Dr. Robert Hickson 3 June 1988 – Saint Clotilde

Belloc and Chesterton:Their Partial Reflections on The Revolution in France1

This brief essay proposes to illuminate how Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton came to

understand the movement generally called “The French Revolution.”

In what follows I shall try to advance our understanding of their deeper understanding

of this truly premonitory Revolution in France. Even while indicating some of their blind spots

and partialities, I shall attempt to show why Belloc and Chesterton could reasonably consider

that the French Revolution was not intrinsically anti-Catholic. That is to say, they did not believe

that “the monster was in the doctrine,” per se. Yet, said Belloc in his matured wisdom: “As is

always the case in great catastrophes, there was a 'time-lag' before the full effects were felt.”2

Moreover, lest one also be misled by “reading history backwards,” as well as not

grasping this “time-lag,” we must be more attentive to the subtle latencies and be more

disciplined and differentiated in our thinking. That is to say, in Belloc's own profound words:

Till we have appreciated that [twofold truth], we cannot understand either the confusion or the intense passions of the time....Now the most difficult thing in the world in connection with history, and the rarest of achievement is the seeing of events as contemporaries saw them, instead of seeing them through the distorting medium of our later knowledge. We know what was going to happen; contemporaries did not. The very words used to designate the attitude taken at the beginning of the struggle change their meanings before the struggle has come to an end.3

My thesis is that Belloc and Chesterton gradually came to understand the French

1 First written in English in the summer of 1988 (published in Spanish in early 1990 in Aportes: Revista de historia contemporánea, 12 (1990), pp. 58-62, transl. by Professor Dr. Miguel Ayuso y Torres). The essay's subtitle intentionally alludes to Edmund Burke's classic, early text, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).

2 Hilaire Belloc, The Great Heresies (Manassas, Virginia: Trinity Communications, 1987), p. 147. This book was first published in 1938.

3 Ibid., pp. 126-127—emphasis is in the original.

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Revolution through the fuller implications of the principle of “corruptio optimi pessima est,”

especially when applied to the true theory of democracy, the Faith, and Catholic culture. They

came to understand how the cultus informs the cultura, and how the deformation of the Catholic

cultus produces an intimate, but long-unseen, deformation in the culture “through the gradually

disintegrating effect of a false philosophy.”4

What Belloc said in 1911 about Rousseau applies, as well, both to himself and to

Chesterton, who largely followed Belloc's views on the French Revolution:

But (as is so often the case with intuitions of genius) though he saw not the whole of the evil, he had put his finger upon its central spot, and from that main and just principle which he laid down -- that under a merely representative system men cannot be really free -- flow all those evils which we now know to attach to this method of government.5

In his preface to his 1911 book, The French Revolution, Belloc had noted that he, “the

writer of these pages is himself a Catholic and in political sympathy strongly attached to the

political theory of the Revolution.”6 Moreover, he adds: “Such personal conditions have perhaps

enabled him [i.e., Belloc] to treat the matter more thoroughly than it might have been treated by

one who rejected either Republicanism upon the one hand, or Catholicism upon the other.”7

Lastly, he addresses the matter of prime importance concerning the French Revolution:

Some years ago the paramount importance of the quarrel between the Church and the Revolution might still have been questioned by men who had no personal experience of the struggle, and of its vast results. To-day the increasing consequences and the contemporary violence of that quarrel make its presentation an essential part of

4 Ibid., p. 147.5 Hilaire Belloc, The French Revolution (London: Williams and Norgate, 1911), p. 27.6 Ibid., pp. vii-viii. In describing this political theory, Belloc says: “This theory of political morals, though subject

to a limitless degradation in practice, underlies the argument of every man who pretends to regard the State as a business affecting the conscience of citizens. Upon it relies every protest against tyranny and every denunciation of foreign aggression.” (p. 14) With reference to this civil and temporal authority, Belloc adds: “Those words 'civil' and 'temporal' must lead the reader to the next consideration; which is that the last authority of all does not reside even in the community” since “the ultimate authority in any act is God.” (p. 15)

7 Ibid., p. viii.

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any study of the period.8

Later in his book, Belloc expresses a conclusion whose implications both he and

Chesterton came to appreciate even more fully:

The reader must seize that moribund condition of the religious life of France upon the eve of the Revolution, for it is at once imperfectly grasped by the general run of historians, and is also the only fact which thoroughly explains what followed. The swoon of the Faith in the eighteenth century is the negative foundation upon which the strange religious experience of the French was about to rise. France, in the generation before the Revolution, was passing through a phase in which the Catholic Faith was at a lower ebb than it had ever been since the preaching and establishment of it in Gaul.9

Writing in 1925, fourteen years later, Belloc now more vividly appreciated Cardinal

Manning's earlier words to him “that all human conflict is ultimately theological.”10 Speaking of

“the martyrdom of Ireland” and “the tragedy played out” between Ireland and Protestant,

oligarchic England, Belloc also said: “I knew its roots as well as any man. I knew that the gulf

was a gulf of religion.”11

Belloc also recognized the potentially explosive presence of the wealthy, powerful, and

hostile Huguenot oligarchy within Catholic France. Even in 1911, Belloc had noted how the

French Revolution

took place in a country which had, in the first place, definitely determined during the religious struggle of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to remain [unlike England] in communion with Rome; and had, in the second place, admitted a very large and important body of converts to the doctrines of the Reformation. . . .[which] was a capital point in the future history of France .. . [i.e.,] the presence of a wealthy, very large, and highly cultivated body of dissentients [mostly Huguenots] in the midst of the nation. . . . and

8 Ibid.9 Ibid., p. 231.10 Hilaire Belloc, The Cruise of the Nona (London: Century Publishing, 1983), p. 55. This book was first published

in 1925, partly as a record of a consolatory sailing voyage he made in the summer of 1914 after the death of his wife, on 2 February 1914, on Candlemas.

11 Ibid ., p. 43.

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it is impossible to understand the Revolution unless very high relief is given to the religious problem.12

The religious problem took on a hardening polarization because of the imprudent (more

than malevolent) Civil Constitution of the Clergy (approved by the Assembly on 12 July, 1790

and signed by Louis XVI on 26 August):

The resistance, therefore, offered by the clergy to the Civil Constitution, had just that effect which a nucleus will have in the crystallization of some solution. It polarized the energies of the Revolution, it provided a definite soil, a definite negative, a definite counterpoint, a definite butt.13

Because of “the temporary eclipse of religion in France before the Revolution broke

out,”14 Belloc argues,“the men who framed the Constitution of the Clergy, the men who voted it,

nay even the men who argued against it, all had at the back of their minds three conceptions

which they were attempting to reconcile.”15 Moreover,

of those three conceptions one was wholly wrong, one was imperfect because superficial, the third alone was true. And these three conceptions were, first, that the Catholic Church was a moribund superstition, secondly that it possessed in its organization and tradition a power to be reckoned with, and thirdly, that the state, its organs, and their corporate inheritance of action, were so bound up with the Catholic Church that it was impossible to effect any general political settlement in which that body, both external to France and internal, should be neglected.16

Belloc thought that the argument of the National Assembly

was just and statesmanlike, prudent and full of foresight, save for one miscalculation, the Catholic Church was not dead, and was not even dying. It was exhibiting many of the symptoms which in other organisms and institutions correspond to the approach of death, but the Catholic Church is an organism and an institution quite unlike any other. It fructifies and expands immediately under

12 H. Belloc, The French Revolution (1911), p. vii.13 Ibid., p. 247.14 Ibid., p. 238.15 Ibid.16 Ibid., p. 239.

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the touch of a lethal weapon, it has at its very roots the conception that material prosperity is stifling to it, poverty and misfortune nutritious.17

Belloc had asked an earlier question and had given his preparatory answer to the fuller

one just given above:

How, we ask, could men so learned, so enthusiastic, so laborious and so closely in touch with all the realities of their time, make a blunder of that magnitude? Much more, how did such a blunder escape the damnation of universal mockery and immediate impotence? The answer is to be discovered in what has just been laid down with so much insistence: the temporary eclipse of religion in France before the Revolution broke out.18

The cumulative corruption of the Faith -- corruptio optimi -- also disclosed “the effects

of a spiritual thing which was going on within” where “faith was breaking down.”19 Especially

because of the faithless (hence hopeless) and morally corrupt Catholic ecclesiastical oligarchy,

Catholic culture “was being strangled at its root, at its spiritual root; therefore the material fruits

of that tree were beginning to wither.“20 As Belloc often said, and Chesterton often implied,

“without authority there is no life” --

As, flake by flake, the beetling avalanches

Build up their imminent crags of noiseless snow,

Till some chance thrill the loosened ruin launches

And the blind havoc leaps unwarned below,

So grew and gathered through the silent years

The madness of a People, wrong by wrong.21

17 Ibid., p. 241.18 Ibid., p. 238.19 H. Belloc, The Great Heresies (1938, 1987), p. 147.20 H. Belloc, The French Revolution (1911), p. 148.21 These are the opening lines of James Russell Lowell's nineteenth-century poem, “Ode to France: February 1848,” which Belloc much admired. See The Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell (Boston: Houghton, Osgood, and Company, 1880), p. 92. The entire poem is to be found on pages 92-94.

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G.K. Chesterton said that “the strongest and most unmistakable mark of madness is the

combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction.”22 A madman is not

really “cracked” (as the English idiom says), but, rather, he is “cramped.” He is not “cracked

enough.” He needs “more air” and more spaciousness as in the spaciousness of the Faith and of

tradition. And, it is here that we may better appreciate both Chesterton's and Belloc's deeper

views about “democracy” or “republicanism,” and the connection with Christianity or the Res

Publica Christiana of Medieval Christendom. Chesterton says:

I was brought up a Liberal, and have always believed in democracy in the elementary liberal doctrine of a self-governing humanity.... The principle of democracy, as I mean it, can be stated in two propositions. The first is this: that the things common to all men are more important than the things peculiar to any men . . . that the essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold separately. And the second principle is merely this: that the political instinct or desire is one of these things which they hold in common. The democratic contention is that government (helping to rule the tribe) is a thing like falling in love, and not a thing like dropping into poetry . . . I have never been able to understand where people got the idea that democracy was in some way opposed to tradition. It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time. Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.... I, at any rate, cannot separate the two ideas of democracy and tradition.23

Belloc essentially agrees with Chesterton when he speaks on “the political theory of the

Revolution,”24 which consists of two parts: “the first is the doctrine of the equality of men; . . .

the second is the mere machinery called 'representative.'”25 The former is the most important

and the key to Belloc's affirmation:

22 G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1959), p. 20. This book was first published in 1908.23 Ibid., pp. 46, 47, 48.24 See, especially, Belloc's The French Revolution (1911), Chapter 1, “The Political Theory of the Revolution.” 25 Ibid ., p. 21.

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The doctrine of the equality of man is a transcendent doctrine: a “dogma,” as we call such doctrines in the field of transcendental religion. It corresponds to no physical reality which we can grasp, it is hardly to be adumbrated even by metaphors drawn from physical objects. We may attempt to rationalize it by saying that what is common to all men is not more important but infinitely more important than the accidents by which men differ. We may compare human attributes to tri-dimensional, and personal attributes to bi-dimensional measurements; we may say that whatever man has of his nature is the standard of man, and we may show that in all such things men are potentially equal. None of these metaphors explain the matter; still less do any of them satisfy the demand of those to whom the dogma may be incomprehensible. Its truth is to be arrived at (for these) in a negative manner. If men are not equal then no scheme of jurisprudence, no act of justice, no movement of human fellowship has any meaning. The doctrine of the equality of man is one which, like many of the great transcendental doctrines, may be proved by the results consequent upon its absence. It is in man to believe it -- and all lively societies believe it. . . . and the passionate sense of justice which springs from this profound and fundamental social dogma of equality, as it moved France during the Revolution to frenzy, so also moved it to creation.26

But as Chesterton sanely said even about the modern world:

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.27

So too was it the case in the cramped and explosive “madness form of virtue” in the

French Revolution. Corruptio optimi pessima est. This is even moreso obvious when we also

understand with St. Thomas Aquinas that man finds in virtue his ultimum potentiae (the utmost

26 Ibid., pp. 21-23, 23.27 G.K.Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p. 30.

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of what he can be). In the traditional Corporate Christendom of St. Thomas and the Middle Ages,

Belloc and Chesterton saw a greater balance, poise, and sense of proportion than in the defective

culture of the French Revolution. In Catholic Medieval Christendom and its Res Publica, even

the Common Man retained his intrinsic dignity, even when he was not “useful.” Chesterton said

that “Christianity could not settle down into the pagan simplicity that the man was made for the

work, when the work was so much less immortally momentous than the man.”28 As Dr. Jowett

had also said to Belloc while he was his student at Balliol College in Oxford: “You cannot have a

Republic without Republicans.”29 In this connection, Chesterton adds what he calls “a truth that

was the link between Christianity and citizenship.”30 It is the link between the Res Publica

Christiana and sanctity: “Alone of all superiors, the saint does not depress the human dignity of

others. He is not conscious of his superiority to them; but only more conscious of his inferiority

than they are.”31

Just as the humility of Christ was the model for the revolutionary humility of the saint,

says Chesterton, so too it is the case that

About that [Christian] revolution no man has ever been able to be impartial. The present writer will make no idle pretence of being so. That it was the most revolutionary of all revolutions, since it identified the dead body on a service gibbet with the fatherhood in the skies, has long been a commonplace without ceasing to be a paradox.32

Unlike the doubtful King Louis XVI, who had apparently lost his conviction about the

legitimacy of kingship, even before the French Revolution erupted, King St. Louis IX of France

was for Belloc, Chesterton, Péguy, and Bernanos, and other knights, the higher model of

Catholic monarchy and chivalry, in combination:

28 G.K. Chesterton, A Short History of England (New York: John Lane Company, 1917), p. 22.29 H. Belloc, The Cruise of the Nona, p. 56. Belloc added that Jowett's “terseness and truth” jolted him, as with a “certain quality of revelation.” (Ibid.)30 G.K. Chesterton, A Short History of England,31 Ibid ., p. 23. It is noteworthy in this context that the last words of La Femme Pauvre, Leon Bloy's 1897 novel, translated into English as The Woman Who Was Poor, are: “The only sadness is not to be a saint.” In a later 1938 translation by I.L. Collins: “There is only one unhappiness...and that is—NOT TO BE ONE OF THE SAINTS.” (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1939), p. 356—the emphasis and capitalization are in the original 1939 text-translation.32 G.K. Chesterton, A Short History of England, p. 20.

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The central pillar which has sustained the storied house of our imagination ever since [Medieval Christendom] has been the idea of the civilized knight amid the savage enchantment; the adventure of a man still sane in a world gone mad.33

The magnanimous chivalry of Belloc and Chesterton deeply and sanely and

compassionately understood how and why, in the distorted French Revolution, there “grew and

gathered through the silent years the madness of a People, wrong by wrong.” “Corruptio

optimae fidei pessima est.” Belloc even said of Napoleon:

Nor, for all his genius, did he clearly perceive that difference of religion is at the root of differences in culture, for the generation to which he belonged had no conception of that profound and universal judgment.34

Moreover, he added:

The Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars . . . also increased the general strength of Protestantism and still further weakened the Catholic culture. They did so indirectly, and the immediate issues were so much more exciting and so much more directly concerned men's lives that this ultimate and profound effect was little appreciated.35

These are the words of a just man who does not read history backwards through the

distorting filter of ideology. And, when speaking of the death of Danton himself, the

magnanimous Catholic Belloc can say: “I will end this book by that last duty of mourning, as we

who hold to immortality yet break our hearts for the dead.”36

--FINIS--

© Robert D. Hickson 1988

33 Ibid., p. 32.34 H. Belloc, The Great Heresies, p. 150.35 Ibid., p. 149.36 H. Belloc, Danton: A Study (London: G.P.Putnam's Sons, 1928), p. 380. This biography was first published in 1899, when the vivid-souled Belloc was twenty-nine years of age.

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