François René vicomte de Chateaubriand: Political Reflections on the True Interests of the French Nation: and on Some Publications Which Have Lately Appeared. No translator listed. London: Henry Colburn, 1814.
_____. The Monarchy According to the Charter. No translator listed. London: John Murray, 1816.
By 1814, the French Revolution and the rule of Napoleon, including his disastrous wars, had bled France. More, it had left the French with the worst kind of political factions—regime factions, in which partisans of hereditary monarchy, republicanism, and Bonapartism menaced one another and the country as a whole. Yet perhaps the nation’s very exhaustion meant an opportunity for a settlement. This was the hope of the Bourbon Restoration, whereby the Count of Provence, brother of the late Louis XVI, returned from exile, ascended the throne as Louis XVIII, and wrote the Charter of 1814, a new constitution for a new regime of limited monarchy. Napoleon’s celebrated enemy, the long-exiled vicomte de Chateaubriand, applauded the Restoration, joined the king during his brief exile when Napoleon returned to power during the period called the Hundred Days, and wrote his Political Reflections in an attempt to answer criticisms of the Charter, “to reconcile opinions, and to call the attention of all Frenchmen to their true interests” (“Advertisement”).
Chateaubriand begins with a moral analogy. If a man guilty of “the greatest crimes” was condemned by a judge, surely the criminal’s brother could not have “amiable intercourse” with the judge; “the cry of blood has separated these two men eternally” (1.1). The same would be true, and even more justifiable, if the man condemned had been innocent. Would it not then be rash of the ones who condemned Louis XVI to death to attempt to vindicate the execution in the presence of his brother? And yet Louis XVIII “has given his word to forget everything,” having pardoned his brother’s killers (1.4). In his government, he has continued officeholders in their places, regardless of whether they have been royalists or republicans, with the only disqualification being moral turpitude, the only qualification being “intelligence and integrity” (11.61).
Unfortunately, others lack the king’s prudence, to say nothing of his Christian spirit. They seek to justify the execution of Louis XVI, attempting to exculpate themselves from charges that the king himself has not lodged against them. There are precedents for such self-justification. Protestants in France (and in England, with Cromwell) have asserted “the legality of regicide,” as have Catholics, as far back as the sixteenth century. Indeed, “the arguments then produced are written with a vigor, science and a logical reasoning rarely to be found in these days” (3.8), when authors seek “by mutilated and ill-explained [Bible] quotations to disturb the minds of simple believers, while to themselves these quotations are merely subjects of ridicule” (4.12). They thus “kindle the altar of immolation with the double torch of fanaticism and philosophy”—a “perfectly new combination,” a sort of demonic reverse-Thomism (4.13). And while the enemies of England’s Cromwell had been persecuted by him, “they were for the most part perfectly moral and religious men” who “did not enrich themselves with the spoils of the proscribed,” as the French revolutionaries had done when confiscating properties held by the Church and the aristocracy (4.15) in “one of the most flagrant acts of injustice produced by the revolution,” the “most dangerous [example] ever given to mankind” (6.37). Nor did the English civil wars of the seventeenth century cause “the arming of all Europe” against England, as the French Revolution had done (4.18). Fortunately (or providentially) “the bravery of our soldiers saved France from the dangers to which you had exposed her, by calling down the vengeance of all nations on an unexampled crime” (4.18).
Chateaubriand doubts that “these deplorable apologies” betoken any hope of a return to a republican regime; the former revolutionaries have been “cured of that chimera.” Further, the “limited monarchy” of Louis XVIII’s Constitutional Charter assures them “all proper guarantees of liberty” (5.19). The apologists exhibit rather “a diseased conscience which nothing can tranquilize, an insufferable vanity which is angry at not being exclusively called to the king’s counsels,” and “a secret despair arising from the insurmountable barrier between Louis XVIII and the murderers of Louis XVI”—does he really pardon us, they ask themselves (5.19). To this latter worry Chateaubriand responds that the king is “very firmly fixed upon the throne,” from which “no human power can now shake him” (5.26). He has no need to ‘make sure of them,’ as Machiavelli advises his ‘prince.’ The king “has no reason to dissemble”; “compassion is his birthright,” and “his word is besides pledged” (5.26). His critics rather seek “to agitate men’s minds, to disseminate idle fears,” and “foment dissensions”—suggesting that they haven’t been entirely cured of republicanism, after all (5.27). But today’s post-revolutionary, post-Napoleonic “France has a great need of repose”; “everyone who truly loves his country [will] endeavor to pour oil into her wounds, not increase and inflame them,” especially since “the miseries at which they repine are trifles in comparison with the errors into which they had fallen,” less than two decades ago (5.28). Prominent among these, as remarked earlier, was the confiscation of the property of the king and the aristocracy. Nonetheless, no reversal of these confiscations, no return of property to the returning exiles, should be undertaken. This would only “repair one injustice by violently committing another,” threatening the ruin of the “new families” and bringing “new convulsions” upon France (6.38). “Disinterestedness and honor are the two great virtues of the French nation: with such a foundation everything may be hoped for” (6.38). Instead of expropriating the expropriators, the King proposes to compensate the exiles with monies allocated annually from his own revenues. This is one instance proving that “the King is the glory and safety of France” (6.38). His intentions have been confirmed throughout this year, as “vengeance was dreaded” by many but, “with the character of the King being bey degrees better known, men’s fears were calmed” (9.45).
It is true that Louis XVIII “insisted on receiving the throne as his inheritance, not as a gift of the people” (10.51). Rightly so, in Chateaubriand’s estimation, as hereditary monarchy is better than elective monarchy. “We are not a republic, and he ought not to recognize the sovereignty of the people” (10.52). Law and hereditary kingship “are perfectly compatible, or rather they are one and the same thing, according to Cicero, and according to common sense” (10.52). Louis XVIII is not “King of the French”—the “master, the possessor, of them”—but “the King of France”—possessor of the country, “proprietor of the territory,” especially against foreign encroachments (10.53). And he is so “By the Grace of God,” inasmuch as “everything is by the Grace of God” (10.54). Pace Enlightenment philosophes: “The greatest philosophers were of the opinion that a religious formula was no less favorable to politics than to morals” (10.55). Chateaubriand argues that the French Republic “last[ed] but for a moment” because its founders “sought to separate the present entirely from the past, to build an edifice without a base, to pluck up religion by the roots, to renew our laws entirely, to change even our language,” an ambition leading to a “monument floating in the air, which had no support in heaven or on earth,” consequently vanishing “with the breath of the first storm” (X.55). When the English, “more reasonable than ourselves,” built their existing political institutions “on the base which they found,” some called it slavery, but “it is owing to such exaggerated views of things that we have passed from the excess of demagogism” under the republic “to the most abject submission to a tyrant,” Napoleon (10.57). The English, by contrast, have “strengthened the bases of liberty among them by giving that liberty a sort of sacred character” (X.58). In France, “a wise and monarchical liberty” can be “the offspring of our own moeurs,” with features “we should recognize [as] our own” (X.59). “An order of things must consequently be found, in which all that is venerable in the political ideas of our forefathers may be preserved without opposing the present ideas too much” (XIII.74).
Chateaubriand acknowledges that no new regime can simply imitate the Ancien Regime. France now has “two great classes”: the aristocrats (comprising most of the royalists), “those who are not obliged to work for a living”; and those who are so obliged, those whom “fortune places in a state of dependence” (XIII.71-72). Both need “good laws”; the commoners also need additional “consideration” because “equality…has been established in education and fortune,” an equality that has carried them “from the empire of custom to the empire of reason” (XIII.72). Add to civil-social equality the liberty of thought and of political action and it is evident that “it would be dangerous to outrage” le peuple (XIII.72). That is, Chateaubriand already sees the ‘Tocqueville problem’—the difficulty of founding a regime of liberty on an egalitarian social base. Louis XVIII also sees this, and “it is what he has provided for in the Charter,” where “all the bases of a rational liberty are accurately laid down, republican principles being so happily incorporated with it, that they serve to strengthen and uphold the grandeur of the monarchy” (XIII.73).
Louis XVIII’s Constitutional Charter of 1814 denies sovereignty to the people, lodging it firmly in the State, which consists of the monarchy and a bicameral legislature with a Chamber of Peers for the aristocrats (members to be appointed by the king) and a Chamber of Deputies (replacing the Estates-General of previous regimes) for the commoners, a small percentage of whom would be entitled to vote, based on a stringent property qualification. The main republican feature of the new government is its list of legal rights enjoyed by all Frenchmen: freedom of religion (although the Roman Catholic Church would be the ‘established’ or State church), freedom of speech and of the press, due process, and a strong right to hold private property against the State (“we are the first people in the world who, by the constitutional act, have abolished the right of confiscation” of property, “a fatal source of corruption, of injustice, and of crimes” [XIV.77-78]). In a turn away from the militarism of both the First Republic and the Bonaparte regime, conscription is abolished. The king initiates the laws, which the parliament then may or may not ratify. The king appoints his ministers, who are not responsible to the legislature. He also appoints the judges. The king conducts foreign policy, including military policy. Being a gift from the king to the people, the Charter is not amendable by the people or the legislature, but neither may the king amend it. The regime is, then, a genuine but limited monarchy, limited by its aristocratic and democratic elements, intended to be perpetual, to end the regime turmoil of the previous three decades.
Both constitutionalist republicans and royalists of the ‘absolutist’ stripe have objected to the Charter. The republicans want additional reforms, more power to the people. Chateaubriand chides them for their impatience, noting that the English Constitution has taken “ages” to reach its current form and riposting that for the French “perfection must be immediately attained” and as a result, “everything is lost because everything is not gained” (XIV.77). As a guard against an overbearing national State, “public opinion” stands as a formidable if informal counterweight (XIV.79). Indeed, “the sensibility of our nation in this respect is so strong, that the great fear is lest, like Athens, it should be too much alive to the inspirations of our orators” (XIV.80). Even under the old monarchy, “we have placed in our opinions the independence which other nations have placed in their laws,” “rarely submitting unconditionally to the opinions of others” (XIV.83).
With respect to the aristocrats, much suspected among the people, Chateaubriand begins by citing Montesquieu. The philosopher calls honor the principle of monarchy, virtue the principle of a republic. In this bicameral legislature, with one aristocratic branch and another democratic-republican branch, balancing one another, “political virtue” or liberty will be upheld because the aristocrats, lovers of honor as ardent as the king, will rally around him, protecting him from republican excesses (XV.84). The problem with the previous Bourbon regimes was that the aristocratic representatives sat in the Estates-General, where they leaned toward republicanism, leaving the aristocratic defenders of monarchic rights, of the monarchic principle of honor, in civil society, not the government. Now, with the Chamber of Peers, they return to the government itself, along with honor. There, they will be “the preservers of all traditions in which honor is concerned,” “the heralds-at-arms of past times” (XV.88). The Chamber of Peers will become “an excellent nursery of offices, of orators, and of statesmen” (XV.88).
For their part, many Royalists, longing for a return to the absolute, unlimited monarchy of the pre-revolutionary Bourbons, regard the Charter as English-all-too-English, incompatible with French moeurs and with France’s more perilous geopolitical circumstance on the main part of the European continent, often threatened by foreign armies. If the bicameral legislature dithers on military spending, they say, “we shall have an enemy at the gates of Paris!” (XVI.92). If, once his army is funded, and the king “can dispose of the soldiery at his pleasure, he may destroy our pretended constitution whenever he is so disposed” (XVI.92). As to our moeurs, in its essence the Charter is an Enlightenment document, they charge, more in line with utilitarian-Lockean England than with France. On this, Chateaubriand concedes that the Enlightenment has “strangely perverted” such terms as constitution, liberty, and equality; in Santo Domingo, for example, “the throats of white men have been cut, to prove that blacks ought to be free”; in France, “reason has been deployed to dethrone the deity and, in leading the human race to perfection,” men “have been made to descend lower than the brutes” (XVI.92-93). That is to say, what Montesquieu means by republican virtue and what Robespierre meant by it are two very different things. And following the excesses of the Revolution, “to rescue ourselves from systems ill-understood, we have plunged into ideas directly opposite”—the “outrages” of Napoleonic tyranny (XVI.93). “The double lesson of anarchy and despotism teach us then that the glory and happiness of France is only to be sought in a wise medium” (XVI.93). Advocates of republicanism in France have charged religion with murder and tyranny; advocates of absolutist monarchy and even Napoleonic despotism have accused reason of the same thing. “This manner of reasoning, on either side, is futile: what is essentially good”—and both religion and reason are essentially good—must “remain so, independently of the evil purposes to which it has been applied” (XVI.94).
The fact that the Charter constitutes a regime resembling the mixed regime of England does not mean that it cannot be good for France. To say so “is a very great error” (XVI.94). The mixed regime wasn’t invented by the English. “It was the opinion of all the ancients that the best form of government possible”—the best one in practice, as distinguished from theory—should include the powers of the one, the few, and the many (XVI.95). Ancient philosophers (Pythagoras Aristotle, Plato, Cicero), one lawgiver (Lycurgus), and sober historians (Polybius, Tacitus) all endorsed the mixed regime, whereas Christianity instituted the representative government adapted to ‘secular’ government by the moderns. Moreover, the origin of the idea doesn’t matter. “It suits our present situation,” is in “no way adverse to our moeurs,” and is “not an absolutely foreign production” (XVI.97).
Having lost so many of its aristocrats on the battlefields of the wars imposed upon it by its geopolitical position, France’s monarchy strengthened too much in the seventeenth century. This was the origin of Ancien Regime absolutism. Louis XIV’s chief minister, Richelieu, “completed the ruin of the aristocratic power” (XVI.100). The First Republic not only ruined them politically but killed or exiled the bulk of them, leaving France vulnerable to Bonaparte. The Charter seeks to recover some of the old equilibrium while giving the King the power he needs to defend the realm on the soil where it sits. “Can anyone seriously believe that if an enemy were on the frontiers, the two houses would refuse to grant the King an army, or that the proprietors of estates would tamely suffer them to be invaded?” (XVIII.110). Surely not “among a people so tenacious of honor, so deeply enamored of military renown” (XVIII.110). And even given its continental position, there could not be “an invasion so sudden, so unexpected, that he should not have received some notice of it a long time beforehand” in this time before motorized transport capable of Blitzkrieg (XVIII.111). True, “it is evident that much greater authority must be left to the executive power in France than in England,” that there is a greater need for secrecy and dispatch—even to the point of needing, in times of national emergency, an executive similar to the Roman dictator—but this is not necessarily a danger to the republican element of the regime (XVIII.111-112). “Our monarchy, perfectly free at home, ought to remain wholly military abroad,” and it can, since in France, unlike England, where manufacturers are honored as much as military officers, the soldier is regarded as “a man who not only exercises the noblest of professions but pursues the most useful career for the State,” combining honor with utility (XVIII.113). The French begin to understand that the republican liberty cap must be concealed “beneath a helmet” (XVIII.113).
As for the danger that the monarch will overbear the legislature, public opinion will prevent it. Even under the Ancien Regime, public opinion “served, as it were, instead of a Charter” (XVIII.115). “Everything, even to the politeness of our moeurs, became a check upon absolute authority”; “why then should this opinion, formerly so powerful, have now lost its force?” (XVIII.115). It hasn’t, as seen in the influence of the newspapers. And politically relevant public opinion today no longer confines itself to France. “There is, moreover, at the present day, a general opinion which predominates over all particular opinions: this is the European opinion—an opinion which obliges one nation to follow the others”; “you must, whether you will or not, be hurried along in the current of the times” (XIX.119). By this, Chateaubriand means something rather more modest than Hegel’s dialectically unfolding Absolute Spirit. He simply observes that the old balance between “the three orders of the state”—the clergy, the aristocrats, the commoners—has been “destroyed” (XIX.121). “It is difficult to express how favorable to virtue was this division in the order of respective social duties”: sacrifices “exacted from the priest”; “delicacy of sentiment” from the aristocrat; “fidelity, probity, respect for the laws, and an observance of good moeurs” from the commoners (XIX.123). That balanced regime “produced the long existence of the ancient monarchy,” which “depended more upon moral force than upon political coercion” (XIX.123). But the Revolution destroyed that regime and it cannot be reconstructed. The cat of democratization is out of the bag. In the new social order, to which political regimes throughout Europe must be adapted, “there are some persons who displease you,” you royalists (XIX.128). Too bad: “be it so” (XIX.128). And take heart, since “they will pass away, and France will still remain” (XIX.128). It is “inevitable” that “men’s minds” return slowly “to a state of quiescence” after a revolution, but that “is not such an evil as ought to make us renounce the good of our country,” make us reject the Charter because it fails to do the impossible, to return to the Ancien Regime (XIX.128-129). As Tocqueville will later remark, “the moeurs of the times” have changed, and that is “a necessity to which all things are imperiously forced to yield” (XIX.130).
“To be a good patriot, or a man for one’s country, it is necessary to be a man of the times” (XX.131). It isn’t to become a Hegelian, a historicist, but to be “a man who, waiving his own opinions, prefers the happiness of his country to everything else,” one who “seeks no impossibility” but “endeavors to make the best use of the materials which are offered to his hand,” a man of practical reason and moderation “who believes, with Solon, that in an enlightened but corrupt age, it is our duty not to regulate our moeurs by the Government but to form the Government agreeable to the existing state of moeurs” (XX.132). [1] That is what the Constitutional Charter does. Aristocrats take note: some of your rights had been “destroyed in public opinion” before the Revolution and Bonaparte (XX.133). Under the Charter, however, you may still hold the rank of officers in the army, even if you must share it with commoners “who have received a respectable education” (XX.133). And aristocrats from the provinces will no longer be held back from rising in the ranks. “Who is he, then, that amongst you will oppose the generous alliance of liberty and honor,” the “essential constituents of nobility”? (XX.136). The Chamber of Peers gives aristocrats an important set of rights and responsibilities in the regime, a more important set than they enjoyed in practice under the absolute monarchy of the last century of the Ancien Regime. The Charter “restores to the gentry their ancient share in the government” and “at the same time draws them nearer to the people as their protectors and defenders,” as they were before Louis XIV and Richelieu fully established absolutism.
And for the commoners, “the most numerous class in France,” the Charter enables all the French “to enjoy that liberty which we have purchased with the purest blood of France,” treating “man with his just dignity” (XXI.144). Far from a historicist, Chateaubriand lauds the Charter’s acknowledgment of “natural rights,” seen in its opening to “all Frenchmen” the opportunity to serve in civil and military positions (XXI.144). You are not getting a republic, but “what man is there who can now be silly enough to dream of a republic after so much sad experience?” (XXI.145). Surely “the Convention has cured us forever of all desire for a republic” even as “Bonaparte had corrected our love of absolute power” (Conclusion.158).Under the new monarchic regime, your natural rights are given legal force with representative government, the right of petition, property rights including the abolition of confiscation, “personal independence, and a safeguard against the attacks of government” seen in all the rights now formalized (XXI.146). “One idea alone has survived” the Revolution,” namely, “the idea of a political order of things which should protect the rights of the people without infringing upon those of the Sovereign” (Conclusion.158).
Finally, the King “finds in the Charter its safety and its splendor” (XXII.148). He has ample resources to protect himself from revolutionary assault and to win the approval of public opinion, whether through “military glory,” patronage of the arts and sciences, or “political researches” into policies that will “give additional value to the institutions of his country” (XXII.148). French monarchs have themselves changed their ways of ruling as circumstances changed, so why should they pine for the old absolutism that can no longer be?
“All Europe seems now disposed to adopt the system of moderate monarchies” (Conclusion.151). There is no need to yearn, Napoleon-like, for a vast empire, since “France only ends where French is no longer spoken”; its cultural empire remains, provoking no hatred (Conclusion.152). [2] “Let us now replace the heat of discord and the ardor of conquest by a taste for the arts and for the glorious exertions of genius,” no longer “look[ing] beyond ourselves” (Conclusion.154). That heat and that ardor have enhanced the French character, the French ethos, “both in force and in gravity,” making us a “less frivolous, more natural, and more justly simple” people (Conclusion.155). Religion now wins real converts rather than persons who merely go through the motions. And “morals have not only survived in our hearts, but are no longer the mere fruit of domestic instruction, being now founded upon the dictates of an enlightened understanding”—an enlightenment not of abstract theory but of harsh experience (Conclusion.155). And so, “Let us then pride ourselves in being Frenchmen—in being free Frenchmen, under a monarch sprung from our own blood,” not under the Corsican Bonaparte, “esteem[ing] other nations without forgetting ourselves” (Conclusion.157).
The still-unsettled character of regime politics prompted Chateaubriand to intervene in the debate a year later with another book, The Monarchy According to the Charter. At this point, he was a member of the Chamber of Peers, with a “duty to declare the truth to France,” and a Minister of State, with a “duty to declare the truth to the King” (Preface v). At this time, “France appear[s] to me to be menaced with new misfortunes” because its new regime of constitutional monarchy is marbled with officers who opposite it and work against it from within (Preface vi).
There are two kinds of monarchists in France: those who support the Bourbon Restoration and those whose opinions are animated by “the moral interests of the revolution”—the Bonapartists (Preface vii). Representative government, seen in the legislature, resembles that well established in contemporary England and the Netherlands. There are also the state administrators, consisting not only of the ministers but also their putative subordinates; Chateaubriand sees that a good man appointed to run an administrative department may have limited influence over the functionaries. Additionally, although the ministers act in the name of the king they may nonetheless act in ways incompatible with the king’s interests.
So, “Three modes of government might exist under the legitimate king”: the ancien regime of absolutism; a despotism or tyranny along Bonapartist lines; the constitutional monarchy under the Charter (I.1). Napoleon is gone, and with him any real prospect of despotism. Absolutism, too, is finished. “There remains then the legitimate monarchy under the constitutional charter,” the “only good mode now left to us” and “the only possible one” (I.2). Unfortunately, “we have contrived to mistake the spirit and character of the Charter” (II.3), succumbing to passions and interests (“our temper”), pursuing aims that contradict one another, opposing both the spirit and the operation of the government, and exhibiting a lack of courage seen in our fear of liberty and preference for “the tranquility of arbitrary power” (II.3). Addressing both the moral principles animating the several factions and the regimes they advocate, “I hope to adhere, above all, to the plain principles of common sense, a rarer quality than its name indicates—alas!” because “the Revolution has so confounded all our ideas, that in politics, as well as religion, France has to begin again with the catechism” (II.4).
The Charter sets down four elements of a “representative monarchy.” These are the King, exercising the royal prerogative, the House of Peers, the House of Deputies, and the Ministry. According to the royal prerogative, “nothing is done directly by the King himself”; he is “as it were, a divinity, placed behind our reach, inviolable and infallible”—pope-like (IV.6). [3] “His person is sacred, and his will can do no wrong.” This is why French citizens may “discuss public affairs without offense to the Monarch, and we may criticize measures which, though in his name, are the mere acts of his Ministers” (IV.6). To put it another way, the King must permit his ministers “to act according to their own views,” not as “the mere executors of the royal will” (V.7). The King sanctions laws; he does not originate them. As a result, members of the legislature “hardly knew how to act when, in the name of the King, they were invited to attack the best interests of the throne” (V.9). If the legislature ventures to reject an ordonnance sanctioned by the King, then his wisdom is denied and a second ordonnance on the subject must declare, at least in effect, that his wisdom was deceived. “All this is miserable, and injurious to the royal person and royal dignity” (VI.11). The King’s approval ought to be “reserved for the final sanction of the law…and not for the sketch of a law proposed by Ministers, and liable to alteration, and even rejection, by the legislature” (VI.11). Under the ancient regime, the King was indeed “the supreme legislator,” but that is no longer the case under what is in reality a mixed regime with a legislature that actually legislates (VI.11). Under the current, mistaken, notion of the Charter’s spirit and character, either the King (in fact his Ministers) will dominate the legislature, curbing “free discussion” of the proposed laws, or that discussion will “impair the respect due to the King’s name, and tend to a degradation of the Royal authority,” France’s only hope for “tranquility and happiness” (VI.12). Although Bonapartists and absolutists fear that such a reform of the Charter, making its letter conform to its spirit and character, will revive the First Republic’s “mania for lawmaking,” Chateaubriand doubts it, as “the spirit of the nation” is no longer revolutionary, the legislature is bicameral, no longer unicameral as it was under that regime; existing procedures slow things down, permitting time for deliberation to overtake the passions of the moment, and the King has not only veto power over laws approved by the legislature but the power to dissolve the legislature and to require new elections (VII.13). Both the King and Ministers and the legislature ought to have the power to propose laws, freely and openly, “open to public observation” (VIII.16). That way, Ministers will no longer be able to “work upon the conscience of the loyal, by exclaiming, ‘It is the King’s proposal—it is his royal will—his Majesty can never consent to this or that amendment” (IX.19). Both the executive and the legislative branches of the government will need to concur, if a proposed law is to be enacted. Indeed, most laws should be initiated by the legislature; ordonnances should be advanced sparingly. “Can it be doubted that it is more reasonable, more decent, more dignified, that the Chambers should discuss and propose, and that the King should examine and approve” (XI.23)?
This hardly renders the King impotent. “Accountable only to God and his conscience,” he heads the French Catholic Church, standing as the exemplar of family duties and “the fountain of their education and morals,” and he can pardon those convicted under the laws, all while maintaining his power to sanction or reject proposed laws; he appoints and dismisses his Ministers, wields the power to declare war, and acts as commander in chief of the army (XII.25). This is a constitutional monarchy in which the monarch enjoys very substantial powers, indeed.
The Revolution attacked the French aristocracy, which now needs “higher privileges, honors, and fortunes” in order to make the Chamber of Peers into a truly independent branch of the legislature. Chateaubriand recommends making more of the peerages hereditary, restoring primogeniture (indispensable to the maintenance of a stable aristocracy), and the redemption of some of the lands confiscated by the revolutionaries. “When the Peers have inferior titles, and less territorial property, than the Deputies, the political balance is destroyed—the natural force of the aristocracy either is lost, or goes to swell the democratic importance of the Chamber of Deputies,” which will come to wield “a dangerous but inevitable preponderance, uniting to its natural and legitimate popularity, the equality of titles and the superiority of fortune” (XIV.31).
With regard to the Chamber of Deputies, Chateaubriand recommends that it function like the British House of Commons, although he is careful not to say so explicitly. He praises the practice of questioning the Ministers and of requiring the Ministry to be “identified with the majority of the Chambers” (XV.36). Press accounts may not insult the body as such, although they may insult individual members, whose speeches, however, may not be altered by newspaper editors. As a further restriction on journalistic exuberance, “the Deputies may call a libeler to their own bar or may direct a public prosecution against him in the courts of justice” (XVI.37). Still, “without the Liberty of the Press there can be no representative government,” a regime “founded on enlightened public opinion,” since “the Chambers cannot be aware of that opinion if the opinion has no organ,” if the press cannot function as “the tongue of the people” (XVII.39). Thus, the police, who operate at the behest of the Ministers, will “destroy the Constitutional balance” by “turn[ing] the public opinion against the Chambers” if they are charged with supervising the press (XVIII.40). As things now stand, “there is no sort of calumny which has not been heaped upon the Chambers” in an effort to discredit it and to further centralize power in executive hands (XIX.43). “No free constitution can exist” under such conditions (XIX.44), even if press freedom is “not without danger” (XX.45). Accordingly, press restrictions should be imposed not by executive action but by “the laws alone” (XX.45). “Ministers sincerely constitutional can never wish us to risk the state, in order to spare their feelings,” “the smarts or itchings of a miserable vanity” (XXI.48). When a legislator, “in his place, should make a severe observation on a Minister, the latter should not think that France is therefore undone, and that the nation is ruined because he is laughed at” (XXXVII.79). If Ministers wish to promote their policies, they should have their own journals, their own writers, to “gather public sentiment about them” (XXI.49); they should exercise freedom of the press to counter opposition politicians and writers exercising that same freedom. And if they simply can’t tolerate criticism, “they should go live elsewhere” (XXI.50). For such sensitive souls, “a free government can never please them” (50). “Under a constitutional Monarchy, public opinion is the legitimate source and principle of administration” (XXIV.56).
What the Ministers can and should do is to prepare the budget, then submit it to the Deputies for their approval. Again, this should “go smoothly” if the Ministry “will return to just principles” and if the Cabinet is part of a legislative majority. The Ministry should be assembled out of eminent men who exhibit “shrewdness in discovering the characters of mankind and art in managing them,” “firm, bold, [and] decided in the measures” “deliberately adopted” by his colleagues (XXVII.59), men whose private opinions may differ but, “once assembled in Cabinet, they should thenceforward have but one mind” (XXV.57). The Cabinet should be sufficiently numerous to divide administrative work equitably”; a numerous body will also increase the number of allies the Ministry has and lessen intrigue “by affording many and fair objects of ambition” (XXVI.58). As to relations with the legislature, “instead of calumniating it, court it,” and “not with words only, but by measures” (XXVIII.60). If the measures you approve contradict the opinions of the legislators, “make no apology or praise” regarding them but tell the legislators “that a fatal necessity presses [them] upon you” (XXVIII.61).
Currently, there is one Minister who exemplifies the type of Minister who must never serve in the administration of a constitutional Monarchy: Joseph Fouché. Fouché was Minister of Police from 1799 (during the time of the Directory, just prior to Napoleon’s accession) to 1810, then again in 1815 until his death in 1820. A Jacobin, then a Bonapartist, always a Freemason, he voted to execute Louis XVI, ransacked churches, and actively participated in the Terror, averring that “the blood of criminals fertilizes the soil and establishes power on sure foundations.” An inveterate intriguer (even Napoleon regarded him with caution), he undertook the “White Terror” against supposed enemies of Louis XVIII. “A minister of this sort,” Chateaubriand observes, “can only be ostensibly employed with the mutes of the seraglio of Bajazet or the mutes of the senate of Buonaparte” (XXIX.64). Consideration of Fouché brings Chateaubriand to a critique of the Ministry of Police itself, which he judges incompatible with the constitutional Charter. “If the Charter, which professes to secure individual liberty, is obeyed, the General Police can have neither power or object” because “this General Police is in fact a political Police, a party engine,” its “chief tendency” being “to stifle public opinion,” to “stab…the constitution to the heart” (XXX.65-66), “attack[ing] the first principles of political order” (XXXIII.70). “Unknown under the old regime—incompatible with the new—it is a monster born of anarchy and despotism, and bred in the filth of the revolution” from which Fouché emerged (XXX.66). “What a bitter irony is the word LIBERTY in his mouth, who, at the end of his eulogies on freedom, can arbitrarily and illegally arrest any of his Majesty’s subjects!” (XXXI.67). “Can debates be free in presence of a bashaw who listens to them only to mark the man, whom he may at leisure denounce and strike, if he cannot corrupt?” (XXXI.67). After all, even under the terms of the Charter, if in a national emergency the Charter is suspended, the police have the power to arrest “all the civil and military authorities” (XXXV.74). “Good God! How can we suffer to exist, in the heart of a constitutional Monarchy, such a seraglio of despotism, such a sink of public corruption,” a department “whose nature is to overleap or violate all laws,” headed by a Minister “whose communications with all that is vile and depraved in society tend to blunt every good feeling and inflame every bad; to profit by corruption and thrive by abuses” (XXXV.75). If such a Ministry must exist, put it under the control of the Minister of Justice and the Attorney General—that is, under the rule of law.
Underlying such Ministerial excesses are the principles and interests of the Revolution, “the falsest doctrines,” “walking hand in hand with irreligion,” entertained by men who “imagine that those who advocate the cause of piety and morals [are] secretly undermining the Charter,” “as if religion and liberty were incompatible” (XXXVIII.81). On the contrary, as Chateaubriand had argued in The Genius of Christianity, “every high and generous public feeling” is “intimately connected with reverence for the principles of justice and of Christianity” (XXXVIII.81). [4] To those secularists who speak of “reaction” while fearing “vengeance,” Chateaubriand replies that all “practical” reaction—i.e., acts of vengeance—must be “repressed”; “but how can they, and why should [the Ministers] endeavor to check moral reaction”? (XXXVIII.82). Such men as Fouché, “who professed the wildest theories of liberty under the Republic,” and then “practiced the most abject baseness under Buonaparte,” can hardly find sincere common cause with advocates of the Charter, since they find in that document “a King whom as republicans they hate, and FREEDOM, which as slaves they abhor” (XXXVIII.82). Such men, and indeed all men under representative government will do well not to act “upon their own vague suspicions and irritable humor” (XXXVIII.83). “The true rule” is “to weigh and measure consequences and facts”; “a statesman should think only of the results” of a proposed measure, because “in politics, if we once stray from the guidance of facts, we shall bewilder ourselves irretrievably “(XXXVIII.83). If a Minister cannot lead, or will not follow the majority, then he must call for the dissolution of the legislature or resign; “it is for him to consider whether he has the courage to risk (even eventually) the safety of the nation in order to keep his place”(XXXIX.85). In the meantime, he should defend his proposals in the legislature: “What higher duty can he have than to attend in Parliament and share in its debates?” (XL.86).
Regrettably, the last three ministries under the Restoration regime have committed “the same error,” espousing principles “essentially contradictory to the principle of existing institutions” (XLI.88). In the first Cabinet, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord served in a Cabinet that was “totally unfit for business”—factitious, eager to rule by unconstitutional executive orders, quick to curb press freedom (XLII.91). In Cabinet “assembled all the survivors of those who have appeared on the stage from 1789 to 1816,” men “dissatisfied with themselves and everybody else,” “clubbing together in one stock of discontent, the vain regrets of imbecility, and the keener remorse of crime” (XLII.92). It was “soon overthrown by a storm which had might have prevented,” the return of Napoleon, “and France was nearly overthrown with it,” as Europe armed against him (XLIII.94). In the second Cabinet, omnipresent and infinitely flexible Talleyrand became Prime Minister. He and his colleagues took advantage of Louis XVIII. “Too long absent from France” in exile, he “did not understand the true state of the national mind” (XLIV.96). His Cabinet members deceived him—Talleyrand in particular being a past master of such tactics—and, admittedly, the King “is perhaps a better judge of business than of men” (XLIV.96). This Cabinet included Chateaubriand’s bête noir, Fouché. “If it were thought that the services of such a man could be useful, he should have been placed behind the curtain; consulted, counseled with in secret,” sparing “the shock which his public appointment gave to loyal feeling and to the dignity of the Monarch” (XLV.98). Predictably, Fouché worked to undermine the regime by isolating the King under the pretense that shadowy forces planned his assassination. “This farce ended I know not how,” but Talleyrand, as usual, landed on his feet, “glad to return to juster principles” in for the remainder of the brief life of the second Cabinet and on into the third (XLVIII.105). As for the Minister of Police, “it is the common affectation of great offenders to bear the tortures of conscience with gaiety,” and so he did (XLIX.108). In a final surge of dissatisfaction, the second Cabinet was vacated.
After the appointment of the third Cabinet, the legislature “did its duty by the King, whom it adores, and by the people, whose rights its guards,” both “strengthening the hands of the Crown with laws against sedition and “advanc[ing] the interests of the people with election and budget reforms (LI.112). But once again, Cabinet members (again including Talleyrand, now with the title “Grand Chamberlain of France”) sought to rule according to “the principle of revolutionary interests,” as their own slogan has it, alleging that the legislature doesn’t represent public opinion and that the royalists are incapable of governing (LIII.116). The same “system of revolutionary partialities” which “threw us into the danger from which we are but just extricated” will, “if pursued, again lead us into an abyss from which we will find no redemption” (LIV.118). This may happen because too many of their “honest supporters” fail to distinguish the material from the moral interests of the revolutionists (LV.120). They shouldn’t be deprived of property or of political rights, but their “anti-Christian and anti-social doctrines” (i.e., “whatever tends to render indifferent or praiseworthy, treachery, robbery, and injustice”) must be resisted (LV.120). The French must never “confound real and tangible interests with pernicious and destructive theories” (LVI.121). Church properties now controlled by the government should be restored and those lands confiscated from the aristocrats which haven’t been sold to commoners should be restored to their rightful owners. “Woe to the nation whose justice has two sets of weights and measures!” (LVII.123). And the French themselves want no more recurrence to revolution; “far from wishing for revolutionists, we are sick of them” (LX.131). The opinions of Parisians, heard “only in [one’s] own little circle,” should not be mistaken for the opinions of the French generally (LXV.145). On the contrary, in today’s France “every effort ought to be strained to secure the triumph of the principles of legitimate monarchy” (LXIII.138). “Public stations should not be filled with the King’s enemies” (LXX.156). Such “boasted idols of despotic administration” have been “disconcerted, astonished, and, as it were, lost, in a free Government” because they are “unacquainted with religion and justice” (LXXIII.167). And because they are, “they always attempt to apply physical force” (the police power) “to the moral system of things,” their “faculty for evil” now “useless under a moral and regular government” (LXXIII.168).
There is, Chateaubriand charges, a “secret purpose concealed behind the system of revolutionary interests” (LXXVI.173): regime change, the replacement of Louis XVIII with another, more pliable monarch who accedes to ruling “by the grace of the People,” not heredity, before the Bourbon family “will strike its roots too deeply” to be readily removed (LXXVII.177). The revolutionary faction has for the most part taken “all the offices” in the government, persecuting those it terms “the Ultra-Royalists” (LXXXI.187), hoping “to wear out the friends of the Throne, and to deprive the Crown of its last partisans” (LXXXIII.194). And since “the Altar would support the Throne, its restoration must therefore be prevented” (LXXXIV.196). Religion being “the keystone of legitimate Government,” the Ministry has made sure that no reestablished the Catholic Church “has risen from the grave of the Minister’s portfolio” (LXXXIV.196). And the Ministry has minimized clerical pensions, knowing that “parents will not consign their children to poverty and contempt” (LXXXIV.198). “The physical and material destruction of religion is inevitable in France, if the secret enemies of the State—who are, a little more openly, those of the Church—should, sometimes under one pretext, sometimes under another, succeed in holding the Clergy in the state of humiliation to which they are at present reduced” (LXXXIV.198). This humiliation includes not only keeping them in a condition of penury but bringing some of them up on false charges, putting them “into the dock among prostitutes and thieves” in a parody of Jesus’ mingling with publicans and sinners (LXXXIV.200). The revolutionists, whether republican or Bonapartist, “who have caused our misfortunes and still meditate our ruin,” “detest Religion because they have persecuted it, because its eternal wisdom and divine morality are in opposition with their vain wisdom and the corruption of their hearts”; “we are again returned to sophistry, the sneers and the injustice of 1789” (LXXXIV.200-201). If this campaign continues, “I do not fear to predict that the wish of Mr. Philosopher Diderot”—that he hoped to see “the last King strangled by a rope made of the bowels of the last Priest”—will “yet be accomplished” (LXXXIV.202).
The revolutionaries have even appealed to foreign powers for support, offering the French crown “to whoever would accept it”—on the terms of the revolutionaries’ principle of popular sovereignty (LXXXVI.212). That is, the same revolutionaries who had threatened the European monarchies, first under the Republic, then under Bonaparte, now sought their endorsement under principles fatal to those very monarchies. “The French Revolution which we had hoped was passed is but the prologue of a more dreadful tragedy: if Christianity be in danger, it cannot be denied, that Europe is thereby menaced with a general convulsion” (LXXXVI.215).
In a nod to modern social contract theory, Chateaubriand concedes that “society in its early stages may have been formed by a congregation of men, uniting their interests and passions; but it has been polished and improved only in proportion as these interests and passions have gradually been regulated by religion, morality, and justice” (LXXXVIII.220). Crucially, “no revolution has ever been terminated, but by a recurrence to these three fundamental principles of all human society” and “no political change has ever been consolidated and established, but by being founded on the state of things which it replaced” (LXXXVIII.220). So, for example, when ancient Rome changed its regime from a monarchy to a republic, “the Gods remained in the Capitol,” and when Charles II of England “re-ascended the throne of his ancestors, religion recovered its strength” and Parliament “preserved the political rights it had acquired” under the Cromwell regime (LXXXVIII.220). “This is what we have not chosen to do,” and as a consequence “the legitimate monarchy” faces the threat of “new misfortunes” (LXXXVIII.221). It can be “saved only by preserving and maintaining the political results of the Revolution, which have been consecrated by the Charter” while putting “a final stop to the Revolution itself” by realigning Church and State “for their mutual dignity and safety” (LXXXIX.222). Such a realignment would win clerical support for the Charter, strengthening its favor among the majority of the French, who are Catholics who deny that liberty means atheist license. “It is proved by the example of England that the existence of an endowed Clergy is not incompatible with that of a constitutional Government” (XC.225). More, “in proportion as the Church shall acquire property, the assistance which the State is obliged to provide will be diminished” and “the Clergy will at the same time resume the dignity which arises from independence” (XC.226-227). Additionally, the Church should keep the parish registers, bringing citizens into the world with the baptism that betokens their membership first in the Kingdom of God, prior to membership in the country of France—a sign that “the first duties of man are the duties of Religion and that these include all the others” (XC.227). Public education also should be restored to the Church and Bishops should sit with the aristocrats in the Chamber of Peers, as they do in the British House of Lords. “I have no doubt that the Clergy—connected with the soil of France by the property of the Church—taking an active part in our civil and political institutions—would at the same time form a class of citizens as devoted to the Charter as ourselves,” bringing with them “a salutary influence,” healing “the wounds of the Revolution, appeas[ing] the agitations of men’s minds, correct[ing] morals, reestablish[ing] the principles of order and justice, preach[ing] salvation, and finally reviv[ing] the spirit of religion which is the cement of social life, and of morality, which gives consistency to Political Institutions” (XC.228-229).
In sum, religion is not bigotry, nor does it harbor “a secret enmity against philosophy” (XC.230). Chateaubriand’s slogan is “King, Religion, and Liberty” (XC.231). For their part, the politically restored aristocracy can “introduce into our new state of society that tradition of ancient honor, that delicacy of sentiment, that contempt of fortune, that generous spirit, that faith, that fidelity which we so much need, and which are the distinctive virtues of a gentleman, and the most necessary ornaments of a state” (XCI.232). There need not be jealousy between “what we formerly called noble and bourgeois” (XCI.233). As for republicanism, “liberty is not new to the French Nobility,” men who “never did acknowledge in our Kings any absolute power but over their hearts and their swords” (XCI.234). Under the Ancien Regime, aristocrats had nothing serious to do. Brought to Versailles under the supervision of the monarchs and their police, they became “triflers by profession, endured rather than desired,” living lives “unworthy of the dignity of manhood” (XCII.237). “Let men of honor be no longer made dependent on knaves”; “such is the natural order of morality and justice” (XCII.238). [5]
Modernity’s statist bureaucracy is here to stay. Bonaparte had accustomed the French to an active government; by now, they “will not know how to walk alone” (XCII.241). For that reason, the King should pay “a more ostentatious attention to commerce, agriculture, literature and arts” and design “great public works” to award “brilliant distinctions to successful talents” in order to rechannel ambition away from revolution and toward the enhancement of civil life (XCII.241). [6] Then, “the radiant and innocent triumphs of peace would obliterate from [the people’s] memories and affections the guilty intoxication of anarchy and the bloody enthusiasm of war” (XCII.242). “Religion, the base of all well-ordered society, the Charter, honorable men, the political things of the Revolution but not the political men of the Revolution—such, in one sentence, is my system” (XCII.242-243).
Chateaubriand’s intervention into the politics of his profoundly wounded country may initially seem remote to the concerns of human beings more than two centuries later. But is not the serious consideration of the aftermath of war and revolution a perennially important task?
Notes
- For a similar observation, more than a century later, see Charles de Gaulle: Speech at Bayeux, June 16, 1946.
- As seen in de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic with the efforts of Minister of Culture André Malraux, another admiring and careful reader of le Vicomte. See Will Morrisey: Cultural Founding in Modernity (Lanham: University Press of America, 1984). See also “Malraux and de Gaulle: Can Democracy Be Cultural?” on this website under the category, “Manners and Morals.”
- “He is the head, or visible prelate, of the Gallican church” (XII.25).
- For a review of Chateaubriand’s earlier book, see “Chateaubriand’s Defense of Christianity,” on this website under “Bible Notes.”
- This is Tocqueville’s argument, set down two decades later in Democracy in America.
- In different circumstances, this was the policy of Charles de Gaulle after his founding of the Fifth Republic, in collaboration with his Minister of Culture, André Malraux. See Will Morrisey: Reflections on de Gaulle: Political Founding in Modernity, Second Edition (Lanham: University Press of America, 1996).
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