Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought

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Mallet complained that ‘All Europe groans under aristocracy ...[being]

ﬁlled with corps, orders, nobles, tribunals, all privileged, all jealous of their

exemptions.’ He dreamed of ‘a regime . . . which, breaking all the barriers

raised between the monarch and the people, causes their wills and their

interests to coincide’ (quoted in Acomb 1973,p.76).

It might be expected from this that Mallet would have suppor ted the

Genevan natifs, when they revolted in 1782 against the privileged orders.

In fact, however, Mallet attacked this revolt with the same counter-

revolutionary arguments he would use again seven years later against the

French revolutionaries. The natif rebellion, argued Mallet, was an example

of demagogues – in this case, the middle-class Repr

esentants – stirring up

‘the people’ with ﬁctitious promises.

Republican factions come to an end sooner or later by tyranny. So, let the Prices,

the Raynals and other enthusiasts who are called by giddy brains the defenders of the

peoples but whom I call their poisoners – let them come stir up to effervescence the

dregs of states; let them nourish restlessness and disquiet in legitimizing insurrections

by the inalienable right to revolt; let us oppose them, not by argumentation, but by

experience . . . The history of Geneva before our eyes, we shall see liberty destroying

itself continually by its attempted self-aggrandisement. Twenty happy nations have

received chains while looking for a government without abuses, and not one has found

it. (quoted in Acomb 1973,p.97)

In 1789,intheMercure, Mallet would complain of the French Revolution

in the same terms. He never assumed, as Burke did, a position of reverence

towards the old regime. ‘He approves of the ends of the Revolution of

1789 but rejects the means’, argued Jacques Godechot (Godechot 1972,

p. 75). For Mallet, it was clear that the French seigneurial system, like the

Genevan political hierarchy, was in need of reform; here, he supported

Jean-Joseph Mounier, who proposed transforming the Estates General into

a unicameral body, in a new union of bourgeois and noblesse. What Mallet

objected to was what he repeatedly referred to as the ‘democracy of the

rabble’ (d

emocratie de la canaille). Thus, he offered limited praise to the

August decrees which abolished feudal privilege, but feared the jacquerie

accompanying it. As soon as the attack on aristocracy threatened to become a

generalised attack on property, he deplored it. As the Revolution progressed,

Mallet became more and more hostile to what he saw as a utopian disregard

for history and experience from ‘the horrible faction of Jacobins’ (quoted

in Acomb 1973,p.249). ‘One does not remake men like decrees’, he

exclaimed in a different context in March 1790 (quoted in Acomb 1973,

p. 81).

Counter-revolutionary thought

He expanded on this theme in his book of 1793,theConsid

erations sur

la Nature de la R

evolution de France, which he wrote in Switzerland after

ﬂeeing France as an

emigr

einMay1792. ‘Ah! When you aspire to lead

men, you must take the trouble to study the human heart’ (Mallet du Pan

1793,p.71). This was exactly what the Revolutionary Convention, in his

view, had failed to do, with its total neglect of experience, a side-effect of its

fanatical enthusiasm. ‘It is absurd to talk ceaselessly of principles, where one

only ﬁnds circumstances’, was Mallet’s pragmatic position (Mallet du Pan

1793,p.77). For this reason, he distanced himself as much from the royalist

counter-revolutionaries as he did from the ‘brigands’ who had usurped

France (Mallet du Pan 1793,pp.14, 21). The royalist die-hards were far

too limited and parochial in their outlook. They did not see that ‘Every

European is today party to this ﬁnal combat of civilisation’ (Mallet du Pan

1793, p. v). For Mallet, the hope was that the coalition forces might be

able to save France from anarchy and save Europe from France, though

he feared that the outcome of war would actually be military dictatorship

(Mallet du Pan 1793,p.74). The French had forgotten that the aim and

duty of all government was ‘the protection of families, public peace and

settled fortunes’ (Mallet du Pan 1793,p.74).

Mallet du Pan’s writing – which through the Mercure reached a very

wide audience – encompassed many of the major themes of counter-

revolutionary thought. His hatred of Condorcian systematising; his belief

that history was ‘experimental politics’; his love of order in general and

monarchical order in particular; his fear that morals were being eroded by

revolution; his dislike of popular sovereignty and natural rights theories; his

defence of property; his cosmopolitan perception that the French Revolu-

tion was not merely French but necessarily European; his obsession with

balance: all these motifs would be reiterated in counter-revolutionary writ-

ings across Europe for several decades. These motifs, moreover, were not

in Mallet part of some irrationalism, but a continuation of the reform-

minded moderation that characterised his writings before the Revolu-

tion. The example of Mallet shows that it was possible to be counter-

revolutionary without being ‘counter-enlightenment’. However, not all

counter-revolutionaries were so moderate. Partly because of his Calvinist

background, and partly because he did not share Montesquieu’s or Burke’s

belief in intermediary bodies, Mallet du Pan was not particularly exercised

by the de-Christianisation process instigated by the Revolution. While he

deplored the ‘pitiless fury’ with which clergy were being persecuted, he

had less antagonism towards their expropriation and the abolition of clerical

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privilege (Godechot 1972,p.75). For other counter-revolutionar y theo-

rists, however, religion – or irreligion – was at the heart of what was wrong

with revolution; these were those thinkers of the 1790s often dubbed the

‘theocrats’.

2 Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald: throne and altar

Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821) and Louis de Bonald (1754–1840)were

nearly exact contemporaries who each acknowledged the kinship they

found in the other’s work. ‘I have never thought anything that you had

not previously written, nor written anything that you had not previously

thought’, Maistre wrote to Bonald (quoted in Godechot 1972,p.101). Both

began their political careers from a platform of pragmatic reform. Maistre,

who was ﬁrst a Substitut, then a senator in his native Savoy, showed himself

in his pre-revolutionary writings to be an enemy of despotism and an advo-

cate of reformed monarchy, who hoped, in true Montesquieu-like form,

that strengthening intermediate bodies (the parlements in France and the

Senate in Savoy) would be enough to check the abuses of the monarchies

of Europe and thereby shore them up. ‘It is necessary to repair continually

if one does not want to see the ediﬁce collapse’, he explained (quoted in

Darcel 1988a, p. 179). Bonald was more strongly reformist. As the mayor

of Millau, a town in the Roquefort-producing and glove-making Rouer-

gue region of France, Bonald spent the 1780s agitating to revive municipal

government and create a Rousseauan spirit of public service, against the

stiﬂingly centralised Bourbon government (Klinck 1996,pp.25–34). He

supported both the aristocratic revolution of 1787–8 and, initially, the Rev-

olution of 1789–90, on the ground that this was the best chance to revive

local government. He only made a ﬁnal break with the Revolution in 1791,

after the controversy over the National Assembly order that clergy must take

a public oath to the new constitution. He ﬂed with his sons to Heidelberg,

where he remained until 1795, working on his Th

eorie du Pouvoir Politique,

published in 1796. Maistre, who had an instinctive dislike of sudden change,

had broken with the Revolution much sooner than Bonald. As early as June

1789, Maistre voiced terror at the transformation of French political institu-

tions. In September 1792, he ﬂed Chamb

ery for northern Italy (ﬁrst Aosta

then Turin), moving to Lausanne the following year, where he organised a

kind of spy network to provide the Savoy monarchy with intelligence and

where he also wrote the slim volume that established his reputation, the

Consid

erations sur la France.

Counter-revolutionary thought

These two works took quite different forms – Maistre’s Consid

erations

was explicitly concerned with the current affair of the French Revolution,

whereas Bonald’s Th

eorie was much more loftily abstract, outlining the

fundamental laws of human existence since the beginning of time. Both

works, however, were in agreement on the absolute interrelatedness of

religion and politics. ‘We are all attached to the throne of the Supreme Being

by a supple chain that restrains without enslaving us’, is the Consid

erations’

famous opening line (Maistre 1994,p.3). The French Revolution, for

Maistre, was a fundamentally ‘anti-religious’ event, which through its attacks

on Christianity, simply conﬁrmed that every important institution in Europe

was ‘Christianised’. ‘[R]eligion mingles in everything, animates and sustains

everything’ (Maistre 1994,p.42). Bonald agreed: civil society, for him,

consisted of the union of religious and political society.

What this meant

was the union of a revived church with a revitalised monarchy.

During the Restoration period and after, Maistre’s reputation – through

his book Du Pape (1819) – was that of the ultimate ultramontane Catholic,

an orthodox defender of the papacy against the ‘Gallican liberties’ of the

French Church. In Du Pape, Maistre genuinely hoped to convert atheists to

faith and those of other Christian faiths to the Roman Catholic Church.

He had spent the years 1803–17 at the court of Tsar Alexander where he

had tried to convert many of his Russian Orthodox friends to Catholicism,

with some success. Maistre’s grander aim in Du Pape was to reinvest the

papacy with the glory it had had in the Middle Ages, before it was weak-

ened by the Reformation and the enlightened attacks of the eighteenth

century. He makes the argument that the pope is the true architect of the

splendour of Europe; and that France is a providential nation intended to

carry on the work of Rome in a secular sphere (Armenteros 2004,pp.103–

9;Maistre1852). Maistre lamented that French kings had become infected

with Jansenism and Gallicanism, which led to uncertainty and prevented

them from carrying out their vocation. Political ruler s, he argued, must

resdiscover their similarity to the pope – to be the entity which ‘governs,

and is not governed, that judges and is not judged’ (Maistre 1843,p.16).

Carl Schmitt was inﬂuenced by Maistre when he wrote that the sovereign

‘is by its very nature the decisive entity’ (Schmitt 2007,p.43; see also

Spektorowski 2002 for the similarities and differences between Maistre and

Schmitt). ‘Infallibility in the spiritual order and sovereignty in the temporal

4 Pref ace to Th

eorie du Pouvoir Politique, Bonald 1864, i.

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order are two perfectly synonymous words’, wrote Maistre in his ‘Lettre sur

le Christianisme’ (quoted in Lebrun 1965,p.135).

An attachment to infallibility, however, was not the same as orthodoxy.

Both Maistre and Bonald took their defence of the social utility of religion

so far that it went beyond standard Catholic dogma. Maistre’s outlook was

shaped at least as much by youthful immersion in illuminist and Masonic

writings (and practice) as it was in the orthodox teachings of the church,

but he does not seem to have found the two to have been in conﬂict (see

Buche 1935; Dermenghem 1979). The real enemy was unbelief. In the

Consid

erations, he predicted a ‘ﬁght to the death between Christianity and

philosophism’ with the predicted result being a ‘rejuvenated’ Christianity

(Maistre 1994,p.47). Bonald, too, imagined half a century of increas-

ing irreligion giving way to a new strengthened Christianity, again with

some unorthodox elements. The philosophes were wrong to suppose that

religion was an interior affair. Religion was what held a society together.

Bonald continued Rousseau’s dream of ﬁnding a civic religion analogous

to Roman paganism; unlike Rousseau, he imagined that Catholicism could

be remodelled to become this religion. In his Th

eorie du Pouvoir Politique,

Bonald proposes erecting a vast civic building in the shape of a pyramid,

a gigantic sign of triadic power where great national rituals such as burials

and coronations would take place – a temple of providence (Klinck 1996,

p. 76).

Providence and sacriﬁce were central to Bonald and Maistre’s politics.

‘With man begins religion; with religion begins sacriﬁce’, wrote Bonald

(Bonald 1864, i,p.493). He took Condorcet’s belief in the indeﬁnite

perfectibility of man and transformed it into the indeﬁnite perfectibility of

social institutions; this was what he called his ‘religion of society’ (Klinck

1996,pp.97, 78). On the part of individuals – in whom Bonald scarcely

believed – this would require the progressive subordination of the self into

the divine whole. ‘All men are unhappy, because all are mortal; thus they

are all punished; thus they are all guilty; thus the will of all, the love of all,

the strength of all are thus necessarily depraved or unregulated’ (quoted in

Quinlan 1953,p.52). Maistre was equally preoccupied with the problem of

evil. He shared with the philosophes a belief in the Newtonian exactness of

the workings of the universe; he refers to God as the ‘Eternal Geometer’, a

veritable clich

e of the eighteenth century. Unlike them, he clung to a belief

in particularised providence as well as general providence; Maistre used the

enlightened deist image of God as a watchmaker (Maistre 1994,p.3), yet

also kept a ﬁercely anti-deist conviction that God could interfere with the

Counter-revolutionary thought

timepiece of human history whenever and wherever He liked: ‘Providence

willed that the ﬁrst blow be struck by the Septembrists, in order that justice

itself would be debased’ (Maistre 1994,p.6).

This made the problem of evil an acute one. ‘Evil is on the earth and it

cannot have come from God’, he writes in his Examen de Rousseau, yet how

could it not have come from God, without denying God’s omnipotence?

(quoted in Lebrun 1965,p.31). Maistre’s answer was that evil was ‘punish-

ment’. Therefore, he writes in the Soir

ees, no evil is necessary; but given

man’s fallen nature, it was nonetheless constant. Man kills butterﬂies on pins,

uses lambs’ guts for harps, kills elephants for their tusks and is constantly

slaughtering his fellow-man. Such slaughter can be divine, if it becomes a

form of sacriﬁce to restore the balance in human existence. There is a big

difference between war and anarchy, for Maistre. One is divine; the other,

satanic.

In his anthropological essay, the

Eclaircissement sur les Sacriﬁces,Maistre

outlined the ubiquity of sacriﬁce in human existence, tracing, for exam-

ple, the practice of sacriﬁcing children and wives in Egypt, India, Greece,

Rome, Carthage, Mexico, Peru and Europe before the time of Charle-

magne (Bradley 1999,p.44). The famous passage on the executioner in

the Soir

ees is not a plea for the virtue of violence per se, but a description

of the kind of blood-letting that in his view can prevent other bloodshed

from becoming anarchy. ‘[A]ll greatness, all power, all social order depends

upon the executioner; he is the terror of human society and the tie that

holds it together. Take away this incomprehensible force from the world

and at t hat very moment order is superceded by chaos, thrones fall, soci-

ety disappears. God, who is the source of the power of the ruler, is also

the source of punishment’ (quoted in Berlin 1994, p. xxviii). Isaiah Berlin

famously argued from Maistre’s preoccupation with violence that he was a

forerunner of f ascism (Berlin 1990). Recent scholarship, however, has dis-

puted this thesis on the grounds that Maistre – like Bonald and unlike many

fascists – was deeply concerned with the question of legitimacy (Bradley

1999; Spektorowski 2002). In this light, Maistre in fact appears anti-fascist –

if the label of fascist were not, in any case, an anachronism. The choice, for

Maistre, was ‘not between liberalism and tyranny but between legitimate

authoritarianism and totalitarian tyranny’ (Spektorowski 2002,p.302). Far

more terrible for Maistre than the executioner was what he called the state

advocated by the ‘cowardly “optimists” of the Directory, a state in which

no law was enforced, in which people committed suicide out of sheer

demoralisation’ (Maistre 1994,p.86).

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The point of politics, in Maistre’s view – which the Revolution illus-

trated for him in horrible detail – was to manage disorder and violence.

The question, then, was which political form could perform this task best.

Maistre rejected the notion that there was one form of political rule that

was best for all nations. He expanded on Montesquieu’s science of the

relation between national characteristics and form of government: ‘despo-

tism for one nation is as natural, as legitimate, as democracy is for another’

(quoted in Lebrun 1965,p.84). But ‘if one asks which government is the

most natural for man, history is there to answer: it is monarchy’ (quoted

in Lebrun 1965,p.84). Counter-revolutionaries often appealed to Egypt

as proof that the ﬁrst and most legitimate political form was monarchy.

Bonald went further: ‘There is no public society except royal monarchy’

(Bonald 1859, i,pp.34ff.). Mixed government, he called ‘political polygamy’

(Bonald 1845,p.96). The great task of the current age was to reinvest the

crown with sacred power, something which could not be done by follow-

ing any kind of English model. Bonald had at least three objections to the

British brand of monarchy: it was mixed; it had allowed ‘the disorder which

female succession can produce’ (Bonald 1859, i,pp.77–8); and, above all,

it was protestant, which meant that the monarch was not a proper sovereign

at all.

Bonald and Maistre shared the belief that Protestantism had sown the

seeds of a fatal individualism whose logical consequence was the disorder

of revolution. ‘What is a protestant?’ asked Maistre. ‘He is a man who

protests.’ Protestantism was, ‘positively, and literally, the sans-culottisme

of religion’, and therefore ‘the great enemy of Europe ...the fatal ulcer

which attaches itself to all the sovereignties and continually consumes

them, the son of pride, the father of anarchy, the universal dissolvent’

(quoted in Lebrun 1965,p.138). Bonald concurred that the Reforma-

tion had led inexorably to the loosening of the bonds that held society

together. Protestantism was a foolish form of egoism. ‘Deregulated self-

love’ would always lead to revolution, in Bonald’s opinion, because men

could only ﬂourish in a well-ordered society founded on religion and sacri-

ﬁce (Bonald 1864, i,pp.493–6). Maistre and Bonald were both preoccupied

with what Maistre called the ‘generative principle’ of society: where did

power come from? The answer, for both of them, was that it came from

God.

Their belief in the divine origins of power shaped Bonald’s and Maistre’s

attitude to constitutions. This is not to say that scepticism about a priori

constitution-building was the exclusive preserve of theocrats. Even without

Counter-revolutionary thought

their divine-right conception of sovereignty, Mallet du Pan had already

denounced the Jacobin avidity for creating laws: ‘Europe cannot tolerate a

legislator’ (quoted in Goldstein 1988,p.56). However, Bonald and Maistre

took the argument further. Their dislike of excessive legislation was not just

a question of pragmatic stability, but one of principle. If power was godly,

then it must follow that men could never constitute it. Therefore, the

revolutionary constitutions were at best pointless and at worst destructive.

Bonald distinguished ‘constituted’ and non-constituted societies; the former

were made by God, the latter by men. Maistre, similarly, betraying the

inﬂuence of Vico on his thought (Vico’s verum-factum principle according

to which it is only possible to have true knowledge of that which one has

created), insisted that ‘Man can modify everything within the sphere of his

activity, but he creates nothing; such is his law, in the physical world as in

the moral world’ (Maistre 1994,p.49). The notion that men could create

a constitution by deliberation and reﬂection was absurd. ‘Nothing great

has great origins’ (Maistre 1994,p.49). ‘No constitution is the result of

deliberation’ (Maistre 1994,p.49). The ‘prodigious’ and escalating number

of laws passed by the National Convention was, to Maistre, a sign of its

weakness.

Their profound antagonism towards man-made laws created a problem for

Bonald’s and Maistre’s political thought, as well as for counter-revolutionary

thought in general. Where was post-revolutionary regeneration to come

from, if not from yet more laws? Blood and sacriﬁce provided Maistre

with part of his answer. But as for the realm in which the regeneration

was to take place, it was in the very fabric of society. This was the only

way that the ‘contrary of revolution’ could be sufﬁciently spontaneous to

accord with God’s providence. It has been said that Bonald and Maistre were

‘among the ﬁrst to identify the social with the political realm’ (Bradley 1999,

p. 24). Their narrow, religious conception of power had the perverse effect

of vastly widening the scope of the rest of their politics, to encompass

the family, customs and economics. Having relinquished man’s pretence

to make constitutions, the traditionalists now focused on an area which

he could inﬂuence (again, the echo of Vico is very strong), namely society

itself. Many commentators have identiﬁed a link between Bonald and the

early socialists on this basis. But what has been less often recognised is

that Bonald’s and Maistre’s interest in society led them to a Rousseauan

preoccupation with the vir tue of women as a safeguard of good politics, a

preoccupation which was directly contrary to the proto-feminist spirit of

the Fourierists and Saint-Simonians.

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3 Maistre and Bonald: women, power and mœurs

Mallet du Pan commented that, in previous eras, when there were changes

in the political order, most people had remained outside the fray. Now,

however, ‘revolutions have penetrated to the very roots of society’ (quoted

in Goldstein 1988,p.12). It was one of the original aspects of counter-

revolutionary thought to ‘identify the social with the political realm’, to

insist that ‘customs and habits, gender and family relations, religion and

economics’ were all political questions (Bradley 1999,p.24). This goes some

way to explaining the afﬁnity between the counter-revolutionaries and the

early French socialists, notably the Saint-Simonians who read and admired

both Bonald and Maistre. It may also explain the claims of certain twentieth-

century sociologists that Bonald was a sociologist avant la lettre (see Nisbet

1944). In much of the content of their social-political thought, however,

Maistre and Bonald had little in common either with nineteenth-century

socialism or twentieth-century sociology. Their aim in opening up the

parameters of the political was largely to close off social change, particularly

for women.

Maistre and Bonald were especially upset by the way the Revolution

inﬁltrated the family, infecting the manners of women and children. When

Maistre denounced the French Revolution as ‘radically bad’, he cited in

particular the way in which young French girls had lost their modesty,

laughing at ‘disgusting details’ which would make men blush (Maistre 1994,

pp. 38–9). The so-called ‘liberty sanctioned by the revolution’ had created

‘horrible outrages’. ‘Marriage has become legal prostitution; there is no

more paternal authority, no more fear of crime, no more shelter for the

indigent’ (Maistre 1994,p.86). In a work with the ironic title, Bienfaits

de la R

evolution Franc¸aise, Maistre accused the revolutionary gover nment

of possessing ‘an immoral principle, a corrupting power inseparable from

the order of things’ (Maistre 1884, vii,p.385). Making use of various

pieces of published testimony, he describes France during the Terror as a

place where every aspect of the social economy is degraded, where forests

are destroyed and roads rendered impassable, where prostitution is at its

height, where a woman can be guillotined the day after giving birth, where

revolutionary soldiers will rape women before and after they are dead, where

naked girls could be used in the place of religious sacraments, where all are

killed without distinction ‘of age or sex’ (Maistre 1884, vii,pp.394–5,

494–5). Such debauch, argued Maistre, proved that the French Republic

was fundamentally illegitimate (Maistre 1884, vii,p.396). There was hope,

Counter-revolutionary thought

however, in the character of women themselves. Maistre scorned Helen

Maria Williams, a republican writer, for having written to the liberal journal

La D

ecade regretting that Frenchwomen had not taken more part in the

patriotic f

etes of the Revolution.

Maistre called Williams a ‘madwoman’

for thinking like this. In Maistre’s view, women were ‘excellent judges of

honour’, especially Frenchwomen, who were ‘more womanly than all the

women in the universe’ and this was why they had remained untouched

by revolutionary fervour (he conveniently overlooked here the extent to

which women actually did participate in revolutionary festivals) (Maistre

1884, vii,pp.406–7).

As this encounter between Maistre and Williams hints, the virtue of

women was a ﬁercely contested prize in the political debates of post-

revolutionary France. By the 1790s, it was a well-worn clich

e that while

men made laws, women were responsible for manners (‘les hommes font

les lois; les femmes font les moeurs’). Much has been written about the

countless attempts of republicans of the 1790s to co-opt women as a tool

in the regeneration of French morals. The Id

eologue Jean-Baptiste Say was

typical, when he expressed the hope, in his republican utopia Olbie,that

virtuous women could republicanise the corrupt old manners of France,

thereby enabling republican institutions to take root. However, the counter-

revolutionaries were no less vociferous in claiming the virtue of women for

their own project of social regeneration along monarchical lines. Moreover,

in many cases, they drew on the same ideological sources as the republicans

to make their case, most notably the conception of women promulgated by

Book Five of Rousseau’s

Emile.

Emile, Rousseau argues that women must always be judged in accor-

dance with their function as mothers, even in cases when they have not

in fact had children. Bonald was in complete agreement with this; like

Rousseau, he claimed that the morals, and thence the political order of any

society required that women recognised their vocation for motherhood.

‘Every being has an end towards which it must reach’, wrote Bonald. ‘The

natural and social end of woman is marriage, or the accomplishment of

her duties, in her family, towards her husband and her children’ (Bonald

1864, i,p.84). Therefore, the entire education of women must be geared

towards the instrumental role they play as wives and mothers (Bonald 1864, i,

pp. 783–6). Bonald argued that licentiousness or sexual freedom was actually

oppressive for women, since it prevented woman from fulﬁlling her natural

5 La D

ecade Philosophique, 1798,no.23,p.306.