Romantic Catholics: France's Postrevolutionary Generation in Search of a Modern Faith

Chapter 3: The Dilemma of Obedience

103  Chapter 3 The Dilemma of Obedience Charles de Montalembert, Catholic Citizen In an 1844 speech before the Chamber of Peers, Charles de Montalembert, the thirty-four-year-old leader of France’s Catholic party, declared that he spoke for a generation of Catholics “born and educated in the midst of freedom,of representative and constitutional institutions ”whose “souls ha[d] been penetrated . . . by their influence.”These Catholics demanded the most complete religious liberty—in this instance, the right to open independent schools, outside the government’s monopoly over secondary education. “We are the sons of the crusaders, and we will never retreat before the sons of Voltaire!” he concluded, with a flourish that soon became a slogan of Catholic politics.1 Montalembert’s affirmation that the “sons of the crusaders” had a role to play in postrevolutionary French society and politics captured a sense of Catholic revival and generational identity that had characterized his career since 1830. Although the issues raised by the Revolution of 1789 remained lively, he asserted, the generation that fought these battles had passed, leaving in its place a cohort of young men without firsthand memories of the Old 1. Margaret Oliphant, Memoir of Count de Montalembert, a Chapter of Recent French History, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1872), 2:59 reprints the speech. It also appears in Montalembert, Œuvres de M le comte de Montalembert, 9 vols. (Paris, 1860–68), 1:401. The “sons of the crusaders” statement is carved into his tombstone in the Picpus Cemetery in Paris. 104 CHAPTER 3 Regime but with shared assumptions about the value of liberty. Montalembert believed that in his fifteen years of involvement in Catholic politics, he and his collaborators had established a model for Catholic citizenship. Followers of the dynamic priest and writer Félicité de Lamennais, Montalembert and his close friend Henri Lacordaire spent the first years of the July monarchy asserting that Catholics had a role to play as Catholics in French political life and representative government. They focused primarily on schooling because they believed that educated Catholics who were aware of their modern rights and of the ancient traditions of their faith could transform French society,giving it a density that liberalism undermined. The sons of the crusaders would remind the sons of Voltaire, who mistook themselves for the abstract,rights-bearing individuals of liberal theory,that they were all in fact bound to others by sentiments of obligation and affection. Montalembert and Lacordaire, like Maurice de Guérin, were deeply attracted to Lamennais—both his ideas and his personal charisma drew the young men into his circle. Montalembert and Lacordaire, however, did not follow Guérin to the monastic, scholarly household at La Chênaie. Instead, they chose a more activist role, writing for and managing the daily newspaper L’Avenir, which promoted Lamennais’s vision of a dynamic, modern Catholicism in the months immediately following the July revolution of 1830. In the stressful, heady atmosphere of a crusading daily newspaper, the two young men embarked on a profound friendship that they came to understand as Catholic fraternity. They believed that their relationship demonstrated how Catholicism could both liberate the individual and locate him securely in a web of social ties: they had reconciled liberal citizenship with Catholic faith. Their friendship was a rebuke to the liberal idea that religion should restrict itself to the realm of privacy because their affection for one another demonstrated Catholicism’s relevance to modern political life. A citizenship modeled on disinterested and egalitarian male friendship, in which men freely chose their fellows and thus freely accepted their obligations , was a stronger foundation for the modern polity than a social order in which rights began and ended with individuals. Ultramontanism was central to Lamennais’s claim that the Catholic faith had something to offer postrevolutionary French society other than a return to the Old Regime. He scorned Catholics who were nostalgic for the eighteenth-century alliance of throne and altar; Catholics should look for leadership to the eternal city of Rome rather than to the flawed French state, he argued. “Without [the pope], no church; without the church, no Christianity; without Christianity, no religion for Christian people and, consequently, no society”—Lamennais tied together the destinies of French THE DILEMMA OF OBEDIENCE 105 2. Félicité de Lamennais, De la Religion considérée dans ses rapports avec l’ordre politique et civil, in Œuvres compl...