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

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that man can, at his pleasure, enter and leave the state like a house through

a continuously open door’ (quoted in Reiss 1955,pp.150–1). Maistre,

too, insisted that government was in ‘no way a matter of choice’ (Maistre

1870,p.503). The only ‘rights of the people’ were those conceded by a

sovereign (Maistre 1994,p.50). Man was not, as Rousseau had indicated,

naturally good. Man was both sociable and corrupt and therefore in need

of government. The alternative to government – here Maistre agreed with

Hobbes – was a state of war. In opposition to the natural rights of the

revolutionaries, Maistre proposed the higher law of God, that cloudy law

which alone was the determinant of right even if men themselves could

only comprehend this higher law imperfectly.

In other words, Maistre’s political thought, like that of the other tradi-

tionalist counter-revolutionaries, was an attempt to reinstate the authority

of divine natural law against the revolutionary claims of individualist nat-

ural rights. Counter-revolutionaries sought to reappropriate the authority

of Rousseau’s volont

erale and to reinvest it with the religious over-

tones which it had lost.

‘In place of the general will, the divine will’,

wrote Haller (Haller 1824–75, i, p. xlviii). Broadly speaking, they accepted

Rousseau’s distinction between the will of all and the general will. The

French Revolution, said Bonald, was an attempt to substitute ‘particular

will’ for ‘general will’ (Bonald 1864, i,p.338). ‘Law has so little to do with

the will of all that the more the will of all is involved, the less it is law’,

argued Maistre (quoted in Goldstein 1988,p.47). What Maistre and his fel-

low counter-revolutionaries could not accept was ﬁrst, that the general will

was artiﬁcal and second, that the general will should be in any sense tied to

the will of ‘the people’. As Bonald wrote, monarchy alone could maintain

the general will by rendering it perpetual through hereditary succession

(Bonald 1864, i,pp.175–84). This attachment to natural law partly explains

the ultimate obsolescence of counter-revolutionary political thought. Marc

Goldstein has called French counter-revolutionary writing the swansong of

natural law, because the concept of natural law was ‘so radically transformed

after 1789 as to be unrecognisable’ (Goldstein 1988,p.15). Moreover, as

mass democracy took hold and became a fact, the counter-revolutionary

belief that it was ﬁctitious seemed increasingly moribund. Robert Nisbet

argued that there was not much difference between Bonald’s criticism of

democratic despotism and Tocqueville’s (Nisbet 1944,p.328). But there

was this difference: Tocqueville recognised that he lived in a ‘democratic

8 On the religious origins of ‘volont

erale’, see Riley 1986.

Counter-revolutionary thought

age’. The counter-revolutionaries had misread history; and since history, for

them, was ‘experimental politics’, this left them with very little. In 1796,

Maistre had famously bet ‘a thousand to one’ that the city of Washington

would never be built ‘and that it will not be called Washington and that

the congress will not meet there’ (Maistre 1994,pp.60–1). By the time of

Andrew Jackson, such a view seemed both absurd and quaint.

This is not to deny that counter-revolutionary political thought persisted

long into the nineteenth century. Indeed, counter-revolutionary ‘romantic’

thinkers such as Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo and Lamennais, dominated

French literary life during the Restoration period as well as that of the

July Monarchy. But as counter-revolutionary thought became aestheticised,

its political meaning became transformed. The ﬁnal section of this chap-

ter will consider the ﬁgure of Pierre-Simon Ballanche, in whose writing

counter-revolutionary thought made the surprising transition from right

to left.

6 Pierre-Simon Ballanche and the end of the counter-revolution

Though he was a generation younger than Bonald and Maistre, the early

career of Pierre-Simon Ballanche (1776–1847) was typical of the Catholic

Traditionalists. The son of a pious Lyon publisher, Ballanche and his family

exchanged an initial sympathy for the Revolution with fear and hostility

after the execution of Louis XVI and the de-Christianization campaign of

Year II (McAlla 1998,pp.10–17). Ballanche, a sickly young man, spent the

Terror outside of Lyon at Grigny, the estate of his maternal grandparents

(McAlla 1998,p.17). On his return to Lyon after the fall of Robespierre,

he was horriﬁed at the ruination – personal, economic and architectural –

that he saw. His ﬁrst work,

Epop

ee Lyonnaise (c.1795) commemorated the

victims of the revolutionary siege of Lyon (McAlla 1998,p.18). He followed

this with a more theoretical work, Du Sentiment, written in 1797, but not

published until 1801, after Bonaparte’s Concordat with Pope Pius VII made

the publication of Christian sentiment seem less dangerous than hitherto

(McAlla 1998,p.22).

Much of Du Sentiment could have been written by Maistre himself, or

by Ballanche’s acquaintance Franc¸ois Ren

e de Chateaubriand, whose best-

selling G

enie du Christianisme appeared on 8 April 1802, just after Napoleon’s

Concordat with Pope Pius VII was ratiﬁed, ushering in a revival of the

Christian faith in France (Chateaubriand 1978b; Godechot 1972,p.134).

Later in life, the mercurial Chateaubriand became an ‘Ultra’, vehemently

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attached to monarchy and restoration. In this work, however, he stressed the

idea that Christianity, as well as being beautiful and poetic and the source

of all great art and literature, was the foundation of political freedom. G

enie

du Christianisme treats religious feeling not as the theocratic base of politics,

but as the guarantee of liberty, of humane politics for the ‘paupers and the

unfortunates who make up the majority of the earth’ (Chateaubriand 1978b,

Book 6,ch.5). In a reversal of Maistre’s mystical executioner, Chateaubriand

sees Christian worship as something that will save the masses from such fre-

quent recourse to the executioner’s blade. ‘In the present state of society,

can you repress an enormous mass of peasants – free and far away from the

eye of the magistrate; can you, in the faubourgs of a great capital, prevent the

crimes of an independent populace without a religion that preaches duties

and virtues to all? Destroy religious worship, and you will need a police

force, prisons and an executioner in every village’ (quoted in McMahon

2001,p.129). Chateaubriand’s argument was not predominantly utilitarian,

however. If Christianity was useful as a mechanism of social control, it was

only because it was true. G

enie du Christianisme is a plea for sincerity against

those men who ‘destroy everything by laughing’ (Chateaubriand 1978b,

Introduction).

Ballanche shared this Rousseauan attachment to sincer ity. Like

Chateaubriand, Ballanche defended Christian feeling and suffering –

something he knew a great deal about, having endured an excruciating

trepan operation that left him in constant pain – against the false, sterile

rationalism of the philosophes. The central theme of Du Sentiment is Chris-

tian expiation – the salutary sacriﬁce that alone can lead to salvation. Like

Maistre, Ballanche saw the Revolution as divine punishment for the impiety

of France. Again, like Maistre – whose Consid

erations Ballanche had read

closely – Ballanche insists that political and social institutions have divine

origins and cannot be engineered by men, condemning these ‘audacious

politicians’ who believe they ‘have it in their power to classify the human

race at their whim, and to arrange empires like sections of a garden’ (quoted

in McAlla 1998,p.43). He attacks, moreover, what he takes to be the indi-

vidualism of Rousseau’s social contract, since ‘man is born for society’.

Ballanche sees the Revolution as a wholly profane occurrence, which can

only be redeemed through the suffering of its victims – such as the heroes of

the Lyon siege – and the grace of God’s providential order. So far, Ballanche

was in tune with earlier counter-revolutionaries.

During the Resoration period, however, in the years 1818–20, Ballanche

modiﬁed his social theory in a direction which earned Maistre’s disapproval

Counter-revolutionary thought

and took him far closer to liberals such as Constant. In his Essai sur les

Institutions Sociales dans leurs Rapports avec les Id

ees Nouvelles of 1818, Ballanche

grafted a new component of progress on to his theory of the divine nature

of social institutions. Maistre complained that Ballanche’s ‘excellent heart’

had become corr upted by a ‘revolutionary spirit’. In fact, Ballanche was

still opposed to the notion of popular sovereignty, but he had now added

into his political theory a notion of popular consent. Providence, he now

argued, worked gradually to increase equality in the civil realm, in line

with Christian equality. The only way for French monarchs to retain their

legitimacywastomoveinthedirectionofF

enelon’s ideal king and away

from absolutism. Those kings were most legitimate who showed the greatest

enelonian love for their people. Ballanche famously remarked that Maistre

was the ‘prophet of the past’ because he sought to return France to a social

order whose time had passed, whereas F

enelon was the ‘prophet of the

future’ (quoted in McAlla 1998,p.325).

In 1827, Ballanche took the idea of social progress still further, with his

new concept of ‘social palingenesis’, which was a self-conscious attempt

to link the liberty of the liberals with the unity of the right-wing Ultras

(Ballanche 1833, iv; see also McAlla 1998, Part Three, ‘Social Palingenesis’).

In biology, ‘palingenesis’ was the theory, associated with Charles Bonnet,

that living beings contain within themselves a tiny pre-for med structure,

which only has to be fertilised to start growing. This, coupled with some

illuminist currents of esoteric history, gave Ballanche the idea that each

historical era contains within itself the germ of the next age. Thus Ballanche

could simultaneously hold to the notion of divine providence – because

the initial germs were all made by God – and that of human progress –

because certain humans (whom Ballanche called ‘initiators’) had the power

to bring these germs to fruition. Moreover, the direction of history was

democratic: each change in era brought nearer the gradual emancipation of

the whole human race. The hero of Ballanche’s history is not the king but

the plebeian. Ballanche restores the element of individual will to ‘volont

erale’. When new European revolutions took place in the 1820s–in

Spain, Naples, Piedmont and Greece – Ballanche welcomed them as a sign

of providentially governed social evolution. In contrast to Maistre, Ballanche

now saw revolutions as part of Christian history, rather than a departure from

it; Maistre and Bonald had failed, he wrote, ‘to understand the new facts’

of the ‘new society’ (Ballanche 1833, ii,p.348).

By the late 1820s, with the Restoration well underway, there was a new

tradition of Catholic social thought in France emerging, sometimes labelled

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‘neo-Catholicism’, which moved many erstwhile counter-revolutionaries

far from the sentiments of the 1790s. In the days following the July Monarchy

of 1830, the Abb

e Lamennais, once an ultraroyalist and now a democrat,

called for ‘God and liberty’, a fusion of democracy and religion. This

was a new progressivist faith, which found support from such ﬁgures as

Victor Hugo and the poet Alphonse de Lamar tine, the latter calling for a

‘parti social’ that would transcend the constrictions of class and speak for

the whole of society (see B

enichou 1977; Berenson 1989). In this era of

religious revival socialist ideas mingled with Catholic romanticism. ‘What

is socialism?’ asked Louis Blanc; the answer being ‘The Gospel in action’

(Berenson 1989,p.545). The impetus for this new union of Christianity

and the left came in part, as Edward Berenson has argued, from the failure

of the revolutionary tradition. The abortive insurrections of 1834 and 1839

moved those on the left to reject the ‘violence and conspiratorial politics’

of the revolutionaries and turn towards ‘a new source of change, one that

would be peace-loving, unifying, and spiritual’ (Berenson 1989,p.544). At

the same time, some on the right began to see the democratic potential in

the fraternal ideals of the early church.

Ballanche – who found new admirers among the socialist Saint-Simonians

and Fourierists – now saw the whole period from 1789 to 1830 in France

as representing an ‘

epoque paling

ensique’ which would usher in a new

phase of peaceful social unity based on progressive Christianity. Ballanche

now expressed horror at Maistre’s insistence that capital punishment was an

eternal feature of political society; he sensed a gathering European-wide

rejection of the practice: society must cease to punish by blood (Ballanche

1833, iv,pp.316–17). Nor could he agree, any longer, with Maistre’s

diagnosis of the Revolution as irreligious. To the contrary, it had provided

the chance for a new religion, a new Christianity – the religion of society

at large. Like Bonald and Maistre, these Catholic progressives of the 1830s

wanted to bring the Revolution to an end. Unlike them, they sought not

to negate it, but rather to complete it.

Romanticism and political thought in

the early nineteenth century

john morrow

In the early decades of the nineteenth century European intellectual life

was enriched by the works of composers, painters, poets and writers who

were inﬂuenced in a variety of ways by the spirit of ‘romanticism’ (Porter

and Teich 1988; Schenk 1979). Romantic ways of thinking had deep roots

in early modern culture but between about 1800 and 1850 they played a

particularly signiﬁcant role in theoretically framed statements on fundamen-

tal political questions. Issues of deﬁnition and taxonomy bedevil the study

of romanticism, but at the risk of some oversimpliﬁcation it is possible to

identify three concerns that were shared by a range of prominent expo-

nents of political romanticism. These writers were all preoccupied with

the epistemological and moral importance of feeling and imagination; they

developed a distinctive notion of the individual; and they stressed ideas of

community.

Although romanticism is sometimes associated with a rejection of reason

and a preference for aesthetically conditioned intuitions, it was more com-

mon for romantic writers to claim, with Coleridge, that ‘deep thinking is

attainable only by a man of deep feeling; . . . all truth is a species of revelation’

(Coleridge 1956–71 [1801], ii,p.709). One important insight that romantics

derived from revelation was the idea that human beings were inﬁnite crea-

tures who possessed affective, moral and religious potentialities that could

not be captured by enlightened rationalism. Furthermore, they believed

that these potentialities could only be recognised within ‘organic’ com-

munities, that is, historically anchored, complex social groupings reﬂecting

the interdependence of their members and embodying values that corre-

sponded with the requirements of their natures. Communities of this kind

were uniﬁed entities, recognising the moral status of their members and

appealing to them on the basis of affective values that were integral to

The author wishes to thank Colin Davis, Mark Francis, Diana Morrow, Jonathan Scott and Andrew

Sharp for commenting on earlier versions of this essay; John Robert s provided invaluable research

assistance.

John Morrow

humanity, producing harmony and symmetry in social relationships and in

the inner life of individuals. For these reasons, romantic writer s frequently

discussed politics in language that was more often employed in aesthetic

discourse.

Despite these common perceptions, romanticism did not give rise to

a uniﬁed political theory. Some of the differing political implications of

romanticism were closely related to the generational placement of different

writers, while others can be traced to the national context. For example,

a number of romantic ﬁgures in England and Germany had been broadly

sympathetic to the French Revolution and were associated with radical

reformism in domestic politics. However, their mature political theory (a

product of the years when Britain and the German states were struggling to

resist Napoleon) was both conservative and nationalistic. By contrast, certain

English and French writers whose political writings were a product of the

post-war years produced radical and progressive varieties of romanticism. In

addition to these generational differences, one can also relate divergences in

political romanticism to national context. For example, while conservative

romantics in England were warmly attached to the traditional constitution,

those in Germany had to contend with the taint of absolutism which had,

they believed, disﬁgured the recent theory and practice of government in

the German states. Their conservatism thus had a ‘restitutive’ aspect: they

sought inspiration in the more distant past and were hostile to the ideas

and practices of European politics immediately prior to the Revolution

(Saye and L

owy 1984,pp.63–4). The outlook of these writers differed

from that adopted by French ﬁgures. In that country romantics became

reconciled to the transformations wrought by the Revolution and directed

their intellectual energies to identifying institutions that would serve the

needs of a modern political culture.

Since generation and context are cross-cutting to some degree, the dis-

cussion of political romanticism that follows will be structured so as to

take account of both of these considerations. It is arranged in three sec-

tions. The ﬁrst will examine the conservative romanticism of Samuel Taylor

Coleridge, Robert Southey and William Wordsworth in England, and of

Adam M

uller, Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Scheiermacher in

Germany.

The second section will sketch brieﬂy the radical critique of

1 Novalis was not a straightforward conservative and his political writings were products of the 1790s

(Beiser 1992,pp.266–7). He will be treated here as a writer who advanced ideas which came to play

a central role in the conservative romanticism that became prominent after the turn of the century;

see Beiser 1992,p.264.

Romanticism and political thought in the early nineteenth century

conservative romanticism produced by Lord Byron, William Hazlitt and

Percy Bysshe Shelley. Progressive expressions of political romanticism in the

writings of Thomas Carlyle in England, and Franc¸ois Ren

e Chateaubriand,

elicit

e de Lamennais and Alphonse de Lamartine in France will be con-

sidered in the ﬁnal section of the essay. These statements were distinctive

because they related romantic themes to the requirements of modernity.

1 Conser vative romanticism in England and Germany, 1800–1830

Although many English and German romantics adopted conservative posi-

tions after 1800

they were not merely reacting against the Revolution and

trying to restore what it had threatened or destroyed. To the contrary, they

attributed the beguiling attractions of revolutionary doctrines to the short-

comings of prevailing conceptions of the nature and role of government.

Traditional institutions were to be revitalised and restored by showing them

in the light of romantic preconceptions. Of the two sets of writers, the

English were far less critical of inherited political institutions because they

did not have to contend with a recent history of absolute government.

They were, however, as hostile to many conventional aspects of eighteenth-

century thought as they were to the wild and destructive conceptions that

they associated with the Revolution. Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth

were deeply alarmed by the thought that philosophical materialism was not

unique to French ideologues and their English imitators, but had become

part of the furniture of the modern mind. Robert Southey, for example,

dismissed the previous century and a half as an age during which men ‘have

been reasoning themselves out of every thing that they ought to believe

and feel’, and he cast back to late medieval and early modern England for a

model of social and political morality that was free of the incubus of materi-

alism (Southey 1829, i,p.5). William Wordsworth venerated the traditional

institutions of eighteenth-century England and praised the socially acquired

and largely unreﬂective habits of Burke’s ‘second nature’. The doctrine of

‘second nature’ stressed the relationship between the intrinsic structure of

the human mind and the institutional, familial and personal experiences

of members of historically coherent, traditional communities (Chandler

1984,p.162). Traditional values were imbued with ‘elementary feelings

of human nature’; they fostered the ‘wisdom of the heart’, not the mere

2 Beiser (1996, pp. xi–xiii) cautions against reading conservatism back into ‘early’ German romanticism

from the 1790s.

John Morrow

‘prudence of the head’ which Wordsworth associated with the Enlighten-

ment (Wordsworth 1974d, pp. 242, 240).

These feelings were evoked in Wordsworth’s mature poetry, but unlike

Southey, who upheld a simple dichotomy between ‘calculation and feeling’,

he sought to replace sterile conceptions of rationality with an emotionally

satisfying fusion of feeling and thought. For example, in the preface to

Lyrical Ballads he claimed that the ‘spontaneous overﬂow of powerful feeling’

that marked good poetry was a product of those who, ‘being possessed

of more than usual organic sensibility had also thought long and deeply’

(Wordsworth 1974e, p. 127). Wordsworth later insisted that his affections

‘had ever been moved’ and his imagination exercised ‘under and for the

guidance of reason’ (Wordswor th 1974d, p. 258; cf. Southey 1829, i,p.79).

These remarks suggest a symbiotic relationship between rational discourse

and second nature: both reason and imaginative sympathy were reinforced

by the wisdom embodied in inherited institutions and the unreﬂective sense

of uncorrupted humanity.

Although Wordsworth retained a place for reason in the operation of the

poetic intelligence he harboured a deep-seated animus against philosophical

system-building. In particular, he objected to speculative metaphysicians’

penchant for ﬁtting ‘words to things’ (Wordsworth 1974c, p. 103). In a

notable passage in The Prelude Wordsworth set this criticism in a particular

biographical context:

Thy subtle speculations, toils abstruse

Among the Schoolmen, and Platonic forms

Of wild ideal pageantry, shap’d out

From things well-matched, or ill, and words for things,

The self-created sustenance of a mind

Debarr’d from Nature’s living images . . .

(Wordsworth 1991 [1798?], i, Bk. vi,

lines 308–13,pp.193–4)

Later in this poem Wordsworth’s critique of speculative philosophy became

sharper: it was pedantic, obscurantist and related to modes of Enlightenment

thinking which were destructive of traditional social and political relation-

ships (Chandler 1984,pp.235ff.). These charges, which one would have

thought might have been levelled at Godwin or Helvetius, were actually

directed at Wordsworth’s friend Coleridge. They reﬂected a marked differ-

ence in emphasis in their respective understandings of how the Enlighten-

ment could be most effectively combated. While Wordsworth thought that

Romanticism and political thought in the early nineteenth century

reason could be harnessed to feeling through t he images of poetry, Coleridge

wished to identify a philosophically coherent alternative to materialism.

At the heart of Coleridge’s system lay a distinction between ‘understand-

ing’ and ‘reason’. The ﬁrst of these terms referred to humans’ calculating

and discursive faculties, while the second applied to capacities of the human

mind which revealed its ‘spiritual and supersensuous’ aspects. The ‘under-

standing’ was developed to varying degrees in different individuals, but ‘rea-

son’, the source of moral feelings and moral principles of justice, law, right

and the state, was common to humankind (Coleridge 1969, ii,p.104n). In

The Friend Coleridge argued that the state was a product of reason and he

traced political obligation to the (frequently unconscious) recognition of its

role in promoting moral perfection (Coleridge, 1969, ii,p.126). However,

while he insisted that the state was a moral agent, Coleridge strenuously

resisted the idea – identiﬁed with Rousseau, but also echoing his own

‘Jacobin’ past – that its structure could be determined by the dictates of

morality (Coleridge 1969, ii,p.127;cf.Coleridge1971,pp.217–29). To

the contrary, questions concerning the structure of government and the

distribution of political rights were subject to the inﬂuence of time and

circumstance and fell within the province of the ‘understanding’. Morality

determined the ends of the state, but in deciding how these ends could be

attained men should not ignore the lessons of experience. Recent events in

France showed that political equality would destabilise unequal societies and

undermine their capacity to produce the range of moral beneﬁts of which

they were capable (Coleridge 1969, ii,pp.103–4;Morrow1990,pp.83ff.).

Coleridge traced his conception of reason to the Christian Platonists

of the seventeenth century and argued that many of the ills of his own

age were a consequence of the displacement of Platonism by philosoph-

ical materialism. By the early nineteenth century materialism had left its

mark on even the most sincere Christians (Coleridge 1972,p.43, 1983, i,

p. 217;Morrow1988). This claim received its fullest treatment in the ﬁrst

‘Lay Sermon’. In this work Coleridge described the Bible as the ‘states-

man’s manual’, but he insisted that it would serve this function only if it

was read through the lens of Christian Platonism. Since this philosophy

directed attention towards those inﬁnite forces that made moral perfection

a goal for humanity, Coleridge believed that it would furnish a corrective to

the materialism that was rife among his contemporaries (Coleridge 1972,

pp. 43ff.).

The English romantics’ response to materialism concentrated on its harm-

ful effect on social and political morality. Southey endorsed Coleridge’s