Princes, Ministers, and their Confessors—Montalembert's part in the Revival—His Posthumous Work on Spain—Indignation against the New Assumptions—Debate of Clergy in Paris on the Lawfulness of Absolving a Liberal Prince or Minister—Wrath at Rome—True Doctrines taught to Darboy and his Clergy.
In proportion as this Popery of physical force came into view, did the mental stress of Catholics who had put their faith in finer forces increase.
Chateaubriand, who played a brilliant part in the Catholic reaction which followed the great French Revolution, especially in that phase of the movement which aimed at linking together, in the imagination, Rome and ideas and hopes now dear to mankind, left a work, at his death, which he called Memoirs from Beyond the Grave—Memoires d'outre Tombe. Montalembert, who played a still more brilliant part in the Catholic reaction which followed the Revolution of 1830, also left behind him a work, to appear after his death. In that work we can trace the pains of a representative mind, showing what must have been those of multitudes at the time of which we now write.
Montalembert saw, in "the absolutist politics, the retrospective fanaticism, the embittered hostility to all modern ideas and institutions, flaunted everywhere by the religious press,"[114] not only a blot on the cause, which had been his life-passion—a passion of feminine flame but of masculine vigour—but also a personal wound. It made his past look like a well-played hypocrisy. He had enthusiastically and victoriously argued for Catholicism under plea of liberty. "I neither can nor will," he cries, "keep silence, as to the monstrous articles published this very year (1868) by the Civiltá Cattolica against liberty in general, and precisely against those Liberal Catholics who, like me, have had the naïveté in the Parliamentary tribune to assert the rights of the Jesuits, and cause them to triumph in the name of liberty."[115]
On the second anniversary of that mysterious Thursday in February 1848, when King Louis Philippe, of the Tuileries, suddenly changed into Mr. Smith in a street cab on the way to exile, Montalembert and Thiers pleaded in the National Assembly for "freedom of instruction" on behalf of the Jesuits. "It was only," says our orator, "in the name of liberty, of modern constitutions, of modern liberty, of the liberty of conscience, of the Press, and of the tribune, that we made the claim." He adds that the victory was won only by Thiers brandishing the text of the Republican constitution in the face of the furious Mountain, a constitution proclaiming equal freedom of worship and association to all. The italics are his own—
"We were all wrong, it is clear. In sound theology M. Renan alone was right—he and the like of him who maintained that Catholicism, and above all, the Jesuits, were absolutely incompatible with liberty. Only—we ought to have been told it then. It was then, and not now, that they ought to have taught us that liberty was a plague, instead of taking advantage of it, and that by our help, in order, twenty years later, to come insulting and repudiating both it and us, at one and the same time.
I have long passed the age of disappointments and passionate emotions, but I declare on reading these bare-faced palinodes I have reddened to the white of my eyes, and shivered to the ends of my nails. I am no longer child enough to complain of the inconsistencies of men in general, or of Jesuits in particular, but I loudly say that this tone of the puppy and the pedant (ce ton de faquin et de pédagogue), employed towards old defenders, all of whom are not dead, and in respect of old struggles, which may be renewed to-morrow, does not become either monks or reputable men. It may be perfectly orthodox. In matters of theology I am no judge, but I think I am a judge in a matter of honour and decency; and I declare it is perfectly indecent."
We give but one more extract from this unconscious palinode of the high-souled Montalembert, who could not even then see that the Liberal Catholicism of his ideal was a generous phantasy, irreconcilable with the Popery of Rome, as much so as was his beloved parliamentary system in politics with the Second Empire. No more could he see that Pope and Jesuit were true to themselves in urging their old and fixed principles, and had been equally true to themselves in using instruments like him so long as they struck or stayed their hand at "the beck of the priest," and in disowning them so soon as they set up to keep a conscience for themselves, "as if the rod should shake itself against them that lift it up." He and his friend Lacordaire carried to Rome the large ideas of a great people, and bathed the quaint figures of the Curia, and the quaint objects of the city, in the tropical light of their own genius, just as Lamartine had done with the withered remnants of the East. After such pictures as Montalembert had drawn in his books, and his speeches, of his ideal Catholic Church, it must have been mortifying to have, in age and sickness, to write as follows—