1810–12). Even more significant was his encounter, during a sojourn in Rome between 1807 and 1809, with some of the theoreticians of German romanticism. Received there by Wilhelm von Humboldt, he met, among other writers and artists, Friedrich von Schlegel, who quickly became his most important intellectual influence. Schlegel confirmed and deepened the mythographical and philological interests awakened in the young man at Heidelberg and generally swept him up into an ­ongoing informal seminar on literature, philosophy, religion, and politics. In 1809, at Rome and under the influence of the Schlegel circle, Eckstein converted to Roman Catholicism.5 He was particularly close to the Schlegel circle during the years 1808–13, remaining in friendly contact with Schlegel until his death, and after that he corresponded with his widow.6 Inasmuch as it has justly been said that Friedrich von Schlegel exercised “a sort of intellectual paternity” over Eckstein,7 it is worth pausing for a moment to be precise about the point in his own intellectual trajectory that Schlegel had reached in these years. Schlegel in 1808–13 was no longer the young radical of early German romanticism.8 In Paris between 1802 and 1804, where he had gone to study Sanskrit with Alexander Hamilton, Schlegel had begun to rethink his ideas about modern Europe; in particular, he began to question his allegiance to   5 That in later years Eckstein was reputedly never seen attending Mass encouraged some Catholics who had doubts about his program to question the sincerity of his conversion. Viaene, Belgium and the Holy See, 45. In any case, Eckstein never considered taking holy orders, a fact that underscores the role of laypeople in the Restoration church generally and in apologetics in particular. See Cholvy, “L’émergence d’un laïcat catholique.”   6 On Eckstein’s early years, see Burtin, Le baron d’Eckstein, 3–33.   7 Ibid., 17.   8 There is an extensive secondary literature on Friedrich von Schlegel and the Jena period of early German romanticism. See Behler, German Romantic Literary Theory; Beiser, Romantic Imperative; Millán-Zaibert, Friedrich Schlegel; and Forster, German Philosophy of Language.

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the intellectual values and the social and political order that had emerged from the French Revolution and that Napoleon Bonaparte was institutionalizing before his eyes. At the same time, he experienced a growing attraction to Roman Catholicism. Then, after he moved to Cologne, his writings and lectures between 1804 and 1808 began to give voice to his new orientation: they extolled the political and moral order of the Middle Ages; they drew suggestive comparisons between Christianity and Indian religions; and they announced a historical ­connection between German culture and that of Vedic India. Binding these elements together was his growing conviction that a modernizing Germany need not inevitably imitate the French, whose model of modernity broke radically with Europe’s religious and political past.9 The studies and reflections of Schlegel’s Paris and Cologne years culminated in 1808 with the near-simultaneous publication of Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians) and his conversion to Roman Catholicism. Both were public expressions of his rejection of a model of modernity deriving from and enshrining revolutionary values: his conversion repudiated both a secular vision of modernity and the Protestantism that its supporters and its critics alike in France linked to the Enlightenment project, and On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians set out key elements of his critique of modern Europe through its study of the language, religion, and philosophy of ancient India. The next year, Schlegel moved to Vienna, where, in the service of Metternich at the Austrian imperial court, he worked to rouse German cultural and military resistance to Bonaparte and, more broadly, to oppose the intellectual foundations and social and legal innovations of modernity.10 Eckstein, then, encountered Schlegel a few months after his conversion and the publication of On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians and a few months before his decampment to Vienna. François Berthiot has asserted that up to the end of his life, Eckstein’s essential reference remained the group of theoreticians of German romanticism whom he encountered between 1807 and around 1815 and that henceforth he sought to integrate his deepening knowledge in various domains  9 Arvidsson, Aryan Idols, 38–9; Tzoref-Ashkenazi, “India and the Identity of Europe,” 727; Germana, “Self-Othering in German Orientalism,” 87. 10 Tzoref-Ashkenazi, “India and the Identity of Europe,” 719–20; TzorefAshkenazi, “Nationalist Aspect,” 117; Arvidsson, Aryan Idols, 40.

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into the framework established in those years.11 This judgment is sound, as long as one recognizes that the essential reference in question is not to German romanticism as such but to Schlegel’s program as of 1808–13. Eckstein returned to the University of Heidelberg in 1812 to continue his studies in philology, the history of religions, and literature and began to learn Sanskrit. However, his enrolment there was short-lived, as he soon became caught up in the activities of Tugendbund, one of the anti-Napoleonic secret societies that flourished in German university towns. Before the year was out, he had become an officer in the third battalion of General Ludwig Adolf Wilhelm Freiherr von Lützow’s free army, although his less-than-onerous duties left him time to continue his academic and literary pursuits. Two years later, however, his formal studies definitively ended when he entered the administrative service of the Allies in Flanders. There, he came to the attention of King Louis XVIII, and in 1816 the restored Bourbon regime appointed him commissioner-general of police for the Department of Bouches-duRhône.12 It was also at this time that Eckstein became, through an act of auto-ennoblement, “baron d’Eckstein.” Behind Eckstein’s somewhat mysterious entry into the French administrative service was almost certainly the hand of Anne-Hyacinthe Maxence, baron de Damas. The two men seem to have met as children when Damas and his mother settled for a time in Denmark as émigrés from the French Revolution. In 1811, Damas was serving in the i­mperial civil service in Hamburg when Eckstein was attending the University of Heidelberg, and then he was military governor of Marseille when Eckstein was commissioner-general of police there. Eckstein continued to benefit from Damas’s patronage even after resigning from active political service in 1818 to devote himself to private studies. Eckstein served first as an attaché to the ministerial cabinet when Damas was appointed minister of war in 1823, and then, when Damas succeeded François-René de Chateaubriand as minister of foreign affairs in August 1824, Eckstein followed him into the department as a “political consultant.” Very little is known about what services Eckstein provided in these capacities, although it is surely a sign of his political astuteness

11 Berthiot, Le baron d’Eckstein, 135. 12 Le Guillou, ed., Le “baron” d’Eckstein, 9–10; Derré, Lamennais, ses amis, 118–19.

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that he managed to hold onto the sinecure that the latter position paid through changes of ministry and even of regime all the way until the Revolution of 1848.13

Le Catholique Despite having given up public service to immerse himself in the study of the Indic manuscripts held by the Bibliothèque nationale, Eckstein remained deeply involved in early Restoration political life through his extensive collaboration on the Ultra journals, Le Drapeau blanc and Annales de littérature et des arts, as well as on the Mennaisians’ Mémorial catholique. In 1826, when new press laws reduced Le Drapeau blanc to the status of a ministerial paper – it would close down in February 1827 – Eckstein decided to establish a journal of his own. This journal, to be called Le Catholique, would elude the scrutiny of government c­ ensors to which political journals were subject by treating contemporary matters only under philosophical, historical, or literary points of view. Le Catholique, as Eckstein envisioned it, would use criticism and the philosophy of history to refute the materialism of the age and submit the chaos of opinions and doctrines of Restoration intellectual life to Catholic doctrine, broadly understood, thereby preparing the way for a new era of intellectual and social harmony.14 Eckstein’s models for this undertaking were two German journals, Concordia and Der Katholik. Concordia, published between 1820 and 1823 by none other than Friedrich von Schlegel, proclaimed itself to be a journal in which “the entire domain of intellectual culture would be considered and remodelled from the point of view of Christianity.”15 The subtitle of Eckstein’s Le Catholique – “a periodic journal in which the universality of knowledge is treated in relation to the unity of doctrine” – so closely echoes Schlegel’s declaration as to leave no doubt about the latter’s influence on Eckstein’s conception of his journal. The declared mission of Der Katholik, for its part, was the spiritual, intellectual, and political

13 Burtin, Le baron d’Eckstein, 75; Le Guillou, ed., Lettres inédites du baron d’Eckstein, 40; Berthiot, Le baron d’Eckstein, 28–30. Eckstein himself claimed to have first met Damas in Marseille. Eckstein, “Ma Carrière politique et littéraire,” 347. 14 Eckstein, “Introduction,” 5, 10, 12; Eckstein, “Des journaux littéraires,” 415. 15 Derré, Lamennais, ses amis, 123; Berthiot, Le baron d’Eckstein, 58–9 (quotation at 59).

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renewal of Catholicism in Germany. It was edited by Joseph Görres in the years 1824–26, immediately preceding Eckstein’s establishment of Le Catholique.16 Eckstein himself contributed to Der Katholik during Görres’s editorship, and he recognized in the latter a kindred theolo­ gical, intellectual, and political spirit. Görres, for his part, promoted Le Catholique in the pages of Der Katholik, praising its panoramic scope and hailing Eckstein as the most authentic German mind to be transplanted into France.17 Although there was evidently anticipation in Parisian intellectual circles about Eckstein’s new journal,18 the reception of its prospectus had left Eckstein concerned that its nature and purpose had already been misunderstood. Accordingly, he sought to resolve any misconceptions in the three dialogues that comprise the preface to the first number of Le Catholique: the first dialogue, between a Liberal and a philosopher, mocks the assumption that the journal will be an agent of the Holy Alliance and the Congregation; the second, between a lady and a man of letters, promises that the journal will not confront French readers with vaporous German metaphysics and sleep-inducing German erudition; and the third, between a man of the world and a scholar, dismisses the objection that the journal will be unscholarly because it lacks footnotes and source citations. What Le Catholique was really about, Eckstein concluded, was expressing living ideas.19 During the four years of Le Catholique’s existence between 1826 and 1829, Eckstein himself, with the help of a small group of assistants, wrote thousands of pages on literature, philosophy, history, mythography, and many other topics,20 all conceived as preliminary studies for a projected great work that would synthesize the philosophy and mythology of ancient civilizations

16 Vanden Heuvel, German Life, 278–81. On Görres, see also Evans, “Joseph Görres and Félicité de Lamennais.” 17 Burtin, Le baron d’Eckstein, 125–6; Berthiot, Le baron d’Eckstein, 86–7. 18 “The first number of Le Catholique has just appeared. Will it live up to the expectations it has excited?” Unsigned, “France,” 106. 19 Eckstein, “Préface en trois dialogues,” v–xxxii. 20 Berthiot counts 9,010 pages across the sixteen volumes of Le Catholique. Berthiot, Le baron d’Eckstein, 30.

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with Catholic theology and metaphysics. Eckstein never completed the promised synthesis, although he worked at it for the rest of his life.21 Le Catholique, which in the absence of a definitive synthetic work remains the most extensive statement of Eckstein’s thought, was treated by contemporaries as a significant intervention in Restoration intellectual life. Its ideas, amplified and extended by Eckstein’s indefatigable promotion of his ideas through correspondence and conversation, earned Eckstein a reputation as an authority on German literature and scholarship, medieval studies, and romanticism – all subjects on which he was widely seen, by allies and opponents alike, as an authorized interpreter of Schlegelian thought to the French.22 Unquestionably, however, it was Eckstein’s passionate insistence that ancient Oriental texts are capitally important for Western thought and the religious history of humankind that had the greatest impact on his contemporaries – and earned him the nickname “baron Sanskrit.” Conversely, Sanskrit and Orientalism in general, which were fashionable topics in salons of the Napoleonic Empire and the Restoration, gave Eckstein an entrée into high society. Louis Le Guillou’s reference to Eckstein as being “of Himalayan culture” nicely captures his contemporaries’ sense of Eckstein as being both massively learned and an authority on India.23

21 Jules Mohl, president of the Société asiatique at the time of Eckstein’s death, recalled having visited Eckstein eight or ten years previously in his room at a religious house to which he had recently moved after falling ill. Eckstein, apparently dying, was sitting on a bed strewn with books, busily making extracts from the Mahabharata. Noting that although Eckstein’s health recovered, his book synthesizing the ancient and the Catholic never appeared, Mohl concluded that Eckstein’s many intellectual strengths were fatally undermined and his labours rendered essentially sterile by his unscholarly methodology. Mohl, “Rapport Annuel,” 15–16. Mohl’s assessment represents the judgment of the new generation of French Orientalists, and indeed the ­articles that Eckstein published in professional journals in the late 1850s  – whose method and subject matter had changed little since the years of Le Catholique – ­confirm, by their contrast with the work of the other contributors, Eckstein’s isolation from evolving disciplinary practices. Eckstein, “De quelques légendes brahmaniques”; Eckstein, “Critique des sources”; Eckstein, “Mémoires sur les contrées occidentales”; Eckstein, “Sur les sources de la cosmogonie.” 22 Berthiot, Le baron d’Eckstein, 151–66. 23 Le Guillou, ed., Le “baron” d’Eckstein, 7.

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Eckstein’s Traditionalism Eckstein set out in Le Catholique the version of the Catholic Traditionalism to which he sought to submit Restoration intellectual life. This section first establishes its epistemological foundation in the contrast that Eckstein drew between religious and abstractive philosophies and then presents its content under the heading of primitive revelation and cosmogonic history.24 Religious and Abstractive Philosophies Eckstein divided the various philosophical systems, past and present, into two schools. In one place, he called them the religious school and the rational school, on the grounds that the former makes God the origin and end of everything, whereas the latter replaces God with humankind and the universe. In another place, he designated them as philosophies of life and philosophies of abstraction because of their modes of proceeding. The two terminological pairs, however, are interchangeable. Religious philosophies are philosophies of life because they grasp things in their totality; that is, they explain all things, ­particularly humankind, holistically in relation to both God and nature. True philosophy must therefore incorporate, without confusing them, theology, physics, and history. Philosophies of abstraction, for their part, are so called because they treat humankind in itself and in isolation from both God and nature.25 Eckstein located the ultimate source of all abstractive philosophies in the tendency of human beings to separate themselves from God and attempt to explain their existence in isolation from him. Eckstein called this “a Protestant manner of ­seeing,” immediately adding that by Protestant he did not mean the Reformation of the sixteenth century but instead its philosophical driving force, which is independent of the theological forms taken by the schism itself. Abandoned to itself, human nature always and 24 In discussing Eckstein’s thought, I treat Le Catholique as a single work; I do not identify specific articles in the text, although they are identified in the notes. At times, I cite articles in Le Drapeau blanc and elsewhere when relevant ideas are treated more fully there. 25 Eckstein, “De Gassendi [part 1],” 439; Eckstein, “Introduction à la philosophie,” 328–9.

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necessarily creates abstractions and sophisms; as a result, an “original Protestantism” appeared in the ancient world in the form of materialist, rationalist, and empiricist philosophies.26 Religious and abstractive philosophies constituted for Eckstein the two, and only two, systems of human knowledge. Religious philosophies make use of abstraction and experience but subordinate them to the divine order and so lead to knowledge by faith, whereas the end result of abstractive philosophies is incredulity in regard to beliefs and ­skepticism in regard to knowledge.27 For Eckstein, then, the history of ­philosophy had been for the most part a genealogy of error owing to false principles. He discussed various ancient, early modern, and ­modern philosophical schools at length in Le Catholique, but these pages do not add up to a history of philosophy properly speaking but to a classification of philosophies by type – materialist, from Epicurus to Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis; rationalist, from Aristotle to Immanuel Kant and the Scots; and idealist, from Plato to Friedrich Schelling – together with an exposure of what Eckstein considered to be the characteristic error in thinking of each type. Eckstein’s fundamental criticism of abstractive philosophies concerned the nature of thought, or the relationship of thinking to ideas. He opened this line of argument by declaring that every object that strikes our senses is a symbol because it possesses two realities, one ­situated outside us and the other inside us. We are able to conceive of a given object because we possess the internal idea of it, and this ideal existence of a thing is more real than its physical appearance. Eckstein next distinguished what he called the forms of thought (or forms of understanding) from the act of thinking. Forms of thought such as logic and reasoning are to thinking as grammar is to speech. The act of thinking necessarily uses forms of thought, just as speech uses grammar, but these forms are the instruments, not the source, of our thoughts. Thinking and reasoning, then, are distinct things, as are ideas and reasonings. Ideas belong to the domain of pure spirit, and we ­possess them immediately, intuitively, and collectively by inspiration, whereas we develop reasonings mediately and successively by the power 26 Eckstein, “Coup d’oeil sur la réforme religieuse,” 195; Eckstein, “De l’état actuel de la France [part 4],” 137–9. 27 Eckstein, “Introduction à la philosophie,” 331, 334; Eckstein, “Philosophie du Catholicisme [part 1],” 349–50.

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of demonstration acquired by experience. To think, he concluded, is to recognize immediately the ideal world, of which the very essence of the mind is composed.28 Eckstein next argued that ideas are separate from both language and the senses. Without language, it is true, the world of ideas would remain forever closed to us, but language only represents ideas and must be distinguished from ideas themselves. Eckstein chided his fellow Traditionalist Louis de Bonald for not having paid enough attention to this difference. Similarly, although without the senses the world of nature would remain closed to us, the senses figure the external world but do not constitute sensation itself; it was on this reef, Eckstein said, that John Locke had become wrecked along with so many other materialists who had unwittingly confused the phenomenon with the reality and thus fallen into skepticism.29 Eckstein’s understanding of the relationship of thinking to ideas is grounded in a version of idealist ontology: what is truly real for Eckstein is thought. It is the idea of a tree, for example, rather than this or that particular tree, that is truly real, and so a tree exists only in the reality of thought itself (although Eckstein hastened to add, contra theosophers and mystics, that external nature is also a real, subsisting thing, not an illusion of the senses).30 A true idea is an immediate view at once of the real or positive nature and the ideal nature of things; therefore, Eckstein called it a revelation of the divine nature that is inherent in ours: “We have in us the world of ideas, which, emanating from God, serves as the type of the universe, an admirable symbol, a sublime hieroglyph of the celestial world.”31 Abstractive philosophies, according to Eckstein, err epistemologically by confusing ideas with forms of thought. Rationalists explain thought as an intellectual operation of the reason that, spontaneously or by induction, reflects on itself and on the exterior objects that strike it. 28 Eckstein, “Philosophie du Catholicisme [part 1],” 334–5, 328–9; Eckstein, “Du présent et de l’avenir,” 264–5; Eckstein, “De la philosophie,” 399–400. 29 Eckstein identified Lockean sensualism as “a disguised Epicureanism.” Eckstein, “De Gassendi [part 1],” 461. He thus maintained the assimilation of Locke to materialism effected by the dévots after the mid-eighteenth century. See Burson, Rise and Fall, 275–6. For Eckstein’s extended views on Locke and his influence, see Eckstein, “Du siècle de la Reine Anne.” Nicolas Burtin gathers and discusses Eckstein’s scattered references to Locke in Burtin, Le baron d’Eckstein, 220–3. 30 Eckstein, “Philosophie du Catholicisme [part 1],” 337–8. 31 Eckstein, “De Gassendi [part 2],” 15–16.

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Modern rationalism – which Eckstein traced to René Descartes and which in Eckstein’s day took the form of Kantianism and the Scottish philosophy – regards human beings as intellectually and morally selfsufficient.32 In claiming to grasp the nature of things by logic and reasoning, rationalists confuse the foundation of ideas and things with the abstract forms of reasoning that our minds must use in order to think. As a result, rationalism, in Eckstein’s formulation, does not ­possess the substance but only the formulas of understanding. Materialists, for their part, commit the yet more grievous error of proposing a trivial philosophy of sensations as the foundation for the mind. In reducing thought to muscles, nerves, and irritation, he said, materialists such as Antoine Destutt de Tracy and Cabanis had committed the greatest ­possible crime of lèse-intelligence because they had submitted thought to analysis, just as the chemist does a material body.33 Still other abstractive philosophers attempt to reconcile materialism and rationalism by ­defining humans as beings who feel and reason at once, and this third cohort is further subdivided into those for whom reason passively reproduces ideas from sense impressions that it receives from outside and those for whom reason actively operates on the data provided to it by the senses.34 Against all these formulations, Eckstein insisted on the incommensurability of thought and matter: “The brain is a material thing, but can matter think? Does one not see the contradiction that exists between these two words: thought and matter?”35 Eckstein labelled post-Kantian idealists, including Johann Gottlieb Fichte, as false idealists because they seemed to acknowledge the existence of a pre-existent ideal world but did not, in Eckstein’s view, truly do so because they regarded the human self as creating its ideas. These false idealists belong, in fact, among the rationalists because their ­idealism of the human self amounts to a spiritualist atheism – admirably suited, Eckstein noted, to romantic souls – that puts the human self above God and the natural world.36 True idealists – those who posit a

32 Eckstein, “Du présent et de l’avenir,” 225–8, 231–2; Eckstein, “Philosophie du Catholicisme [part 1],” 319. 33 Eckstein, “De Gassendi [part 2],” 52–3; Eckstein, “Du présent et de l’avenir,” 215–16, 221–4; Eckstein, “Philosophie du Catholicisme [part 1],” 324, 359–60. 34 Eckstein, “Introduction à la philosophie,” 328–9, 332. 35 Eckstein, “Philosophie du Catholicisme [part 1],” 340. 36 Eckstein, “Du présent et de l’avenir,” 220, 233, 268–9.

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fully independent ideal world – now existed, Eckstein said, in two forms: as Gnostics, by whom he meant theosophers, and as mystics, by whom he meant Protestant visionaries. Both theosophers and visionaries, however, reject knowledge of nature and awareness of the self, and so they contemplate only projections of their own minds, rendering their ideal worlds fantastic, disordered, and savage.37 Eckstein defined the purpose of philosophy teleologically as “to explain the final cause, to give an ultimate account of the existence of things” – above all, of humankind.38 Materialism and rationalism, therefore, are intrinsically false systems because they cannot explain the origin of ideas in us, nor can they explain the origin of life. If the purpose of philosophy is to give an ultimate account of the existence of things, and if reasoning and experience are incapable of yielding ­ultimate explanations, then divine help is necessary in order to achieve true philosophy. Divine help, in theological language, is grace, and Eckstein stated outright that true philosophy is grace from above. Philosophy, then, is for Eckstein neither a theory of the faculties of understanding nor a particular intellectual system but instead a branch of religion.39 Primitive Revelation and Cosmogonic History Since questions of ultimate origins, then, transcend for Eckstein the power of human reason and can be explained only by revelation, a true philosophy is impossible without revelation. Conversely, he regarded human reason, despite it limits, as capable of understanding what has been revealed to it.40 However, in order for ultimate truths to be ­conceived within the limits of human intelligence, they must be introduced into human consciousness from outside. And so Eckstein arrived at the necessity of the fundamental Catholic Traditionalist concept of a primitive revelation. Its content, in Eckstein’s version, includes the

37 Ibid., 268–9, 272. On Eckstein’s youthful fascination with Illuminism, see Burtin, Le baron d’Eckstein, 14. 38 Eckstein, “Du présent et de l’avenir,” 271. 39 Eckstein, “Philosophie du Catholicisme [part 2],” 269; Eckstein, “Philosophie du Catholicisme [part 1], 377; Eckstein, “Du présent et de l’avenir,” 266; Eckstein, “De la littérature dramatique,” 10. 40 Eckstein, “De Gassendi [part 2],” 30.

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idea of God and the divine creation of spiritual entities, human beings, and the natural world; the rebellion of the evil principle against the divine order and the corruption of human nature; and the future coming of a saviour who is at once an expiatory victim and a conquering hero who will rehabilitate fallen and corrupted humankind. Eckstein called this content “the archetypal ideas of our destiny.”41 Abstractive philosophies, according to Eckstein, fundamentally lack a proper appreciation of history, and without history there can be no real philosophy. By history, however, he meant cosmogonic history, or the content of the primitive revelation. The issue is at bottom epistemological. Cosmogonic history reveals that humankind has a double nature because it is ruled by two contrary powers: one divine and inherent in its nature and the other the fruit of corruption. The corruption of our nature in the fall means that our senses deceive us, our understanding is vitiated, and our imagination is corrupted. Their refusal to accept this cosmogonic history both renders abstractive philosophies incapable of explaining or even acknowledging our disordered ­epistemological condition and undermines their methods of seeking knowledge.42 Eckstein noted that the empirically verifiable state of our epistemological condition supports the testimony of cosmogonic history: we perceive everything inside and outside us to be double, imperfect, divided; yet at the same time, we feel and understand a pre-established harmony, a perfect wholeness. A true philosophy, for Eckstein, must both accept and explain “this bizarre phenomenon, this incoherence that reasoning rejects.”43 Abstractive philosophies fail on both counts: materialists and rationalists do not even acknowledge this incoherence; and theosophers and visionaries, for their part, acknowledge it but regard it as only an illusory reality. Religious philosophies, in contrast, recognize this existential conundrum and accept that the present world was primitively a creation in which everything, humankind included, was perfect before this creation fell into chaos through the activity of the infernal power. As the notion of an infernal power indicates, Eckstein posited that behind our epistemological limitations lies evil. Materialists 41 Eckstein, “De la religion ... volume 1er,” 87–8; Eckstein, “De l’état actuel de la France [part 4],” 146 (quotation). 42 Eckstein, “Du présent et de l’avenir,” 270–1; Eckstein, “Des journaux litté­ raires,” 395. 43 Eckstein, “Du présent et de l’avenir,” 273.

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and rationalists ignore the existence of evil or, worse, regard it as an inherent property of nature, whereas theosophers and visionaries treat it as an illusion. Nevertheless, cautioned Eckstein, to deny or disregard evil is to be deceived about human nature and about reality.44 Eckstein insisted that philosophers must accept that the cosmogonic event of the fall is both the necessary starting point for philosophy and itself immune from philosophical inquiry: “Man and nature have had to fall from their primitive state. If one asks about the manner in which they were degraded, why they lost their perfection, I will reply first that this is a question of fact which concerns the philosopher only as a fact, and which, consequently, cannot become the object of his speculation. But because this fact, acquired by experience and confirmed by history, is proper to human nature, such as it is now constituted, no real ­philosophy can pass over it in silence.”45 Although his gloss on the fall accepts the theological concept of the fall as historical explanation and uses it to constrain philosophy, Eckstein, instead of simply asserting the historicity of the biblical narratives (which he did elsewhere), argued that it is reasonable to accept the doctrine of original sin – and that, conversely, rejecting the doctrine is unreasonable – because it makes sense of the evidence around us. The key words in the passage just quoted are “acquired by experience and confirmed by history” because Eckstein’s position was that accepting the historicity of the biblical cosmogony is not dependent on a priori acceptance of revealed truth. In short, Eckstein was offering a variation on the utilitarian apologetics, so common in eighteenth-century Catholicism,46 in that instead of attempting to provide rational arguments for the truth of Christianity, he argued that only the acceptance of Christianity as historically true makes possible a criterion of truth and, therefore, a philosophy that does not end in skepticism.47 Eckstein here expressed in Traditionalist idiom a fundamental conviction of religious conservatism in the modern period: the only defence against historical and philosophical skepticism is to ground intellectual analysis in the revelation of the divine mind and its plan for the world. 44 Ibid., 270–5. See also Eckstein, “Introduction à la philosophie,” 332–3. 45 Eckstein, “De la philosophie,” 406–7. 46 See Everdell, Christian Apologetics in France. 47 Eckstein, “Du présent et de l’avenir,” 275. See also Eckstein, “De la philo­ sophie,” 405.

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History, in Eckstein’s view, displays both what is most universal (i.e., the primitive revelation) and what is most individual (i.e., specific peoples, individuals, and events). The historian’s task is to separate out what is universal and divinely established from what is accidental, temporary, and individual. This process requires both exhaustive study of the ancient traditions of the peoples of the world and what Eckstein called a “high point of general observation.”48 On the one hand, Eckstein proclaimed empirical evidence to be the watchword of his day; on the other hand, empirical evidence in isolation is nothing, for it must, Eckstein said, be assembled into a vast system.49 Eckstein elsewhere likened the findings of the various sciences to piles of construction materials that require an architect’s design to organize them into a building.50 The vast system or architect’s design corresponds to Eckstein’s “high point of general observation”: to understand any ­historical period, one must understand it in relation to the entire course of history, and since the entire course of history is nothing other than the fulfillment of the archetypal ideas of our destiny set out in the primitive revelation and fulfilled in Christianity, the high point of ­general observation is Christianity itself, which alone, Eckstein said, possesses in full “the secret of civilization, and the mystery of human destinies.” By Christianity, however, Eckstein did not mean the saving faith of a purely theological Christianity but instead what he called philosophical Christianity, or the application of the former to history, which yields a philosophy of h ­ istory.51 Eckstein regarded the philosophy of history as a new science that was both central to his own thought and the key intellectual ­development of his era. History without philosophy, he continued, is meaningless since what is important is not the mere narration of events but the reason for them; thus a philosophy of h ­ istory will be a true philosophy of the human race. The task of the philosopher historian is thus to understand the place of modern times within the

48 Eckstein, “De l’état actuel de la France [part 4],” 146. 49 Eckstein, “De Gassendi [part 2],” 39–40. Some indication of what Eckstein had in mind here may be seen in the lecture series that he delivered to the Société royale des bonnes-lettres in early 1829, where he hoped to establish the concordance of philosophy with religion, physics, and history. The lectures were published in Le Catholique as “Philosophie du Catholicisme.” 50 Eckstein, “De l’époque actuelle,” 47. 51 Eckstein, “De l’état actuel de la France [part 5],” 157.

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true philosophy of history, or philosophical Christianity, in which the beginning and end of history are known.52 Eckstein’s conviction that understanding any historical period requires understanding the entire course of history locates the meaning of history outside of history itself in the divine order of creation. Eckstein’s remarks in an 1831 article on the possibility of a poetry of his day display the tension in his thought between historicity and transhistorical meaning. He had become convinced, he told his readers, that poetry – a true poetry that would make a mark in the history of humankind (or, in Hegelian terms, be world-historical) – was no longer possible. The failure lay not with poets themselves but with the present age. A great poet embodies the ideas and faith of the era, and so poets of his day depicted the human condition as modern society conceived it to be. And that was the problem. Modern society – the society issuing from the Enlightenment and French Revolution – had a false idea of both humankind and the present era because it rejected the cosmogonic history that explains humankind as at once a spiritual and a fallen being and failed to recognize the present era as a transitional moment in the unfolding of the divine order of creation.53 Eckstein concluded that the fatal defect of the modern manner of writing history, derived from Voltaire and Nicolas de Condorcet, was that it misunderstood the past because it judged it according to the principles and errors of the day instead of placing it within the divine order that alone gives meaning to history.54

The Internal Complexity o f C at h o l i c T r a d i t i o n a l i s m Eckstein’s German intellectual formation, as we have seen, set him apart from the other Catholic Traditionalists. Scholars have increasingly recognized that the Counter-Revolution was not a monolithic episteme.55 Attention to Eckstein’s references to other Traditionalists further

52 Eckstein, “De Gassendi [part 2],” 39–40; Eckstein, “Histoire des Gaulois,” ­168–9, 180. 53 Eckstein, “De l’époque actuelle,” 45–7. 54 Eckstein, “Des historiens de l’Europe modern,” 45, 47, 50. 55 Masseau, Les ennemis des philosophes, 421–2; Armenteros and Lebrun, “Introduction,” 2.

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specifies how Catholic Traditionalism, as a subset of the CounterRevolution, was itself characterized by internal complexity. Eckstein had little to say about Louis de Bonald, somewhat more about Joseph de Maistre, and a great deal about Félicité de Lamennais; he also mentioned in passing minor Traditionalists such as Jean-Sébastien Laurentie and Friedrich Leopold Graf zu Stolberg-Stolberg. Eckstein did not discuss Bonald’s sociological Traditionalism in any detail; when he did mention Bonald, his tone was always respectful, but it is clear that he regarded Bonald’s science of society as insufficiently grounded in historical evidence and too closely tied to the social and political structures of King Louis XIV’s reign.56 Eckstein’s references to Joseph de Maistre were few and brief but almost always admiring.57 He recognized in Maistre a kindred spirit whose attacks on modern philosophy he fully endorsed, yet there were important differences between them. Although Maistre accepted the existence of the primitive revelation and acknowledged that pagan religions preserve traces of it,58 his Traditionalism was not based on historical erudition.59 Maistre’s innovation in relation both to ­eighteenth-century apologetics and to other forms of Traditionalism was to conceptualize the providential direction of history in terms of

56 Eckstein, “Des journaux littéraires,” 410–11; Eckstein, “De l’état actuel de la France [part 4],” 170; Eckstein, “De la théocratie primitive,” 228–9. 57 See Eckstein, “De la religion ... volume 1er,” 87; Eckstein, “De l’état actuel de la France [part 4],” 151; Eckstein, “Des journaux littéraires,” 404. It is interesting that Eckstein linked Maistre favourably with Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin as another example of someone with a high general point of observation. Eckstein’s dismissal of Illuminist sects, mentioned above, must therefore be tempered with recognition of his ongoing admiration for Franz von Baader as well as Saint-Martin. 58 Much of Maistre’s knowledge of Orientalism, including his introduction to the writings of Friedrich von Schlegel, was mediated through the Göttingen-educated Russian scholar and later statesman Sergei Uvarov. Carolina Armenteros, however, identifies Maistre’s principal Orientalist source as having been an older English work, Jacob Bryant’s New System, or An Analysis of Ancient Mythography (1774). Armenteros, French Idea of History, 202–4. 59 On the use of both reason and erudition in defence of Christianity in the wave of Catholic Enlightenment utilitarian apologetics in the second half of the eighteenth century, see Masseau, Les ennemis des philosophes, 260–1, 268–9; and Burson, “Catholic Enlightenment in France,” 79–81.

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a statistical demonstration of the normal social order.60 Eckstein, for his part, denied the validity of statistical reasoning about the divine order underlying history and explicitly warned against “encumbering the historical sciences by accumulating knowledge that is largely ­chimerical and always parasitic – statistics, for example, with which European governments are so infatuated.”61 Historical erudition, he affirmed, is and must remain the primary means of recovering the primitive ­revelation and confirming the Christian truths. Another area of disagreement concerns perfectibility – or, rather, the end point of perfectibility. Both Eckstein and Maistre shared a belief in human perfectibility within the historical process, as long as humankind follows the path of Christianity.62 For Maistre, however, perfectibility will ­culminate in a final spiritual transformation of humankind at the end of time,63 whereas Eckstein dismissed any such expectation of a future qualitative transformation.64 Eckstein’s relationship with Lamennais was complex. Le Guillou notes that it is not easy to say exactly what either man thought of the other. Both were touchy, quick to quarrel, and complained about the other to their correspondents, but their relationship survived several crises over the years, and something like friendship endured.65 In Le Catholique, Eckstein praised Lamennnais’s character, eloquence, and faith, ­proclaimed his genius, and defended his common-sense epistemology against attacks by Catholic opponents of Traditionalism,66 but he sharply

60 See Armenteros, French Idea of History, 37, 43–4, 97, 217–18; and Barbeau, “Savoyard Philosopher,” 171–2, 185–6. 61 Eckstein, “Des journaux littéraires,” 408–9. 62 On Maistre’s idea of perfectibility, see Constantinidès, “Two Great Enemies,” 106–18; and Armenteros, “Maistre’s Rousseaus,” 94. 63 On Maistre’s “third revelation,” see Armenteros, French Idea of History, 182, 292. 64 Eckstein, “Essais de palingénésie sociale,” 114. Eckstein associated this idea with Pierre-Simon Ballanche rather than Maistre, even though Ballanche regarded Christianity as final and denied the possibility of a third revelation. See McCalla, Romantic Historiosophy, 129. 65 Le Guillou, ed., Le “baron” d’Eckstein, 15. The correspondence between Eckstein and Lamennais is collected in ibid., 18–71. 66 See Eckstein’s review of two books by young abbés critical of Lamennais. Eckstein [B. d’E.], “Variétés.”

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disagreed with Lamennnais on a number of significant points.67 Specifically, although the two men shared the basic Traditionalist definition of common sense as the general reason of the human race, which contains the highest truths, Eckstein thought that Lamennais was wrong to equate the general reason with the opinion of the greatest number. Such a doctrine of absolute equality, he said, fails to recognize that sometimes a solitary genius attains a truth that has been extinguished among the masses.68 A second point of criticism is Lamennais’s use of skepticism in Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de religion (1817–23) to deny human reason any role in attaining truth. Eckstein called Lamennais the “Jean-Jacques of Christianity,”69 by which he meant that his disdain for human reasoning, like Rousseau’s, constituted a form of misanthropy. By reducing human reason to rubble in order to raise the standard of faith over the debris, Eckstein concluded, Lamennais made authority purely external to human minds, thereby introducting an element of coercion that corrupted and disfigured his entire system.70 Finally, because skepticism, Eckstein argued, is itself a form of human reasoning, Lamennais was wrong to believe that he could raise the altar of religion on the ruins of human speculation – just as, from the opposite direction, Kant was wrong to think that he could make it the foundation of transcendent reason.71

67 Eckstein’s criticisms drew a response from the Mennaisians, to which he replied in a postscript to the first volume of Le Catholique that although he adhered with heart and soul to the Catholic doctrine professed and applied by Lamennais and Mémorial catholique, he felt that he must protest against the form and character of their polemic. Eckstein, “Post-scriptum,” 517–18. 68 Eckstein, “De l’état actuel de la France [part 4],” 152–3. 69 Eckstein, “Des journaux littéraires,” 404. See also Eckstein, “De l’état actuel de la France [part 4],” 144. 70 Eckstein, “De l’état actuel de la France [part 4],” 158, 163; Eckstein, “Des journaux littéraires,” 404–5; Eckstein, “Du présent et de l’avenir,” 52–3. See also Eckstein, “De la philosophie,” 410. In a response to Eckstein’s criticism, Lamennais denied that he had ever wanted “to enclose intelligences within the confines of the catechism.” Letter to Eckstein, 3 April 1826, in Le Guillou, Le “baron” d’Eckstein, 163–4. Jean-René Derré notes that Eckstein may well have contributed to Lamennais’s reconsideration of the role of human reason as he developed his ideas about a Catholic science in the later 1820s. Derré, Lamennais, ses amis, 163–4. 71 Eckstein, “Philosophie du Catholicisme [part 1],” 320.

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An Orientalist History of Religions

Ferdinand d’Eckstein’s method throughout Le Catholique was to set against rationalist and materialist philosophies and their socio-political consequences a philosophy of history predicated on a primitive ­revelation whose content is cosmogonic history. Like all Catholic Traditionalists, Eckstein posited a primitive revelation whose content may be recovered through erudition; unlike any other Traditionalists, he applied his erudition above all to Indian and other Asian religious and ­philosophical texts. This chapter analyzes Eckstein’s conceptualization of religion in light of the Orientalist inflection of his Traditionalism. In recognition of the massive influence exerted on Eckstein by the methodology and conceptual framework of Friedrich von Schlegel’s Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians) (1808), the chapter opens with an account of Schlegel’s Orientalism.1 It next examines Eckstein’s history of religions under the subheadings of Catholicism before Catholicism and paganism as a corruption of ­primitive revelation, before turning first to an analysis of Eckstein’s mythography as an application of the historical criticism that he had learned from Schlegel and then to an account of his ­concomitant ­critique of rival mythographic systems. The chapter concludes with some reflections on Eckstein’s Orientalist Traditionalism as a Catholic science.

  1 The use of the term “Orientalism” to designate an emerging domain of study dates from 1810. The term was coined by the Arabicist Silvestre de Sacy, and its scope quickly expanded to incorporate the study of all Asian languages, literatures, and religions. See Despland, L’émergence des sciences, 238.

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Schlegel’s Orientalism By the time Eckstein encountered Schlegel, the latter was, in Suzanne Marchand’s words, “on the downslope of [his] Indo-mania.”2 Schlegel’s disillusionment with India had gone hand in hand with repudiation of his own early romanticism, and both were connected to his decision to convert to Catholicism, a decision that both signalled and grew out of his new conviction that unmediated access to the divine was not p ­ ossible. Epistemologically, this meant rejecting the intellectual intuition that had been central to the early German romanticism (Frühromantik) of his Jena period in favour of revelation and incarnation. The result, however, was not an orthodox Catholic theology but what has been called a “Romantic-Christian synthesis” in which philosophy (broadly understood) functioned not as a substitute for revelation but as an expression of it.3 Schlegel set out in On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians a historical framework of four epochs or periods of Indian philosophy and religion, which he also called the “epochs of the Oriental mind.” Far from being a sequence of progressive development, the four epochs embody successive degeneration. The first epoch was characterized by the diffusion of the doctrine of emanation, which included the idea of the immortality of the soul in the form of belief in metempsychosis, or transmigration of souls. Schlegel incorporated the caste system into metempsychosis by interpreting it as an earthly purgatory that purifies the soul over multiple lifetimes; in doing so, he assigned the Hindu law codes – above all, The Laws of Manu – to the earliest period of Oriental thought.4 The second epoch arose when the doctrine of emanation eventually degenerated into astrology and a materialist conception of nature. The third epoch, characterized by the elaboration of the d ­ octrine of the two principles of good and evil, yielded to the fourth when d ­ ualism degenerated in turn into pantheism.5 In presenting pantheism, which he described as intellectually false, morally dangerous, and spiritually  2 Marchand, German Orientalism, 59.  3 O’Meara, Romantic Idealism, 11 (quotation), 121, 123. Numerous critics have argued that Schlegel’s theology was never entirely orthodox on certain points. See Riasanovsky, Emergence of Romanticism, 76.  4 Schlegel, On the Language and Wisdom, 472; Arvidsson, Aryan Idols, 39–40.  5 Schlegel, On the Language and Wisdom, 495; see also 490.

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fatal, as the terminus of Indian speculative thought, Schlegel definitively renounced the Frühromantik dream that the wisdom of India would offer Europe a positive unity; instead, he now declared, the wisdom of India had culminated in nihilism.6 The “epochs of the Oriental mind” served Schlegel as more than a contingent sequence. He identified the passage from emanation through materialism and dualism to pantheism as a fixed succession that o ­ perates as a law of culture; that is, the speculative thought of all ancient peoples passed through the same four epochs of degeneration. This being so, the fourfold schema provided Schlegel with a meta-historical framework applicable to any and all mythological systems. Every Asian and European mythology, he asserted, may be rendered intelligible by assigning its elements to their proper place in the regular succession of the four epochs.7 This meta-historical framework is closely related to Schlegel’s historical model of criticism. By the late 1790s, Schlegel had developed a concept of historical criticism that he opposed to conventional ­criticism according to aesthetic rules in art and to Kantian criticism in philosophy. In place of these negative forms of criticism, as he dubbed them, Schlegel now argued that a work of art or philosophical system derives its meaning from its place in the ongoing, developing idea of art or philosophy and cannot be properly understood in isolation or against some absolute standard of beauty or logic.8 On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians extended the distinction between historical and negative criticism from art and philosophy to the history of religions by contrasting scholars who contemplate the inner life of mythological systems with those whom Schlegel dismissed as “ordinary letter-learned critics” who study merely their external forms.9 Sound mythography, for Schlegel, is a form of historical criticism that grasps the inner life of mythological systems by ordering their elements in relation to the principle of the regular ­succession of doctrines.

 6 O’Meara, Romantic Idealism, 122; Arvidsson, Aryan Idols, 39; Park, “Catholic Apologist,” 97.  7 Schlegel, On the Language and Wisdom, 497–8.  8 Berman, Experience of the Foreign, 70, 122–3; Millán-Zaibert, Friedrich Schlegel, 122–31.  9 Schlegel, On the Language and Wisdom, 499.

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Schlegel’s fourfold sequence of the epochs of the Oriental mind indexes, as we have seen, a process of degeneration. What forces drove this process? Schlegel approached his answer through another ­question: what explains the presence in Indian and other Oriental mythologies of clear knowledge of the true God and other spiritual truths combined with gross errors and arbitrary fictions? He rejected out of hand the ­possibility that this co-existence may be explained by the trope of the progressive development of the human mind from an initial state of ignorance and irrationality up to the highest development of the soul and intelligence. The sophisticated doctrine of emanation, he said, which historical study shows to belong to the earliest epoch of Indian speculative thought, is inconceivable as the product of primordial stupidity, whereas it may easily be explained as originating in a corruption of revealed truth. In place, then, of the idea of progressive ­development, Schlegel proposed – on the basis, he said, of historical evidence alone – the alternative notion of degeneration from an original revelation, or “ur-revelation” (Uroffenbarung), which he described as a glance into the mysterious depth of its own existence granted by God to newly created humankind.10 Schlegel’s question had now been reformulated to ask why the original revelation did not remain pristine. Why did it suffer corruption, degenerating first into the doctrine of emanation and then into the doctrines of the later epochs? His answer placed the blame squarely on human reason: the human mind distorted the original revelation when it attempted to grasp it by means of its rational faculty. The doctrine of emanation represents the first corruption of the original revelation by reason; subsequent corruptions drove the degenerative process onward until in pantheism – the first ever system entirely based on human reason – the last gleam of the original revelation was extinguished.11 This last point is one of the keys to On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians as a critique of European modernity. Pantheism, as pure rationalism, marks the transition from Oriental to European philosophy.12 The dominant strains of modern philosophy – whether Enlightenment

10 Ibid., 471–3. 11 Ibid., 490. See also Tzoref-Ashkenazi, “Nationalist Aspect,” 111. 12 Schlegel, On the Language and Wisdom, 490.

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rationalism, utilitarianism, Kantian rationalism, or some forms of German idealism – represented for Schlegel the poisoned fruit of the original Indian loss of contact with the primitive revelation. Europe now, like India long ago, faced the threat of nihilism.13

Eckstein’s Orientalist Traditionalism Eckstein’s Orientalist Traditionalism bears Schlegel’s imprint; indeed, it is tempting to speculate that Eckstein immersed himself in the Orientalist textual corpus in direct response to Schlegel’s appeal in On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians for “a critical work drawn from the peculiar Indian records yet existing of the primitive history of the world.”14 In any case, Schlegel is far and away the most cited authority in Le Catholique,15 to the extent that Eckstein found it necessary to defend himself from having pillaged his works.16 Eckstein’s key ­inheritances from Schlegel include the meta-historical framework in which the four “epochs of the Oriental mind” embody successive stages 13 Tzoref-Ashkenazi, “Nationalist Aspect,” 111; Marchand, German Orientalism, 63; Park, “Catholic Apologist,” 84. 14 Schlegel, On the Language and Wisdom, 513. 15 Eckstein often referred to the Schlegel brothers without any attempt to distinguish between the thought of Friedrich and August Wilhelm. Not having realized the extent to which the intellectual trajectories of the brothers had diverged over the years, he seems to have assumed that their ideas were interchangeable. A rude awakening on this point occurred in 1827 when he referred to August Wilhelm as “half-Catholic.” Eckstein, “De l’état actuel de la France [part 3],” 607. August Wilhelm responded ­publicly, in Berichtung einiger Missdeutungen (Correction of Some Misunderstandings) (1828), affirming both his Protestantism as well as the gulf that now existed between the brothers. See Herling, German Gita, 198–9. In his counter-response, Eckstein acknowledged this declaration but insisted that, like other great minds of the day, August Wilhelm was now in the midst of an intellectual struggle whose direction was toward Catholicism even if he never followed the path of conversion to its end. A few years later, Eckstein reverted to claiming that August Wilhelm was Catholic. Eckstein, “Réponse à M. A.G. [Auguste Guillaume] de Schlegel,” 349, 352; Eckstein, “De la France, dans ses ­rapports,” 240. 16 Eckstein, “De la religion ... tome III,” 74. Eckstein did distance himself from Schlegel at times in Le Catholique but only mildly and, more importantly, only from the Frühromantik Schlegel. In 1835 and again in 1854, after Le Catholique had ceased ­publishing, Eckstein chastised late-period Schlegel for falling too much under the influence of Illuminism. See Eckstein, “De la France, dans ses rapports,” 187; and Eckstein, “Essai d’une philosophie de l’histoire,” 96–104.

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of degeneration from an original revelation; his historical model of criticism, which grasps the inner life of mythological systems by ­ordering their elements in relation to the historical principle of the regular ­succession of doctrines; and the strategic use of Orientalism as a means of undermining a false conception of modernity by linking modern European philosophy and social theory to the pantheism and materialism into which Indian speculative thought ultimately degenerated when it cut itself off from the primitive revelation. These elements are integral to the history of religions through which Eckstein theorized his ­conceptualization of religion. Catholicism before Catholicism Eckstein treated the terms “faith,” “revelation,” “primitive science,” and “tradition” as interchangeable designations for the truths primitively revealed to earliest humankind17 – which, as noted in the previous chapter, included the idea of God and the divine creation of spiritual entities, human beings, and the natural world; the rebellion of the evil principle against the divine order and the corruption of human nature; and the promise of a mediator who is at once an expiatory victim and a saviour who will rehabilitate fallen and corrupted humankind. For Eckstein, these truths constituted, along with prophecies of the end of the world, what he called “the original religion of the human race.”18 More often, however, Eckstein referred to this original religion as either natural religion or patriarchal religion, on the grounds that the book of nature had served the forefathers of the various ancient peoples – the patriarchs – as scriptures in which they studied the mysteries of the creation of which they were a part.19 Natural – or patriarchal – religion, then, in Eckstein’s conceptualization, is not deism or rational morality but the sum of the positive dogmas, mysteries, and rituals that express the content of the primitive revelation. Eckstein distinguished Christianity from the natural or patriarchal revelation in that it not only confirms and restores but also fulfills the divine promise that the human race will be delivered from its fall by the expiatory sacrifice of the

17 Eckstein, “Introduction à la philosophie,” 335. 18 Eckstein, “De la religion ... volume 1er,” 87–8 (quotation at 88). 19 Eckstein, “De la nature des élémens,” 331.

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Messiah.20 Nevertheless, he explicitly stated that the Catholic doctrines contained in the primitive revelation were transmitted by the patriarchs to the forefathers of the various ancient peoples. Catholicism, then, was for Eckstein eternally revealed and as old as the world.21 Conversely, he did not scruple to identify the truths of natural religion preserved in the traditions of ancient peoples as, variously, “the Catholicism before Catholicism,” “anterior Christianity,” “primitive Catholicism,” “primordial Catholicism,” and “the Catholicism of the religion of nature.”22 The status that Eckstein granted to the Old Testament is a corollary of his conception of Catholicism before Catholicism. He understood it not as a special revelation of the heavenly truth denied to the rest of humankind but as a gift to the Hebrew people for the purpose of ­separating them from other peoples so that the Saviour of the human race might be born from a people unsullied by idolatry. Similarly, the Mosaic law, which completed the isolation of the Hebrew people, ­symbolically reflects the primitively revealed truths and so finds ­analogues among many ancient nations.23 Nevertheless, however unorthodox Eckstein’s insistence that revelation was not limited to the Hebrews might have been, he yielded to no pious contemporary in his contempt for biblical criticism. Eckstein had boarded for a time as a youth with a Lutheran pastor who attempted to teach him the principles of biblical criticism. This well-meaning man, he recalled, treating the Bible as a human-authored book of history, poetry, and morality, explained the Old Testament as the work of an age of barbarism and ignorance and d ­ ismissed the New Testament’s tales about a miracleworking Man-God as fables typical of its time and place. Young Eckstein had been appalled: “This provoked a crisis: my heart froze inside me, my soul drew back in horror. Where would I find truth? I wanted reality, not allegory.”24

20 Eckstein, “Des confesseurs des empereurs,” 133. 21 Eckstein, “Arnauld de Bresse,” 508; Eckstein, “Des confesseurs des empereurs,” 133. 22 These terms are used in, respectively, Eckstein, “Le directeur du Catholique,” 558; Eckstein, “Sur les missions protestantes,” 171–2; Eckstein, “De la fin dont on menace le Christianisme,” 183; Eckstein, “De l’état actuel de la France [part 4],” 139; and Eckstein, “Philosophie du Catholicisme [part 1],” 435. 23 Eckstein, “De l’état actuel de la France [part 4],” 132–4. 24 Eckstein, De l’Espagne, 297–300.

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Eckstein regarded biblical criticism as rooted in rationalist attacks on the truth of revelation in general and on the truth of the Mosaic cosmogony and chronology in particular.25 He was confident, however, that such attacks were being successfully countered by a greater understanding of Antiquity. Sixty years ago, he said, when people had laughed out loud at the biblical chronology, the church was grateful for any scrap of historical or geological evidence supporting some detail of Moses’s narrative, but now Orientalist scholarship had discovered in the traditions of India, China, Egypt, and elsewhere the primitive ­cosmogonies that confirm Genesis as the true history of the human race and strengthen Christian truth. 26 Eckstein’s concept of a Catholicism before Catholicism allowed him to transform the data of comparative religion from a weapon wielded against Christianity by unbelievers into an apologetic resource. And although this strategy was common to the Catholic Traditionalists as a whole,27 Eckstein extended and strengthened it by incorporating Orientalist scholarship. The apparent rejection, however, of an absolute gap between the true religion and false religions brought about by Eckstein’s ­modification of traditional theological understandings of revelation and paganism troubled some orthodox Catholics. The diplomat and philosopher Nicolas Massias, representing this constituency, published three letters to Eckstein contesting various aspects of the views on ancient religion set out in early numbers of Le Catholique, the third of which drew attention to the dangers of what he called his Indo-Christian Catholicism.28 Liberals, too, would accuse Eckstein of purveying an Indo-Christianity, although for them the issue was the reactionary program that it ­represented (see chapter 18). That the charge of “Indo-Christianity” 25 On the connections linking the higher criticism of the Bible to Orientalism at Protestant German universities, see Marchand, German Orientalism, 57–8, 76. 26 It might seem that the enormous age of the world implied by the immense cycles of time posited most notably in Indian religion and philosophy would make such a reconciliation impossible. But Schlegel, and Eckstein after him, based on the widely accepted authority of William Jones, concurred that properly interpreted the Indian evidence confirms and independently corroborates the biblical narrative. On Jones’s Mosaic ethnology as a rational defence of the biblical account of human history ­constructed out of the materials collected by Orientalist scholarship, see Trautmann, Aryans and British India, 40–2, 57–9, 74. 27 Vadé, L’enchantement littéraire, 120. 28 Massias, Troisième lettre.

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was levelled against Eckstein by both orthodox Catholics and Liberals underscores the complexity of his Traditionalism in relation to the intellectual and socio-political life of post-revolutionary France. Eckstein responded in Le Catholique that the charge of IndoChristianity, from whichever camp, was based on a misunderstanding of his thought. It was simply not the case, he said, that the idolatry of the Brahmins was in any way confused with Christianity in his demonstration that a corrupted version of the primitive revelation had been preserved in India. His critics, ignorant of historical criticism, had failed to grasp the meta-historical framework that assigns each mythological system to its proper place.29 The historical criticism of mythologies, moreover, re-establishes on a logical level the sharp distinction between Christianity and paganism, which the Traditionalist modification of the concepts of revelation and paganism appeared to blur. Thus Christianity, Eckstein said, both as the fulfillment of the human destinies predicted for the human race at the moment of its fall and as the religion primitively revealed, subsumes all truth into itself. Pagan religions, on the contrary, are only transient forms, and the truth that they contain is alien to them because it derives from the primitive revelation and therefore belongs by right to Christianity, whereas what truly belongs to paganism are the errors in doctrine and worship that corrupted the revealed truths. This being so, Eckstein protested, it was insane to accuse him of Indo-Christianity when he was simply being a historian.30 Paganism as a Corruption of Primitive Revelation The relationship between the Catholicism before Catholicism and the religious systems of the ancient world – paganism – received considerable attention in Le Catholique. Eckstein offered multiple definitions of paganism: it is primitive revelation altered, a truth obscured and halfeffaced, a powerful symbol that leaves the heart cold and empty but seizes the imagination, a double corruption, and a corrupted and degenerated Catholicism soiled by the doctrine of evil and altered by

29 Eckstein, “Le directeur du Catholique,” 563–4. 30 Eckstein, “De la religion ... volume 1er,” 49; Eckstein, “De la religion ... tome III,” 97.

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human passions.31 Paganism, in short, represented for Eckstein a degeneration of the Catholicism before Catholicism, a corruption of the primitively revealed truths under often hideous forms.32 The question of how paganism came into existence is for Eckstein the question of how the natural or patriarchal religion became ­corrupted. His answer is that it came about through a two-stage h ­ istorical process of alteration and profanation. The first stage was the ­degeneration of the primitive revelation into the cosmology and poetry of early humankind. Although this “Genesis as the pagans made it” distorted the natural religion of the patriarchs, it nevertheless transmitted to posterity something of the content of the primitive revelation.33 To that point, then, the primitive revelation had been altered but not, Eckstein said, profaned. This further step was taken with the introduction of evil and impiety into paganism as a result of the second stage in the corruption of the primitive revelation. Early humankind, according to Eckstein, received not one but two revelations: the first was the ­primitive revelation communicated by God, and the second was “the revelation of the evil principle, son of pride, in revolt against the heavens, father of chaos,” which “irrupted into the order of creation, where it spoiled everything, overthrew everything, and corrupted the human mind.”34 Paganism thus contains both an altered version of Genesis and an anti-Genesis; it is a corrupted version of the primitive revelation mixed together with a religion of hell whose obscene and bloody ­iniquities, Eckstein said, reveal to us the mysteries of the abyss.35 The various pagan religions embody, for Eckstein, this twofold process of alteration and profanation. First, the natural or patriarchal religion was altered by the vices and follies, the vivid imagination, and the ­reasonings of ancient peoples. The diversity of pagan beliefs is immense, Eckstein said, because human thought is itself immense, but this 31 Eckstein, “Des confesseurs des empereurs,” 133; Eckstein, “De la nature des élémens,” 332; Eckstein, “Du rôle que joue le soleil,” 511; Eckstein, “De la religion ... tome III,” 82. 32 Eckstein, “Philosophie du Catholicisme [part 1],” 435; Eckstein, “De l’état actuel de la France [part 4],” 139. 33 Eckstein, “‘De la religion ... tome III,” 82; Eckstein, “Le directeur du Catholique,” 558–9 (quotation at 559). 34 Eckstein, “Philosophie du Catholicisme [part 1],” 401; Eckstein, “Le directeur du Catholique,” 560; Eckstein, “De la religion ... volume 1er,” 87 (quotation). 35 Eckstein, “De la religion ... tome III,” 82.

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diversity consists in the form and objects of worship, not in the foundations of the doctrines themselves.36 This being so, not only, he asserted, are the traditions of the most ancient peoples our best guides to the content of primitive revelation, but primitive revelation also, and inversely, provides the criterion for the correct interpretation of the traditions themselves.37 For Eckstein, then, the primitive traditions are not merely evidence for what long-ago peoples believed but also ­testimony to the content of the primitive revelation. Any departures from primitive revelation – that is, any deviations from the truths f­ ulfilled in Christianity – are evidence of the corruption of tradition. Eckstein, however, distinguished idolatry from mere alteration. Idolatry – the true crime of the first days of the world – was a guilty deviation from the primitive revelation by which the primitively revealed truths were not only altered but also profaned. The process of profanation reached its extremity in a spirit of materialism and sectarianism, or what Eckstein called the Protestant principle in paganism. Nevertheless, he cautioned, the Protestant principle, which often hides itself in the folds of paganism, must not be confused with degenerated Catholicism because, even in its errors, corrupted Catholicism offers grandeur and majesty.38 Thus pagan religions contain, hidden under the veil of symbols, disfigured truths mixed with greater errors. Even the most idolatrous forms of paganism, Eckstein assured his readers, retain traces of the primitive revelation. Properly speaking, then, there are no false religions, only religions that have deviated from the truth but in which truth nevertheless subsists. The endurance of paganism proved for Eckstein that it preserved, despite itself, something of Catholicism, although error continued to slowly and irrevocably undermine it.39 36 Eckstein, “Cours de philosophie,” 350–1; Eckstein, “Lettres sur l’histoire de France,” 64–5. 37 Eckstein, “De l’histoire [part 1],” 174. 38 Eckstein, “De l’état actuel de la France [part 4],” 132, 139–41. 39 Eckstein, “De la religion ... volume 1er,” 30–1; Eckstein, “Philosophie du Catholicisme [part 1],” 433. Paralleling his conception of pagan mythology as a corruption of the primitive revelation was Eckstein’s contention, while discussing depictions of multi-limbed Hindu deities, that paganism similarly corrupted humankind’s innate ­aesthetic judgment. The sculptors of ancient India, he observed, had been as skilled as the Greeks in carving graceful human forms, but the dictates of their mythology ­compelled them to deform their representations of gods and goddesses to the point of prodigious monstrosity. Eckstein, “Le Brahmane infortuné,” 65.

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Eckstein envisionsed the corruption of the patriarchal religion as a cumulative process, such that the older a tradition is, the closer to the source it will be and the less corruption it will have suffered. He accordingly regarded the truths of primitive revelation, so disfigured by ­centuries of idolatry, as remaining discernible in the traditions of ancient peoples – particularly those of Asia – on the grounds that they were closest to the cradle of the human race. And it is the religious and philosophical traditions of India, Eckstein thought, that constitute the archetypal expression of paganism’s internal development, which is at once “the metamorphoses that the idea of God has undergone in the heart, thought, and imagination of man” and “the principal milestones of the road that error has travelled.”40 Eckstein’s schema of the internal development of paganism corresponds to Schlegel’s “epochs of the Oriental mind” as a meta-historical framework. But Eckstein’s history of paganism is complicated by the fact that he both modified Schlegel’s fourfold meta-historical framework and combined it with a ternary structure of historical eras and their respective epistemological signatures. In some places in Le Catholique, then, Eckstein rehearsed Schlegel’s account of the degeneration of paganism, beginning with the doctrine of emanation and passing through materialism and dualism on the way to its terminus in pantheism.41 However, corresponding to his idea that early humankind had received two revelations, Eckstein posited two forms of pantheism and two forms of materialism: naive pantheism and materialism derived from the alteration of the primitive revelation into pagan cosmology and poetry, whereas idolatrous and immoral pantheism and materialism are the fruit of the anti-Genesis based on the revelation of the evil principle.42 In other places, moreover, Eckstein began to develop (albeit in fragmentary form) an alternative meta-historical framework that subsumes the history of paganism into a three-stage universal history. Thus early humans passed from the patriarchal age through the ­sacerdotal age to the historical age, and their respective epistemological

40 Eckstein, “Gita Govinda,” 346; Eckstein, “Philosophie du Catholicisme [part 1],” 399 (quotation). 41 Eckstein, “De l’histoire [part 2],” 138; Eckstein, “Philosophie du Catholicisme [part 1],” 406. 42 Eckstein, “Du rôle que joue le soleil,” 511–12; Eckstein, “De la philosophie,” 416.

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signatures of the Word (or primitive revelation), the symbol, and reason mark the stages of the degeneration of paganism, whereas the succeeding Christian era represents the restoration and fulfillment of the word. According to this tripartite framework, earliest humankind in the patriarchal era spoke a single language and shared a single theocratic order in the form of the patriarchal constitution of the family, which itself symbolized the primitively revealed cosmogony received by Adam and transmitted to the patriarchs. In those remote times, the primitive revelation acted immediately on human thought, such that the Word dominated symbols. The patriarchal era yielded to the sacerdotal era when the social order divided into castes, leading to the emergence of independent hierarchical priesthoods – which, Eckstein thought, had not existed in the primitive theocracy of the patriarchal era because its principle did not reside in mediation by sacrifice. Dominated by priestly legislation,43 the sacerdotal or legislative era was marked by two characteristics: first, the degeneration of the speculative thought of the patriarchal era into a poetic naturalism that retained only a shadowy understanding of the primitively revealed truths; and second, the dispersal of humankind into multiple societies and languages. Each people retained an image of the preceding order of things that was subject to local variations; religions, in particular, proliferated and became further corrupted as the doctrines of the natural and universal religion of the patriarchal age were refracted through a wide variety of local customs, social practices, and external symbols.44 Symbols, in fact, in what Eckstein identified as the critical religious development of the sacerdotal era, gradually broke free from domination by the Word and conquered human minds. In the historical era, various forms of civil government had succeeded the regime of castes – none of them, Eckstein said, absolutely good or absolutely bad – until eventually the social order came to be placed on an entirely civil and rational foundation. Over the course of this third and final era of ancient paganism, the state

43 Eckstein identified The Laws of Manu as containing a core of very old material that reflects the ideas of the primitive centuries, albeit overlain by traces of an advanced material civilization, and he declared that it therefore represents the c­ onstitutive code of the human race. Eckstein, “De l’histoire [part 1],” 466–7. 44 Eckstein, “De la théocratie primitive,” 236–7; Eckstein, “De l’histoire [part 1],” 460–1, 464, 482; Eckstein, “De la religion ... volume 2me,” 233–4.

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gradually detached itself from religion, morality became isolated from doctrine, mythology was cut off from its source, and the august ­priesthoods of the sacerdotal era degenerated into doctrinally ignorant and ritually slipshod castes whose sole concern was to retain their authority over the mass of the people. Under these conditions, the symbolism of the religio-social order gradually ceased to be felt and understood, such that over the course of the historical era, what had been divine eventually became purely human, and theocracy, having lost its true meaning, was reduced to an obsolete form.45 The steady degeneration of paganism, in Eckstein’s account, was periodically interrupted by attempts to return to its patriarchal sources. He interpreted Siddhartha, Laozi (or Lao Tzu), and Pythagoras as ­having attempted such reformations of pagan doctrines and institutions, although they had introduced new errors as well. Whereas Buddhism, 46 he said, had enjoyed immense success in the East, Pythagoreanism had ultimately failed in the West, such that individual reason became the measure of all things both in cosmology, where atomism replaced the patriarchal cosmos, and in legislation, where constitutions based on rational principles replaced the theocratic social order. From time to time, Eckstein allowed, something of the ancient spirit reappeared under the form of the mysteries, but these institutions were highly ­corrupted in their doctrines and morals. Paganism, Eckstein concluded, had ended its development in the grip of a crushing fatalism, from which only the coming of Christianity could free humankind.47

45 Eckstein, “De la religion ... volume 1er,” 32; Eckstein, “De l’histoire [part 1],” 482; Eckstein, “Philosophie du Catholicisme [part 1],” 438–9; Eckstein, “De la théo­ cratie primitive,” 236–7. 46 Eckstein derived his knowledge of Buddhism from the works of Julius Heinrich Klaproth and above all Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat. See Eckstein, “De la nature des élémens,” 346; and Eckstein, “De l’Asie,” 340. On eighteenth- and early-nineteenthcentury European knowledge of Buddhism, see App, Birth of Orientalism. A sound, textually based understanding of Buddhism, achieved by above all Eugène Burnouf, came about only in the 1830s and 1840s. See Douailler, Droit, and Vermeren, eds, Philosophie, France, 382–3. 47 Eckstein, “Philosophie du Catholicisme [part 1],” 439, 441–2.

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Mythography Eckstein sharply criticized other mythographers for what he considered their false or inadequate methodologies. In discussing Eckstein’s mythography and his critiques of rival mythographers, we may ­appropriate, as a useful heuristic tool, his own tripartite framework of the Word, the symbol, and reason: Eckstein’s Traditionalist mythography corresponds to the Word; the mythographic school, whose leading representative was Friedrich Creuzer, corresponds to the symbol; and philosophe and Idéologue mythography correspond to reason. Eckstein’s Mythography Eckstein defined a myth as a narrative of a fact under symbolic form; as such, myth is neither invented nor fantastic but instead rests on something real, either physical things in the order of nature or moral ideas in the order of intelligences. In the system of primitive thought, Eckstein continued, mythological systems are collectively nothing less than the language by which the primitive human race reveals its entire thought to us.48 The would-be mythographer, however, faces formidable obstacles in seeking to decipher the language of myths: the complex and confused nature of paganism itself, the fragmented and chaotic state in which myths have been transmitted to us, and the false ­interpretations of mythology that emerged in Antiquity itself – albeit already distant from primitive times – among both the Greeks and the Church Fathers. The Greeks, ignorant of the true nature of myths and of the primitive ideas that they expressed, invented a factitious and deceitful mythography that both distorted their own myths and deceived ­posterity. The Church Fathers, for their part, had been struck by the similarities between paganism and Christianity, but whereas a learned elite among them acknowledged the primitive revelation, the majority attributed the similarities to the efforts of the Devil to counterfeit the divine works. Eckstein dismissed the demonic imposture explanation,

48 Eckstein [B. d’E.], “Religions de l’Antiquité ... Premier article,” 3.

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which still had support among many orthodox Catholics in Eckstein’s day, as dispensing with all reasoning and criticism.49 And here we come to Eckstein’s most important inheritance from Schlegel: historical criticism as the sole mythographic method capable of overcoming these obstacles and rendering the mythological ­systems of Antiquity intelligible.50 Like the master, Eckstein dismissed the ­conventional understanding of criticism as pedantic nitpicking over petty rules and advocated in its place a historical model of criticism that allows a synthetic grasp of the whole.51 Just as for Schlegel sound mythography orders mythemes by assigning them their appropriate place in his fourfold meta-historical framework, so too for Eckstein is the task of mythography to place mythemes in the overall schema of the internal development of paganism in such a way that they are ­neither haphazardly confused nor isolated from each other. 52 The ­ultimate goal of Eckstein’s mythography is to reconstruct the ­primordial ­traditions within paganism that represent the earliest ideas of h ­ umankind and thereby to recover the primitive revelation that acted ­immediately on earliest human thought. Consequently, his mythography is a regressive hermeneutic driven by the hope of reattaining, as far as humanly ­possible, the pristine Word that lies behind the symbols that mediate it. Eckstein regarded philology as an indispensable aid to the historical criticism of myths. Whereas the events of ancient empires, he observed, had been documented in conventional historical sources, the origins of peoples lay beyond the historical period in the primordial era, which had until recently been enveloped in deep darkness. Now, however, philology had begun to pierce the darkness that had hitherto obscured the thoughts and institutions of earliest humankind. Although ­philology would indeed become the master historical science of the ­nineteenth

49 Eckstein, “De l’état actuel de la France [part 4],” 134. On the elimination of the Devil as an explanation for the origin of paganism by eighteenth-century t­ hinkers, see Rubiés, “Theology, Ethnography,” 596. 50 Eckstein, “De la nature des élémens,” 332–3. 51 Eckstein, “Des journaux littéraires,” 427–8. See also Berthiot, Le baron d’Eckstein, 67–9. 52 Eckstein [B. d’E.], “Religions de l’Antiquité ... Premier article,” 4.

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century,53 Eckstein placed philology in the service of his Traditionalism. The primitive work of the human mind in developing and clothing ideas, he contended, is recoverable in the grammatical forms of ­languages. A universal language and a universal grammar – that is, a language of nature that Adam must have spoken – probably existed, he thought, and although this language of nature is no longer extant, the ruins of this language are discernable in the grammatical structures of ancient languages. Such languages, Eckstein said, contain not only words that emerged from the needs of physical life but also “thought words” (mots de la pensée), or words of a transcendental origin that ­symbolize spiritual truths. These thought words, Eckstein ­continued, formed the original philosophy of the human mind, which was nothing less than a revelation of divinity itself.54 True philology, then, is not a matter of what Eckstein dismissed as the analysis and c­ lassification of grammatical puerilities or the crude manipulation of etymologies; rather, it is a historical and philosophical science that clarifies the birth of peoples and their primitive formation by explicating the vestiges of symbolic wisdom preserved in ancient languages.55 Eckstein’s Schlegelian method distanced him from other Tradition­ alists in the matter of mythography. In particular, Eckstein dismissed Félicité de Lamennais’s mythographical erudition and methodology. The ­latter’s efforts – in the third and fourth volumes of Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de religion (1817–23) and subsequently – to comb through the records of Antiquity in search of evidence that the Christian truths were contained in the primitive beliefs of the human race added up, he thought, to little more than a collection of superficial facts and chance resemblances. Eckstein similarly criticized Lamennais for ­placing too much importance on the word tradition; tradition, he said, is a corollary of the truth but is not the truth itself, and the important thing when studying ancient religious and philosophical systems is to grasp the spirit of the whole rather than isolating facts and fugitive insights. It is interesting to note that these are, essentially, the same charges of isolating mythemes and neglecting the filiation of thought

53 Turner, Philology, x. 54 Eckstein, “De Gassendi [part 2],” 44; Eckstein, “Histoire des Gaulois,” 195–6. 55 Eckstein, “Des journaux littéraires,” 415–19; Eckstein, Sur les rapports entre l’Inde et l’Europe, 4.

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that Eckstein brought against rationalist mythographers (see below). Lamennais, Eckstein concluded, was in the end too much a priest and his Traditionalism too ecclesiastical. “Ecclesiastical” in Eckstein’s usage means narrow, superficial, and isolated, in the sense of failing to ­recognize the universal truths preserved in the cosmogonic and theocratic traditions of pagan societies. This judgment depended on Eckstein’s contrast between priest and theologian in light of historical criticism. A priest, he said, relies on external citations and proofs, whereas a theologian penetrates doctrine and lives in its spirit. The problem, of course, was that Lamennais lacked the training in historical criticism and philology that would have enabled him to assign the individual witnesses whom he cited to their proper place in the ­meta-historical framework governing the internal development of paganism, and so he was incapable of synthesizing the traditions of the human race and the universal revelation into a scientific and complete Catholic theory.56 Without saying it in so many words, Eckstein ­insinuated that Lamennais and the other Catholic Traditionalists had  failed to overcome fully the decadence of theology because they had not immersed themselves in Schlegel’s philosophy of history and h­istorical criticism. Eckstein’s Critique of the Symbolic School of Mythography Eckstein recognized that in many respects the mythographical approach practised by Friedrich Creuzer, along with that of allies like Joseph Görres, which Eckstein designated the symbolic school of mythography, paralleled his own: like him, these scholars were attempting to use criticism to decode the mythological language of the most distant Antiquity, to recover the primitive revelation, and ultimately to reveal the meaning of the universe and human existence, or in Eckstein’s words, “to explain in some manner the gigantic sphinx of nature and humankind.”57 However, although he respected Creuzer as a proponent of a synthetic approach to myth (and enjoyed a collegial meeting with him during Creuzer’s visit to Paris in 1826), Eckstein sharply

56 Eckstein, “De l’état actuel de la France [part 4],” 166–7; Eckstein, “Introduction à la philosophie,” 335–7. See also Eckstein, “Des journaux littéraires,” 416–17. 57 Eckstein, “Ma carrière politique et littéraire,” 337–8 (quotation at 338).

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distinguished his approach to myth from that of the symbolic school in general and from Creuzer’s in particular: “My doctrine is absolutely foreign to that of Creuzer, whose talent and knowledge I love and respect, but whose fundamental opinions I do not share.”58 The heart of Eckstein’s critique targeted three points of disagreement. First, there is the issue of Neoplatonism. Eckstein identified Neoplatonic philosophy as a travestied form of the Catholicism before Catholicism and noted that the Church Fathers, recognizing it as such, incorporated a purified form of it into Christianity as a specific instance of what Eckstein took to be the church’s general practice of regenerating and re-establishing the primitive truths by extricating them from pagan idolatry.59 All this aside, however, Eckstein rejected as unsupported by criticism the Neoplatonists’ view that the similarities between Christianity and the ancient beliefs could be attributed to plagiarism on the part of Jews and Christians. He then explicitly linked Creuzer to the Neoplatonists by emphasizing that the key point is that paganism is not the original Catholicism in its purity, “whatever the Neoplatonists may say with the learned interpretations of their eloquent disciple, Creuzer.”60 Eckstein identified Creuzer’s mythographic framework, with its p­assage from unity to multiplicity and the attempt at return to unity, as Neoplatonic, and he observed that recognizing Creuzer’s (unwitting) Neoplatonism is the key to evaluating his work.61 Bemoaning what he 58 Eckstein, “De la religion ... tome III,” 82. The publication in 1825 of the first volume of Joseph-Daniel Guigniaut’s translation of Creuzer’s Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, besonders der Griechen (Symbolism and Mythology of the Ancient Peoples, Particularly the Greek) (1810–12, revised edition 1819–21) – which Eckstein respected (Eckstein, “Le directeur du Catholique,” 561) – served Eckstein as the occasion for a six-part article in Le Drapeau blanc. Only the fifth article focuses fully on Creuzer; the others set out Eckstein’s understanding of myth and discuss erroneous interpretations of myth from the Greeks to his own day. Much of the content of these articles ­reappeared in Le Catholique. 59 Eckstein, “De l’état actuel de la France [part 4],” 134; Eckstein, “Des confesseurs des empereurs,” 134. This is a Traditionalist version of the accommodationism practised by Jesuit missionaries to China and India, whom Eckstein greatly admired and whose efforts he contrasted with Protestant missionary practices. See Eckstein, “Sur les missions protestantes.” 60 Eckstein, “De l’état actuel de la France [part 4],” 134–5. 61 Ibid., 135; Eckstein [B. d’E.], “Religions de l’Antiquité ... Deuxième article,” 4. Eckstein discussed the strengths and weaknesses of the Neoplatonic understanding of mythology in “Religions de l’Antiquité ... Troisième article.”

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claimed was a persistent misunderstanding, namely the conclusion that because he had studied with Creuzer at Heidelberg, he shared Creuzer’s Neoplatonic interpretation of myth, Eckstein rejected the claims that truth is found in its essence within all religions and that paganism is the original Catholicism in its purity because he saw in these claims the Neoplatonic version of a widespread error of the present age: the idea that all religions should be tolerated because they embody the same truth. In Eckstein’s view, and this is a standard Traditionalist theme, tolerance is equivalent to indifference toward religion.62 Eckstein’s second criticism of Creuzer is that he had misunderstood the nature of paganism by failing to recognize that it represents a double corruption of the primitive revelation. Creuzer, that is, did not distinguish between what is pure in pagan mythology (because it derives from the primitive revelation, albeit in distorted form) and what is impure (because it derives from the revelation of the mysteries of hell by the evil principle). He noted in passing that if Creuzer had recognized the erotic symbols and rituals of paganism as belonging to the obscene iniquities revealed by the evil principle instead of interpreting them as profound symbols, he would not have given Johann Heinrich Voss the opening for attack that he exploited so damagingly in his twovolume Antisymbolik (1824–26).63 Eckstein’s final point of disagreement is that he considered Creuzer, and by extension the entire symbolic approach to myth, to be insufficiently critical in the treatment of sources. In declaring that they “have not always followed the line of a healthy criticism” and “have sometimes received too easily or have confused suspect witnesses, without considering the genius of the epoch,”64 Eckstein meant that symbolic ­mythographers lacked the meta-historical framework for the internal development of paganism that alone can render pagan mythology intelligible. Absent this framework, Creuzer in particular was unable to separate his criticism from the mythologies that it purports to ­elucidate, with the dual consequence that he had gotten lost among

62 Eckstein, “Le directeur du Catholique,” 561–2; Eckstein, “Aperçu des écoles littéraires,” 169. 63 Eckstein, “De la religion ... tome III,” 82; Eckstein [B. d’E.], “Religions de l’Antiquité ... Cinquième article,” 4. 64 Eckstein, “De la religion ... volume 1er,” 78.

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the primitive ideas and had abandoned disciplined criticism for the ardour of his imagination. The mark of the symbolic approach to myth, Eckstein concluded, is confusion and losing oneself among ideas.65 Eckstein’s Critique of Philosophe and Idéologue Mythography For Eckstein, German rationalist mythographers  – principally ­represented by Christian Gottlob Heyne and his school – whose scholarship he for the most part respected while opposing their approach to myth,66 were distinct from the French, for whom he had nothing but contempt. Eckstein’s attitude toward Heyne was complicated: he praised Heyne for correctly treating myths under a universal point of view and for recognizing their symbolic nature, but he judged that Heyne’s immense erudition was undermined by false philosophical principles. Heyne argued – famously in his day – that resemblances between the fetishism of sub-Saharan Africa and the animal worship of ancient Egypt proved that the earliest religion of humankind was a savage fetishism. Eckstein countered that because Heyne, as a Latinist, had never studied African religion, his theory was based on superficial observation and a misunderstanding of the nature of fetishism. A proper understanding of “the astonishing analogies between these brutal notions and the most subtle opinions of the most refined sects in their systems of theology and universal cosmogony,” he said, showed that fetishism could not possibly have been the earliest religion of humankind but was instead the debris of a massively degenerated and dimly recalled anterior high religion.67 Eckstein’s critique of Heyne’s thesis was a particular application of his strategy against all mythographies that were predicated on a theory of the progressive development of the human mind: the latest historical and philological evidence, he insisted time and again, demonstrated

65 Ibid., 78; Eckstein [B. d’E.], “Religions de l’Antiquité ... Cinquième article,” 4; Eckstein [B. d’E.], “Religions de l’antiquité ... Deuxième article,” 4; Eckstein [B. d’E.], “Religions de l’Antiquité ... Premier article,” 4. 66 On Heyne and his school, see Williamson, Longing for Myth. Eckstein wrote “Heine” for “Heyne,” but one must not confuse Heyne with Heinrich Heine, with whom Eckstein crossed swords in the 1830s. See chapter 18 herein and Eckstein, “De la France, dans ses rapports.” 67 Eckstein, “De la religion ... tome III,” 59, 63 (quotation).

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that humankind’s earliest beliefs were not crude products of ignorant or irrational minds but profound religious truths and therefore that the available evidence supported the hypothesis of primitive ­revelation.68 Eckstein similarly dismissed the concept of progressive revelation that served as the foundation for the German theological Enlightenment. He observed that what Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, whom Eckstein called the most beautiful blossom in the garland of Protestantism (not a compliment!), and his system truly demonstrated was the evaporation of modern Protestantism into a vain and vague religiosity in the face of new philosophically established knowledge.69 Eckstein singled out Voss among Heyne’s many disciples for the greatest opprobrium, characterizing him as a terrible man whose knowledge of Homer was sound but who was otherwise completely ignorant in all matters of religion and philosophy.70 The explanation for Eckstein’s immoderate language is that Voss, openly rationalist and barely ­dissembling his materialism, not only championed the hypothesis of savagery as the most ancient state of humankind but further, unlike Heyne, both isolated Greece from the Orient and denied that ­humankind had received any sort of divine revelation whatsoever. Eckstein attributed these egregious errors to Voss’s wilful refusal to recognize that the most ancient monuments of the human mind unanimously testify to a ­primitive revelation and to humankind’s celestial origin, a refusal ­motivated, in turn, by his anti-Christian animus: among rationalists, he explained, hatred of the Orient as the cradle of religions and as the homeland of dogmas and mysteries followed from their hatred of Catholic faith in Christ.71 French philosophe and Idéologue mythographers, to Eckstein’s mind, shared all of the rationalist and materialist errors of the Germans without the depth of scholarship possessed by the best of them. He was particularly exercised by their invocation of priestly imposture as an alternative or complement to the theory that religion originated as a

68 Eckstein, “De la religion ... volume 1er,” 36–7; Eckstein, “Histoire des Gaulois,” 182. 69 Eckstein, “De la religion ... tome III,” 63–4; Eckstein, “Sur les biens du clergé,” 140–1. 70 Eckstein, “De la religion ... volume 2me,” 213. 71 Eckstein [B. d’E.], “Religions de l’Antiquité ... Sixième et dernier article,” 3; Eckstein [B. d’E.], “Religions de l’antiquité ... Cinquième article,” 4.

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crude product of early human minds. Explicitly linking eighteenthcentury and Idéologue mythography, Eckstein countered what he called this “dreadful system of Voltaire and Volney” by arguing – on the ­authority of the Traditionalist article of faith that falsehood is a spirit of destruction and therefore cannot create anything that endures – that priestly imposture could not in principle have produced the religious doctrines and the social institutions of paganism.72 More broadly, Eckstein condemned the rationalism and materialism of philosophes and Idéologues, which substitute individual human reason and chance for the guiding influence of divine reason. Their errors had culminated for Eckstein in Constantin-François Volney’s La loi naturelle, ou Catéchisme du citoyen français (1793). Both the man and the work rendered Eckstein almost apoplectic: the former he described as resembling someone who had overheard something without understanding it and the latter as perhaps the most impious and immoral work ever written.73 Eckstein had surprisingly little to say about Volney’s Les ruines, ou Méditations sur les révolutions des empires (1791). His prime exemplar of a French mythography constructed on rationalist and materialist ­prejudices instead of the ancient evidence was Charles-François Dupuis’s Origine de tous les cultes, ou Religion universelle (1795). Eckstein dismissed the enormous age for the world posited by Dupuis as part of his i­ mpious attack on the biblical chronology, assuring his readers that Dupuis’s error in exaggerating the age of the world had been proven by the recent demonstration that the zodiac of Denderah is not nearly as old as some had claimed.74 More importantly, the correct dating of the zodiac was further evidence that scientific knowledge of the universe, which according to Dupuis’s theory was the basis of all ancient religions, came only much later. The true primitive religion, Eckstein said, ­contemplated God in the midst of nature, and its cosmology was not a developed science but a religious belief in which natural phenomena served not as objects of scientific knowledge but as symbols of spiritual truths. That being so, Dupuis’s identification of mythic heroes and divine incarnations as planetary or elemental forces completely 72 Eckstein, “De la religion ... volume 1er,” 30. 73 Eckstein, “Du présent et de l’avenir,” 148–9, 275; Eckstein, “De Gassendi [part 2],” 41. 74 Eckstein [B. d’E.], “Religions de l’Antiquité ... Quatrième article,” 4; Eckstein, “Du présent et de l’avenir,” 282–3.

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misunderstood the ancient doctrines. In ancient India, to take an archetypical example for Eckstein, the sun was not worshipped but instead symbolized the pure spiritual logos, or divine reason.75 Eckstein characterized rationalist and materialist mythography, across whatever variants individual theorists may introduce, as an analytical approach that isolates a myth or mytheme from the whole and reduces it to a material or psychological explanation. Further, this analytical approach, by treating mythology as an aggregation of fortuitous and isolated formations, neglects the succession of thought and fails to grasp it organically and synthetically in its relation to the primitive revelation. The mark of the analytical approach to mythography, in short, is isolation and fleeing from ideas; its practitioners, Eckstein concluded, lacking any sense of historical criticism, misunderstood the nature of revelation and falsified the mythologies that they studied.76 Although Eckstein clearly favoured symbolic approaches to mythography over rationalist approaches, the former represented at best a halfway house because for Eckstein the primitive revelation had suffered a double alienation, first by symbols and then by reason. Restoration of the primitively revealed truth, conversely, required the reassertion of the dominance of the Word over symbols as well as over reason. We may, therefore, identify a chiliastic relationship between Eckstein’s history of religions and his critique of mythography. In Eckstein’s historical account of the degeneration of paganism, we recall, the primitive ­revelation received by the patriarchal forefathers of the pagan nations, corresponding to the Word, was first refracted into symbols and then corrupted by individual reason until its content was completely lost. Mythographically, rationalist approaches had cut modern people off from revelation, whereas the symbolic approach had restored spirituality and the quest for revealed truth but had lost itself in a forest of symbols. Only Eckstein’s Traditionalist mythography, corresponding to the ­coming of Christianity as the fulfillment of the primitive revelation after the long degeneration of paganism, had been able to recover, via ­philology and historical criticism, the Word – or the primitive revelation that lies behind the symbols of all ancient mythologies. 75 Eckstein, “De la théocratie primitive,” 234; Eckstein, “Du rôle que joue le soleil,” 534–5; Eckstein, “Philosophie du Catholicisme [part 2],” 281–2. 76 Eckstein, “De la religion ... volume 1er,” 77–8; Eckstein [B. d’E.], “Religions de l’Antiquité ... Premier article,” 4; Eckstein, “De la religion ... volume 2me,” 223.

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Eckstein’s Orientalist T r a d i t i o n a l i s m a s a C at h o l i c S c i e n c e Early-nineteenth-century Orientalism, in affirming the Orient as the cradle of humankind’s religious history, looked back to the “light from the East” paradigm of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Christian erudition as much as forward to the recognition that the intellectual, cultural, and religious heritage of Asia was independent of that of Europe and worthy of study in its own right.77 It was, as Suzanne Marchand observes of its German variants, “not a product of the ­modern, imperial age, but something much older, richer, and stranger, something enduringly shaped by the longing to hear God’s word, to understand the meaning of his revelation, and to propagate (Christian) truths as one understood them.”78 These characterizations apply in full to Eckstein. His Orientalist Traditionalism constituted an attempt to re-anchor European philosophy and society in religion by linking the intellectual and religious heritage of Europe to the primitive revelation that lay behind and remained discernible within Eastern religious traditions.79 The apparently recondite matter of the status of Oriental religions was in fact an element, and recognized as such by contemporaries, of the fraught question of the relationship between European culture and religion. Early-nineteenth-century Orientalism, then, was as much about post-revolutionary European self-definition as about Asian texts and traditions.80 “Catholic science” – the proposal to overcome the separation of knowledge from belief by showing that Catholicism and modern ­intellectual life were mutually supporting – is usually considered a Mennaisian concept (and was discussed as such in part 3). Eckstein, however, d ­ eveloped in Le Catholique, contemporaneously and largely independently of Lamennais and his followers at Mémorial catholique, a 77 See Stroumsa, “Ex oriente numen,” 94–5. 78 Marchand, German Orientalism, 1. 79 Consequently, and in another link with the early modern “light from the East” paradigm, Eckstein’s Orientalist Traditionalism replicates the practice of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century popes, who deployed theocratic iconography and ­architecture from ancient Egypt to defend the authority of the church against contemporary critics. See Adshead, “China a Colony of Egypt,” 114–15. 80 See, inter alia, Marchand, Down from Olympus, 152; Cowan, Indo-German Identification, 2–3; Arvidsson, Aryan Idols, 4; and Herling, German Gita, 264.

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parallel concept under the rubric of “Christian science”: “A great ­ignorance unfortunately reigns over the true genius of Christianity. This ignorance is due in part to the philosophy of the last century, incorporated in the customs, the opinions, the prejudices of the present day, but still more to the decadence of theology, which is no longer studied as a science and is taught in too exclusively scholastic a manner. A Christian science is necessary to oppose anti-Christian science.”81 Eckstein’s Christian science, like Mennaisian Catholic science, aimed both to modernize Catholic intellectual life and to Catholicize modern science and scholarship. On the one hand, he said, the church was at present intellectually incapable of meeting the challenge of impious modern knowledge both because it had become afraid of new advances in knowledge and because its seminaries remained mired in scholasticism and Cartesian theology. On the other hand, the corruption of ­intellectual life outside the church by the widespread incorporation of Enlightenment and Protestant errors had produced a nihilistic ­anti-Christian science. Eckstein proposed to overcome both Catholic theological decadence and anti-Christian science by grounding modern intellectual life in the unity and universality of Catholic truth. What was needed were “studies in high philology, high philosophy” and “a vast and general view over the moral and historical development of the human race.”82 What Eckstein meant by these phrases is clear: the foundation of Christian science must be the philosophy of history and the historical criticism that he learned from Schlegel. Equally clearly, he was offering his own Orientalist Traditionalism as the model for the new intellectual weapons required to combat the church’s new enemies. Catholicism would triumph, he predicted, when the faithful undertook the immense work of synthesizing its positive doctrinal truth with ­modern critical methodology.83

81 Eckstein, “De la fin dont on menace le Christianisme,” 179. 82 Eckstein, “De l’état présent de la religion Catholique,” 57–8; Eckstein, “Du présent et de l’avenir,” 133; Eckstein, “De la fin dont on menace le Christianisme,” 179–80 (quotation). 83 Eckstein, “Du progrès de la Révolution,” 21–2. Eckstein’s belief that the h ­ istorical sciences were preparing a harvest that the Catholic Church would soon reap closely parallels Lamennais’s hopes in Des progrès de la Révolution et de la guerre contre l’église (1829). Eckstein, “De l’époque actuelle,” 47. See Lamennais, Des progrès de la Révolution, 278–80.

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Eckstein’s Political Theology

Just as Ferdinand d’Eckstein insisted, as we saw at the end of the previous chapter, that Catholics must engage with modern ideas in order to Catholicize them, so too did he call for a new order of society that would acknowledge modern social and political transformations but subordinate them to the authority of the Catholic Church. This chapter first analyzes Eckstein’s political theology – a form of liberal-Catholicism – in terms of his prescriptions for the proper relationship between the state and the church, or more broadly, between the social order and the spiritual order, and then places it in a dialogic relationship with truly liberal conceptualizations of knowledge, liberty, history, tradition, ­development, and religion.

E c k s t e i n ’ s L i b e r a l - C at h o l i c i s m Most of Eckstein’s articles in Le Drapeau blanc and Annales de littérature et des arts had been on literary or erudite – and from 1823 increasingly on Orientalist – topics, but his periodic denunciations of the heirs of the French Revolution and his declarations that philosophism, materialism, liberalism, constitutionalism, and industrialism were all s­ ophisms that collectively constituted “the wisdom of the age” left no doubt as to his hostility toward Restoration liberalism.1 Eckstein, however, declined to  1 Eckstein, “De la secte révolutionnaire,” 4; Eckstein [B. d’E.], “Le temps présent,” 3. Nicolas Burtin notes that although many of Eckstein’s articles in Le Drapeau blanc, which between 1823 and 1827 he helped to edit, appeared without attribution or signed “O.,” they are identifiable by the fact that material from them reappears in Le Catholique. Burtin, Le baron d’Eckstein, 85–6.

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identify himself fully with the Ultra program. His very first article in Le Catholique noted that although he shared many of the religious and political opinions of Louis de Bonald, Joseph de Maistre, and Félicité de Lamennais, fear of revolution had given their writings a “taint of reaction” that Eckstein believed was neither necessary nor even useful in maintaining sound doctrines.2 He himself possessed, he said, “a royalist heart and an independent character,” and he described his ideas as “at once Catholic, independent, royalist, and even liberal in the honourable sense of the word.”3 A clue to what Eckstein meant by “liberal in the honourable sense of the word” may be found in his declaration that liberty and equality, the two great ideas of the era, are the most profound needs of the human race – but only if they are properly understood. Liberty in its true Christian sense is the freedom of individuals from any despotic restrictions on their right to associate with others as they see fit and to pursue their moral and spiritual ends, whereas the Christian sense of equality is justice itself, without which there is no society but only oppression.4 Eckstein detested the revolutionaries and what he considered their criminal actions but nevertheless believed that the Revolution had been decreed by providence as God’s judgment on the old and deeply ­corrupt order of things. He did not, therefore, equate the Christian sense of liberty and justice with the social order of the Old Regime, which he considered forever dissolved.5 This conviction that it was neither ­possible nor desirable to re-establish the institutions of the Old Regime distinguishes Eckstein from Traditionalists like Bonald who fully aligned themselves with the Ultra faction in Restoration politics. Eckstein, conceiving of his role within Traditionalism as prodding Catholics to move beyond the structures of the Old Regime, called in Le Catholique for a new social order that would acknowledge the transformations of social and political life that had emerged from the Revolution and its aftermath but would be suffused by Catholic faith. This prescription meant that Eckstein for the most part supported the Constitutional Charter of 1814, which he regarded as embodying 2 Eckstein, “Introduction,” 8–9. 3 Eckstein, “Ma carrière politique et littéraire,” 257, 259 (quotations), 268. 4 Eckstein, “Du présent et de l’avenir,” 294–5; Eckstein, “Ma carrière politique et littéraire,” 263. 5 Eckstein, “Du présent et de l’avenir,” 49; Eckstein, “Sur les biens du clergé,” 162.

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these transformations while guaranteeing the rights of Catholics to practise their faith, to assemble, and to participate fully in civil and political life.6 Eckstein was more equivocal, however, on certain specific provisions of the Charter and of the Restoration regime more generally. On the freedom of the press, for example, he held an instrumentalist view: although the freedom to publicize bad opinions was a regrettable but necessary compromise with the needs of the times, Catholics should seize on the potential that the power of the press offered them to further their cause.7 In contrast, Eckstein was not so sanguine about the Restoration’s perpetuation of the University, which he considered a despotic administrative system bent on subordinating public education to a materialist philosophy.8 The University, in fact, is a specific instance of what Eckstein considered the most dangerous threat to liberty: the administrative and legislative manias of the modern state – whether revolutionary, imperial, or royalist – that pitted the government against society and threatened to extinguish public freedoms that had historically been beyond the reach of the state.9 Eckstein’s views on the complementarity between Catholicism and the Charter meant that even though he insisted on his ultramontane bona fides, he dissented from the strong form of ultramontanism ­advocated by Lamennais.10 Eckstein proposed instead a qualified ­ultramontanism: whereas Gallicanism must be repudiated and the church liberated from governmental authority, the church itself ought not to hold any political authority. Catholics, he advised, should renounce royal or ministerial favour because the church is the empire of grace, not of temporal power, and ecclesiastics must not be allowed to worm their way into affairs of state or to claim impunity in civil 6 Eckstein, “Ma carrière politique et littéraire,” 344–5; Eckstein, “Sur les biens du clergé,” 146. 7 Eckstein, “De la licence de la presse,” 185; Eckstein, “Du présent et de l’avenir,” 125; Eckstein, “Ma carrière politique et littéraire,” 268–9, 355–6. 8 Eckstein, “Sur les biens du clergé,” 147; Eckstein, “Du présent et de l’avenir,” 72, 136, 139, 141. 9 Eckstein, “De l’état présent de la religion Catholique,” 36, 39, 44; Eckstein, “Du progrès de la Révolution,” 17. 10 Eckstein, “De l’état présent de la religion Catholique,” 59–61. Eckstein ultimately valued Lamennais less for his positive doctrines than as “an energetic and useful dissolvent on the old party of the Counter-Revolution, on the old religious and monarchical party.” Eckstein, “Ma carrière politique et littéraire,” 344.

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affairs.11 Eckstein lamented that the political circumstances of the Restoration had forced the clergy to side with the Ultras, making them the target of political hatred, whereas if they had been able to remain neutral, they could have defended both religion and the monarchy more effectively.12 However, if Eckstein argued that Christianity is not a form of political organization and should not exercise political ­authority, he equally repudiated the complete separation of the social order and the spiritual order. Although the church is indeed the empire of grace, he said, the state as a temporal power is susceptible of being transformed by grace, and indeed it is precisely the role of the church to serve as a spiritualizing agent for the social order. An absolute ­separation between church and state would have the effect of ­materializing the state and abandoning it to a democratic anarchy of all opinions.13 Eckstein firmly believed that a new social and religious order was emerging out of the chaos of the revolutionary period. He shared, in fact, a belief in the perfectibility of the human race with Restoration Liberals, but he added the important caveat that progress is possible only insofar as humankind follows the path of Christianity.14 The new order, however, had not yet arrived. Eckstein judged that the Constituent Assembly, Convention, Directory, Consulate, Napoleonic Empire, and Restoration had one after the other all tried but failed to bring the revolutionary period to an end, and the result of these failures was that society remained at present in an intermediate stage characterized by instability in politics, religion, and philosophy. The revolutionary period, in Eckstein’s view, needed to run its course before it could be definitively overcome – and specifically the speculative abstractions of

11 Eckstein, “Ma carrière politique et littéraire,” 267–8, 345. Eckstein considered the temporal sovereignty of the pope over the Papal States to be an anachronism. Eckstein, “De Rome,” 169. 12 Eckstein, “De l’état présent de la religion Catholique,” 71–2. Eckstein also provided pragmatic reasons for the church to renounce any claim to political authority: any religious or political inquisition would unleash a reaction against the church; political power would encourage the priesthood to become intellectually lazy and to neglect its conduct; and, worst of all, temporal powers could turn the instruments of oppression against the church. Eckstein, “De la fin dont on menace le Christianisme,” 186–7; Eckstein, “Ma carrière politique et littéraire,” 266, 355. 13 Eckstein, “Essais de palingénésie sociale,” 110–11; Eckstein, “Des confesseurs des empereurs,” 135. 14 Eckstein, “Du progrès de la Révolution,” 24–5.

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rationalist and materialist philosophers needed to be fully transformed into ­positive laws and society completely secularized and reduced to interests alone. Eckstein prophesied that only when France had become nothing but an enormous administrative bureaucracy under materialism and legal atheism would Catholicism re-emerge to place order and liberty in accord with each other, introduce harmony into things, and establish an empire of liberty ruled solely by ideas. Only then would France emerge from the revolutionary period and a new social existence begin.15 Eckstein envisioned the new Catholic social order as a temporal image of the spiritual society.16 In concrete terms, his political position ­corresponded, in late Restoration France, to liberal-Catholicism. This term must not be construed to mean that Eckstein had become a Liberal; far from it. Eckstein, in fact, magnificently exemplifies Vincent Viaene’s thesis that liberal-Catholicism (as was noted in chapter 9) was a form of political Catholicism resolutely opposed to liberal values. Eckstein’s guiding belief was the characteristic liberal-Catholic conviction that society must be founded on Catholicism if it is to survive and flourish.17 Eckstein’s liberal-Catholicism, then, represented the application to social and political life of his version of the Catholic Traditionalism to which he sought to submit Restoration intellectual life. A recent book takes for its subject how in the L’Avenir years (­ 1830–31) – the brief period during which Lamennais sought to incorporate the post-revolutionary social and intellectual order into a revivified faith – liberal-Catholicism in its Mennaisian form exercised a powerful ­attraction on a group of young Catholics in search of a modern faith that “would be expansive, dynamic, and glorious instead of the nostalgic, bitter, and fearful faith that was the stereotype of the Restoration years.”18 Eckstein receives no mention in this account, yet, as Jean-René Derré demonstrated half a century ago, Eckstein advocated the ­liberal-Catholic position in Le Catholique before Lamennais and the Mennaisians came around to it, and Viaene has more recently affirmed that it was Eckstein rather than Lamennais who “spearheaded the 15 Eckstein, “Du présent et de l’avenir,” 260–1; Eckstein, “Du progrès de la Révolution,” 7–8, 12, 25–7. 16 Eckstein, “Du progrès de la Révolution,” 12. 17 Viaene, Belgium and the Holy See, 71. 18 C.E. Harrison, Romantic Catholics, 2.

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evolution toward liberal-Catholicism.”19 It is not insignificant in this respect that Charles de Montalembert, a leader of the young Catholics, was a devoted and careful reader of Le Catholique, as were other members of his circle, including Louis de Carné, Charles de Saint-Foi, Philarète Chasles, Edmond de Cazalès, and Théophile Foisset, several of whom assisted Eckstein with the production of the journal. Further, this group subsequently edited first Le Correspondant and then Revue européenne, journals that served as the voice of liberal-Catholicism in the early 1830s after Lamennais broke with the church. Eckstein, for his part, reciprocated their interest, contributing an article to the initial number of Revue européenne in 1831.20 Eckstein, it is fair to say, deserves recognition alongside Lamennais as a maître de penser for the young liberal-Catholics of the late Restoration and early July Monarchy.21

Eckstein and the Liberals Eckstein engaged in Le Catholique with three factions of Restoration Liberals: Doctrinaires, Globistes, and Benjamin Constant. The Doctrinaires with whom he was particularly concerned – Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard, François Guizot, and Victor Cousin – largely ignored him, but with the Globistes and Constant, there ensued something resembling a dialogue, which was for the most part mutually respectful with the former and anything but with the latter. The Doctrinaires Eckstein confessed to harbouring a certain admiration for the Doctrinaires – for which many of his Ultra friends reproached him – owing to their repudiation of the revolutionary hatreds and their ­dedication to liberty, equality, and toleration; they formed, he said, the honest, worthy part of liberalism.22 Nevertheless, he regarded their rational spiritualism, in all its variations, as yet another form of the

19 Derré, Lamennais, ses amis, 165–6; Viaene, Belgium and the Holy See, 54. 20 Eckstein, “De l’époque actuelle.” 21 On Eckstein’s earlier formative influence on Belgian ultramontane corporativism around 1815, see Viaene, Belgium and the Holy See, 44–51. 22 Eckstein, “Introduction,” 7–8; Eckstein, “De l’état présent de la religion Catholique,” 65–6.

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modern abstractive philosophy that analyzes God, humankind, and the universe in light of individual reason and rejects the authority of the past and the transmission of doctrines.23 The task of exposing the errors of the Doctrinaires took on a particular urgency in the later volumes of Le Catholique when the twists and turns of Restoration politics led Eckstein to fear that the Doctrinaires were about to achieve their longheld ambition of systematizing modern opinion and realizing it in the state.24 Eckstein considered the Doctrinaires’ understanding of liberty and their account of its relationship to Christianity to be characteristic and interrelated errors. While acknowledging their genuine commitment to liberty, Eckstein accused them of misrepresenting its true nature because they had misunderstood human nature itself. The fundamental problem, in Eckstein’s analysis, was that the Doctrinaires had confused the Revolution with the necessities of human nature. The Revolution had, in fact, coincided with some needs of human nature and had hastened some future prospects, but its social and political constructions had systematized the evils of the absolute monarchy into what was now called the legal regime. The Doctrinaires, he thought, aggravated this situation by advocating a single type of liberty ruled by order or common sense, which in practice meant living under the constant tutelage of legislative and administrative bodies. There now existed, in short, a police force, an administration, judicial functions, and a representative government, but there was no longer any society. What the times needed, Eckstein said, was a completely individual liberty that would in turn engender liberty of association. Only Catholic Christianity was capable of reconciling the idea of liberty with the necessity of the state by progressively transforming the latter into an institution that protected against injustice.25 Eckstein’s critique of Doctrinaire historiography parallels his assessment of their social and political stances. He genuinely respected the historical scholarship of Guizot and his school but only up to a point. Guizot, in his view, could not explain the foundation of civilization and did not truly judge historical actors and events because his mind 23 Eckstein, “Du présent et de l’avenir,” 42, 45, 51. 24 Eckstein, “Du progrès de la Révolution,” 31. 25 Eckstein, “Cours d’histoire modern,” 220–3; Eckstein, “Cours de philo­ sophie,” 345.

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operated entirely within the doctrines of modern civilization. Guizot and the Doctrinaires, that is, explained everything that had happened in history by either reason or natural instinct when in fact the history of the human race is explicable only by recourse to the Christian ­doctrines of the creation, fall, and redemption of humankind. The Doctrinaires, he concluded, did not know humankind because in ­repudiating Christianity, they lacked the true philosophy that underlies its history.26 Eckstein ultimately traced the Doctrinaires’ political and historiographical errors to the philosophical errors inherent in their rational spiritualism. His fundamental criticism of Cousin’s Eclecticism was that it lacked an infallible criterion on the basis of which to distinguish what is true from what is false in the heterogeneous schools of sensualism, rationalism, skepticism, and mysticism (which, in any case, he doubted truly contain everything in the vast domain of philosophy). For Eckstein, of course, there is only one infallible criterion of truth: Christianity. The criterion of truth, moreover, is a standard by which to evaluate systems, not to reconcile them. Cousin however, in denying the Christian faith, had rejected the only possible criterion of truth, and so was incapable of separating truth from falsehood, rendering his Eclecticism nothing more than an encyclopedic compilation. Cousin’s vaunted philosophical method, Eckstein concluded, led either to a labyrinth without an exit (analogous to the labyrinth of pagan ­mythologies in which scholars of religion who lack the correct historical method become lost) or, worse, to a pantheism whose absorption of contradictions into unity culminates in nihilism.27 Eckstein was equally critical of Cousin’s view of the relationship between philosophy and religion, which he summarized as being that religion, which veils truth in symbols, is a philosophy for the masses and children, whereas philosophy, which translates the symbols of religion into the rational doctrines that alone give full truth, is a religion for enlightened people.28 His response focused on the necessary complementarity of intuition and revelation and on the nature of symbols. 26 Eckstein, “Du présent et de l’avenir,” 263, 277, 286–7, 293; Eckstein, “Cours de philosophie,” 333–4. 27 Eckstein, “De l’éclecticisme modern,” 319; Eckstein, “Du présent et de l’avenir,” 214, 241, 244; Eckstein, “De la philosophie,” 435. 28 Eckstein, “De la fin dont on menace le Christianisme,” 176–7.

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Cousin, Eckstein noted, agreed with the materialists in taking the savage origin of the human race as his starting point, but instead of depicting a slow development of the intelligence following its emergence from the midst of brute matter, he endowed infant humankind with all the inherent capacities, including intuition of the idea of God, necessary for it to progress by its own powers. Although Eckstein agreed that intuition of the idea of God is a fundamental and original human capacity, he denied that it was sufficient to guide humankind along its path of development. A positive religion containing the primitive truths was a necessary supplement, and such a religion could have come into existence only by means of an external revelation. Eckstein added that Cousin’s position is refuted by historical evidence since there is not a single primitive nation whose origins were not consecrated by a positive revelation.29 Cousin was equally, and relatedly, mistaken, Eckstein thought, on the nature of religious symbols. They are not poetic or imagistic products of intuition but instead dogmas whose content is the primitively revealed truths of the creation, fall, and redemption. Further, the content of a religious symbol is not, as Cousin asserted, a rational abstraction that philosophy can remove from its poetic envelope; it is nothing less than the enigma of existence under the spiritual form of a mystery – and as such is a higher and more profound knowledge than that which derives from abstraction.30 Eckstein’s summary view of the Doctrinaires was that they purported to have grasped the meaning of their era when in fact they merely expressed public opinion in philosophical language. To truly ­understand an era, he repeated once again, one must stand apart from it and ­recognize its place in a philosophy of history that embraces the entire destiny of humankind. For Eckstein, of course, this philosophy of ­history is Christianity, without which the Doctrinaires were unable to raise themselves above the circumstances of the day. In the end, he ­concluded, their sovereignty of reason had resolved into popular ­sovereignty, and their rational spiritualism was more a politics than a philosophy.31

29 Eckstein, “Cours de philosophie,” 332–3, 351. 30 Ibid., 354–5. 31 Eckstein, “De l’éclecticisme modern,” 318, 320–1, 323.

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The Globistes The young Liberals of Le Globe – who, as we saw in chapter 12, gave serious attention to the status of religion in Restoration France – took a lively interest in contemporary scholarship on religion, not least in the Orientalist research that they anticipated was about to transform historical and religious knowledge.32 It is not surprising, then, that they would have taken notice of Eckstein. Paul Dubois, Théodore Jouffroy, Charles de Rémusat, Jean-Philibert Damiron, and (probably) Pierre Leroux all engaged with Eckstein in Le Globe. Le Globe’s first encounter with Le Catholique, through its 1825 ­prospectus, was one of utter incomprehension.33 Several short pieces followed, reflecting two competing views of Eckstein among the editors of Le Globe: one rudely dismissive and the other guardedly positive. Jouffroy was the harshest critic; in three unsigned letters, he mocked Eckstein’s pretentions and Germanic obscurity and bluntly labelled him a ­charlatan. Some other members of the editorial team, however, ­disapproved of Jouffroy flouting Le Globe’s practice of respecting its adversaries while disagreeing with them, and some of the team – Derré suggests Leroux in particular – genuinely respected Eckstein despite opposing his politics and mysticism.34 A second stream of short pieces, then, while retaining a tone of puzzlement and criticizing both the Catholic foundations and disordered presentation of Eckstein’s thought, welcomed Le Catholique. Eckstein, one such article declared, had ­rendered a great service to French readers by informing them about German philosophy. Another recommended Le Catholique for its original and profound ideas, adding that of most interest were the articles on little-known literatures such as Serbian and pre-Islamic Arab poetry. A third piece, finally, describing Le Catholique as “a canal opened between Germany and France,” ­encouraged readers “to examine it without prejudice, read it with impartiality, and judge it only after having studied it.”35 Later, Le Globe found ­common ground with Eckstein on the issue

32 P.W., “Religions de l’Orient,” 743. 33 Unsigned, “Le Catholique.” 34 Goblot, La jeune France libérale, 251–2; Derré, Lamennais, ses amis, 165n185. 35 Unsigned, “France”; Unsigned, “Bulletin littéraire: Le Catholique, ouvrage pério­ dique”; Unsigned, “Bulletin littéraire: Le Catholique, publié par M. le baron d’Eckstein,” 508 (quotation).

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of religious freedom, commending Eckstein’s rejection – unexpected from a Catholic writer – of the domination of the church over the state.36 Le Globe’s considered assessment of Eckstein was entrusted to Rémusat and Damiron. Rémusat’s critique came in two articles a little over a year apart. His first article attempted to define the nature of Eckstein’s Catholicism. On the one hand, it was certainly not the Catholicism preached by the majority of the clergy; Rémusat playfully imagined the befuddlement of a provincial curé who subscribed to Le Catholique in the expectation of wholesome spiritual nourishment only to be ­confronted with Eckstein’s mystico-philosophical Orientalism. On the  other hand, Eckstein’s Catholicism was not that of Maistre, Lamennais, and Bonald either or indeed of anyone else. Rémusat concluded that Eckstein’s interpretation of Catholicism, whatever else it might be, should properly be termed a reformed religion or a neo-Catholicism.37 In the second, more substantial, article, Rémusat, after noting an encouraging evolution in Eckstein’s political views, turned to a critique of his Traditionalism. Rémusat identified two key elements of Eckstein’s system: primitive revelation and the traditions that derive from it. Eckstein, he said, wanted to recover the primitive revelation given to earliest humankind, which Eckstein thought still constituted, in ­weakened or altered traditions, the true moral and social system of humankind. He proceeded toward this goal by submitting philosophy, politics, literature, and all the moral sciences to erudition, resulting in a system composed of a priori views, borrowed traditions, learned reminiscences, and theological expressions taken in a symbolic and uncommon sense. Rémusat then delivered his judgment: a system that presents itself as primitive in its origin and that maintains itself by ­tradition cannot be a philosophy in the modern sense because philosophy proper is based on observation and reason. Eckstein’s refusal to accept the supremacy of reason rendered his Traditionalism out of step with the times and incapable of offering guidance on intellectual or social matters. Rémusat concluded with what could have been the credo 36 Unsigned, “Liberté religieuse,” 495, to which was appended a letter from Eckstein, “Au rédacteur du Globe” (6 June 1828); Unsigned, “Des rapports de l’église catholique,” 637, to which was appended another letter from Eckstein, “Au rédacteur du Globe” (14 August 1828). 37 Rémusat [C.R.], “De l’état actuel des affaires,” 285.

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of the Globistes: “We ourselves believe that the authority of reason alone establishes and legitimates that of legislation; that the importance of traditions and historical facts resides entirely in the value that reason recognizes in them.”38 The second discussion of Eckstein’s Traditionalism in the pages of Le Globe came in the course of Damiron’s series of articles on contemporary French philosophers. Damiron identified Eckstein as a member of the theological school of philosophy along with Bonald, Lamennais, and Maistre, although he somewhat grudgingly recognized that, unlike the others, Eckstein defended tolerance and freedom of religion. Damiron’s principal criticism – paralleling Rémusat’s – was that Eckstein privileged tradition over psychological analysis as the means for knowing humankind. Eckstein, he said, found human nature not in the operation of the mind but in Adam and Christ, the archetypes of fallen and redeemed humankind. Since they, in turn, are to be found only in historical documents, everything for Eckstein was a matter of erudition and historical critique rather than psychological analysis.39 Otherwise, Damiron’s discussion of Eckstein followed the framework of his critique of the other Catholic Traditionalists outlined in ­chapter 11. Eckstein, he concluded, had not succeeded any better than Bonald or Maistre at discovering true knowledge in ancient traditions. His essential error was to believe that a theory can emerge out of inspiration and a system out of poetry when one must instead abandon the path of revelation for that of observation and reasoning.40 Broadly speaking, Eckstein’s response to the Globistes parallels his critique of the Doctrinaires. He had initially identified Le Globe as an organ of the Doctrinaire school,41 but he soon came to distinguish between the Doctrinaire school proper and “the new doctrinaires who have chosen the Globe as their organ,” although with the qualification that “the opinions of this second faction of the Doctrinaire party are contained, at least in germ, in those of the first.”42 The Globistes, too,

38 Rémusat [C.R.], “Le Catholique, ouvrage périodique,” 268–9 (quotation at 269). 39 Damiron, Essai sur l’histoire de la philosophie, 180–1. The material on Eckstein remained unchanged in the two subsequent editions. 40 Ibid., 403–4. 41 See Le Drapeau blanc, 11 April 1825, 4 July 1825, and 31 October 1826, among others. 42 Eckstein, “De l’état actuel de la France [part 2],” 47.

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he said, were sincerely committed to liberty, equality, and toleration but did not properly understand these values; in particular, they betrayed their professed principles whenever they turned their attention to the place of the Catholic Church in Restoration society.43 Two issues were of paramount importance for Eckstein. First, there was the question of indemnification for church property confiscated during the Revolution. The position of the Globistes, as summarized by Eckstein, was that the seizure of church property was justified by the imprescriptible legislative right of the sovereign people, or rather of the sovereign reason, and that all subsidies paid by the state to the Catholic Church for its upkeep and clerical salaries should be eliminated on the grounds that the church should be wholly supported through contributions from the faithful. Eckstein responded, first, that the Revolution had seized church property by force majeure but not by right in itself, although he recognized that in this matter – as with other Old Regime i­nstitutions and privileges abolished by the Revolution – a return to the old ways is impossible, and so the church must accept the loss of its property. The crux of his dispute with Le Globe on this issue, however, was his contention that the church had a legitimate claim on the state budget. Since the state had enriched itself by depriving the church of its resources though confiscating its property, it was only just that the nation should take care of those whom it had dispossessed. Funding the church out of the state budget was not, as the Globistes implied, a favour that the state did for the church but instead an indemnity that the state owed the church by right.44 The second issue was that of religious liberty. The Globistes, Eckstein charged, professed the maxims of liberty, t­ olerance, and equality but refused to extend liberty of association to Catholics and their religious communities. The doctrines of Le Globe, he concluded, floated uncertainly between the idea of liberty and a spirit of ­philosophical and Jansenist intolerance.45 Rémusat’s description of Eckstein’s Catholicism as a neo-Catholicism drew an immediate rejoinder in the form of a letter to the editor.

43 Eckstein, “De l’état présent de la religion Catholique,” 65–6; Eckstein, “Du présent et de l’avenir,” 316–17. 44 Eckstein, “Sur les biens du clergé,” 149–51; Eckstein, “De la fin dont menace le Christianisme,” 170. 45 Eckstein, “De l’état présent de la religion Catholique,” 67–9; Eckstein, “De la fin dont menace le Christianisme,” 170–1.

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Asserting that the church had always distinguished between practical writers who disseminate the simple word of the Gospel and philosophical writers who seek out this word in the traditions and beliefs of the human race, Eckstein placed himself in a long line of Christian philosophical writers stretching from Saint Augustine and Clement of Alexandria in Antiquity to Maistre and Bonald in his own day. His attempt, he concluded, to demonstrate the existence of a single and identical revelation embracing the entire human race continued the oldest undertaking of learned Catholicism, agreed fully with the most rigorous orthodoxy, and was unsullied by Protestantism, neo-­Catholicism, or any other heterodoxy.46 Eckstein’s most fundamental critique of the Globistes was anchored in his diagnosis of the crisis of faith in modern French society in terms of his categories of religious and abstractive philosophies (see ­chapter 16). He considered Enlightenment philosophism and its c­ ontemporary heirs, which he classified as modern-day representatives of abstractive philosophies, to be incapable of grasping the true nature of humankind and other foundational knowledge that is attainable only within a ­religious philosophy that recognizes God as the origin and end of all things.47 The Globistes, for their part, perpetuated these errors. Most fundamentally, their psychological approach, which proposed to gain knowledge of humankind by observing the mind and reporting as experimental data the results of these alleged observations, was a specific example of a new abstractive philosophy that isolated humankind from its Creator and cosmogonic history.48 Damiron’s remarks, cited in chapter 11, regarding the philosopher’s proper method – which is to know oneself through reflection on one’s mental operations, then to know sensible things, and finally to know past things – exemplified for Eckstein the psychologist’s catastrophic inversion of the Traditionalist epistemological method, which began with knowledge of cosmogonic history and worked forward to knowledge of the world and human nature. In affirming that all real knowledge is, as religious philosophies teach, synthetic and immediate rather than analytic and abstract, Eckstein inverted Damiron’s criticism of him for failing to understand that faith is not a form of poetry but instead knowledge of reality. 46 Eckstein, “Au rédacteur du Globe” (26 March 1828). 47 Eckstein, “Sur les biens du clergé,” 137–8. 48 Eckstein [B. d’E.], “‘Esquisses de philosophie morale,’” 4.

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A further fruit of the Globistes’ corruption by abstractive philosophism, for Eckstein, was their false understanding of history. Eckstein’s critique turned on a number of contested terms, notably “tradition,” “development,” and “primitive.” At its heart were the meaning and significance of the traditions of ancient peoples. Eckstein argued that his liberal critics misread the ancient traditions because they operated with the false Enlightenment idea of development, according to which the human race progresses over time from crude, immature beginnings toward civilized maturity on the analogy of the development of an individual from infancy through childhood to adulthood. The more ancient – the more “primitive” – a tradition, on this view, the closer it is to the crude, rudimentary origins of the human race, and therefore the correct interpretation of the ancient traditions is to see them as naive, irrational productions of the childhood of humankind. But, Eckstein countered, such an interpretation ignores the testimony of the ancient traditions themselves, in which the earliest humans are never envisioned as children but instead as spiritual and moral beings who, while yet fresh from the Creator’s hand and bearing the likeness of God, fell by their own sin.49 Eckstein, here, while reducing the ­depiction of humankind in all ancient traditions to variants on one of the fundamental notions of the “Catholicism before Catholicism,” characteristically accepted this reconstructed ancient testimony at face value as historical evidence. Eckstein similarly contested the equation of “primitive” with “savage” by exposing it as yet another by-product of the false idea of the progressive development of the human race. Savagery did exist, Eckstein agreed, but instead of being a crude, irrational, uncivilized state that was the starting point of a process of progressive development, it was a state of degeneration. After all, no matter how corrupted they may have become, the traditions of all ancient peoples testify that the earliest members of the human race were created as spiritual and moral beings. Savagery, then, was not the aboriginal state of humankind but a product of ­history. Specifically, Eckstein explained, the cosmogonic historical event of the fall so corrupted some branches of primitive humans that they lost all contact with the ancient traditions and, rendered bereft of guidance

49 Eckstein, “De la religion ... volume 1er,” 36–7; Eckstein, “De l’histoire [part 1],” 174.

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from the primitive revelation, quickly degenerated into the dismal state accurately described as savagery. “Savagery,” in short, was not the equivalent but the opposite of “primitive.”50 A still further, and to Eckstein’s mind even more dangerous, corollary of the Globistes’ false conception of development was the idea that earlier stages in the developmental process become obsolete over time. This idea, Eckstein noted, was programatically expressed in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (The Education of the Human Race) (1780) and underlay Jouffroy’s “Comment les ­dogmes finissent” (1825). Eckstein summed up Jouffroy’s message for his contemporaries as being that just as it had been a crime against history to remain pagan under Constantine, so too was it today a crime against history to remain Christian.51 He characterized the Globistes’ belief that Christianity had played its world historical role and must now give way to a new religion commensurate with the intellectual and spiritual needs of the day as the great error of modern times and as further evidence that they misunderstood the present historical moment. Christianity, as the true philosophy of history, so far from being merely a stage in humankind’s spiritual and moral development, is for Eckstein nothing less than the divine order that provides direction and meaning to history itself. Christianity therefore will not have run its course until God decides to bring history to an end.52 Eckstein’s critique of the Globistes culminated in the attribution of their various errors to their lack of faith. Faith, Eckstein declared, is the complete and absolute conviction of the truth, seized at once by all the forces of the soul rather than by the abstractive faculty alone. The Globistes’ project  – which Eckstein sardonically described as ­proposing to muzzle the tiger of the Revolution by teaching the ­bourgeoisie a little knowledge, some philosophy, and a few doctrines – was doomed to fail because without faith one cannot have knowledge. The Globistes, like all those who reason only by abstraction, imagined that humankind can exist in a state of absolute indifference concerning the mysteries of its origin and end. In contrast, Eckstein held that faith is as necessary to the human race as having air to breathe: absolute 50 Eckstein, “Histoire des Gaulois,” 180–1. 51 Eckstein, “De la fin dont on menace le Christianisme,” 174–5. 52 Eckstein, “Essais de palingénésie sociale,” 113. See also Eckstein, “De la fin dont on menace le Christianisme,” 174–6.

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indifference to the mysteries of the origin and end of humankind contained in Christianity would be as fatal to present-day society as the loss of contact with the primitive revelation had been to ancient peoples. This being so, the modern infidelity represented by the Globistes would turn out to have been only a transitory misstep, and civilization would survive because the church, despite the weakening of its a­ uthority, continued to awaken the faith that lies deep in the consciousnesses of individual human beings.53 Benjamin Constant Eckstein’s most prominent critic among the Liberals was Benjamin Constant; conversely, Constant’s De la religion, considérée dans sa source, ses formes et ses développements (1824–31) drew Eckstein’s particular ire both as an egregious example of liberal thought having been corrupted by Protestant and Enlightenment errors and as the work of a man whom Eckstein despised personally; his criticisms were spiced with ad h ­ ominem attacks on Constant’s learning and honesty not found in his interactions with Doctrinaires and Globistes. Their exchanges followed a ­dialectical pattern. Eckstein devoted the first substantive article in the first issue of Le Catholique to a lengthy review of volume 1 of De la religion,54 incorporating and expanding a five-part review that he had previously published in Le Drapeau blanc.55 His review of volume 2 ­followed a few issues later.56 Constant then addressed, often polemically, Eckstein’s criticisms in the third volume of De la religion, to which Eckstein responded at length and in kind.57 That Eckstein immediately

53 Eckstein, “Du progrès de la Révolution,” 27; Eckstein, “De la fin dont on menace le Christianisme,” 174; Eckstein, “Sur les biens du clergé,” 137–9. 54 Eckstein, “De la religion ... volume 1er.” 55 Eckstein [B ... d’E ...], “De la religion ... Premier article”; Eckstein [B ... d’E ...], “De la religion ... Deuxième article”; Eckstein [B ... d’E ...], “De la religion ... Troisième article”; Eckstein [B  ... d’E  ...], “De la religion  ... Quatrième article”; Eckstein [B  ... d’E ...], “De la religion ... Cinquième et dernier article.” The content of the first three parts reappears in Le Catholique almost word for word, with only some introductory and bridging material omitted. Parts four and five, rewritten and greatly expanded, are supplemented by material on Constant’s discussion of Greek religion in volume 2 of De la religion. 56 Eckstein, “De la religion ... volume 2me.” 57 Eckstein, “De la religion ... tome III.”

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republished this piece as a pamphlet – a step unique in the history of Le Catholique – indicates the importance that he placed on responding publicly to Constant.58 Constant returned to the fray here and there in volumes 4 and 5 but drew no reply because by the time the final two volumes of De la religion were published, Le Catholique had ceased to appear. In total, Eckstein devoted 188 pages of Le Catholique to the first three volumes of De la religion, plus additional commentary in other articles. He undertook this enormous effort and expenditure in part because he could not let a single perceived personal slight go unchallenged but principally, as Derré notes,59 because Eckstein’s method of refuting Constant was to rewrite his entire book so as to provide readers of Le Catholique with the true history of religions that Constant had so woefully misrepresented. Although this meant that Eckstein’s reviews of the successive volumes of De la religion provided concise  – for Eckstein! – statements of his Orientalist Traditionalism (even if it was not developed strictly in response to Constant), the important point is that the conflict between Eckstein and Constant laid bare the ­fundamental irreconcilability of Traditionalist and Liberal concep­ tualizations of religion. In reviewing the first two volumes of De la religion, Eckstein first credited Constant with rejecting the rationalist philosophy of the eighteenth century and its Directory and empire heirs as well as the despicable system of the morality of self-interest.60 He then turned to his task of destruction. Constant, he said, as a politician and a man of the world who possessed only a smattering of knowledge, was unqualified to treat the great questions of religion, which are properly the task for an entire lifetime of study. He had read extensively, it was true, but his reading was undisciplined, and he lacked even a preliminary understanding of philological method and source criticism. His book, in sum, was an incoherent attempt to fuse the sensation of the materialists, the sentiment of the deists, and the absolute reason of the Kantians in light of his Protestantism and the liberal ideas of the day.61 Of the numerous errors that Eckstein identified in De la religion, three received particular

58 Eckstein, Réponse de M. le baron d’Eckstein. 59 Derré, Lamennais, ses amis, 128. 60 Eckstein, “De la religion ... volume 1er,” 15–16. 61 Ibid., 17, 21–2; Eckstein, “De la religion ... volume 2me,” 207–18.

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attention: the ancient priesthood, fetishism, and sentiment. Constant’s depiction of the priesthoods of ancient polytheism as exclusive and oppressive castes infuriated Eckstein. The priesthoods that emerged out of the patriarchal religion, he countered, had lived in families and in no way resembled an association of men purely and exclusively devoted to the religious life. The priesthoods of primitive paganism, he added, were animated by the spirit of truth and ought not to be confused with those of the corrupted paganism of later times.62 Eckstein had a great deal to say about Constant’s understanding of fetishism, but it boiled down to the assertion that Constant was wrong to identify fetishism as the earliest form of religion because the same cosmic system of paganism is found in both savages and the most civilized polytheists. Even what everyone agreed to have been the two crudest, most hideous, and most absurd practices of savage life – cannibalism and tattooing – were corruptions of forgotten ancient systems and degenerated priesthoods.63 Constant most grievously erred, however, in reducing religions to pure sentiment by seeing in them only forms instead of dogmas and mysteries. Eckstein identified Constant’s system of sentiment as an Epicureanism of the heart, rather than of sensations, in which emotion illicitly absorbed the intelligence.64 Elsewhere, he called Constant’s religion a mysticism of enlightened sentiment embellished with a tint of vague reverie that possessed no more substance than an ice sorbet eaten on a hot summer day.65 Constant’s response to Eckstein in volume 3 of De la religion was principally concentrated in five passages, none of which mention Eckstein by name and only one of which cites Le Catholique but whose target was clear to all, especially to Eckstein himself. Constant here, after insinuating that Eckstein had plagiarized from Henry Thomas Colebrooke and Friedrich von Schlegel, charged Eckstein with, among

62 Eckstein, “De la religion ... volume 1er,” 31–2; Eckstein, “De la religion  ... volume 2me,” 235–6, 240–1. 63 Eckstein, “De la religion ... volume 1er,” 88, 97–105, 108–9; Eckstein, “De la religion ... volume 2me,” 227–9. 64 Eckstein, “De la religion ... volume 1er,” 39, 109; Eckstein, “De la religion ... volume 2me,” 216–17. 65 Eckstein, “De la fin dont menace le Christianisme,” 174. Eckstein called sentimentalism the “diseased religiosity of the last century.” Eckstein, “De la religion  ... tome III,” 58.

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other things, distorting and confusing everything that he discussed, clinging to a symbolic interpretation of Homer long since abandoned by the scholarly world, elevating the religion of India above all ancient religions, and even, as “a new sort of fanatic,” raising it almost to the level of Christianity in order to submit the Gospel to the despotic views contained in the Veda.66 The longest passage, which is a note to “a new sort of fanatic,” is a masterpiece of polemic in which Constant described Traditionalism as “a recent school that seeks in the theocracies of the Orient the model of theocracy that it hopes to transplant to Europe” and characterized Eckstein himself as “a clever man who ­possesses the knowledge common to all those who studied at German universities, who knows how to use this light baggage with a distinctive art,” and whose goal is “to establish a great intellectual power that would hold a monopoly on authority – that is to say, which would make Europe into a parody of Egypt. The Brahmins, the Druids, all the corporations that have oppressed peoples are the objects of his admiration. Human sacrifices and orgies where debauchery joins with murder appear to him mysterious representations of a primitive order, or religious ­strivings toward a future order. All is good, provided that liberty counts for ­nothing; all is sublime, provided that individuality is proscribed.”67 We saw in chapter 17 that some orthodox Catholics charged Eckstein with purveying a form of “Indo-Christianity.” This same charge was levelled against Eckstein by Liberals during and after the Restoration as a shorthand for their interpretation of Eckstein’s Orientalist Traditionalism as a reactionary program threatening the return of despotism, clericalism, and intolerance. Constant, as here, was a leading exponent of this view, but he was hardly alone. The constitutional monarchist Jean-Denis Lanjuinais, an opponent of the Ultras who was active in the Société asiatique, similarly, if more irenically, cautioned Eckstein on the dangers posed by his Indo-Christian Catholicism. After 1830, the view of Eckstein’s Orientalism as a cover for theocracy, voiced by both Heinrich Heine and Stendhal, became something of a liberal commonplace.68 Its most extreme expression, surely, came from the pen of Augustin Chaho (or Agosti Xaho), a writer, scholar, and

66 Constant, De la religion, 287, 315 (quotation), 797n136, 819n8. 67 Ibid., 802–3n45. 68 Schwab, Oriental Renaissance, 269; Berthiot, Le baron d’Eckstein, 130.

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Basque nationalist committed to republicanism, secularism, and ­socialism who, denouncing Eckstein’s “brahmanico-cossacko-politicoreligious p ­ ropaganda,” identified him as an agent of the Tsar whose Catholicism was a ruse and whose true goal was the absorption of Roman Catholicism into an Asiatic theocracy and the metamorphosis of Catholic priests into Brahmins.69 Eckstein responded to Constant’s attacks in detail in his review of the third volume of De la religion. His counterblast to Constant’s note on “a new sort of fanatic” alone covers fully twenty pages of outrage and refutation. His general procedure was to reprint Constant’s words and to refute them almost line by line. Some basic points recur: it was Constant, not himself, who plagiarized from foreign scholars; it was Constant, not himself, who distorted and confused everything; and, to top it off, Constant was ungrateful for all the hard work that Eckstein had put into identifying and correcting these distortions and confusions! Above all, Eckstein charged, Constant misunderstood the nature of fetishism, polytheism, and Greek religion because his mind was wholly dominated by the prejudices of recent opinions. Most fundamentally, Eckstein again and again denied that he was an enemy of liberty who wanted to transplant an Oriental theocracy to Europe; the only true theocracy, he insisted, is Christianity. He himself studied the ancient sacerdotal regime of India simply as a historian, cataloguing its virtues and its faults (although he remarked that the historian ought not to forget that without their priesthoods neither the Orient nor the Occident would ever have possessed any civilization). Constant’s true target, Eckstein concluded, was not the ancient pagan priesthoods but the Catholic Church, and the entirety of Constant’s work was motivated by hatred of Catholicism.70 Eckstein acknowledged in a postscript that his response had been at times intemperate, but he justified it on the grounds that he had been provoked.71 He then delivered his parting shot: Constant’s work was obsolete, for it had evidently been conceived

69 Chaho, La propagande russe à Paris, 4, 12 (quotation), 28, 34. 70 Eckstein, “De la religion ... tome III,” 70–94, 109. 71 Ibid., 112. Interestingly, Le Globe weighed in on the dispute between Constant and Eckstein in a surprisingly neutral manner, not only noting that Eckstein’s “lively” response to Constant had been provoked by Constant’s mocking treatment of Eckstein but also encouraging the public to decide for themselves between the two parties. Unsigned, “Bulletin littéraire: Le Catholique, publié par M. le baron d’Eckstein.”

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at a time when hypotheses on the savage origin of the human race and the systems of perfectibility predicated on them were still widely accepted, hypotheses that modern philology had now completely undermined by demonstrating that the origins of human thought, as encountered in the most ancient documents of myth and history, rest on a bedrock of sublime metaphysics.72 Eckstein received only a handful of mentions in the printed version of the fourth volume of De la religion, although Pierre Deguise importantly reports that references to Le Catholique fill the margins of the manuscript copy on which it is based.73 Constant reserved his final frontal attack on Eckstein for the penultimate chapter of the fifth and final volume, where, citing passages in which Eckstein defended the Inquisition and opposed independent thought, liberty of discussion, and the spread of enlightenment, he warned his readers of the threat to modern society posed by those who wanted to resuscitate theocracy and resubject modern society to persecution and despotism.74 Ultimately, the feud between Eckstein and Constant was not very edifying. Deguise calls it a dialogue of the deaf in which polemic ­predominated over good faith efforts to understand what the other was trying to accomplish. Constant, for his part, tried to demolish his ­adversary’s authority by attack and ridicule, and Eckstein mistook Constant for a Liberal Protestant – a perception, it is true, encouraged by Constant in the late 1820s (see chapter 13).75 Stripped of polemic, it is a matter of two fundamentally opposed projects being carried out under the common guise of a history of religions. A remark by Eckstein reveals the fundamental source of their mutual unintelligibility: “According to M. Benjamin Constant, it would be more useful to know the function of things than the real nature of things themselves, as if, in ignorance of the nature of things, it was possible to judge their application. When he tells us that the doctrines of the priests hold little interest for him and that he concerns himself solely with what the priests do with them, it is because he prefers to surround himself with the dreams of his imagination rather than to search for realities.”76 Eckstein, 72 Eckstein, “De la religion ... tome III,” 112–13. 73 Deguise, Benjamin Constant méconnu, 225. 74 Constant, De la religion, 572–3, 997nn4–5, 997n7. 75 Deguise, Benjamin Constant méconnu, 223–4. 76 Eckstein, “De la religion ... tome III,” 76.

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that is, recognized the sociological – to use a slightly anachronistic term – nature of Constant’s history of religions but found it incomprehensible because for him the history of religions, like religion itself, is and ought only to be the quest for a deeper understanding of revealed truth. Eckstein and Constant were offering their contemporaries ­irreconcilable conceptualizations of religion as integral elements of irreconcilable programs for the construction of the new order of things in post-revolutionary France.

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Conclusion

The categorial transformations of religion collectively effected by the post-revolutionary conceptualizations of religion examined in this study variously continued or reacted against a radical redefinition of the image, function, and meaning of religion that had been underway since the seventeenth century.1 The profound disagreement that marks their varied and contrary responses to questions about the nature of religion, the place of religion within the emerging new order of things, and whether or not society ultimately rested on religious foundations ­signalled the emergence of alternative or rival modernities. This study thereby not only clarifies the historical transformations from which intellectual modernity – plural at the moment of its emergence – arose but also elucidates the complex relationship between models of ­modernity that broke radically with Europe’s religious and political pasts and models that accommodated those pasts to varying degrees, a fraught relationship that lies at the heart of much subsequent Western intellectual history. Over the next 200 years, thinkers – initially theologians, philosophers, and historians but increasingly representatives from the new academic disciplines of sociology, psychology, ­political studies, and the study of religion – again and again took up the ­epistemological, historical, social, and political status of religion. They ­contested the relationship between revelation and reason or,

 1 For the idea of the Enlightenment as a religious revolution, see Ferrone, Enlightenment, 102. On the idea of modernity as a historical process that transformed not only institutions but also categories and practices, see Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, xv.

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alternatively, the idea of religion as sentiment or inner spiritual experience that places it beyond the reach of reason; they drew out the ­implications of the integration of religion into the historical process – either by means of degeneration from a pristine origin or by means of various forms of progressive development – and of the historicity of ­religion; they argued that religion is in some way either beneficial or detrimental to social order and the well-being of individuals; and they negotiated the civil status of religion in theory and practice. Later, thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries massively expanded the complexity of these debates in interaction with other ­currents of thought, but the fact that they were still recognizably ­addressing ­problems and potential lines of resolution identified and worked out by the theorists studied in this book attests to the latter’s historical significance. If the ongoing relevance to modern intellectual history of the issues and problems foregrounded by post-revolutionary theorists of religion is beyond doubt, recognition of the internal tensions and contradictions within their conceptualizations of religion similarly deepens our ­understanding of developments and impasses in the contemporary conceptualizations of religion employed by present-day polities, and it illuminates the status of conceptualizing religion today. The Idéologues’ attempt to eliminate what they considered the calamitous civil effects of religion and to imbue the civil order with secular, republican values established the paradigm for modern liberationist critiques of religion. Feuerbachian, Marxist, and Communist critiques of religion all belong to this liberationist lineage, and indeed the perennial popularity of Constantin-François Volney on the radical left signals a degree of continuity within it. Two elements of the Idéologue project in particular have persisted across the liberationist lineage. The first is a strain of illiberalism. The philosopher John Gray has drawn attention to a tradition of militant atheism in which the project of a rationalist ethics conceived and administered by scientific experts eliminates the need for toleration.2 He does not discuss the Idéologues, but their project for a secularized ethics based on their science of ideas was an early and influential example of this tendency. Second, the Idéologues were engaged, to use modern behavioural

 2 Gray, Seven Types of Atheism, 20–1.

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economics jargon, in harm reduction. They were, in fact, an early example of using the insights of cognitive science and evolutionary psychology (although they would have spoken of “analysis of understanding”) to study the impact of behavioural biases and the mental frames that inform people’s decision-making processes. This very approach, however, resulted in a tension  – unrecognized by the Idéologues – at the heart of their critique of religion. On the one hand, their conceptualization of religion as a by-product of the psychological and existential situation of humankind undermines religious explanations of religion as a transcendental phenomenon; on the other hand, this same explanation demonstrates that religion is in some sense natural to human beings, thereby calling into question the viability of any secularizing program. This tension is related to what Michael Walzer has called the paradox of liberation. Certain modern states – he ­discusses Israel, India, and Algeria – came into existence in the twentieth century as a result of secular national movements of liberation from foreign rule. These states, however, are no longer the secular states envisioned by their founders because roughly twenty to thirty years after ­independence, and by the instrument of the democracy that the liberationists themselves instituted, their moral and political cultures were overwhelmed by an alternative form of modernity that fused ­neo-­Traditionalist religious movements with nationalism.3 Idéologue ­religious policy, itself part of the liberationist program of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution that stands behind twentiethcentury secular liberation movements, encountered a problem similar to Walzer’s paradox of liberation, only substituting liberation from the Old Regime alliance of throne and altar for liberation from external oppression. The regime change was not the result of democratic politics, of course, but the Idéologues’ moral and political culture was overwhelmed by an alternative form of modernity that fused the traditional and the constitutional in terms of intellectual and social forms. (Even the time line fits: from the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789 to the Restoration in 1814 is twenty-five years.) Political theology demands that political and social institutions and practices derive their legitimation from particular religious truths. Historically, political theology in some form or other provided the basis

 3 Walzer, Paradox of Liberation, xi–xii, 27–8.

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of social organization for most known civilizations, including Western civilization, where Christian versions of political theology were long dominant.4 Many forms of political theology are flourishing in the world today,5 including the Hindutva movement (also known as Vedic nationalism) in India and Islamism in parts of the Muslim world.6 Contemporary Western versions of political theology contend that modern liberaldemocratic societies are necessarily morally and spiritually empty and that separating church and state inevitably leads to exploitation, ­corruption, and social degradation. Proponents of this view range from so-called New Traditionalists to far-right figures.7 The Catholic Traditionalists have long been recognized by historians as the first great critics of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution,8 but it has not been sufficiently appreciated that they also occupy a crucial place in the history of political theology. Their attempts to resubordinate the social and political life of post-­revolutionary France to Catholic doctrine and authority marked nothing less than the debut of a modern form of political theology. However, although all of the Catholic Traditionalists sought in their various ways to subordinate reason and knowledge to revelation and to reassert the supremacy of the spiritual principle over society, Louis de Bonald and the early Félicité de Lamennais rejected in its entirety the society issuing from the Revolution, whereas the Mennaisians and Ferdinand d’Eckstein accepted certain elements of post-revolutionary society as providentially ordained. These rival Traditionalist patterns of theological, social,

  4 See Lilla, Stillborn God, 3–5.   5 Political theology today is closely linked to what has been called reactionary modernism, or a form of modernity that rejects the norms of liberal-democratic culture. See Herf, Reactionary Modernism.  6 See Jaffrelot, ed., Hindu Nationalism, 3–25; Doniger and Nussbaum, eds, Pluralism and Democracy in India; and Maher, Salafi-Jihadism, 169–206.   7 See Stout, Democracy and Tradition, 2.   8 Historians have tended to regard Traditionalism as less historically significant than other forms of anti-liberal modernity, such as the cultural and political nationalism originating with Johann Gottfried Herder. See Sternhell, Anti-Enlightenment Tradition, 8, 26–7, 282. Sociologists, for their part, have praised the Catholic Traditionalists’ analyses of the growth and implications of individualism and other aspects of the post-revolutionary social order as containing penetrating insights into the modern condition. Reedy, “Traditionalist Critique,” 51.

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and political engagement persist within modern Catholicism as rival strategies for combatting secular liberalism, individualism, and philosophical naturalism.9 The heritage of the Mennaisians (although the contribution of Eckstein should be recognized here, too) is evident in ­nineteenth-century Catholic use of the discourse of religious liberty to contest government oversight and control of Catholic worship, education, and administration, and it remained discernible in the Christian democracy and social Catholicism movements of the twentieth century.10 Bonald, for his part, deeply influenced French Catholic reactionary conservatives throughout the nineteenth century, and the intransigent stance taken by Bonald and the early Lamennais toward the society issuing from the Revolution, which would soon come to be called “integralism,”11 contributed (despite the theological condemnation of Traditionalism) to the church’s retrenchment at Vatican I and to the ongoing opposition by some elements of the Catholic Church to the changes brought about by Vatican II.12 More broadly, Bonald’s use of history and reason to support traditional authority has been taken up by other modern forms of political theology, and today a renewed interest in Bonald on the part of conservatives and the far right has resulted in the first English translations of his writings.13 Bonald’s role in the repeal of legal divorce under the Restoration has earned him hero status among some conservatives today,14 and his summary of his hierarchical and organic conception of social and political order in Du divorce, considéré au XIXè siècle, relativement à l’état domestique et à l’état

  9 For a recent case study of the “internal diversity and political plasticity” of Catholic engagement with the concept of human rights, see Shortall, “Theology and the Politics,” quotation at 460. 10 In America today, conservative Protestants as well as Catholics are using the language of religious liberty in their campaigns against public schools. See Ravitch, “Dark History.” 11 Poulat, “La dernière bataille,” 85. 12 Misner, Social Catholicism in Europe, 38–41; Bernardi, Maurice Blondel, 252; Kselman, Conscience and Conversion, 190–1. 13 Bonald, On Divorce; Bonald, True and Only Wealth; Blum, ed. and trans., Critics of the Enlightenment. Of the six writers included in the latter work, Bonald receives the most space. 14 See Blum, ed. and trans., Critics of the Enlightenment, xxiv.

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publique (1801) – the only one of Bonald’s major books to be translated in full – is once again serving as a rallying cry for the far right.15 Laïcité, as enacted by the Third Republic (1870–1940) in a series of education laws from the early 1880s and culminating in the separation of church and state in 1905, is a particular model of secularism that became an integral element of French national identity. Derived not only from the Jacobins, as many commentators have noted, but also from the Idéologues and Doctrinaires and conceived in conscious opposition to intransigent Catholicism, laïcité as a statist, dirigiste approach to religious policy blurred the line distinguishing the separation of church and state from secularization.16 In recent decades, the crisis over the place of Islam in French society has provoked extensive debate and reflection regarding both the concept of laïcité and, by extension, the continuing place and nature of secularism in French national identity.17 Laïcité is now increasingly understood as guaranteeing freedom of conscience and the free exercise of religious practice instead of a clear-cut separation of religion from public life, to the extent that it is now possible to speak of laïcité as functioning in practice as a liberal variety of secularism.18 This evolution in its meaning has allowed some contemporary scholars to argue that laws banning the burqa in public spaces, for example, are not manifestations but rather distortions of laïcité because they transform the concept into a vehicle for state indoctrination.19 Of course, such indoctrination was precisely the intention of the Idéologues and Doctrinaires, as well as of laïcité’s

15 See the review article Devlin, “Louis de Bonald.” F. Roger Devlin is a prominent contributor to far-right publications, often writing on gender, women, and marriage. The Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center identify the journal in which this review article appears, The Occidental Quarterly (published by the Charles Martel Society since 2001), as a white nationalist publication. See Anti-Defamation League, “Occidental Observer.” 16 See K. Chadwick, “Education in Secular France,” 49–50; and Jansen, Secularism, Assimilation, 204–5. 17 For a recent perspective, see Lacorne, Limits of Tolerance, 173–88. Given the Idéologues’ contribution to the construction of laïcité, the fact that Volney’s critique of religion was originally presented in relation to Islamic societies adds an intriguing dimension to the present situation. 18 K. Chadwick, “Education in Secular France,” 53–4; Jansen, Secularism, Assimilation, 205. 19 Hunter-Henin, “Why the French,” 617, 639.

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Third Republic founders. Even during the Third Republic, however, neo-Kantian academics and politicians provided a counterweight to militantly secularist conceptions of laïcité by maintaining that laïcité need not be anti-religious in principle because Christian morality, as they perceived it, was progressively approaching the universal Kantian morality.20 Contemporary discussions of laïcité are so fraught with ­difficulties in part because they draw on multiple conceptualizations of religion. And although a secularizing interpretation of laïcité still has its defenders in France – and perhaps moreso in Quebec21 – it is in states whose governments claim absolute authority over religion that the spirit of its original statist model lives on.22 Benjamin Constant’s pluralist liberalism has direct bearing on discussions about the status of religion in liberal-democratic countries today. Constant, in fact, has been hailed as a writer with a message for our own times in matters of church and state,23 and more generally his optimism about the harmony between religious forms and modern values reappears among some contemporary advocates of religious pluralism.24 This study, however, has shown that Constant’s optimism depended on his conviction that the directionality of history is always toward ­increasing subjectivity in religious forms and increasing ­tolerance in political forms. Further, not only was his version of pluralism selective in that it tolerated only subjectivized, nondogmatic, and moral religiosities and excluded many religious doctrines and practices as being external, obsolete, and regressive, but the criterion for exclusion – disproportionality to the

20 Jansen, Secularism, Assimilation, 203–4, 213, 216–17. 21 At the time of writing, a new Quebec law banning people working in the public sector from wearing religious symbols appears to have majority support within the province. 22 Religious policy in the People’s Republic of China calls to mind Alexandre Kojève’s observation that “the Chinese revolution is nothing but the introduction of the Napoleonic Code into China.” Interview in La Quinzaine Littéraire, 1–15 July 1968, 19, quoted in Lilla, Reckless Mind, 122. 23 Helena Rosenblatt’s concluding paragraph to her recent study is exemplary in this respect: “Perhaps most importantly, [Constant] reminds us that the liberal insistence on state neutrality in religious matters is not a sign of indifference, but the very opposite. It is only when religious sects are allowed to proliferate freely and when people are encouraged to develop their ‘right to examine,’ that they can aspire to the ‘more elevated’ form of morality so deeply valued by Constant.” Rosenblatt, Liberal Values, 248. 24 See, for example, Eck, New Religious America.

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state of development attained by modern society – was also theological (in a broad sense) in that his confidence in the directionality of history was underwritten by faith in a providential order. Constant, finally, gave no thought as to how to enforce his selective pluralism because he assumed that all nonsubjective forms of religion would simply disappear as long as governments did not interfere. Modern liberal-democratic societies are indeed religiously plural, of course, but as a result not of providence but of the constitutional and legal frameworks that govern how religion must operate in Western countries. These frameworks, in turn, depend on particular conceptualizations of religion that either presume a definition of religion as private or conceptualize it as subjective, individualist, and/or a matter of conscience.25 Here, too, it is a question of a selective pluralism because these constitutional and legal frameworks suppress many kinds of religious difference, only instead of relying on a metaphysical i­nvisible hand to enforce their selective pluralism, liberal-democratic societies depend on legislatures and courts of law to establish limits on the ­religious freedom of their citizens. The fallacy of expecting all religions to be subjectivized, nondogmatic, and moral points up the inadequacy of the conceptualizations of religion, theological or metaphysical in origin, that underlie the constitutional and legal frameworks governing religion in liberal democracies.26 Legislatures and courts of law now find ­themselves trying to deal with problems that are intractable given the metaphysical elements inherent in these conceptualizations of religion. Commentators have noted that Western liberalism’s conceptualization of religion has remained undertheorized by liberal political ­philosophers.27 A critique of liberalism, however, is constitutive of the post-colonialist project, and so liberalism’s critics have more than compensated for this neglect in their demonstrations that liberalism ­operates with a culturally specific conception of religion that discriminates among

25 Constant, of course, is hardly the only or even the principal source of the modern conception of religion as private; at the very least, we must cite the Enlightenment constructions of natural religion that so influenced the American Founding Fathers and the broad stream of German Liberal Protestant theology descending from Friedrich Schleiermacher. 26 See Sullivan, Impossibility of Religious Freedom. 27 See Laborde, Liberalism’s Religion, 1; Lilla, Stillborn God, 303–4.

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and within religions, at best evaluating them as more or less private, interiorized, and compatible with universal moral reason or at worst identifying all religions as instances of the survival of pre-modern modes of thought and practice within modernity.28 These critics have further questioned the assumption that modernity’s analytic categories ­transcend the specific intellectual and historical traditions of the era of European history in which they originated.29 This scholarship has tended to focus on economic and political categories such as capital, citizenship, and the state, but religion is another such modern analytic category. The work in the study of religion cited in the Introduction, work that identifies the concept of religion not as a distinctive ­cross-cultural domain of human life but as a historically conditioned and culturally specific Western ideological category, has begun to “­provincialize” the category of religion. This study’s analysis of how post-­revolutionary thinkers constructed the conceptualizations of religion that entered into the conceptual armoury of modernity further ­confirms that specific conceptualizations of religion are always the product of particular histories. The recognition by liberalism’s critics of the historical nature of its conceptualization of religion represents – although it is not always articulated as such – an awareness that religion is an epistemological object that possesses a history across diverse cultural, institutional, material, and theoretical practices. And of course, it is not only liberal ­democracies but all polities that operate with historically specific and often tacit conceptualizations of religion. Multiple modern conceptualizations of religion are politically active today. Conversely, present-day theorists and critics are actively reconceptualizing religion in the ­contemporary historical context. They, like the post-revolutionary ­thinkers discussed in this study whose foundational modern conceptualizations of religion are now under scrutiny, are structuring a specific body of knowledge and organizing social space in the service of diverse political, social, and cultural projects. As we move beyond the postrevolutionary conceptualizations of religion (and perhaps eventually beyond the category of religion), to theorize about religion is still to theorize about epistemology, history, society, and politics. 28 Foundational studies include Casanova, Public Religions; Asad, Formations of the Secular; and Mahmood, Religious Difference. 29 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, xiii–xiv, 17, 42.

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Index

Abbadie, Jacques, 81, 172 Abel-Rémusat, Jean-Pierre, 171, ­177–9, 362n46 Adam, 81, 146, 162, 361, 365, 386 allegory, 15, 37, 43, 318–19, 355 Ami de la religion, 138 Annales de littérature et des arts, 334, 375 Annales de philosophie chrétienne, 194–5 Anquetil-Duperron, Abraham Hyacinthe, 173, 176 anti-clericalism, 20, 50, 55, 57, 151, 250 anti-Semitism, 7, 165n14 apologetics, 81–2, 102n25 App, Urs, 35n18, 45n43 Artois, Duke of. See Charles X, King Asiatic Society of Calcutta, 66n51, 122 atheism, 297, 340, 379, 400; Bonald and, 92–3, 104n33, 113–14; Lamennais and, 141, 147, 164–5 Augustine, Saint, 145, 167, 295n33, 388 Azouvi, François, 22 barbarism, 7, 28, 215, 293, 365. See also stadial theory Bayle, Pierre, 114, 309

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Bergier, Nicolas-Sylvestre, 81–2, 105, 172–3 Berthiot, François, 330n3, 332 Bible, 81–2, 101, 103, 168–9. See also Old Testament; Pentateuch biblical criticism, 81, 140; Eckstein and, 355–6; Lamennais and, 159, 169 Bonald, Louis-Gabriel-Amboise, ­vicomte de, 69–72; apologetic ­program, 75, 114–15; on atheism, 92–3, 104n33, 113–14; and Catholic Enlightenment, 115–17; and Eckstein, 339, 346, 376; on family law, 70, 127–30, 403–4; and the French church, 117–18; and the Idéologues, 77–9, 97; on ­idolatry, 105–10; on the Jewish ­religion, 100–2; and Lamennais, 138, 140–1, 146–7, 149–50, 171; on ­language, 77–80, 117; and Liberal critics, 214–15, 222–3, 230, 315; on modern philosophy, 90–5; on natural religion, 96–103, 105, 107, 110, 177; on paganism, 67, 96, 105–9, 110–13; political ­theology, 125–32, 402–4; on ­primitive revelation, 81–3, 117–18; on religious sentiment, 106–7,

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Index

111–12, 114; on rights, 90, 97–8, 127; and Rousseau, 91, 93, 97, 99, 101n19; on sacrifice, 98–100, ­101–2, 111, 117; teleological ­developmentalism, 83–90, 97, 100, 102–3; a theocrat, 131–2; three ages of monotheism, 67, 96, 100–3, 109 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 136, 258–60, 318 Bonnetty, Augustin, 150n47, 194–6 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, 105, 111, 145, 162, 234, 243, 314–15; Discours sur l’histoire universelle, ­172–3; Histoire des variations des Églises protestantes, 86–7 brahmins, 176n49, 357, 394–5 Brown, Howard G., 49n1 Buddhism, 43, 45n43, 162, 362; Tibetan Buddhism, 177 Buonarroti, Philippe, 34–5 Burnouf, Eugène, 155, 177–9, 362n46 Cabanis, Pierre-Jean-Georges: Bonald on, 77, 79, 91, 95; and Constant, 265; Damiron on, 214–15; Eckstein on, 338, 340; and Maine de Biran, 204–5. See also Idéologues calendar, revolutionary, 18, 55, 59, 61 Calvin, Jean, 92, 103, 141 Calvinism, 93, 104, 140, 275 Carné, Louis de, 150n47, 185, 193, 380 Cartesian theology, 78, 118, 138, 151, 155–6, 374 Catholic Traditionalism, internal ­complexity of, 345–6 Cazalès, Edmond de, 47, 155, 193, 380 censorship, 72, 120–2, 127–8, 260, 272

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Chaho, Augustin (Agosti Xaho), 394 Champollion, Jean-François, 155 Charles X, King, 72, 122–4, 184 Chateaubriand, François-René de, 75n14, 122, 138, 333 Chevaliers de la foi, 120, 123 Chidester, David, 112 China, 162, 177, 291–2, 323–4, 405n22 Christ, 28, 103, 118, 165–6, 190, 386 church and state: Constant on, 307–9; Doctrinaires on, 243–4, 250–2; Eckstein on, 377–9; Globistes on, 250–2; Idéologues on, 57–8, 60–2; Mennaisians on, 188–9; Ultras on, 123, 131–2 Church Fathers, 43n39, 103, 150, 167, 363, 367 civil liberties, 120, 124, 183–5, 259 clericalism, 28, 124, 132, 394 common sense: Bonald on, 83; Cousin on, 224, 225n9; Jouffroy on, 232–3; Scottish, 206–7, 216 Comte, Auguste, 89, 90n81, 91n82 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, 21, 77, 79, 143, 204–5, 209 Condorcet, Sophie de, 18, 265 Condorcet, Nicolas de, 20, 23, 50, 73, 84, 91, 93, 256, 269, 345 Congrégation, the, 123–4, 335 Constant, Benjamin, 256–61, 274–7; on church and state, 307–9; Du polythéisme romain, 273–4; and Eckstein, 272, 291–7, 315; on fetishism, 271, 288–90, 293, 295–7; as a historian, 269; and the Idéologues, 258, 265, 281, 306; on Judaism, 292; and Lamennais, 270, 315–17; moral philosophy, 267, 294–6, 298–303, 309–12; mythography, 314–23; on ­polytheism, 289–91, 295–8,

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298–302; on primitive revelation, 316, 319, 321, 323–5; principle of proportionality, 283–4; on religious sentiment, 266–8, 276–7, 279–81, 286, 302; and Rousseau, 307–8; on sacrifice, 276, 288, 296, 300, ­310–11; on self-interest, 281–2, 291, 295–6, 299, 310–11 Constitutional Charter of 1814, 72, 93, 119–21, 124–6, 182, 202, ­241–2, 250, 376–7 Constitutional Charter of 1830, 185, 187–8, constitutional monarchists, 68, ­120–2, 200, 394 Constitution of Year III (1795), ­49–51, 57, 257 Constitution of Year VIII (1799), 55–6 Constitution of Year X (1802), 62 coup d’état: of 18–19 Brumaire, 49n1, 55, 258; of 22 Floréal, 55; of 18 Fructidor, 54, 62, 258; of 9 Thermidor, 49 Cousin, Victor, 153, 199–203, 231, 245, 247, 251n29; Eckstein on, 382–3; hermeneutic of ­desymbolization, 224–6; Mennaisians on, 58; on philosophy of history, 211–12; spontaneity/­ reflection, 209, 12, 224. See also Eclecticism Coux, Charles de, 185, 192 Creuzer, Friedrich: Bonald’s allusion to, 108n47; Constant on, 272n46, 321–5; Dubois on, 247–50; and Eckstein, 311, 366–9; mythography, 246–50 Cult of Reason, 59–60, 267n32 Cult of the Supreme Being, 59–60, 131n37 Cuvier, Georges, 155, 204

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Damiron, Jean-Philibert, 202–3, 219, 246–6; and Eckstein, 386, 388; on the method of philosophy, 213–16; on sensationalism, 226–7; on ­traditionalism, 227–31, 248. See also Globistes Daunou, Pierre-Claude-François, 18, 20, 23, 51–3, 56, 59, 259 Décade philosophique, littéraire et ­politique, 18, 26, 27, 30, 64, 71 Decazes, Elie, 120, 122, 200 Degérando, Joseph-Marie, 204 Deguise, Pierre, 261, 276, 277, 396 deism, 27, 92, 99n9, 140–1, 143, 354 democracy, 19, 51, 56, 104, 141, 165, 401; of enlightened reason, 51; political versus social, 239, 242 Derré, Jean-René, 172, 379, 384, 392 Descartes, René, 92–3, 142, 157, 201, 340 despotism: Bonald on, 109–10; Constant on, 282, 394, 396; Doctrinaires on, 212, 239–40; Idéologues on, 24, 31, 33–4, 42, 45; religious despotism, 24, 31, 42, 65. See also tyranny Destutt de Tracy, Antoine, 17–18, ­20–3, 28, 50, 65; Analyse raisonnée de l’origine de tous les cultes, 29–32, 58, 65; and Bonald, 77–8, 91; and the Directory, 52–4, 58–9; Doctrinaires on, 204–5, 214; Eckstein on, 340. See also Idéologues Dickey, Laurence, 322 Diderot, Denis, 135, 139, 141 divorce. See family law Doctrinaires, 199–201, 203–4, 261, 404; on church and state, 243–4, 250–2; and Constant, 306, 309, 311–12; and Eckstein, 382–3, ­390–3; moral philosophy, 214,

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Index

239; psychological method in ­philosophy, 207, 208, 216, 218, 230, 311; rational spiritualism, 158, 213, 241–2; on relation ­between philosophy and religion, 220–3, 224–5; on representative government, 240–1; on rights, 241–2; on self-interest, 207, 226, 236; on sensationalism, 204–7, 209–11, 213–15, 226–7; on ­sovereignty of reason, 238–40, 242, 244, 251; teleological ­developmentalism, 243. See also Cousin, Victor; Guizot, François; Maine de Biran, François-PierreGonthier; Royer-Collard, Pierre-Paul Dubois, Paul-François, 202–3, 384; critique of Guigniaut and Creuzer, 247–50 Dupuis, Charles-François, 35n18, ­59–60, 288n35; Bonald and, 97, 106; Constant and, 318–20; Eckstein and, 371–2; Mennasians and, 170, 174–5; Origine de tous les cultes, 29–30, 371; Volney and, 39, 40, 43 Eckstein, Ferdinand d’, 108n47, 185; apologetic program, 343; and ­biblical criticism, 355–6; Christian science, 373–4; on church and state, 377–9; conception of ­philology, 364–6; and Constant, 272, 291–7, 315, 391–7; on ­cosmogonic history, 327, 342, 235, 349, 388; and the Doctrinaires, 380–3; on fetishism, 369, 393, 395; German intellectual formation, 330–3; and the Globistes, 384–91; and Indo-Christianity, 356–7, 394; and Lamennais, 171–2,

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346–8, 365–6, 376–7; on language, 339, 361, 363, 365–6; Le Catholique, 334–6; liberal-Catholicism, 327–8, 375–80; on modern philosophy, 346, 352–3; mythography, 363–72; on natural religion, 354–5, 358; on paganism, 356–62, 363–4, 3 ­ 67–8, 371–2; on philosophy of history, 344–5, 374, 383; political theology, 378–9; on polytheism, 375–80; on primitive revelation, 341–4, 357–61, 389–91; on rights, 330, 376–7; on sacrifice, 354, 361; and Schlegel, 332–3, 353–4, 364; on sensationalism, 339, 382 Eclecticism, 194, 207–11, 214–15, 219, 244, 382 École normale supérieure, 51–2, 200, 202, 247, 248 écoles centrales, 51–2, 64 Egypt, 33, 40, 291–5, 303, 323, 369, 394 Encyclopédie, 77, 95 Enlightenment(s): Catholic, 346n59, 116–17; German, 262–5, 269, 370; historiography of, 18–20, 91n83, 93n92; moderate, 19, 27, 58–60, 63; radical, 19–20, 25, 33, 36, 58, 280; Scottish, 285, 313n23 equality, 50–1, 119, 126, 190, 239–42, 284, 348, 376 Estates General, 34, 69, 126 euhemerism, 163 fall, the, 91, 107, 142, 164, 277, ­342–3, 389 Fauriel, Claude Charles, 265–6 Ferrand, Antoine-François-Claude, 323 fetishism: Constant on, 271, 288–90, 293, 295–7; Eckstein on, 369, 393, 395

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Feuerbach, Ludwig, 43, 400 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 340 Flood, the, 162, 168n25, 170 Foisset, Théodore, 150n47, 193, 380 Frayssinous, Denis de, 123, 183 French Revolution, interpretations of: by Bonald, 86, 91n83, 93, 104; by Israel, 19; by Mennaisians, 147, 186 Funkenstein, Amos, 90 Furet, François, 73 Gallicanism, 136, 138, 183, 185–6, 188, 250, 377 Garat, Dominique-Joseph de, 17–18, 51–2, 56 Garsten, Bryan, 312–14 Gauchet, Marcel, 255, 308 Genesis, Book of, 98–9, 356, 358; ­anti-Genesis, 358, 360 Gengembre, Gérard, 80, 87, 89, 148, 150 Gerbet, Olympe-Philippe, 150, 152, 154, 172–3, 175, 181, 191–3 Germany: Constant and, 259, 262, 254–5, 268; Cousin and, 200–1; Eckstein and, 327, 330, 332, 335, 384 Gibbon, Edward, 168, 315 Globistes, 201–3; on Catholic Traditionalism, 227–31; on church and state, 250–2; and Constant, 306, 311–12; on Guigniaut and Creuzer, 247–50; and Eckstein, 384–91; interest in religion, 245–6; and Mennaisians, 227; on religious sentiment, ­311–12. See also Damiron, JeanPhilibert; Dubois, Paul-François; Jouffroy, Théodore Goblot, Jean-Jacques, 227 Goetz, Rose, 29, 31

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Index 443 Görres, Joseph, 272n46, 324, 335,  366, Gray, John, 400 Greeks, 113, 156n12, 292–5, ­299–301, 363 Gregory XVI, Pope, 137, 189–90, 192, 195 Guigniaut, Joseph-Daniel, 246–8, 250, 321n44, 367n58. See also Creuzer, Friedrich Guizot, François, 12, 200–4, 241–4, 251, 380–2 Haac, Oscar, 170 Hamilton, Alexander, 66n51, 332 Hegel, G.W.F., 200–1, 208n19, ­212–13, 313n24 Heine, Heinrich, 369, 394 Helvétius, Anne-Catherine, 18, 33 Helvétius, Claude-Adrien, 20, 23, 25, 33, 35n18, 50, 262, 281 heresy, 139, 141, 147 Hermann, Gottfried, 322 Heyne, Christian Gottlob, 369–70 Hindu law codes, 350 Hindutva movement, 402 historicism, 13, 265, 269, 284n23 historicity, 6, 169, 268, 343, 345 historiography of religion. See mythography Hofmann, Étienne, 269 Holbach, Paul-Henri Thiry d’, 20, 23, 26–7, 33, 35n18, 55, 135, 262 Homeric poems, 294n42, 299, 370, 394 Hottentots (or Khoisan), 112 Houtteville, Claude-François, 81, 142, 172 Huet, Pierre-Daniel, 81, 168, 172 human sacrifice. See sacrifice Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 331 Hume, David, 36, 81, 110, 309

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444

Index

idéologie, 10, 20–2, 27, 29, 30, 52, 57, 244 Idéologues, 17–20, 124; and Bonaparte, 56–7, 63–6, 259; on church and state, 57–8, 60–2; and the Directory, 50–4, 59; on ­history, 23–5; on language, 22, 41; moral philosophy, 26–7, 31–2, 41, 53, 61; and national festivals, 53– 5, 59–61, 258; on self-interest, ­25–7, 32, 38, 51, 53; on s­ensationalism, 20–2, 38–9. See also Daunou, Pierre-ClaudeFrançois; Destutt de Tracy, Antoine; Volney, Constantin-François idolatry. See paganism; mythography immortality of the soul, 22, 59, 103, 111, 161, 222, 350 India, 171, 194, 298, 303, 372, 401–2 individualism, 67, 91n82, 92–3, 240, 402n8, 403 individual liberties. See civil liberties individual rights. See rights innate ideas, 21–2, 77–8, 80, 99, 143, 281 Institut national des sciences et arts, 21, 52, 64 integralism, 403 intérêt bien entendu. See self-interest intolerance, 28, 307–8, 315, 318, 387, 394 Islamism, 402 Israel, 401 Israel, Jonathan, 19–20 jacobinism, 55–6, 59–60, 197 Jacobins, 24, 49–51, 200, 242, 257, 404 Jesuits, 162, 168, 173, 234, 367n59 Jewish religion. See Judaism; Mosaic revelation, the

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Jews, 100–1, 130, 141, 165n14, 231, 330, 367 Job, Book of, 101 Jones, William, 168, 356n26 jongleurs (tricksters), 288–9 Joubert, Joseph, 83 Jouffroy, Théodore: and Creuzer, 48; how dogmas end, 234–7; and Le Globe, 201–3; on philosophy, 215–19; philosophy of history, 212, 220, 231–4; on primitive ­revelation, 248 Judaism, 7, 43, 165n14, 231. See also Mosaic revelation, the Kant, Immanuel, 43, 265–7, 309, 338, 348 Kappler, Claude, 179 Kepler, Johannes, 89–90 Klinck, David, 89–90, 131–2 Kloocke, Kurt, 269–71, 314 La Bourdonnaye, François-Régis de, 124 Lacordaire, Henri, 185, 189, 192 laïcité, 404–5 Lamennais, Félicité de, 135–8, ­189–91, 225n9; apologetic ­program, 138, 142–3, 149; and atheism, 141, 147, 164–5; and ­biblical criticism, 159, 169; and Bonald, 138, 140–1, ­146–7, 1 ­ 49–50, 160–1, 171; Christianity as old as the world, 165–8; and Constant, 270, 315–17; critique of modern philosophy, 143–4, 147–8; and Doctrinaires, 214, 223, 227, 230–1, 240, 250–1; and Eckstein, 171–2, 346–8, 365–6, 376–7; Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de religion, 137–8, 139–40; general reason of humankind,

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Index 445

146–7, 149; on language, 146, 149; on natural religion, 139–40, 161, 174; order of faith/order of ­conception, 152–4; and Pascal, 148–9; on primitive revelation, 145–6; and Rousseau, 136, 139–41, 158–9; on sacrifice, 161, 163–6; sensus communis epistemology, ­144–6, 156, 161, 172, 191–2; ­teleological developmentalism, 166, 185; theological versus ­sociological traditionalism, 73, 150; theology of religions, ­160–1, 168; ultramontanism, ­182–4, 190–1 Lamennais, Jean-Marie, 135–7 language: Bonald on, 77–80, 117; Doctrinaires on, 223, 230; Eckstein on, 339, 361, 363, 365–6; Idéologues on, 22, 41; Lamennais on, 146, 149 Lanjuinais, Jean-Denis, 176n49, 394 Laplanche, François, 6, 82, 153, 156 La Révellière-Lépeaux, Louis Marie de, 60 Laromiguière, Pierre, 204, 207 Laurentie, Pierre-Sébastien, 154, 195, 346 L’Avenir, 151, 184–90, 192–3, 195, 379 Le Catholique. See Eckstein, Ferdinand d’ Le Conservateur, 138 Le Correspondant, 192–3, 380 Le Défenseur, 150 Le Drapeau blanc, 138, 334, 375, 391 legality versus legitimacy, 125–31, 187–8 Le Globe, 201–3, 213–14, 234, 245, 273, 395n71 Le Guillou, Louis, 137, 336, 347 Leo XII, Pope, 183

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Leroux, Pierre, 202, 203n5, 384 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 231, 262–3, 370, 390 Levitical Civil Code, 101 Levitin, Dimitri, 9, 101n23 liberal-Catholicism, definition of, 184 liberationist critiques, 400–1 liberties. See civil liberties liberty: conceptions of, 127, 141, 185–6, 239, 308–9, 376; religious liberty, 251–2, 303–5, 312 Lignac, Joseph-Adrien Lelarge de, 221 Locke, John, 21, 79, 143, 209, 339 Louis Philippe, King, 184, 261 Louis XIV, King, 106, 151 Louis XVI, King, 141 Louis XVIII, King, 72, 120–3, 126, 174, 182, 259–60, 333 Luther, Martin, 92, 103 Lutheranism, 104n33 Maimonides, 40n31, 43n39, 168 Maine de Biran, François-PierreGonthier, 158, 204–5, 207, 225–6; and Bonald, 222–3; rational ­psychology, 205–6, 220–3 Maistre, Joseph de, 121–2, 163, 270, 315, 346–7, 376 mal sacerdotal, 48, 64, 124 Manent, Pierre, 243 Manuel, Frank, 38 Marchand, Suzanne, 350, 373 Martignac, Jean-Baptiste Gay, Viscount of, 72, 124, 130, 201 Marx, Karl, 43, 400 Masseau, Didier, 9, 116–17 Massias, Nicolas, 356 Mauvillon, Jakob, 257, 262 mediator, expectation of, 98–9, ­101–2, 111, 165, 354 Mémorial catholique, 150–1, 172, 227

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446

Index

Mennaisians, 150–1, 348n67, 403; apologetic program, 172–3, 195; Catholic science, 154–8, 348n70; Catholic science of ­religions, ­170–3, 178–80, 191–5; on church and state, 188–9; and Constant, 158–9; crisis of dualism, 152–6, 173; general reason of humankind, 158, 173–4, 317–18, 348; and the Globistes, 158, 227, 250–1; “God and Liberty” slogan, 185; interpretation of the July Revolution, 184–5, 187–8; ­liberal-Catholicism, 184, 190, 192; on paganism, 162–5, 173; political theology, 182–9; on rights, 181, 187–8; on subversive books, 174–5. See also L’Avenir metempsychosis, 350 Middle Ages, 23, 332 Mirabeau, Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de, 34 miracles, 39, 46, 81–2, 251 Missions to the Interior, 114n66, 137, 174 mitigated traditionalism, 192n34 modernity, models of, 134, 197, 253, 332 Mohl, Jules, 336n21 Montalembert, Charles de, 11, 185, 189, 192–3, 380 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de, 33, 91, 115, 263, 284n22 Montlosier, François de, 124, 234 moral philosophy: Constant on, 267, 294–6, 298–303, 309–12; Doctrinaires on, 214, 239; Idéologues on, 26–7, 31–2, 41, 53, 61; Kantian, 302, 311, 405 Mosaic revelation, the, 107–8, 117, 165–6, 292, 355–6. See also Judaism

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Moses, 101n19, 113n63, 230, 292 Moulinié, Henri, 79, 131–2 mythography: of Constant, 314–23; of Creuzer, 246–50; of Destutt de Tracy, 30–2; of Dupuis, 29–30, 39; of Eckstein, 363–72; of Volney, ­37–48. See also paganism natural/natal distinction, 57, 86, 98 naturalization of mythic themes, 179 natural religion, 406n25; Bonald on, 96–103, 105, 107, 110, 177; Eckstein on, 354–5, 358; Lamennais on, 139–40, 161, 174 Neologians, the, 262–3, 265–6 Neoplatonism, 208n20, 367–8 Neufchâteau, François de, 55 Newton, Isaac, 89–90 nihilism, 351, 353, 374, 382 Noah, 162 Old Testament, 292, 355 Orientalism, 7, 266n30, 336, 354, 373; origin of term, 349n1; of Schlegel, 350–3; as textual ­scholarship, 43n39, 66, 172 paganism: Bonald on, 67, 96, 105–9, 110–13; Eckstein on, 356–62, ­363–4, 367–8, 371–2; Mennaisians on, 162–5, 173. See also mythography Palmyra, 36 pantheism, 212, 250, 296–7, 350–3, 360 Paoli, Pasquali, 34–5 Paravey, Charles Hyppolite de, 176–9 Pascal, Blaise, 148–9, 279 patriarchal religion. See natural religion patriarchs, 81, 167, 231, 354–5, 361 Pelasgians. See Greeks Pentateuch, 101, 194

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Index 447

perfectibility, 22–3, 84–6, 264–9, 347, 378 philology, 155, 178, 331, 333 philosophical history, 232, 269, 271, 285–6, 291 philosophy of history, 6, 44; Cousin on, 211–12; Eckstein on, 344–5, 374, 383; Jouffroy on, 220, 231–4 Picavet, François, 17 Plato, 201, 208, 292, 338 Platonism, 113n63, 208, 246, 292, 322–3n48. See also Neoplatonism Plongeron, Bernard, 59 pluralist liberalism, 197, 253, 257, 315, 405–6. See also Constant, Benjamin Polignac, Jules de, 124, 201 political theology, 67, 132, 134, ­401–3; of Bonald, 125–32, 402–4; of Eckstein, 378–9; Mennaisian, 182–9 polytheism: Constant on, 289–91, 295–8; 298–302; Eckstein on, ­375–80; as the original form of ­religion, 81, 110–11 Portalis, Jean-Étienne-Marie, 63 preformationism, 84, 87, 99 priestcraft, 42, 62, 250, 282, 320 primitive monotheism, 81, 98, ­110–11, 161–2, 173, 317 primitive revelation, 13, 29; AbelRémusat on, 177–8; Bonald on, 81–3, 117–18; Constant on, 316, 319, 321, 323–5; Creuzer on, ­246–7; Damiron on; 230; Eckstein on, 341–4, 357–61, 389–91; Jouffroy on, 248; Lammenais on, 145–6; Schlegel on, 352 Proclus, 201 progress. See perfectibility; ­teleological developmentalism

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progressive revelation, 262–3, 304, 370 prophecy, 81–2 Protestantism, 104, 140–1, 159, ­275–6, 370; Eckstein’s original Protestantism, 337–8 providence, 88–90, 234, 237, 304 Quebec, 405 Quinet, Edgar, 212 Raynal, Guillaume-Thomas, 135, 139 Reedy, W. Jay, 76, 88–9, 91n82 Reid, Thomas, 206–7, 216, 238 religious pluralism, 304–5, 312–13, 405 religious sentiment: Bonald on, ­106–7, 111–12, 114; Constant on, 266–8, 276–7, 279–81, 286, 302; Globistes on, 311–12 Rémusat, Charles de, 12, 202, 384–7 Revue européenne, 193, 380 Riambourg, Jean-Baptiste-Claude, 193–5 Richelieu, Armand-Emmanuel de Vignerot du Plessis, Duke of, 122 rights, 49–50, 62, 120–1, 403n9; Bonald on, 90, 97–8, 127; Doctrinaires on, 241–2; Eckstein on, 330, 376–7; Mennaisians on, 181, 187–8 Robespierre, Maximilien, 27, 58–60, 267n32 Rohrbacher, René-François, 171 romanticism, German, 246, 330–3, 336, 350–1 Rosenblatt, Helena, 405 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 59, 115, 240, 267n32; Bonald and, 91, 93, 97, 99, 101n19; Constant and, 307–8; Lamennais and, 136, 139–41, 158–9

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448

Index

Royer-Collard, Pierre-Paul, 206–7, 216, 239, 243 Sabeism, 40n31, 162 sacrifice: Bonald on, 98–100, 101–2, 111, 117; Constant on, 276, 288, 296, 300, 310–11; Eckstein on, 354, 361; human sacrifice, 108–9, 163, 288, 296, 394; Lamennais on, 161, 163–6 Sacrilege, Law of, 123, 131, 164 Said, Edward, 66n49 Saint-Simonians, the, 91n82, 194, 203n5, 240n4 Salinis, Louis-Antoine de, 150, 192–3, 195n43 Satan, 147, 164 savages, 7, 86–7, 393 Say, Jean-Baptiste, 27–8, 56, 259 Schelling, Friedrich, 200, 208n19, 246–7, 264 Schlegel, August Wilhelm von, 264, 266 Schlegel, Friedrich von, 264, 266, 331–4, 356n26, 393; historical criticism, 351, 357, 364; Orientalism, 172, 327, 350–3; on ur-revelation, 352 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 208n20, 280, 406n25 scholasticism, 104–5, 113, 196, 374 science, conceptions of, 153–6, 178–9 self-interest: Catholic Traditionalists on, 109, 163n7; Constant on, ­281–2, 291, 295–6, 299, 310–11; Doctrinaires on, 207, 226, 236; Idéologues on, 25–7, 32, 38, 51, 53 sensationalism: Bonald on, 77–8; Doctrinaires on, 204–7, 209–11, 213–15, 226–7; Eckstein on, 339, 382; Idéologues on, 20–2, 38–9 sensualism. See sensationalism

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sensus communis epistemology. See Lamennais, Jean-Marie Shusterman, Noah, 61–2 Sieyès, Emmanuel-Joseph, 34, 55 Smith, Adam, 207, 285, 313n23 Société asiatique, 171, 178, 195, 336, 394 sovereignty of the people, 50, 69, 141, 239–40, 318 stadial theory, 285–6, 289–90 Staël, Germaine de, 28, 205, 257–9, 264–5, 275; Considérations sur les principaux événements de la Révolution française, 71, 126, 147 Starobinski, Jean, 264–5, 284 star worship. See Sabeism statist liberalism, definition of, 197. See also Doctrinaires Stewart, Dugald, 206, 216–17 Stoczkowski, Wiktor, 179 Stolberg-Stolberg, Friedrich Leopold Graf zu, 346 Suard, Jean-Baptiste-Antoine, 256, 262, 313n23 superstition, 23–5, 33–4, 42, 62, 114, 222, 229, 304 Taylor, Charles, 83, 15 teleological developmentalism: Bonald on, 83–90, 97, 100, 102–3; Constant on, 285; Doctrinaires on, 243; Lamennais on, 166, 185 Terror, the, 18–19, 35, 49–50, 200, 233, 239 Tertullian, 102n29, 167 theocracy, 100–1, 185, 323–4, 361–2, 394–6 Theophilanthropy, 60, 104n33, 276 theosophers, 339, 341–3 Todorov, Tzvetan, 284n22, 306, 314 tolerance, 127–8, 139, 250–1, 308–9, 368

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Index 449

tyranny, 51, 207, 295, 316–17. See also despotism ultramontanism, 181–2, 183 Ultras (ultra-royalists), 72, 93, 120–4, 138, 240, 306, 309 unbelief, 140, 174, 226–7 Université catholique, 193, 195n43 University, the, 130, 151, 188, 201, 203, 244, 377; the Imperial University, 65, 71–2, 123 Van Kley, Dale K., 58, 116 Vatican I, 196, 403 Vatican II, 136n1, 403 Veda, 194, 394 Viaene, Vincent, 181–4, 189, 379 Villèle, Joseph de, 122–4, 200–1 Villiers, Charles de, 265–6, 275

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Volney, Constantin-François, 32–5; and Bonaparte, 34, 56–7, 65–6; ­critique of religion, 37–48; Les ruines, ou Méditations sur les ­révolutions des empires, 35–7; Voyage en Syrie et en Egypte, 33–5. See also Idéologues Voltaire, 27, 33, 115, 139, 323, 345, 371 Voss, Johann Heinrich, 324, 368, 370 Walzer, Michael, 401 Wilken, Friedrich, 331 zodiac, 29–40, 170, 318; Zodiac of Denderah, 170, 371 zoolatry, 41 Zoroastrianism, 43, 173, 193, 266, 298

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