Strongly imbued with English ideas, he fully appreciated the conservative power of an energetic opposition, ever ready to criticise, to question, to challenge, or to expose whatever might seem arbitrary or unconstitutional in the acts of the government. But this idea of an opposition at once loyal and law-loving, was unfamiliar to his countrymen. To them, as a general thing, opposition meant revolution, and to many the spectacle of a peer of France, a Catholic, and a proprietaire, who was at once the friend of the proletaire, the dissenter, the oppressor, and the slave, was a paradox. And yet paradox there was none, for his declaration of principles was always clear and bold. Thus, in striving to cull from the Chamber of Peers a public expression of sympathy for the Poles, he insisted that it was their right and their duty to make an avowal of national sentiments, an expression of national opinion, that it was an obligation imposed by humanity and required by wise policy. “What is it,” he asked, “that has raised [pg 441] the British parliament to so high a degree of popularity and moral influence in Europe? Is it not because for more than a century no grave event has happened in any country without finding an echo there? Is it not because no right has been oppressed, no treaty broken anywhere, without a discussion on both sides of the question before the peers and commons of England, whose assemblies have thus become, in the silence of the world, a sort of tribunal where all the great causes of humanity are pleaded, and where opinion pronounces those formidable judgments which, sooner or later, are always executed?”
And his independence was that of the man as well as of the orator. He was committed to no policy, sought no party ends, but always, and at all cost, maintained the good, the just, the honorable. A lost or desperate cause, if equitable, was always sure of his support. The three oppressed nations of the earth, Poland under Russia, Ireland under England, and Greece under Turkey, were his most cherished clients. The weaker side ever strongly attracted him. “Penetrated by the conviction that just causes are everlasting,” says M. Cochin, “and that every protest against injustice ends by moving heaven and convincing men, he sought out, so to speak, every oppressed cause when at its last breath, to take its burden upon himself, and to become its champion. There is a suffering race, a race lost in distant isles, the race of black slaves, which has been oppressed for centuries. He took its cause in hand, and from the year 1837 labored for its emancipation. There are in all manufacturing places a crowd of hollow-cheeked children, with pale faces and worn eyes, and the sight of them made a profound impression upon him; he took their cause also in hand. If you run over the mere index of his speeches, you will find all generous efforts contained in it.”
The year 1836 brought two notable events in the life of Montalembert—the publication of his first work, his Life of S. Elizabeth, and his marriage to a daughter of the noble house of de Merode in Belgium. Meantime, he continued his attacks on vandalism in art and his parliamentary labors, and was mainly instrumental in the creation of the committee of historical art and the commission on historical monuments, from both of which he was excluded under the Empire, which no more sympathized with his pure conceptions of Christian art than it did with his conception of Christian morals.
Rio has recorded the result of the impression made by Montalembert upon the English poet Rogers, which admirably illustrates the fact that Montalembert's religion was not a sort of moral “Sunday suit” to be put off and on as occasion might require, and at the same time reveals to us the old poet in an entirely new aspect. The Montalemberts had spent the evening with Rogers, “and after their departure,” Rio relates, “when I found myself alone with Rogers, the expression of his countenance, which up to that moment had been smiling and animated, changed so suddenly that I feared I had offended him by some word of doubtful meaning which I might not altogether have understood. He paced about the room without saying anything, and I did not know whether I might venture to break this incomprehensible silence. At last he broke it himself, and said to me that, if he had the power of putting himself in the place of another, he would choose that of Montalembert, not on account of his youth and his beautiful wife, [pg 442] but because he possessed that immovable and cloudless faith that seemed to himself the most enviable of all gifts.”
Mr. Neale advised Montalembert that he had been elected an honorary member of the Cambridge Camden Society. On receipt of the news of this “unsolicited and unmerited honor,” Montalembert replied in a letter protesting against the usurpation of the title “Catholic” by the Camden Society. Here are some of its trenchant passages:
“The attempt to steal away from us, and appropriate to the use of a fraction of the Church of England, the glorious title of Catholic, is proved to be an usurpation by every monument of the past and present, by the coronation oath of your sovereigns, by all the laws that have established your church. The name itself is spurned with indignation by the greater half at least of those who belong to the Church of England, just as the Church of England itself is rejected with scorn and detestation by the greater half of the inhabitants of the United Kingdom. The judgment of the whole indifferent world, the common sense of humanity, agrees with the judgment of the Church of Rome, and with the sense of her 150 millions of children, to dispossess you of this name. The Church of England, who has denied her mother, is rightly without a sister. She has chosen to break the bonds of unity and obedience. Let her therefore stand alone before the judgment-seat of God and man. Even the debased Russian Church—that church where lay-despotism has closed the church's mouth and turned her into a slave—disdains to recognize the Anglicans as Catholics. Even the Eastern heretics, although so sweetly courted by Puseyite missionaries, sneer at this new and fictitious Catholicism. That the so-called Anglo-Catholics, whose very name betrays their usurpation and their contradiction, whose doctrinal articles, whose liturgy, whose whole history, are such as to disconnect them from all mankind except those who are born English and speak English—that they should pretend on the strength of their private judgment alone to be what the rest of mankind deny them to be, will assuredly be ranked among the first follies of the XIXth century.... You may turn aside for three hundred years to come, as you have done for three hundred years past, from the fountain of living waters; but to dig out a small channel of your own, for your own private insular use, wherein the living truth will run apart from its own docile and ever obedient children—that will no more be granted to you than it has been to the Arians, the Nestorians, the Donatists, or any other triumphant heresy. I protest, therefore, against the usurpation of a sacred name by the Camden Society as iniquitous; and I next protest against the object of this society, and all such efforts in the Anglican Church, as absurd.”
We now have before us a period of seven years in the life of Montalembert, the record of which may be said to be the history of the great public questions which then agitated France; so intimately was his entire parliamentary career bound up with their development. The first and most important of these questions was that of education. Then, as now, the examination for the degree of A.B. (baccalaureat) was the key to all public occupations.
But at that time, from 1830 to 1848, no one had a right to present himself for this examination unless he had been educated in one of the public lycées, or some school licensed by the university, into whose hands the government had placed the monopoly of education. A wealthy parent might educate a boy under his own supervision in the best universities of England or Germany, or by private tutors, yet the youth would not be permitted to present himself for examination, although able to pass it with ease. And the degree resulting from this examination was the essential condition upon which the possibility of a public career was opened to every young Frenchman. Without it he could by no possibility be admitted [pg 443] to any public employment, the bench or the bar. Ability, accomplishments, acquirements, had nothing to do with the question. The young man must pass through a state school, or he was for ever debarred from a public career in his own country. But to pass through a state school, as all Christian parents, both Catholic and Protestant, then well knew in France, was to leave it with the loss of his religious principles. The biographer may well find it “equally incredible that such restrictions should have been borne by any people, and that a government founded upon liberal principles and erected by revolution should have dared to maintain them; but so it was.”
The parliamentary campaign on the educational question opened in 1844. Discussion soon reached a point of warmth. “There is one result given under the auspices of the university,” said Montalembert, “which governs every other, and which is as clear as daylight. It is that children who leave their family with the seed of faith in them, to enter the university, come out of it infidels.” The contradictions and mouvement incited by this statement pushed the orator to more emphatic statement. “I appeal,” he said, “to the testimony of all fathers and mothers. Let us take any ten children out of the schools regulated by the university, at the end of their studies, and find one Christian among them if you can. One in ten! and that would be a prodigy. I address myself not to such or such a religious belief, but to all. Catholics, Protestants, Jews, all who believe humbly and sincerely in the religion which they possess, it is to them I appeal, whom I recognize as my brethren. And all those who have a sincere belief, and practise it, will confirm what I have said of the religious results of the education of the university. Let us hear the testimony of the young and eloquent defender of French Protestantism, the son of our colleague M. Agenor de Gasparin.... ‘Religious education,’ he says, ‘has no existence in the colleges.... I bethink myself with terror what I was when I issued forth from this national education. I recollect what all my companions were. Were we very good citizens? I know not, but certainly we were not Christians; we did not possess even the weakest beginnings of evangelical faith.’ ”
The results of the French compulsory anti-Christian education may be read in current history. “The men it has brought up are the men who allowed France to be bound for eighteen years in the humiliating bondage of the Second Empire; who have furnished excuses to all the world for calling her the most socially depraved of nations; who have filled her light literature with abominations, and her graver works with blasphemy; and who have finally procured for her national downfall and humiliation.”