France's revolution of 1789 shattered the alliance of throne and altar which had been the pillar upon which rested Church and State relations throughout Catholic Europe during the ancien régime. After 1815, religion's role within society and politics was fiercely contested. Arthur McCalla is among the most learned of historians when it comes to conservative and religious thought during France's Restoration. In his most recent book, he turns his attention to three different schools of thought: the ideologues, traditionalists and liberals. His focus centres on how these three groupings attempted to reconceptualise and historicise the socio-political foundations of religion. McCalla is an able writer with an uncanny ability to make the complex, digestible and the tedious, captivating.
Not merely does he disentangle these different schools from each other, but he deftly emphasises how they were in dialogue throughout the period 1795–1830. Ideas about religion's social and political role were not elaborated in ivory towers, but through an, at times fierce, debate amongst France's intellectual elite. He recovers much of the vibrancy, originality and immense sophistication that characterised these historico-theologico-political pundits who wanted to understand not only religion's history and function, but equally its proper place within the political and constitutional landscape of Restoration France.
The structure of the book makes good logical sequential sense, enabling McCalla to showcase seamlessly the great diversity of thinking that surrounded religion in French political thought during the 1820s. Each part of the book follows key thinkers: Constantin-François Chassebœuf (better known as Volney), Antoine Destutt de Tracy, Louis de Bonald, Félicité de Lamennais, Victor Cousin, Maine de Biran, Benjamin Constant and finally Ferdinand d'Eckstein. Each of these parts, dedicated to individual thinkers, is divided respectively into three chapters. The first chapter examines the basic biography and background of the thinker in the question. Then the second chapter explores how each understood and appreciated the nature and social function of religion. Every concluding chapter represents an immersive exploration of the author's conceptualisation of both political theology and religion's appropriate place within their competing visions of modernity. This watertight structure is buttressed with assiduous cross-referencing between chapters. Thorough research and eagle-eyed close readings allow McCalla to highlight how the authors in question reviewed each other's work, responded to it and in a few cases even resorted to character assassination. In an age of Christian, especially Catholic, revival the question of political theology occupied the centre ground of political thought during the 1820s.
Given the complexity of the subject matter it is difficult to do justice to these three schools of thought in a short review. What follows is intended to provide a flavour, rather than a comprehensive summary, of their sophisticated conceptualisation of religion. Chronologically the ideologues came first, publishing their main treatises during the 1790s. They were the progenitors of a secularising and anti-religious movement that would culminate in modern atheism. They inspired much of Marx's later sceptical thinking about God, the soul and religion. In essence, they viewed religion as a fiction born of primitive humankind's need to explain existence and the world. It was a web of lies and untruths that held human beings in bondage to perpetual immaturity, not to mention the whims of sacerdotal and political elites. Religion epistemologically clouded reality and made true knowledge of the world impossible. Modern political society needed to emancipate individuals from this damaging and tyrannical system. Volney, Destutt de Tracy and their associates yearned for materialist underpinnings of human existence and a secular code of ethics to guide the future. Theirs was a radical and elegant rejection not just of organised religion and revelation but of spirituality as well.
Of a different temper were traditionalists like Lamennais and Bonald. Unhappy with purely intransigent and counterrevolutionary apologias for religion, they wished to develop Catholic sociological theory and political-theology so that Rome could withstand the challenges of the post-revolutionary order. They were attached to the traditions, doctrines and dogmas handed down to them by their heritage. Yet they wanted to ‘develop’ these inheritances removing impurities from the past (like Gallicanism), replacing them with an authentic Christianity which they (surprisingly) believed had existed even before Christ had been incarnated.
For them, it was a question of identifying what was authentic and reasonable in the evolution of Catholic society from what was a degeneration of the original faith and community ethos. From reading McCalla's chapters on traditionalism, one cannot escape the conclusion that John Henry Newman did not appear out of nowhere and must have owed quite a debt towards these French traditionalists. Finally these conservative thinkers saw religion as an antidote to individualism and the disaggregation of communal solidarity. Linguistic and social bonds were of divine inspiration in their view. It followed that government and social cohesion were a miracle ordained and willed by a beneficent God. They considered that society and politics ultimately rested on religious foundations and that revelation was the true guide to human existence. Reason unguided by faith or religious truth could only lead to disastrous consequences and degenerate forms of politics.
Much more difficult to define was the liberal version of religious history and its socio-political ramifications. This has much to do with the reality that French liberalism during the 1820s and 1830s was hardly cohesive and was characterised by enormous divergences in epistemological, ethical and social reasoning. Liberal philosophers were, unlike the ideologues, sympathetic to fundamental religious truths and their concomitant spiritual benefits for both the individual and society. Given their optimistic outlook and faith in progress they believed that education, intellectual development and religious freedom would benefit organised Churches. Independent and free enquiry would enable intellectuals to discover the true nature of religion freed from the accretions and superstitions imposed by establishments and sacerdotal elites.
In this scheme, liberalism benefited religion by freeing it from arbitrary traditions and rationalising its history, social foundations and pastoral purpose. There was a sense that all religions, worthy of that name, shared traits, basic ethical standards and a desire for the public good. Due to a variety of factors religions had strayed from their primitive origins and become very distinct from each other but when it came to the state and public life such pluralism mattered little. For thinkers like Cousin and Constant, the state needed to avoid religious entanglements and adopt a supra-confessional stance. According to Cousin, a system of education was needed that would exalt rational reason above the superstitions and petty squabbles over divine revelation that had caused so much religious conflict in the past. In Constant's view pluralism would foster harmony rather than conflict. Given his belief in progress, he considered that the liberal creed would make the different religions coalesce in harmony as humanity and society moved forward.
All three schools, as must be apparent, developed widely contrasting responses, through dialogue and debate, about religion's history, nature, social construction and political theology. McCalla's great virtue is to present this debate, not as some dusty relic of a bygone age of religious revival, but rather as something that speaks to present concerns about the limits of state action when it comes to religious conscience. This book is a masterpiece of close reading and intertextual analysis. Its ability to mix epistemological, proto-sociological and political theory is impressive and without doubt it makes a valuable contribution to the study of post-Napoleonic religious thought. Students of the French Restoration, or those wishing to learn the fundamentals of the history of political thought, need to read McCalla as he is a master of his craft. This book will remain unsurpassed for many decades.
