Catholicism and Democracy: An Essay in the History of Political Thought by Emile Perreau-Saussine (review)

Emile Perreau-Saussine has written the first in-depth study of the relationship between Catholicism and the republican legacy of the French Revolution. In Catholicism and Democracy, he argues that the Catholic religion sustained a fraught relationship with democratic ideals ever since the French revolutionary government provoked a schism within the French Church by proclaiming the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. In requiring French clerics to swear allegiance to the state rather than the pope, the Constitution threw most French Catholics into the pope’s arms. It also inspired the early conservative Joseph de Maistre to found political ultra-montanism, which Perreau-Saussine describes as a form of historical pessimism and authoritarian politics whereby popes governed the Church independently of absolutist kings.

In 1814, however, the Bourbon Restoration established Gallicanism, which subordinated the Church to the state. This spelled the collapse of political ultramontanism as Félicité Robert de Lamennais, Maistre’s ultramontanist disciple, accused the government of atheism before declaring that the people were Rome’s true upholders and sovereignty’s real source. In response, Rome adopted a reactionary position, condemning Lamennais and adopting the theological variant of ultramontanism, which led to the declaration of papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council.

In the meantime, French Catholics had to confront the new republican tide. Drawing on Comtian sociology to set up laicity as a secular religion, France’s Third Republic discriminated against the Catholic Church to the extent of denying it status as a civil association. Catholics were now obliged to fight for their political survival and to center their political thought on freedom of conscience, education, and religion. They also were forced to reflect more deeply on their place in the public sphere. Charles Péguy emphasized that Christians should cultivate both spiritual and political lives, practicing humility in private but “bursting with pride” as citizens. The resulting Catholic political thought, which defended temporal liberty and worked toward a brighter political future, prepared the Second Vatican Council.

Catholicism and Democracy constitutes an original and valuable contribution to the history of Christian political thought. However its central argument that the First and Second Vatican Councils were theoretically antithetical depends crucially on the unsustainable proposition that Maistre was an intolerant authoritarian and antiprogressivist whose absolutist legacy was overturned as Catholicism became democratized. This portrait, indebted to a caricature prevalent in French scholarship, crumbles before the facts. Maistre not only wrote extensively in favor of freedom of education and religion during his years in Russia, thus effectively paving the way for those whom Perreau-Saussine identifies as democratic Catholics. After the Revolution, Maistre also repudiated royal absolutism, developed a radically progressivist theory of history, recognized the advantages of democracy, and exercised a formative influence on Auguste Comte, the father of republican laicity. The battle lines between “reactionary” ultramontanism and “democratic” Catholicism were thus not as clearly drawn historically as they can be logically. Indeed, it is disputable that they could be drawn at all. What the evidence suggests instead is that throughout the nineteenth century, Catholics had to renew their political theoretical reservoir to carve out a political space for themselves. They had to combat, for instance, for freedom of education not only under the Third Republic but also during the Bourbon Restoration and the July monarchy. It is not, then, that absolutist “reaction” was replaced by libertarian democratism and that these corresponded to the First and Second Vatican Councils, respectively: absolutism was in any case well dead among loyal monarchists like Maistre by the turn of the nineteenth century. Rather, it is that the Revolution obliged Catholics to find new ways of expressing and practicing their religious beliefs, demonstrated by the continuous and contrasting examples of the First and Second Vatican Councils.

In all, though, Catholicism and Democracy treats an important subject with originality and erudition, remaining indispensable reading for...