a national or a nationalized religion.
Napoleon, who wished the church only as an adjunct of his own power, never understood anything of all this. He saw that the church was more conservative than Protestantism, and in fact so by virtue of her Catholicity, that she had a stronger hold on the French people, and could serve him better than any Protestant sect; but he did not see that the church, sought for a political end, is necessarily powerless even to that end, and that she serves a political end only when she is sought for her own sake, recognized and supported for a religious end, or as the free and independent kingdom of God on earth. Not understanding this, he refused her unrestrained liberty, and sought by his own legislation to subject her in his own dominions to his own will, and to compel her either to support his policy or to feel the full weight of his vengeance. She must support him, wear his livery, do his bidding, hold his enemies to be her enemies, or he would not tolerate her at all. She, as the church of God, could not accept this position and sink into a mere national church, however powerful the nation. She asserted her independence, and her independence alike of him and those he professed to govern. He commanded her to obey him: she refused. He quarrelled with her, dragged her supreme pontiff from his throne, despoiled him of his estates, imprisoned him, was excommunicated, became powerless before his enemies, was defeated, lost his throne, and was sent by his conquerors to fret his life away as a prisoner of England on the barren isle of St. Helena, leaving French society hardly less disorganized than he found it.
The Restoration which followed was a return toward legitimacy, and
under it France actually recuperated with a rapidity which seems marvellous to unbelievers. But it humiliated the nation, because it was imposed on it by foreign bayonets, and its work of reparation and expiation necessarily made it unpopular with all who had profited by the plunder and confiscations of the Revolution, or by the wars of the Empire. The spirit of 1789 still possessed a large portion of the population. The Bourbons returned, also, with the old Gallican traditions of the relation of church and state, which had lost the monarchy, and prepared the people for the old revolution. They would have the church, indeed, but they would never recognize her rightful supremacy; and, though giving France really the best government she had had for a long time, they at length fell before the intrigues of a younger branch of the family, supported by the combined factions of the Bonapartists, republicans, and socialists.
The monarchy of July or the Barricades was, notwithstanding the pretences of the juste milieu, or doctrinaires, a purely revolutionary government, improvised in the interests of disorder, without a shadow of legality, and without anything, in the nation or in religion, on which it could rest; and from the first it was spurned by the legitimists, the old national nobility, by the peasantry, the larger part of the republicans, and supported only by the bourgeoisie, or business classes, and the Bonapartists, the latter of whom hoped to make it a stepping-stone to the restoration of the Napoleonic empire. It had no hold on the nation, no power to reconstitute it on a solid and permanent basis; and so, as a new generation appeared on the stage, it fell without a struggle before the Parisian mob. It was indifferent
rather than avowedly hostile to the church, but it gave free scope to the infidel press, warred against the Jesuits, and maintained the infidel university in the monopoly of education. It, however, indirectly served the cause of religion by the little court favor the bishops could obtain, and who, in consequence, retired, and looked after the interests of religion in their respective dioceses, so that when a Parisian mob overthrew the citizen-king in February, 1848, and proclaimed the republic, the church was really more influential in France than she had been since 1682. She had influence enough to displace the party that made the revolution from the control of public affairs, to defeat and crush the reds and communists in the terrible days of June, 1848, to save French society from utter dissolution, and maintain order under a republic proclaimed by the friends of disorder. We are far from being convinced that, if the bishops and clergy had continued to show the energy in supporting the republic that they did in wresting it from the control of the infidels and destructives, they would not have been able to reconstitute French society on a Catholic and a republican basis, to the advantage alike of religion and society.
Certain it is, the church, though not officially supported by the republic, and had many and bitter enemies in France, was freer under it than she had been since the great Western Schism, and had a fair opportunity to prove to the world that she is wedded to no particular form of government or political organization, and can subsist as well, to say the least, in a republic as in a monarchy. We thought at the time, and we still think, though no enemy to monarchy and no blind defender of republicanism, that the French bishops and clergy committed a grave
blunder in abandoning the republic and surrendering French society to the nephew of his uncle—a member of the Carbonari, a known conspirator against the Pope in 1832, and a favorite with the red republicans and socialists. It would be difficult to estimate the damage they did to France and to the cause of religion throughout the world. It will cost, perhaps, centuries of bitter struggle and suffering on the part of Catholics, to repair the sad effects of that blunder. But French Catholics had for ages been accustomed to rely on royal support, and they lacked the robust and vigorous habits under God of self-reliance. The bishops and clergy could easily have marched to a martyrs’ death, but they had with all their experience never learned the folly of putting their trust for the church in princes. They remembered the Reign of Terror; they remembered, also, the flesh-pots of Egypt, and shrank from the hunger, thirst, and fatigue of the desert.
The new emperor found the French people divided into three principal parties—the church or Catholic party, which included the Bourbonists and the better part of the Orleanists; the republican party, properly so-called; and the socialistic or extreme radical party, represented in the recent civil war by the communists of Paris and of all Europe. His policy on commencing his reign was avowedly to keep the control of all these parties in his own hands, by leaving each party something to hope from his government, and allowing no one to gain the ascendency, and, as far as possible, engrossing the whole nation in the pursuit of material goods. He acknowledged the sovereignty of the nation, professed to hold from 1789, and favored universal suffrage, which was in accordance with the views of the republican party; he
adopted measures to secure employment to the working-men of the cities and towns, among whom was the great body of the socialists, or communists, by his encouragement of expensive national and municipal works; and, to retain his hold on them and to protect himself from the assassins of the secret societies, he made his Italian campaign, drove the Austrians out of Italy, and prepared the way for Italian unification, and for despoiling the Holy Father of his temporal possessions and sovereignty; raised the salaries paid to clergy as servants of the state, and repaired churches and abbeys as national monuments at the national expense, to please and secure the church party. But he suppressed the freedom the church had enjoyed under the republic, maintained the “organic articles” of his uncle, and all the old Gallican edicts and legislation against the freedom and independence of the church in full force, trusting that she would see a compensation for her loss of liberty in the increased pomp and splendor of her worship or the gilded slavery to which he reduced her.