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

by Georg Brandes

The religious reaction reaches its climax in the famous Encyclical of Pius IX., which pronounces free thought to be the delirium of liberty, anathematises civil marriage, separation of church and state, liberty of religion, liberty of the press, liberty of speech, and the erroneous idea that the church ought to make its peace with progress, liberalism, and modern civilisation. But even more severely consistent than the Encyclical are the apologies for it, the German Bishop Kettler's Die falsche und die wahre Freiheit and the French Bishop Dupanloup's La convention du 15 Septembre et l'Encyclique du 8 Décembre, which explain and justify the Pope's determined stand against "the insolent repudiation of all the great truths which form the foundation of human society." Let no one, however, imagine that these pamphlets are either very sensational in tone or very full of glaring absurdities. Both in manner and matter they have a strong resemblance to moderate articles in a Danish Liberal newspaper.

To such results did the Neo-Catholic movement lead. But it is to be noted that these results belong entirely to the domain of political history, and in no way concern literature. Every movement continues to affect the course of general history long after it has ceased influencing the history of literature. It affects the latter as long as it has, not only monarchs, nobles, and bishops, but men of distinguished intellect and talent in its service. After 1830 this is no longer the case with the religious reaction in France. The difference between the reaction in 1820 and the reaction with which exhausted and unhappy France was visited after the defeats and the Commune of 1870-71, is that the former vigorous crusade against light had almost every Frenchman of intellect and talent in its service, in its army, whilst the latter could not boast of a single supporter with any literary pretensions.

We have now to see how that first reaction came to an end. It was, in the first place, attacked from without. The daily press began to declaim against the spirit of antagonism to enlightenment; Béranger sang his songs on the subject; one enterprising publisher, Touquet by name, brought out between the years 1817 and 1824 thirty-one thousand copies of the works of Voltaire (1,598,000 vols.) and twenty-four thousand five hundred copies of the works of Rousseau. He was punished and the sale of his books was prohibited; but this aroused such exasperation that the Globe prophesied a general apostasy from Catholicism, whereupon the country was again inundated with the Touquet editions.

The government next wreaked its vengeance on a master of language, the rustic simplicity of whose satiric pamphlets proved an effective offensive weapon.

Paul Louis Courier, born in Paris in 1773, was one of the cleverest writers of the age. From his father, a rich bourgeois who in his youth had narrowly escaped being murdered because he had had an amour with a lady of rank, he inherited a burning hatred of the indolent and haughty aristocracy. At the age of twenty he entered an artillery regiment and served in the campaigns of the Revolution, but they only gave him a loathing of war. From his earliest youth literature had had a strong attraction for him, especially ancient literature, which he studied as a philologist. In 1795 he left his regiment, which was then besieging Mainz, without permission, and occupied himself with translating Latin authors. In 1798 we find him again in the army, in Italy; presently he is studying in Paris; then he returns to Italy in command of a squadron of artillery. He keeps quiet during the Empire, and after its fall lives the life of an agriculturist and Hellenist on his farm in Touraine.

It was the persecution by the victorious clerical party of every countryman, however insignificant, in whom they detected an enemy, which induced Paul Louis Courier to appear before the public as an author. In 1816 he wrote a Petition to the Two Chambers, employing for the first time that plain, shrewd rustic style which, with the purest Greek models in view, he was so successful in acquiring. In simple, clear, always moderate language he tells of the injuries inflicted by clerically disposed provincial tyrants upon unfortunate peasants guilty of not having taken off their hats to a priest or of having "spoken ill of the government." He confesses that there is probably a good foundation for the accusations, since in his part of the country the priests are not popular, and very few people know what the government is. Then he shows how imprisonment for six months without a proper trial, and misery, sickness, and death brought upon the children and other relatives of the prisoners, are the punishment for perfectly trifling offences. Forty gendarmes are sent to a village directly it falls under the suspicion of "Bonapartism"; the suspected persons are taken naked from their beds and fettered like criminals. "They are carried off; their relations, their children would have followed them, if it had been permitted by authority. Authority, Messieurs! that is the great word in France.... Everywhere we see inscribed: Not reasons, authority. It is true that this authority is not the authority of the councils or of the fathers of the church, much less of the law; but it is the authority of the gendarmes, and that is as good as any other."

Courier did not write books, or even what we generally call pamphlets. He produced his effect with tracts of a few pages. In these, with apparent naïve downrightness, in reality with consummate satiric art, he kept up an agitation against the rule of the hereditary monarchy until his assassination in 1825.

A gem of satiric humour is his Pétition pour les villageois que l'on empêche de danser. Its occasion was the prohibition by hypocritical magistrates and priests of dancing in the village market-places. He unveils the hypocrisy which lies at the root of the new holy-day regulations, and the harm which they do. He is perfectly aware of the fact that these holy-days were originally ordained for the good of the serfs and bondmen—but there are no serfs and bondmen in France now. Once their taxes are paid, the peasants now work for themselves, and to compel them to be idle is ridiculous; it is worse even than the old imposts; those at least benefited the courtiers, but idleness benefits no one. He describes the hot-headed young village priests, who fulminate against dancing and all other pleasures, and compares them with the aged curé of Véretz, who is beloved by his flock for his gentle goodness, but who is hated and persecuted by the authorities because of his having sworn allegiance to the constitution at the time of the Revolution. In a later tract Courier tells of the assassination of this good old man. He writes of everything without resentment, simply ejaculating with a sigh that comes from the heart: "Thy will, O Lord, be done!" He cannot, however, resist adding: "Who could have predicted this in the days of Austerlitz?"

He grants that the rural population is much more settled and much happier now than it was before the Revolution, but he maintains that it is also much less religious. "The curé of Azai, who wished last Easter to have his canopy carried by four male communicants, could not find four such in the village. The peasant is so happy in possession of the land of which he has so lately become owner (the confiscated lands of the nobility and the church) that he is entirely absorbed in its cultivation, and forgets religion and everything else." Courier allows that Lamennais is right in reproaching the people with indifference in the matter of religion. "We do not belong to the number of the lukewarm whom the Lord, as Holy Scripture tells us, spews out of his mouth; we are worse; we are cold."

Nowhere do we find more graphic descriptions than in Courier's writings of the state of society throughout France during the latter years of Louis XVIII's reign.