Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 3. The Reaction in France

by Georg Brandes

To such converts add the great party of the timorous, all those who lived in fear of the Red Republic, and in whose eyes religion was, first and foremost, a safeguard against it. It was among these that the army of the principle of authority obtained most recruits. From a religious body the church suddenly turned into a political party.

A change in outward conditions is always prepared for by a change in opinions, and the outward change even more certainly produces opinions which correspond to the new conditions. The feelings and thoughts which prepared for the Concordat were, after its conclusion, at perfect liberty to express themselves; they called forth others of the same nature; and with the expression of these feelings and thoughts in literature began an intellectual movement which has its point of departure in the Concordat and translates that document into the language of literature. It is the course of this intellectual movement which we are to follow. If we omitted to do so, there would be a sensible hiatus in that psychology of the first half of our century which it is the object of these studies to elaborate. Granted that the subject is not a paying one, that it is neither rich nor attractive, it is nevertheless, from our point of view, a very important one.

From which class of society did the literary movement emanate? If it could by any possibility have emanated from the peasantry, there might have been something simple-hearted and touching about it; if from the ranks of the hardly tried, suffering priesthood, it would perhaps have attracted attention by its fervour; if it had been the production of the party who, following the example of their ruler, attached themselves to the church from worldly motives, it would have been marked by the absence of any inspiring idea. But none of these supposed cases is the actual one. These three groups formed the public for the new literature, were its sounding-board and echo; not one of them was intellectually fertile. The new Catholic school of literature was destitute of the qualities of simplicity and fervour. But it was not without an inspiring idea. With conviction and determination it vindicates the idea which the Revolution had utterly repudiated and discredited, namely, the principle of authority. Its tendency is rather political than religious. Its leaders do not desire so much to rescue souls as to rescue tradition; they crave for religion as a panacea for lawlessness; the persistency of their appeal to authority is due to their bankruptcy in everything except outward authority.

The movement begins at widely separated, disconnected points; none of its originators are at first acquainted with each other. During the Revolution Chateaubriand, for instance, is wandering about in America, De Maistre in Switzerland; Bonald plans his first work at Heidelberg. As soon as the intellectual reaction begins, most of the emigrants return home, and the principle of authority is championed in literature both by foreign, independent writers like De Maistre, and by men like Chateaubriand and Bonald, whom Bonaparte's assumption of power recalls to France. These latter attach themselves for the time being to Bonaparte, in his capacity of restorer of the church; but soon, either during his reign or after his fall, they espouse, with far greater warmth, far more strength of conviction, the cause of the Bourbons, to which their own fundamental principle draws them with all the force of consistency. Napoleon's plan of gaining the support of the church and depriving the Bourbons of the sympathy of the clergy by means of the Concordat failed, as it was naturally predestined to do. Soon there was open war between him and the Pope; and soon the literary movement, the origin of which is contemporaneous with the Concordat, declares itself openly on the side of royalty with its supposed rightful claims.

The originators of the movement naturally feel drawn to each other; they make one another's acquaintance, and soon found a kind of school. They have several important characteristics in common, characteristics which are also to be found even in the latest disciples of the school, men like Lamennais, De Vigny, Lamartine, and Hugo. They are all without exception of noble birth and bound by personal ties to the old royal families. De Maistre was the King of Sardinia's ambassador in Russia. Bonald served in his youth in Louis XV.'s regiment of Musketeers, and during that King's last days went regularly to his bedside to get the parole for the day—he had had smallpox, and consequently ran no risk of infection. The first time his duty brought him into the apartment of the new King, Louis XVI., Marie Antoinette honoured the young Musketeer with a friendly look and a few gracious words. That last glance of a dying King, who bequeathed to his successor a ruined monarchy, and that first look of a young, beautiful, and hopeful Queen were never effaced from Bonald's memory. They became the guiding stars of his life. As to Chateaubriand, directly he heard of the judicial murder of the Duke of Enghien he sent in his resignation as Secretary of Legation under Napoleon's government, and from that moment until 1824 acted the part of a faithful servant of the Bourbons. It was a rôle which he entered into so seriously, and which circumstances rendered so compulsory, that he played it to perfection. As regards the next generation, Lamartine has told us, in the preface to his Meditations and in his Reminiscences how, as a young officer in the Guards, he galloped by the side of Louis XVIII.'s carriage when that monarch moved from Paris to St. Germain. De Vigny was from his childhood an enthusiastic Royalist; in the days of the Empire his father gave him the Cross of St. Louis to kiss; his ideas of feudal fealty made him an officer of the King; his pride led him to stand to his colours even when all the hopes he had conceived of the Legitimist monarchy were disappointed and superseded by an unexpressed feeling of contempt; after the Revolution of 1830 he became the unprejudiced, but reserved and laconic Conservative whose acquaintance we make in his later works.[1] Victor Hugo has himself sufficiently explained to his readers how powerful was the influence exercised upon him as a young author by the recollection of the Royalist surroundings of his childhood, and especially by the teaching of his mother, the enthusiastically loyal Breton bourgeois.

The theoretic leaders of this school are not great geniuses. They are strong, despotic characters, who love power because they require obedience, and authority because they desire submission; or they are proud and vain members of the aristocracy of intellect, who would rather bow the knee to a paradox than follow with the crowd of writers who have done homage to reason; or (but this only seldom) they are romanticists, who are moved to tears by the thought of the faith which they no longer possess, but which they make desperate efforts to acquire. They are fighters like De Maistre and Lamennais—men made of the stuff of pontiffs and inquisitors, or they are obstinacy personified, like Bonald and Chateaubriand, who speak as they do more from obstinacy than persuasion. "Moi, catholique entêté," says Chateaubriand of himself. That is the correct word—obstinate, not fervent.

Their power over their contemporaries lay in their talent. For talent is such a magician that it can sustain any cause for a considerable time. Chateaubriand was the colourist of the school; De Maistre, with his strength of character, his wit, and his astounding theories, its leader; Bonald, with his rules for everything, its schoolmaster. The best of the young, aspiring poets of the day began their career under its influence, and though it did not retain its hold on them long, it gained by their means a popularity which, added to the authority possessed by its thinkers, was sufficient to make its cause seem for a short time victorious, more especially as the restoration of the Bourbons realised its political ideals.

In the course of a few years, however, all its best men, with music playing and colours flying, went over to the enemy's camp. The school was dissolved by its own essential unnaturalness. The principle which held it together, that principle of tradition and authority which had presented the appearance of an impregnable fortress, turned out to be undermined, hollow, concealing under its very foundations an unsuspected explosive. Men discovered that they had taken up their position on the top of a powder magazine, and hastened to leave it before it blew up.

Sylvain Maréchal writes in a book published in 1800 (Pour et contre la Bible): "A very decided religious reaction distinguishes this first year of the nineteenth century." It distinguishes the first twenty, and in countries of slow development and those inclined to be stationary, at least seventy.

The literary reaction against the spirit of the eighteenth century does not begin as a definitely religious reaction. We have seen that in the group of works which I have designated the "Emigrant Literature" it "has not yet become submission to authority, but is the natural and justifiable defence of feeling, soul, passion, and poetry against frigid intellectuality, exact calculation, and a literature stifled by rules and dead traditions." Of the first step in this reactionary movement I wrote: "The first move is only to take Rousseau's weapons and direct them against his antagonist, Voltaire."[2] Men are no longer contented with Voltaire's cold deism; they oppose to it Rousseau's copious and vague sentimentality. They follow in Rousseau's footsteps, build on the foundation of his emotionalism and imagination. A glance at the successive phases of the Revolution has shown us that this movement is, as it were, presaged in the midst of the great upheaval by Robespierre's attempt to place Rousseau as an obstacle in the way of the annihilation of all the sentiment which had been so closely associated with the tradition and authority of the church, and which threatened to disappear with the church. In its origin the great religious reaction was, as we have seen, only the revulsion, the revolt, of feeling against reason; what begot it was the perfectly vague craving to feel and to give expression to feeling. The history of the movement is the history of the lamentable manner in which this craving was gradually misdirected.