Book Review: "Apostles of Empire: The Jesuits and New France"

I have seen reviews (and even the back cover blurb) of this book calling it "revisionist history"; I'd prefer to call it careful history. The author, Bronwen McShea, neither attacks nor defends what the Jesuits did when spreading the Gospel in North America. It's neither hagiography nor a lurid exposé of their efforts both to convert the native population to Christianity and to bring them into the French empire. I say this because throughout the text, McShea demonstrates how the Jesuits both cooperated with the French monarchy and ruling classes to spread the ideals of their native culture and the Catholic faith among the native tribes in North America and differed with the goals and methods of the French monarchy and ruling classes in achieving their missionary efforts. Events in France, like the Fronde, and wars in Europe and North America often thwarted the goals of the Jesuit missionaries to provide protection, education, religious formation, medicine, and other assistance to the Indigenous peoples. While several French elites, like Marie-Madeleine de Vignerot, duchesse d'Aigullon, Francois Sublet de Noyers, and Marguerite d'Alegre, the Marquise de Bauge, and others, contributed to the Jesuits' religious, educational, and charitable efforts, the entity they wanted support from to achieve the other goal of establishing French culture and power in North America, the monarchy and its administration--including military and financial aid--was the one that seemed reluctant to support them as the Society of Jesus desired.

As an example of the cooperation, the Jesuits indeed wanted to encourage cooperation between their Indigenous allies against the Iroquois tribes in colonial organization and military conflict. This continued into the conflict between English and French colonizing efforts in the later seventeenth century in Nine Year's War, etc. They even continued these efforts when the French stopped sending military aid. As an example of their disagreement with the methods and goals of the French monarchy especially during the personal reign of Louis XIV and the premiership of Colbert, the Jesuit missionaries deplored the dangers of the brandy trade and Colbert's encouragement of intermarriage between the Frenchmen and the Indigenous women. The first because it could cause drunkenness and violence in the colonial settlements and the second because the Frenchmen were not worthy of the excellence of the Abenaki or Huron women!

Throughout the book, McShea carefully describes the missionary efforts of the Jesuits in New France, often by telling the stories of the individual Jesuits, their vocations, formation in Old and New France, and missionary careers. At the end of the book, as the Society of Jesus was suppressed first in France by King Louis XV and then throughout the world (except Russia!) by Pope Clement XIV, McShea describes the last days of the remaining Jesuit missionaries in France and in Canada (now held by the English), including two who fell victim to the French Revolution (Fathers Simeon Le Bansais and Julien-Francois Derville) when they returned to France and one who welcomed Benjamin Franklin and the Carroll cousins to Quebec in 1776 (Father Pierre-Rene Floquet). 

The publisher, the University of Nebraska Press describes the book as:

Winner of the 2020 Catholic Press Association Book Award in History

Apostles of Empire is a revisionist history of the French Jesuit mission to Indigenous North Americans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, offering a comprehensive view of a transatlantic enterprise with integral secular concerns. Between 1611 and 1764, 320 Jesuits were sent from France to North America to serve as missionaries. Most labored in colonial New France, a vast territory comprising eastern Canada and the Great Lakes region, inhabited by diverse Native American populations. Although committed to spreading Catholic doctrines and rituals and adapting them to diverse Indigenous cultures, these missionaries also devoted significant energy to more worldly concerns, particularly the transatlantic expansion of the absolutist-era Bourbon state and the importation of the culture of elite, urban French society.

In Apostles of Empire Bronwen McShea accounts for these secular dimensions of the mission’s history through candid portraits of Jesuits engaged in a range of activities. We see them not only preaching and catechizing in terms borrowed from Indigenous idioms but also cultivating trade and military partnerships between the French and various Indian tribes. McShea shows how the Jesuits’ robust conceptions of secular spheres of Christian action informed their efforts from both sides of the Atlantic to build up a French and Catholic empire in North America through Indigenous cooperation.

Please find additional comments below:

Table of Contents (I've added the subtitles in the chapters)

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction

--Historiographical Interventions

--Sources and Interpretive Approaches

--Men of this World

Note on Primary Sources

Part 1. Foundations and the Era of the Parisian Relations

1. A Mission for France

--A Young Jesuit in Bourbon Paris (Paul Le Jeune)

--French Expansions and Missions before 1632

--Lay Metropolitan Support and Sebastien Cramoisy's Press

--Working for France's "Powerful Genius"

(Throughout this chapter McShea establishes the importance of the Jesuit Relations, the reports written by the Jesuit missionaries and published in Paris by Sebastien Cramoisy, who "may have been the layman most crucial to the early success of the Jesuit mission to New France", p. 20)

2. Rescuing the “Poor Miserable Savage”

--"At the Best, Their Riches are Only Poverty"

--"Voila, Their Fine Eating"

--"The Cabins on This Country Are Neither Louvres Nor Palaces"

--"I Mocked Their Superstitions"

--Natives as Carnival "Maskers," "Sorcerers," and "Charlatans"

(Throughout this chapter McShea compares the Paul Le Jeune's descriptions of the poverty, bad food, and primitive living quarters of the natives in North America to the poverty, bad food, and primitive living quarters of the rural and urban poor in France!)

3. Surviving the Beaver Wars and the Fronde

--A Political Mission in France

--A Martyr for Christ and New France (St. Isaac Jogues)

--Maneuvers during the Fronde

--A New Holy War for the "Heirs of Saint Louis"

4. Exporting and Importing Catholic Charity

--Social Charity at the Sillery Reserve

--The Huron Refugee Crisis

--Diversifying Charitable Ministries and New Transatlantic Challenges

--"Give to Many Poor People and to Many Kinds"

Part 2. A Longue Durée of War and Metropolitan Neglect

5. Crusading for Iroquois Country

--The Carignon-Salieres Campaign and the Iroquois Mission

--Western Expansion and Renewed War

--The Nine Years War and the Peace of Montreal

--Queen Anne's War

--Warfare and Conversion

6. Cultivating an Indigenous Colonial Aristocracy

--To "Civilize" the Natives or "Play the Savage"?

--Frustrations with the Colonial French

7. Losing Paris

--The End of the Cramoisy Relations

--A House Divided

--Mounting Metropolitan Skepticism and Indifference

--Renewed Publishing Efforts for the Mission

8. A Mission with No Empire

--Jesuits at the Limits of Empire

--The French and Indian War

--The French Suppression of the Society of Jesus

--Quiet Death under British, Protestant Rule

Conclusion

(A good summary of her overall analysis of the complexity of the Jesuit mission in New France, combining the spread of the Gospel with the establishment of colonial territories. The anecdotes with which she opens her conclusion, of Pope Benedict XV reprimanding "Catholic missionaries who had helped fan the national-imperial zeitgeist" that contributed to the horrors of World War I (in Maximum Illud, 1919) and then canonizing Joan of Arc in 1920, "a saint exceedingly identified with French Nationalism", before, during, and after the Great War (p. 255), symbolize the dual nature of the Jesuit mission in North America. She offers a devastating analysis of how their efforts set the stage for later French colonial efforts, imposing a political, national culture on the native people.)

Notes

Bibliography

Index

I would have appreciated a better map showing the different areas of Jesuit missionary activity both in the Canadian north and the USA south (and in between). Figure 5 among the illustrations is a contemporary map but it is very faint and hard to read. It's interesting that McShea never looks at the Arkansas region and the efforts of the French there, but then, as Morris Arnold noted in two books (Unequal Laws Unto a Savage Race: European Legal Traditions in Arkansas, 1686-1836 and Colonial Arkansas, 1686-1804: A Cultural and Social History) on Colonial Arkansas, there wasn't much success in that region for either the French or the Jesuits (see my reviews here and here).

There were two strange typos: one even made the index, as King Louis XVI on page 139 is listed: "In the fall of 1688 Louis XVI went to war over territories in Europe against England, the Hapsburg powers, the Dutch, and other members of the Grand Alliance." (Of course "Louis XVI" should be Louis XIV!) The same transposition of the "I" and the "V" occurs in the Conclusion on page 260: "With political, mercantile, and religious interests coalescing in Paris during Richelieu and Louis XVI's eras . . ." Since I worked as a proofreader at an advertising agency years ago, I know how easy it is for one's eyes to miss details like that!

Having read McShea's first two books (this one and her biography of Richelieu's niece), I look forward to picking up my copy of her next work, Women of the Church: What Every Catholic Should Know, from Eighth Day Books soon.

Book Review: "La Duchesse" by Bronwen McShea

From Pegasus Books with the double subtitle: The Life of Marie de Vigneron--Cardinal Richelieu's Forgotten Heiress Who Shaped the Fate of France:

A rich portrait of a compelling, complex woman who emerged from a sheltered rural childhood into the fraught, often deadly world of the French royal court and Parisian high society—and who would come to rule them both.

Married off at sixteen to a military officer she barely knew, Marie de Vignerot was intended to lead an ordinary aristocratic life, produce heirs, and quietly assist the men in her family rise to prominence. Instead, she became a widow at eighteen and rose to become the indispensable and highly visible right-hand of the most powerful figure in French politics—the ruthless Cardinal Richelieu.

Richelieu was her uncle and, as he lay dying, the Cardinal broke with tradition and entrusted her, above his male heirs, with his vast fortune. She would go on to shape her country’s political, religious, and cultural life as the unconventional and independent Duchesse d’Aiguillon in ways that reverberated across Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

Marie de Vignerot was respected, beloved, and feared by churchmen, statesmen, financiers, writers, artists, and even future canonized saints. Many would owe their careers and eventual historical legacies to her patronage and her enterprising labor and vision. Pope Alexander VII and even the Sun King, Louis XIV, would defer to her. She was one of the most intelligent, accomplished, and occasionally ruthless French leaders of the seventeenth century. Yet, as all too often happens to great women in history, she was all but forgotten by modern times.

La Duchesse is the first fully researched modern biography of Vignerot, putting her onto center stage in the histories of France and the globalizing Catholic Church where she belongs. In these pages, we see Marie navigate scandalous accusations and intrigue to creatively and tenaciously champion the people and causes she cared about. We also see her engage with fascinating personalities such as Queen Marie de Médici and influence French imperial ambitions and the Fronde Civil War. Filled with adventure and daring, art and politics, La Duchesse establishes Vignerot as a figure without whom France’s storied Golden Age cannot be fully understood.

While I'm not quite sure that the Duchesse d'Aiguillon "shaped the Fate of France", she certainly had a great impact on the Catholic Church in France, French Canada (Quebec), and missionary fields around the world. The impact of the French Revolution kind of limits how much her political and social efforts could shape France's fate/future. Slightly hyperbolic, but perhaps indirectly she did by supporting the monarchy against the Fronde and Mazarin so that King Louis XIV ruled absolutely, giving the later French revolutionists something to rebel against!

Nevertheless, McShea's biography of this forgotten and misunderstood (at least in Catholic circles) French peer provides enough evidence of her subject's impact on culture, literature, and religion in her lifetime that it does make the reader wonder why she has been forgotten. 

Marie de Vignerot influenced Catholic piety and charity in Paris and beyond not just by her charitable contributions but even more by her vision and goals in giving the money to support her causes. One example that struck me because I am devoted to Eucharistic Adoration with a weekly hour at my parish, and regularly attend First Friday Benediction and Adoration at our Cathedral, was her influence at her parish church of Saint Sulpice while Jean-Jacques Olier was pastor. She supported him in establishing "a Benediction service that would take place in the church on the first Sunday and first Thursday of every month." (p. 207) There was a procession with the Host in the Monstrance and adoration of the Host on the Altar, this in a time when "Benediction services were rare in France" and Marie regularly attended these services because her "devotion to Christ in the Blessed Sacrament . . . was deep and sincere." She provided the funds for the candles, vestments, and the other liturgical objects required (the Monstrance, the thurifer, incense, and bells, etc). But as McShea explains, Marie also attached certain conditions, including "organ music, the ringing of the church bells, and the singing of numerous Latin hymns and responses" and "a vocal prayer for the repose of the soul of the late Cardinal Richelieu." (p. 208) 

This example is emblematic of the Duchesse's involvement in her charitable causes: she didn't just give the money, she gave direction and encouraged certain goals. McShea emphasizes that as the patroness of Saint Vincent de Paul, she inspired--not always with his immediate agreement--the methods by which improvements in the lives of the poor in rural France and civic Paris would be carried out. She had vision and the will and means to achieve her goals. 

McShea notes one vision Marie could not achieve: she thought she had a vocation to the Carmelite order but her uncle Richelieu dissuaded her, even after her husband died, to pursue it. But she certainly balanced an active live with breaks for contemplation and prayer. For example, in the chapter on Saint Sulpice, McShea recounts a 1:00 a.m. visit Marie made to the Blessed Sacrament after a busy day: She wished to make her prayer where she could be "more returned and recollected" than at home. (p. 210)

The other goal that she did not achieve as she wished was to publish her uncle's works and a history of his era based on his memoirs and other documents. The death of the author of the history she commissioned thwarted that latter effort as "the Jesuit leadership in Paris for some reason confiscated [his manuscript]" instead of giving it to her as he instructed (p. 367). She did negotiate the completion of his tomb in the chapel of the Sorbonne, but she could not maintain the unity of the house of Richelieu because of constant demands for money from her nephew Armand-Jean. His lawsuits and other actions against her estate made her last months, as she suffered from breast cancer, harder. She died on April 17, 1675. 

The book is divided into two parts: the first when Cardinal Richelieu was alive and had taken such an interest in his niece, especially after her husband died (Part One--Princesse Niece), including chapters 1 through 31, and the second after his death, since he chose her rather than her younger brother as his heir and executrix (Part Two--Pair [Peer] de France, including chapters 32 through 58. There is also a charming "Author's Afterword" demonstrating the personal link between the author and her subject (as she comes as close as she can to Marie's grave site), Acknowledgements, Sources, Notes, and an Index. It is a well-researched and narrated book. I would have appreciated either a table of names or a couple of family trees as the names and titles can be a little confusing as the characters emerge, drop away and come back again.

If Marie de Vignerot did not "shape the fate of France", she was certainly alive at an exciting time in French history: the reigns of Kings Louis XIII and XIV, with motherly Regents to both young kings (Marie de Medici and Anne of Austria respectively), the chief ministries of Richelieu and Mazarin, the Thirty Years War, the Fronde revolution, the Jansenist controversy, even the English Civil War, as Henrietta Maria returned to France after King Charles I was imprisoned. Marie even hoped to do more to support English Catholics in exile or at home--and also Catholics in Ireland, ravaged by Oliver Cromwell. She was also interested and engaged in missionary efforts in Tunis, Algiers, Vietnam, and Madagascar, and supported the seminary in Paris training missionaries as part of the Société des Missions Étrangères de Paris.

Why was such an influential figure forgotten? McShea suggests that it is because one eulogy which emphasized her retirement from worldly pursuits was chosen as the template for understanding her life, rather than another, which demonstrated her energy and direction. The preacher at one memorial Mass, at the seminary cited above, on May 13, 1675, Father Jacques-Charles de Brisacier, credited her for "magnanimity, courage, and great negotiating skills" and praised her for ardor, leadership, and judicious governance. Father Brisacier offered a more dynamic appraisal of Marie de Vignerot's achievements. (Here's an article  by McShea discussing that eulogy and describing her "contributions to the colonial-era foundations of the American church while clarifying her role in spreading French Catholicism elsewhere in the world.")

On August 12 of the same year, Father Esprit Fléchier, at the Carmelite convent church on Rue Chapon, portrayed her as the victim of a frustrated religious vocation and much more conventionally as a pious, retiring, and charitable benefactress. (See pages 377 through 380 in chapter 58, "A Forgotten "Femme Forte""). Indeed, when one reads her biography in the old Catholic Encyclopedia, it is Fléchier's version that is cited while Brisacier's is ignored:

After the death of Richelieu, who made her his principal heir, she retired to the Petit-Luxembourg, published her uncle's works and continued her generous benefactions to all kinds of charities. She carried out the Cardinal's last request by having the church and the college of the Sorbonne completed, as well as the Hôtel Richelieu, which has since been converted into the Bibliothèque Nationale. The great Fléchier was charged with pronouncing her funeral oration, which is regarded as one of the masterpieces of eloquence of French pulpit oratory.

Highly recommended. Please note that I purchased my copy from Eighth Day Books. I look forward to reading her first book (Apostles of Empire: The Jesuits and the New Frontier) and to the publication next year of Women of the Church: What Every Catholic Should Know from Augustine Institute and Ignatius Press.

Book Review: Belloc on "The French Revolution"

Hilaire Belloc, born in France of a French father and an English mother, does not tell the history of the French Revolution in this relatively brief book. He analyses the causes, characters, events, and issues of the Revolution, including the military campaigns fought in France by the Revolutionaries against European monarchies. He offer character sketches, much as he did in his Characters of the Reformation, and argues that the Catholic Church has nothing to fear from democracy nor democracy from the Catholic Church.

His target audience is an English reader or student; perhaps one hostile to Catholicism based on centuries of prejudice. The book was published in 1911, just 61 years after the Restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in England to a most hostile public and legislative response. Belloc attempts to explain the context of Catholicism in France after the Wars of Religion and after the Revolution to an audience not prepared for sympathy with Catholics or the hierarchy. His tone and style throughout the book is precise, measured, and even rather limited. Ultimately, I'm not sure his approach is effective.

Belloc in Chapter 1 begins with an explanation of the political theory of the French Revolution, hoping to help Englishmen, who should recognize it as their own, look past their country's history of the Napoleonic Wars:

The political theory upon which the Revolution proceeded has, especially in this country [England], suffered ridicule as local, as ephemeral, and as fallacious. It is universal, it is eternal, and it is true.

It may be briefly stated thus: that a political community pretending to sovereignty, that is, pretending to a moral right of defending its existence against all other communities, derives the civil and temporal authority of its laws not from its actual rulers, nor even from its magistracy, but from itself.

But the community cannot express authority unless it possesses corporate initiative; that is, unless the mass of its component units are able to combine for the purpose of a common expression, are conscious of a common will, and have something in common which makes the whole sovereign indeed.

It may be that this power of corporate initiative and of corresponding corporate expression is forbidden to men. In that case no such thing as a sovereign community can be said to exist. In that case "patriotism," "public opinion," "the genius of a people," are terms without meaning. But the human race in all times and in all places has agreed that such terms have meaning, and the conception that a community can so live, order and be itself, is a human conception as consonant to the nature of man as is his sense of right and wrong; it is much more intimately a part of that nature than are the common accidents determining human life, such as nourishment, generation or repose: nay, more intimate a part of it than anything which attaches to the body.

If that is the political theory of the French Revolution, Robert Cardinal Bellarmine would agree with it.

In Chapter 2 Belloc summarizes Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Contrat Social, which he calls the "text of the Revolution", emphasizing Rousseau's style and diction throughout:

Nevertheless, if it be closely read the Contrat Social will be discovered to say all that can be said of the moral basis of democracy. Our ignorance of the historical basis of the State is presumed in the very opening lines of it. The logical priority of the family to the State is the next statement. The ridiculous and shameful argument that strength is the basis of authority—which has never had standing save among the uninstructed or the superficial—is contemptuously dismissed in a very simple proof which forms the third chapter, and that chapter is not a page of a book in length. It is with the fifth chapter that the powerful argument begins, and the logical precedence of human association to any particular form of government is the foundation stone of that analysis. It is this indeed which gives its title to the book: the moral authority of men in community arises from conscious association; or, as an exact phraseology would have it, a "social contract." All the business of democracy as based upon the only moral authority in a State follows from this first principle, and is developed in Rousseau's extraordinary achievement which, much more than any other writing not religious, has affected the destiny of mankind.

It is indeed astonishing to one who is well acquainted not only with the matter, but with the manner of the Contrat Social, to remark what criticisms have been passed upon it by those who either have not read the work or, having read it, did so with an imperfect knowledge of the meaning of French words. The two great counter arguments, the one theoretic the other practical, which democracy has to meet, stand luminously exposed in these pages, though in so short a treatise the author might have been excused from considering them. The theoretical argument against democracy is, of course, that man being prone to evil, something external to him and indifferent to his passions must be put up to govern him; the people will corrupt themselves, but a despot or an oligarchy, when it has satisfied its corrupt desires, still has a wide margin over which it may rule well because it is indifferent. You cannot bribe the despot or the oligarch beyond the limit of his desires, but a whole people can follow its own corrupt desires to the full, and they will infect all government.

In Chapter 3 "Characters of the Revolution", Belloc is merciless in his analysis of the characters and personalities of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Of the king he states:

Few men are possessed of the eye, the subtle sympathy, the very rapid power of decision, and the comprehension of human contrasts and differences which build up the apt leader of an armed force great or small. Most men are mediocre in the combination of these qualities. But Louis was quite exceptionally hopeless where they were concerned. He could never have seen the simplest position nor have appreciated the military aspects of any character or of any body of men. He could ride, but he could not ride at the head of a column. He was not merely bad at this trade, he was nul. Drafted as a private into a conscript army, he would never have been entrusted with the duties of a corporal. He would have been impossible as a sergeant; and, possessed of commissioned rank, ridicule would have compelled him to take his discharge.

This lack did not only, or chiefly, betray itself in his inability to meet personally the armed crisis of a revolution; it was not only, or chiefly, apparent in his complete breakdown during the assault upon the palace on the 10th of August: it was also, and much more, the disastrous cause of his inability to oversee, or even to choose, military advisers. . . .

. . . From the beginning to the end of the movement, the whole of the military problem escaped him. . . .

Of the queen he notes:

Marie Antoinette presents to history a character which it is of the highest interest to regard as a whole. It is the business of her biographers to consider that character as a whole; but in her connection with the Revolution there is but one aspect of it which is of importance, and that is the attitude which such a character was bound to take towards the French nation in the midst of which the Queen found herself.

It is the solution of the whole problem which the Queen's action sets before us to apprehend the gulf that separated her not only from the French temperament, but from a comprehension of all French society. Had she been a woman lacking in energy or in decision, this alien character in her would have been a small matter, and her ignorance of the French in every form of their activity, or rather her inability to comprehend them, would have been but a private failing productive only of certain local and immediate consequences, and not in any way determining the great lines of the revolutionary movement.

As it was, her energy was not only abundant but steadfast; it grew more secure in its action as it increased with her years, and the initiative which gave that energy its course never vacillated, but was always direct. She knew her own mind, and she attempted, often with a partial success, to realise her convictions. There was no character in touch with the Executive during the first years of the Revolution comparable to hers for fixity of purpose and definition of view.

It was due to this energy and singleness of aim that her misunderstanding of the material with which she had to deal was of such fatal importance.

He likewise dissects the leaders of the Revolution: Mirabeau, La Fayette (sic), Dumouriez, Danton, Carnot, Marat, and Robespierre--the latter with surprising sympathy, attempting to absolve him from blame for the Reign of Terror.

Belloc breaks down the Revolution into six phases, briefly summarizes and then analyses the events in each phase:

From May 1789 to 17th of July 1789.
From the 17th of July 1789 to the 6th of Oct. 1789.
From October 1789 to June 1791.
From June 1791 to September 1792.

From the invasion of September 1792 to the establishment of the Committee of Public Safety, April 1793.

From April 1793 to July 1794.

In his description of the military campaigns of the French Revolution, Chapter 5, he compares the initial success to the final defeat, with the first substantial mention of Napoleon Bonaparte:

The Revolution would never have achieved its object: on the contrary, it would have led to no less than a violent reaction against those principles which were maturing before it broke out, and which it carried to triumph, had not the armies of revolutionary France proved successful in the field; but the grasping of this mere historic fact, I mean the success of the revolutionary armies, is unfortunately no simple matter.

We all know that as a matter of fact the Revolution was, upon the whole, successful in imposing its view upon Europe. We all know that from that success as from a germ has proceeded, and is still proceeding, modern society. But the nature, the cause and the extent of the military success which alone made this possible, is widely ignored and still more widely misunderstood. No other signal military effort which achieved its object has in history ended in military disaster—yet this was the case with the revolutionary wars. After twenty years of advance, during which the ideas of the Revolution were sown throughout Western civilisation, and had time to take root, the armies of the Revolution stumbled into the vast trap or blunder of the Russian campaign; this was succeeded by the decisive defeat of the democratic armies at Leipsic [Leipzig], and the superb strategy of the campaign of 1814, the brilliant rally of what is called the Hundred Days, only served to emphasise the completeness of the apparent failure. For that masterly campaign was followed by Napoleon's first abdication, that brilliant rally ended in Waterloo and the ruin of the French army. When we consider the spread of Grecian culture over the East by the parallel military triumph of Alexander, or the conquest of Gaul by the Roman armies under Cæsar, we are met by political phenomena and a political success no more striking than the success of the Revolution. The Revolution did as much by the sword as ever did Alexander or Cæsar, and as surely compelled one of the great transformations of Europe. But the fact that the great story can be read to a conclusion of defeat disturbs the mind of the student.

Please note that Belloc ends both the consideration of the phases of the Revolution and the military campaigns in 1794 with the fall of Robespierre, so he does not discuss the Thermidorean Reaction or The Directory, nor the French army's invasions of the Netherlands, Spain, and Italy, etc. England was less involved in the military actions of the period Belloc covers; he notes at the conclusion of this chapter that the naval superiority of Britain's fleet was obvious, but not as consequential at this phase of the war: the heroism of Admiral Nelson was to come.

Image credit: Le Massacre des Carmes by Marie–Marc–Antoine Bilcocq

Finally, Belloc comes to his last argument, that democracy and Catholicism are not incompatible--and yet, the Catholic Church in France suffered greatly during phases of the Revolution--at first by focusing on the political theory of the French Revolution and the social doctrine of the Catholic Church:

We must, then, approach our business by asking at the outset the most general question of all: "Was there a necessary and fundamental quarrel between the doctrines of the Revolution and those of the Catholic Church?"

Those ill acquainted with either party, and therefore ill equipped for reply, commonly reply with assurance in the affirmative. The French (and still more the non-French) Republican who may happen, by the accident of his life, to have missed the Catholic Church, to have had no intimacy with any Catholic character, no reading of Catholic philosophy, and perhaps even no chance view of so much as an external Catholic ceremony, replies unhesitatingly that the Church is the necessary enemy of the Revolution. Again, the émigré, the wealthy woman, the recluse, any one of the many contemporary types to whom the democratic theory of the Revolution came as a complete novelty, and to-day the wealthy families in that tradition, reply as unhesitatingly that the Revolution is the necessary enemy of the Church. The reply seems quite sufficient to the Tory squire in England or Germany, who may happen to be a Catholic by birth or by conversion; and it seems equally obvious to (let us say) a democratic member of some Protestant Church in one of the new countries.

Historically and logically, theologically also, those who affirm a necessary antagonism between the Republic and the Church are in error. Those who are best fitted to approach the problem by their knowledge both of what the Revolution attempted and of what Catholic philosophy is, find it in proportion to their knowledge difficult or impossible to answer that fundamental question in the affirmative. They cannot call the Revolution a necessary enemy of the Church, nor the Church of Democracy.

So why is there such a lasting--and Belloc emphasizes that the conflict goes on in 1911 (six years after the official Separation of Church and State in France)--conflict and such grievances between the Catholic Church and the spirit of the Republic and democracy in France?

First he examines the condition of the Gallican Catholic Church under the Ancien Regime, under which anti-clerical disbelief was accepted and allowed, and the practice of the faith was weakening while the officials of the Church, the bishops and cardinals, were protected, worldly, and wealthy. I think Belloc errs though when he tries to compare monasticism during the reign of Henry VIII to the Catholic hierarchy in eighteenth century France. He also ignores the Vendee (as he mentioned the uprisings there only briefly in Chapter 5) and the massacres there. He places the blame for the conflict on the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the oaths required of priests and bishops because the politicians were wrong about the Catholic Church:

Had the Catholic Church been, as nearly all educated men then imagined, a moribund superstition, had the phase of decline through which it was passing been a phase comparable to that through which other religions have passed in their last moments, had it been supported by ancient families from mere tradition, clung to by remote peasants from mere ignorance and isolation, abandoned (as it was) in the towns simply because the towns had better opportunities of intellectual enlightenment and of acquiring elementary knowledge in history and the sciences; had, in a word, the imaginary picture which these men drew in their minds of the Catholic Church and its fortunes been an exact one, then the Civil Constitution of the Clergy would have been a statesmanlike act. It would have permitted the hold of the Catholic Church upon such districts as it still retained to vanish slowly and without shock. It proposed to keep alive at a reasonable salary the ministers of a ritual which would presumably have lost all vitality before the last of its pensioners was dead; it would have prepared a bed, as it were, upon which the last of Catholicism in Gaul could peacefully pass away. The action of the politicians in framing the Constitution would have seemed more generous with every passing decade and their wisdom in avoiding offence to the few who still remained faithful, would have been increasingly applauded.

If the French had known about Catholics in Ireland or England under the Tudors and the Stuarts, they wouldn't have made such a mistake. When the priests and a few bishops refused the oaths and the conflict inside and outside France ramped up in intensity, the massacres of September 1792 and the campaign of De-Christianization marked Catholic memories in France as surely as Irish memories of Cromwell:

There followed immediately a general attack upon religion. The attempted closing of all churches was, of course, a failure, but it was firmly believed that such attachment as yet remained to the Catholic Church was due only to the ignorance of the provincial districts which displayed it, or to the self-seeking of those who fostered it. The attempt at mere "de-christianisation," as it was called, failed, but the months of terror and cruelty, the vast number of martyrdoms (for they were no less) and the incredible sufferings and indignities to which the priests who attempted to remain in the country were subjected, burnt itself, as it were, into the very fibre of the Catholic organisation in France, and remained, in spite of political theory one way or the other, and in spite of the national sympathies of the priesthood, the one great active memory inherited from that time.

Belloc believes that this memory--and the opposite memory of supporters of the Republic perceiving Catholic intransigence--will take generations to fade. 

Here is one of the examples of Belloc's measured and even rather limited approach, which I think fails. He devotes much more explanation to the weakness of the Catholic Church in France before the Revolution--eight paragraphs detailing the worldliness of the clergy, the "moribund condition of the religious life of France upon the eve of the Revolution", and the intertwining of the Church and the State--and but one paragraph to the great efforts to de-Christianize France. I think Belloc missed a great opportunity with his audience here: English public opinion had been sympathetic to the exiled French non-juring priests; English monks and nuns re-established the religious life in England after fleeing France. Belloc does not recount the September massacres; the changes in the calendar; he mentions the closing of churches but does not offer details about their desecration; he ignores the efforts to establish different cults of Reason and the Supreme Being: in short, in his dedication to the political theory of the French Revolution, Belloc passes over its abuses, injustices, and cruelties.

This is not the book on The French Revolution I expected from the author of Europe and the Faith. Perhaps I need to re-read the latter.

Book Review: Romantic Catholics

 

From the publisher, Cornell University Press:

 

In this well-written and imaginatively structured book, Carol E. Harrison brings to life a cohort of nineteenth-century French men and women who argued that a reformed Catholicism could reconcile the divisions in French culture and society that were the legacy of revolution and empire. They include, most prominently, Charles de Montalembert, Pauline Craven, Amélie and Frédéric Ozanam, Léopoldine Hugo, Maurice de Guérin, and Victorine Monniot. The men and women whose stories appear in Romantic Catholics were bound together by filial love, friendship, and in some cases marriage. Harrison draws on their diaries, letters, and published works to construct a portrait of a generation linked by a determination to live their faith in a modern world.

Rejecting both the atomizing force of revolutionary liberalism and the increasing intransigence of the church hierarchy, the romantic Catholics advocated a middle way, in which a revitalized Catholic faith and liberty formed the basis for modern society. Harrison traces the history of nineteenth-century France and, in parallel, the life course of these individuals as they grow up, learn independence, and take on the responsibilities and disappointments of adulthood. Although the shared goals of the romantic Catholics were never realized in French politics and culture, Harrison's work offers a significant corrective to the traditional understanding of the opposition between religion and the secular republican tradition in France.

Introduction: Romantic Catholics and the Two Frances
1. First Communion: The Most Beautiful Day in the Lives and Deaths of Little Girls
2. The Education of Maurice de Guérin
3. The Dilemma of Obedience: Charles de Montalembert, Catholic Citizen
4. Pauline Craven's Holy Family: Writing the Modern Saint
5. Frédéric and Amélie Ozanam: Charity, Marriage, and the Catholic Social
6. A Free Church in a Free State: The Roman Question
Epilogue: The Devout Woman of the Third Republic and the Eclipse of Catholic Fraternity

As I mentioned when I previewed this book last month, reading about the post-Revolutionary Catholic laity and clergy working to rebuild the Catholic Church in France reminded me of the parallel history of post-Reformation/Recusant Catholic laity and clergy working to rebuild the Church in England. Both communities had suffered devastation: the French for a short time, the English for a long time. Both communities had to renew their infrastructure and revive their culture after periods of persecution and iconoclasm. In some way, both communities had to deal with the issue of Church authority after their restoration. The old Recusant English laity had been leading and working for the freedom of Catholics for a long time when the hierarchy returned in 1850--after all, they had been the ones building the chapels and paying the priests as chaplains and there was a period of adjustment.

The laity and clergy Harrison writes about in nineteenth century France rejected the Cisalpine tendencies of the Church hierarchy before the Revolution and were thoroughly Ultramontane, but then struggled when successive popes rejected their new model for the Church and society to work in freedom. moving away from monarchy toward republican democracy. As Harrison describes the crucial rejection of Lamennais' L'Avenir by Pope Gregory XVI and later Pope Pius IX's rejection of Lamennais' follower Charles de Montalembert, it seems now clear that the popes lost an opportunity for the Church to lead society forward.

I was surprised to read that Pope St. Pius X's great change in the age of First Communion was unpopular in France in 1910 (Quam Singulari)--First Holy Communion held the place that Confirmation holds now in the United States during a child's life as a Catholic; it was a step toward adulthood. As Harrison depicts the preparation and celebration of First Holy Communion, she notes the importance of children's literature, especially the novel Le Journal de Marguerite in modeling Catholic childhood, its piety, morality, and progress toward holiness. By recounting the First Communions of Leopoldine Hugo, Victor Hugo's daughter, and two other young girls who died young, Harrison notes that the memory of that day, with all its beauty and innocence, was treasured by the parents who lost their children.

Advancing from First Communion to education, Harrison examines the school experiences of the poet Maurice de Guerin at the College Stanislas in Paris, founded by Abbe Claude Rosalie Liautard. She creates a vivid image of this boys boarding school where the students developed strong bonds of fraternity. From the College Stanislaus, Guerin joins Lamennais' all male community at La Chenaie, briefly continuing his studies after deciding that he does not have a religious vocation. Both he and his sister Eugenie wrote poetry, although both of them died before they could publish--friends edited their works, especially Eugenie's journals, to show her great love and support of her brother in his literary career, thwarted by his early death at age 29.

Continuing the exploration of Lamennais' project for the Church to be the ally of modern culture with its emphasis on freedom and social justice, Harrison then writes about Charles de Montalembert and his great friend, Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire, who restored the Dominican order in France in 1850. As the three men wrote and published for L'Avenir they found themselves more and more in conflict with the French hierarchy and then with Pope Gregory XVI and faced the crucial test of their Ultramontanist views--what do you do when the authority you have sworn obedience to tells you to stop what you think is most important for modern culture and the Church? Montalembert and Lacordaire submitted to the pope's instructions, but Lamennais could not.

Perhaps the most fascinating chapter is "Pauline Craven's Holy Family: Writing the Modern Saint" as Harrison describes how Pauline Craven wrote her family's story of suffering and holiness, telling how her brother and sisters died in a powerful and popular memoir, Le Recit d'une soeur.  Readers wrote to Pauline telling her how much her memoir moved them, encouraged them to be better Catholics, and led them to pray for the same holy and happy deaths she depicts. Harrison even notes the connection between St. Therese of Lisieux's L'Histoire d'une ame--the emphasis on holiness in the family, in simple everyday life combined with simplicity of expression and lack of literary pretense.

My favorite chapter, however, was "Frédéric and Amélie Ozanam: Charity, Marriage, and the Catholic Social" with Harrison's examination of Blessed Frédéric Ozanam's great charitable project, The Society of St. Vincent de Paul, the lay organization dedicated to charity and contact with the poor. Harrison shows how Ozanam rejected philanthropy with its emphasis on analyzing and solving social ills and instead gathered young men in associations to visit the poor, to help people directly since part of the purpose of The Society of St. Vincent de Paul was to save the soul of the young men, to increase their love of the poor and thus of Jesus, and grow in humility and faith. Harrison also describes Ozanam's great conversion to the virtues of Marriage: he had thought that marriage would call him and other men in the Society away from their work with the poor. When he meets Amélie Soulacroix (what an evocative name!) he realizes that marriage and the family are the true basis of society, that husband and wife can support each other in their efforts to love and serve the poor. Harrison picks up the Lamennain project of establishing a Catholic society with a discussion of how Ozanam opposed the legalization of divorce because of its effects on women, children, and men, creating autonomous individuals and breaking down social bonds. Ozanam dies before he can finish his great work--an answer to Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Civilisation au Ve siècle. Amélie Ozanam dedicated the rest of her life to her husband's cause, making sure his achievements and goals were not forgotten--and she was surely rewarded by Frédéric Ozanam's beatification by Pope St. John Paul II in Paris at Notre Dame in 1997--during World Youth Day celebrations!

The final chapter is about French Catholic reaction to the crisis of the temporal sovereignty of the papacy in the midst of the Italian Risorgimento--again Craven and Montalembert struggle with their ultramontane beliefs, even as Papal Infallibility is defined as a doctrine at the First Vatican Council. Once again, with Pope Pius IX, they see their great Romantic Catholic project rejected--and Montalembert even experiences rejection after death when Pope Pius IX cancels his scheduled funeral Mass and moves it to another church without any announcement--which seems supremely petty and uncharitable for a pope. As the last surviving member of the Romantic generation, Pauline Craven is uncomfortable living in the new Rome of the "prisoner of the Vatican".

Harrison concludes her study with the examination of two fictions: the sequel to Le Journal de Marguerite and the political interference of Empress Eugenie (who was the object of slurs and attacks much like Marie Antoinette).

She summarizes her book by asserting the importance of understanding the Romantic Catholic movement:

Restoring romantic Catholics to the story of modern France reminds us that French women and men of the postrevolutionary period saw possibilities other than inflexible church-state conflict. These children of the nineteenth century believed that Catholicism was a model for a society that aspired to be more than an aggregation of atomized individuals. They were eager to demonstrate that Christians tied indissolubly to each other by sacramental bonds constituted a more resilient society than liberal individuals who might occasionally and temporarily enter into contracts with one another. They believed that thy could offer this lesson to their fellow French men and women, and willingness to engage with French society as a whole was the hallmark of Catholic romanticism. Romantic confidence in a dynamic, modern religious faith was not merely a strategy to protect Catholic communities by isolating them from the rest of society and defending them from the rise of secularism.

Although the Catholic romantics Harrison describes were disappointed in the failure of their projects, she notes that they were vindicated by Pope Leo XIII's pontificate, with his great vision of "a political and social agenda that engaged the church with modern republicanism and the social question", summarized in Rerum Novarum (1891). Romantic Catholics is a very important study of Catholics in nineteenth century France--I highly recommend it as well written and imaginative structured as the publisher notes, and sympathetic to the historical figures and their cause.

St. Joan of Arc and the English Reformation

Just a quick note about St. Joan of Arc and the English Reformation--listening to the EWTN radio broadcast of Mass yesterday I heard the celebrant mention that if she had not led France in defeating the English during the Hundred Years War, at least of part of France (more than Calais!) might have been under English control. And that would have had consequences.

St. Joan was burned alive at the stake on May 30 in 1431. In 1531, one hundred years later, Henry VIII started his break away from the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church by forcing the Convocation of Bishops to acknowledge his authority over the Church in England "as far as God allows", and proclaiming himself the Supreme Head and Governor of the Ecclesiae Anglicanae in the Act of Supremacy three years later. Thus if she had not helped rally France to defeat the English, "France" would have participated in the English Reformation, her great monasteries suppressed (250 years before the French Revolution's suppression), statues and paintings of Notre Dame crushed and burned along with other great Christian art, and many glorious Gothic cathedrals despoiled and destroyed, their shrines and relics, treasures and art plundered--Chartres without the Sancta Camisa, Sainte Chapelle without the relic of the Crown of Thorns--again anticipating much of the iconoclasm that did occur after the French Revolution. But without St. Joan of Arc, hearing the voices of the saints, going to her country's weak king, and leading France to victory, France would have been Anglican (Protestant) in the 16th century, and western culture, Catholic culture, would have lost the same things in France as were lost in England: art, music, visual beauty, books, monasticism, and worship.

This website suggests other aspects of an alternative history without St. Joan of Arc:

What events might not have happened without Joan of Arc saving France? Without Joan of Arc it is very doubtful that France would have become the strong unified nation that it became. Without a strong France many of the later events that occurred in Europe and around the world would have been much different. It is even conceivable that American independence from Britain would never have happened because it was the French military assistance that made the difference and directly caused the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown.

Do you think France would've existed to this day without Joan of Arc's actions? Joan helped to give the people of France a national identity. Before Joan people would identify themselves as being from parts of France such as people from the region of Burgundy calling themselves Burgundians. After Joan of Arc the people were much more likely to identify themselves as being French. It was having a national identity that helped forge the great nation that France became and still is today.

In one of those strange ironies, the Church of England honors Joan of Arc on their liturgical calendar--as a visionary (not necessarily because her visions were true, but because she listened to them)! The Catholic Church honors St. Joan of Arc as a martyr and virgin, unjustly condemned to death; a holy Maiden who loved Jesus and Notre Dame.

Off Topic: Charles, Duke of Orleans and Historical Fiction

Charles, the Duke of Orleans was born on November 24, 1394. His father, Louis, the Duke of Orleans was assasinated by Jean sans Peur, the Duke of Burgundy. Jean's eponymous tower is a tourist sight in Paris today. Charles and his brothers swore an oath of vengeance against the house of Burgundy and this oath, according to Hella Haasse's extraordinary historical novel In a Dark Wood Wandering, dominated and directed his life.

Charles was a great poet and composed most of his poems while held a prisoner of war in England after the Battle of Agincourt for 24 years. When the English laid siege to Orleans--the occasion of St. Joan of Arc's great victory--it was a transgression of the contemporary military code, since its ruler was being held captive. I remember reading Haasse's novel soon after I'd graduated from WSU with my BA. (Note that Haasse died in September this year, known as the "Grand Old Lady" of Dutch literature.) After all the required reading for my degree, I was thrilled with her historical fiction. At the time, it was a great publishing event, because of the source of the English translation. I read the book again a few years ago, and had the same experience of being completely transported to that time and era, being involved in the struggles of the characters and yet (I was an English major, after all) noticing some of the technique Haasse and her translators used. For instance, the section depicting Charles's 24 years in captivity in England is written in the historical present, as though time stood still. The text included some of his poetry, in French and English. Here is an English translation of a rondel composed by Charles, the Duke of Orleans:

Strengthen, my Love, this castle of my heart,
And with some store of pleasure give me aid,
For Jealousy, with all them of his part,
Strong siege about the weary tower has laid.
Nay, if to break his bands thou art afraid,
Too weak to make his cruel force depart,
Strengthen at least this castle of my heart,
And with some store of pleasure give me aid.
Nay, let not Jealousy, for all his art
Be master, and the tower in ruin laid,
That still, ah Love! thy gracious rule obeyed.
Advance, and give me succour of thy part;
Strengthen, my Love, this castle of my heart.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING to all my U.S. readers!