Democracy in France. January 1849

by François Guizot

The poor and humble would be submissive to the will of God and the laws of society. They would seek the satisfaction of their wants in regular and assiduous labour, the improvement of their condition in good conduct and provident habits, and consolation and hope in the futurity promised to man.

These are the Christian virtues—they are called Faith, Hope, and Charity. Is this the conduct men are exhorted by the preachers of Democracy to pursue? Are these the sentiments which these men, who affect a veneration for the Founder of Christianity, try to rekindle in the hearts of the people?

I doubt whether they can carry the impudence of mendacity so far as to answer in the affirmative; and if they dared to do so, I am sure that, spite of the credulity of the public, they would receive a universal contradiction.

But these monstrous attempts, whether the result of fraud or of folly, will not succeed. Christianity will not be disfigured or degraded so. Nothing can be more anti-Christian than the ideas, the language, or the influence of the present race of reformers of social order. If Communism and Socialism prevailed, Christianity must become extinct: if Christianity were more potent, Communism and Socialism would soon sink into the chaotic mass of obscure and forgotten extravagances.

I wish to be perfectly just; and while attacking notions which are the disgrace and the curse of our times, I would acknowledge whatever germ of morality they contain, and show what virtuous pretexts or benevolent instincts may delude their advocates or seduce their converts.

There is a sentiment, noble and beautiful in itself, which has been much and often appealed to throughout all the perturbations and convulsions of society in France; this sentiment is, enthusiasm for mankind—the enthusiasm of confidence, sympathy, and hope. This feeling reigned supreme among us in 1789, and gave its resistless impulse to that epoch. There was no virtue that was not ascribed to man—no success that was not hoped and predicted for him. Faith and hope in man took the place of faith and hope in God. The trial was not long deferred. The idol did not long retain its power. Confidence was soon convicted of presumption, and sympathy ended in social war and the scaffold. The hopes that were fulfilled appeared insignificant, compared to those that had vanished like dreams. Never did experience advance with such rapid strides to confront and overthrow pride.

Yet it is to this same sentiment that our modern reformers of social order appeal. It is this same idolatrous enthusiasm for human nature that they invoke. At the same time that they rob man of his sublimest emotions and loftiest prospects, they exalt without measure his nature and his power: rather, I ought to say, they miserably degrade them, for they promise him nothing beyond this earth; but while there, their belief in him is blind and implicit—their hope from him, and for him, boundless.

The most melancholy reflection is, that this insane idolatry is their only excuse; the only one of their ideas which springs from a source of the smallest elevation, or possesses the smallest moral value. If they had not a blind faith in man, and a servile adoration of humanity, they would be nothing more than the propagators of a rapacious, brutish, and lawless materialism.

“If man exalteth himself,” says Pascal, “I abase him; if he abaseth himself, I exalt him.” We ought continually to bear in mind and to apply these admirable words. Certainly man is a being worthy to inspire us with respect and love, and with high hopes of his future condition. To those who were insensible to the nobleness of his nature and his destiny—to himself, if he forgot it—I should say with Pascal, “If man abaseth himself, I exalt him.” But to those who promise themselves everything from him, by promising him everything; whose expectations from him are as boundless as those they labour to excite in him; to those who, goaded by their own pride, are constantly striving to inflate his pride; who forget, and try to make him forget, the frailty and wretchedness of his nature, the supreme laws by which he is bound, and the support of which he stands in need,—to those men I would say with Pascal, “If man exalteth himself, I abase him.” And facts,—recent, glaring, incontrovertible facts,—say it far more impressively than I.

It is impossible to restore France to the state of things which prevailed in 1789—to rekindle that enthusiasm of presumptuous confidence and hope with which the nation was then drunk—an enthusiasm which then was genuine as well as general, had the ardour and spontaneity of youth, and was rendered excusable by inexperience, but which now would be only a false and factitious excitement; a thin, an ineffectual veil thrown over bad passions and insane dreams. By what incurable arrogance could we reject the lessons which God has lavished upon us for the last sixty years? He does not require of us to despair of ourselves and of our species, to abandon all efforts for its progress, or to shut our hearts against a tender sympathy in its weal or woe; but He does forbid us to exalt our own nature into an idol. He commands us to see it as it is; without illusion and without coldness; and to love and serve it according to the laws He has established. I have certainly no desire to extinguish any of the small portion of moral ardour still remaining in the world, nor to infuse additional doubt and indifference into hearts already so lukewarm and uncertain. But neither can I add to their delusions. It is not by retracing its course toward the sources of the revolution, that France will walk with a firm and animated step: those fountains are all dry, and our generation will not go to slake its thirst or refresh its spirit at them. You complain of its languor; you want to see the faith and the moral energy, which are the soul and strength of nations, revive among us: but it is vain to seek them in the revolutionary spirit, which is wholly incapable of inspiring them. It is a fire which has still power to consume, but can neither warm nor enlighten. Instead of reviving and invigorating our belief in the great truths which are the wholesome stimulants as well as the true guardians of society, they can only diffuse doubt and perplexity. Certainly France wants to be morally elevated and strengthened; she wants to regain her faith in, and attachment to, fixed and undisputed principles. But the revolutionary spirit can do nothing to appease these wants; the scenes and the harangues, the predictions and the recollections which it suggests, can only retard the work. The honour of its accomplishment is reserved for other moral powers and other intellectual tendencies.