French conservatives and the challenge of the revolutionary past

While German writers had to contend with aspects of eighteenth-century government that were not considered part of a viable tradition, conservative thinkers in France faced the problem of how to respond to the events of the 1790s and the period of Napoleonic rule that had followed them. One response was to regard these events as interruptions to a tradition that was endowed with many of the virtues that Burke had ascribed to his countrymen’s inheritance. JOSEPH DE MAISTRE, a loyal and long-suffering subject of the King of Piedmont and Sardinia, one whose intellectual interests focused on France, adopted this position. He looked to the restoration of the Bourbons in 1814 as the occasion for a return to a system of royal authority whose legitimacy and practical value was demonstrated (to those not beguiled by the spurious and dangerous attractions of

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‘enlightened reason’) by its integration within a social and political culture whose long- evity was a sure sign of its fitness for the needs of the French people and of divine approbation. LOUIS DE BONALD, a contemporary of Maistre’s who held office under the Restoration, thought that revolutionary ideas had acquired a sufficiently firm hold on the mind of his countrymen to pose as an alternative tradition to that of the ancien régime . He sought to shake off this incubus by stressing the congruence of the model of royal government of the Bourbons and fundamental, divinely ordained patterns of authority embedded in the traditional family.

Bonald and Maistre wished to purge the government of post-war France of innovations that resulted from the Revolution. For some French conservatives, however, the Restoration was welcomed as providing an opportunity to fuse the substantive advantages of the old regime with the spirit of freedom that was the most important legacy of the Revolution. This hope provided the focus of FRANCOIS CHATEAUBRIAND’S post-war works. While rejecting the excesses of the revolutionary period, Chateaubriand also condemned the Napoleonic regime as the ‘saturnalia of monarchy’. He appealed to the Bourbons to fortify aspects of traditional government with conventions drawn from constitutional monarchy. The aim was to secure freedom by making arbitrary rule impossible, while preserving the benefits associated with images of social and political order imbued with the lustre and warmth of a long tradition of monarchy.

When these hopes were dashed by the intransigence of the Bourbons and the stifling and tawdry ethos of the July monarchy, other romantic figures (such as LAMARTINE and LAMENNAIS) turned away from monarchy and sought salvation in republican democracy. As the century progressed, however, it was more common for conservative thinkers to follow Bonald’s example and to see the Revolution as the starting-point of a malign counter-tradition that needed to be sternly resisted. This line was prominent in the writings of right-wing thinkers active in the closing decades of the century who were fortified in their traditionalist faith by the impact of the military humiliations of 1870, the revolutionary spectre raised by the Paris Commune of 1871 and the perpetuation of centralization and anti-clericalism under the Third Republic.

In response to this state of affairs CHARLES MAURRAS extolled the virtues of the tradition of political and religious authority embodied in the Bourbon monarchy and the Roman Catholic Church. The former would shun any attempt to adopt a constitutional guise and would rule instead as the unquestioned (and indeed unquestionable) head of a state whose members would be incorporated in a range of functional, geographical, professional and occupational and religious corporations. A return to what Maurras depicted as the traditional French state would relieve subjects (who republicans foolishly treated as sovereigns as well) of the constant interference that was the hallmark of republican government. As subjects of a Bourbon king, ordinary French men (women were subsumed in patriarchal families) would be at liberty to deal with their own affairs under the direction of a monarch whose power was untrammelled and openly acknowledged. These arrangements recognized universal and hence natural patterns of subordination in ways that took account of the distinctive character and historical experience of the French people.

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French conservatives and the challenge of the revolutionary past