Book Review, Part One: "The Republic of Love"; Nussbaum on "Le Nozze di Figaro"

I purchased this book from Eighth Day Books. It's from Oxford University Press:

In The Republic of Love, philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum argues that opera engages in political dialogue with the other institutions of public life. Opera interrogates the underlying political culture: what human beings have to be like to sustain different political institutions. Opera’s central contribution, buttressed by the powers of the chorus and the nuances of musical expression, is its exploration of emotions in the structuring of public life, including the role of gender, rank, and class. Nussbaum argues that a distinct Mozartean strand of opera embodies the political project of the Enlightenment. These operas, starting with those of Mozart himself—The Marriage of Figaro, Idomeneo, The Magic Flute, Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte, and La Clemenza di Tito—portray an egalitarian vision, not just of republican political institutions, but of emotion. This vision calls for the rejection of feudal hierarchy based on retributive anger and fear, and an embrace of love. This project has faced complications from the power-politics, tyranny, and oppression of the modern world, and so Mozart’s heirs considered how the Republic of Love can exist despite evil. Nussbaum traces the development of the Mozartean vision from Beethoven’s Fidelio and Verdi’s Don Carlos to Heggie’s Dead Man Walking and Adams’s Nixon in China. Contrasting with this hopeful tradition, Nussbaum considers one antagonist, Richard Wagner, who envisioned a closed and unaccepting society, fearful of strangers, and with eyes forever cast backwards. Ending with hope, Nussbaum examines Verdi’s Falstaff and its joyful and humorous depiction of human frailty.

Eighth Day Books stocks several of her previously published books.

Her focus on Mozart's operas was one of the main reasons I wanted to read this book. I've especially relished the chapter on Le Nozze di Figaro. Nussbaum wrote an essay for Chicago Lyric Opera in 2024 that is very similar to this chapter in The Republic of Love:

1. Equality and Love at the End of "The Marriage of Figaro": Forging Democratic Emotions

    "Happy in That Way"

    The Ancien Regime and the Male Voice: Shame, Disgust

    Females: Fraternity, Equality, Liberty [Liberté, égalité, fraternité]

    Creating a Man: "Mischievous Look," a "Good Outside Myself"

    Cherubino, Rousseau, Herder: Spaces for Craziness, "Dispositions of Peace"

    Transcending the Everyday? [Martha] Nussbaum contra [Charles O.] Nussbaum

After reading that chapter, I watched (again) three videotaped productions of that opera, one from the Glyndebourne Festival directed by Sir Peter Hall (1973)*, one from the Paris Opera directed by Giorgio Strehler (1980)*, and one from the Metropolitan Opera directed by Jean-Ponnelle (1985)#. I also watched one staged by Sir Thomas Allen (who sang the Count in the Met version above) with a young cast at the Royal College of Music and a couple of others online. I'm very familiar with the first three and as I read the chapter I recognized some of the ways their directors' interpretations and Allen's differed or matched Nussbaum's view of the opera, particularly the difference between the male characters' rivalry (the Count and Figaro/Bartolo and Figaro (still smarting over how Figaro helped the Count marry Rosina in Il Barbiere di Siviglia) and the female characters' partnership of equality and sympathy (the Countess Rosina and Susanna). 

In between these two contrasts, Nussbaum poses Cherubino, the young page, who moves between the two poles of the opera but identifies more with the women (in her view), certainly in his expressions of love and desire in his two arias as she contends--in both the Lyric Opera essay (and the book)--because "he has been educated by women and by music":

He talks about love. He is the only male in the opera (before the last act, at any rate) who has the slightest interest in that emotion. Certainly, the breathlessness of "Non so più" expresses the promiscuous quality, as well as the confusion, of adolescent infatuation. But it also contains romantic and poetic sentiments. The musical idiom, breathless and yet tender, is utterly unlike the tense accents of the adult males. When we reach the Countess's chamber, Cherubino's difference from other males becomes even more evident. Deeply infatuated with the Countess, he has decided to make her a present. What sort of present? What naturally occurs to him is to write a poem, set it to music, and sing it himself.

The content of that passion (in the beautiful aria "Voi che sapete") is remarkable for its utter difference from the arias of all the other males. First of all, Cherubino simply talks about love, and about its beautiful female object. He has nothing to say about other men, and he seems utterly impervious to questions of honor, shame, and competition. Second, he is eager to learn something, and he is eager to learn it from women: "You who know what sort of thing love is, women, tell me whether that is what I have in my heart." Third, unlike all the other males, he is utterly vulnerable, and he makes no attempt to conceal his vulnerability. Finally, and most remarkably, he locates what he is pursuing in a place outside of his own ego: "I seek a good that is outside myself." Hearing these words, we realize that no other male in the opera deigns to seek a good outside himself: all are preoccupied with winning a competitive victory, or shielding the ego from shame.

Cherubino, traditionally, is sung by a woman, a mezzo-soprano (although some recent productions I've seen online cast a male counter-tenor! How horrible; ruins the effect of the character's persona.), so that his natural community does seem to be among the women--the Countess and Susanna, Barbarina and the girls before the wedding, etc. He looks to Susanna and the Countess for protection; he certainly does not want to leave the Countess or go to war; as he tells Susanna, he really respects the Countess ("Ah, che troppo rispetto ella m'ispira!") He wants to stay where it's safe, with the women. As Beaumarchais wrote him, he's vulnerable.

Nussbaum offers a detailed analysis of the famous dressing up scene, as Susanna sings “Venite inginocchiatevi,” and certainly the Glyndebourne and Paris productions follow her lead (at the Met in the Ponnelle production Cherubino is behind a screen and we never see him in a girl's dress at all). Cherubino is happy to cooperate with Susanna and and she and the Countess in the first two productions are both amused and admiring of his transformation--since the Countess never sees Cherubino dressed as a girl in the Ponnelle, the scene relies on Susanna's aria alone. It seemed to me that the production by Sir Thomas Allen and a few others coarsened the character of Cherubino, depicting him as randy and rude, so that some of the charm Nussbaum looks for in this scene is absent.

Nussbaum emphasizes how different Cherubino is from the other men, but she does skip a crucial line during the last scene, when he is flirting with the Countess (thinking she's Susanna): why can't I do what the Count does everyday?: "E perche far io non posso/quelche il Conte or or fara?" He's learned something from the Count that the ladies won't appreciate. Nussbaum does admit that at the end of the opera when the Count has apologized and the Countess has accepted his apology, knowing his contrition will not last long:

Indeed, it seems far more likely that Cherubino will be corrupted by the male world around him than that the other men will drop their quest for honor and status and learn to sing like Cherubino.

Nor does Nussbaum contend with Barbarina's disrespectful conversation with the Count in front of the Countess in Act III, Scene 12 when Cherubino is discovered among the maidens at Court, not having joined the regiment, but dressed like one of the peasant girls. Barbarina reminds the Count that he promised her anything when they were kissing and cuddling. She wants to marry Cherubino, but she promises the Count that she'll still love him like a kitten:

BARBARINA Eccellenza, eccellenza, voi mi dite sì spesso, qual volta m'abbracciate e mi baciate: «Barbarina, se m'ami, ti darò quel che brami».

CONTE Io, dissi questo?

BARBARINA Voi. Or datemi, padrone, in sposo Cherubino, e v'amerò com'amo il mio gattino.

Poor Count; now he's a kitten? Barbarina seems more like the Count than the Countess or Susanna. And if Cherubino goes along, this a very different sort of reciprocity than Nussbaum is suggesting (is he willing to share Barbarina with the Count? That's not the kind of love either Susanna or the Countess want from their husbands). 

Nussbaum's other detailed analysis of Mozart's musical setting of Da Ponte's libretto (part of her argument is that Mozart sometimes emphasizes these ideas of fraternity, equality, and liberty musically more than Da Ponte does literarily) is of the duet between the Countess and Susanna in Act III, "Canzonetta sull'aria". She comments: "Their musical partnership expresses a kind of friendly attunement that is, we might say, an image of mutual respect, but also a reciprocal affection that is deeper than respect." She does refer to the scene in the Shawshank Redemption movie when Dufresne plays the duet over the prison loud speaker and Red describing the impression of beauty and freedom the prisoners experienced in spite of not understanding the words.

Nussbaum comments also on the finale with the Count's apology and the Countess's acceptance of it, noting that she knows he'll not reform. For the sake of at least some happiness, she accepts, after a pause, when his answer had been "no, no, no, no, no!" Thus, "Ah! Tutti contenti saremo così." "We'll alll be happy that way!"

Questo giorno di tormenti, 

di capricci e di follia, 

in contenti e in allegria solo 

Amor può terminar. 

Sposi, amici, al ballo! al gioco! 

Alle mine date fuoco, 

ed al suon di lieta marcia 

corriam tutti a festeggiar. 

This day of torment,
Of caprices and folly,
Love can end
Only in contentment and joy.
Lovers and friends, let's round things off
In dancing and pleasure,
And to the sound of a gay march
Let's hasten to the revelry.

[During this ensemble in the Ponnelle/Met Opera production, the men go to one side of the stage and the women on the other--and Cherubino's with the women!]

Thus she concludes: 

What that seems to mean is that all present say yes to a world that seeks and aims at reciprocity, respect, and attunement without being starry-eyed about perfection, a world in which people commit themselves to liberty, fraternity, and equality, while understanding that these transcendent ideals are not to be attained by exiting from the real world into a pristine world, but rather by pursuing them in this one . . .

And I would conclude that this is why the French Revolution devolved into terror, violence, and cruelty: the leaders did think they had to create a pristine world for their ideals to succeed--thus this week we'll mark Bastille Day (today) AND the feast of Carmelites of Compiegne (July 17), martyred because they wanted to practice their Faith and their vocations freely. Now there's an operatic finale (especially the 1987 performance from the Met of Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites with Jessye Norman, Maria Ewing, Betsy Norden and a slashing blade in John Dexter's production! Readily available on line.)

Nevertheless, it does seem appropriate to post this today since it's Bastille Day. Beaumarchais's play had been banned in France because of its revolutionary tendencies. The Emperor Joseph allowed its performance and Da Ponte (not Mozart as in Amadeus!) assured him that the opera would not encourage those ideas.

I'm not commenting on the two more historical or philosophical chapters because this post is already long and my main interest is in Nussbaum's interpretation of the opera (the libretto and the score) not so much the background to Mozart's interest in this view of the society of the Almaviva household. I think that will be different in the next chapter about the influence of Freemasonry on Idomeneo and Die Zauberflote.

I might just comment on the Mozart chapters on this blog. 

*These two performances are available on YouTube.

#The Metropolitan Opera performance is available for rental or with a membership at Met on Demand 

Image Credit: Fair Use of Cover in a book review.

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.

The Anglo-Irish Confessor of King Louis XVI

Today, January 21, is the 224th anniversary of the execution of Louis Capet--as the National Convention called him--King Louis XVI. (In contrast, Charles I had not been deposed when he was executed after the English Civil War in 1649.)

This Eyewitness to History post describes the event. The monarch was attended the night before and the day of his execution by an Anglo-Irish priest, the Abbe Henry Essex Edgeworth, who heard the king's last Confession, celebrated Mass for him, and supported him throughout the ordeal--he is the eyewitness cited in the link above. According to 1878's A Compendium of Irish Biography found on this site, he was a:

cousin of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, was born at Edgeworthstown in 1745. His father, Essex Edgeworth, "who took the name of "de Firmont" from a neighbouring hill (Fairy Mount), became a Catholic and emigrated to France when Henry was but six years of age. The lad was educated for the priesthood at the Sorbonne, and after ordination became distinguished among the Parisian clergy for his talents and piety. In 1789 he was appointed confessor to Madame Elizabeth, and was justly esteemed the friend and adviser of the royal family. When Louis XVI. was condemned to the guillotine, he sent for the Abbe Edgeworth, then in concealment at Choisy, who immediately repaired to his master. The Abbe attended the unfortunate King to the scaffold, 21st January 1793, and has left a minute account of the execution. He makes no mention of the exclamation usually attributed to him as the knife fell — "Son of St. Louis, ascend to heaven!" After encountering many dangers, he escaped to England in 1796, where he is stated to have declined a pension offered him by Pitt. He afterwards joined Louis XVIII. at Blankenburg, and accompanied him to Mittau. He was from time to time intrusted with several important missions for the Bourbons. He fell a victim to a virulent fever, caught in his ministrations amongst French prisoners of war at Mittau, and died 22nd May 1807, aged about 62. In his last moments he was attended by the Princess, daughter of Louis XVI.; the exiled French royal family went into mourning, and Louis XVIII. composed his epitaph.

Note that Elena Maria Vidal includes the scene of Madame Royale visiting the Abbe on his deathbed in her novel about the Princess Marie-Therese, Louis and Marie Antoinette's only child to survive the French Revolution, and her incredible life. The author provided this excerpt on her blog in 2010:

The town of Mitau was bright with snow in the sunshine of a May morning, and cold winds whipped around the little palace which His Imperial Majesty the Tsar of All the Russias had generously loaned to the impoverished, exiled Bourbons. In a small, sparsely furnished room of the palace, an aged priest lay dying. In a chair beside his bed sat a young woman, not quite thirty, in a maroon, high-waisted wool dress, with a white linen apron. Under a close fitting white cap, her amber-colored hair, in a grecian knot, framed a strong, solemn face with piercing blue-gray eyes. Dipping a cloth into a basin of water, she sponged the forehead of the sick man, whose chest shuddered and heaved. At first glance, no one would guess that she was Madame Royale, daughter of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, their Mousseline la sérieuse, now the Duchesse d’Angoulême. With closer examination, no one with her dignified, albeit rather stiff bearing could be anything but a princess. She radiated a cold majesty to those who did not know her, but in her eyes burned the fires of deep emotions; her frigid manner was from sadness, not apathy or scorn.

The Catholic Encyclopedia notes that the Edgeworth family moved to Ireland during the reign of Elizabeth I and the Abbe's father became a Catholic during the reign of King George II. Edgeworth was offered an Irish diocese after his ordination but noted that England was a distant second language to him since he was raised in France from childhood. When Le Clerc, the Archbishop of Paris, fled in 1792, he appointed Edgeworth as the Vicar General of the diocese, and the Holy See never recognized Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Gobel, who had taken the oath of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (who ended up on the guillotine just like Louis XVI--on April 13, 1794).

The Blessed Martyrs of Compiegne

From my article published in the July/August 2013 issue of OSV's The Catholic Answer Magazine, based on a mini-pilgrimage I took while in Paris in 2010:

A visitor in Paris today might arrive at the Place de la Nation, a hub of transportation and commerce on the right bank of the Seine River, and never know about the revolutionary deeds of blood committed there.

Restaurants, taxis and buses ring around the Place de la Nation and its statue depicting Marianne, the symbol of the Republic, while locals walk their dogs in the park. But here, in the last hot summer of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, on July 17, 1794, 14 nuns, three lay sisters and two servants of the Carmelite house of Compiègne died for their Catholic faith.

What brought them to such a bloody end beneath the blade of the guillotine the day after the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel?

The answer might be surprising if we presume the ideals of liberty, fraternity and equality truly summarize the spirit of the French Revolution. After the fall of the traditional, absolute monarchy and the rise of the National Assembly with a constitutional monarchy in 1789, the state attacked the Catholic Church, confiscating churches and closing convents. . . .

For pilgrims seeking to walk the path of the Carmelites, after leaving the whirl of the Place de la Nation, they should walk to Cimitière de Picpus where the Carmelites are buried in one of the two mass graves behind the wall next to the family tombs. The opening hours are limited, the entrance fee is only two euros, and it is far off the tourist track.

But it is peaceful and apart, perfect for a traveler who wants to be a pilgrim in Paris, contemplating the mystery and the glory of martyrdom.

The ultimate source on the Blessed Carmelite Martyrs of Compiegne is William Bush's To Quell the Terror: The True Story of the Carmelite Martyrs of Compiegne from ICS Publications:

Recounts the dramatic true story of the Discalced Carmelite nuns of Compiègne, martyred during the French Revolution's "Great Terror," and known to the world through their fictional representation in Gertrud von Le Fort's Song at the Scaffoldand Francis Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites. Includes index and 15 photos. 

At the height of the French Revolution's "Great Terror," a community of sixteen Carmelite nuns from Compiègne offered their lives to restore peace to the church and to France. Ten days after their deaths by the guillotine, Robespierre fell, and with his execution on the same scaffold the Reign of Terror effectively ended. Had God thus accepted and used the Carmelites' generous self-gift?

Through Gertrud von Le Fort's modern novella, Song at the Scaffold, and Francis Poulenc's famed opera, Dialogues of the Carmelites, (with its libretto by Georges Bernanos), modern audiences around the world have become captivated by the mysterious destiny of these Compiègne martyrs, Blessed Teresa of St. Augustine and her companions. Now, for the first time in English, William Bush explores at length the facts behind the fictional representations, and reflects on their spiritual significance. Based on years of research, this book recounts in lively detail virtually all that is known of the life and background of each of the martyrs, as well as the troubled times in which they lived. The Compiègne Carmelites, sustained by their remarkable prioress, emerge as distinct individuals, struggling as Christians to understand and respond to an awesome calling, relying not on their own strength but on the mercy of God and the guiding hand of Providence. 

The May/June Issue of the St. Austin Review

There's my name on the cover of the May/June issue of the St. Austin Review, reversed out of one of Monet's studies of the Cathedral in Rouen. I contributed an article about the role of Marian apparitions in France in renewing devotion and faith after the French Revolution: “Revolution and Private Revelation: Some Notes on Marian Apparitions in France”. As always, I'm looking forward to receiving my comp copy and reading the rest of the articles!

The Next Issue of The St. Austin Review

Publisher Joseph Pearce announces its topic and its contents. If you are interested in the French Revolution and its effects on the Catholic Church in France, this is the issue for you:

The theme of this issue is “Revolution versus Revelation: France & the Faith”.

Highlights:

Stephanie A. Mann compares “Revolution and Private Revelation”, sketching “Some Notes on Marian Apparitions in France”.

Joseph G. Trabbic writes on “Étienne Gilson on Doing Philosophy in the Light of Revelation”.

Fr. Henri Giroux reveals “What everybody seems to have missed” in Pascal’s Wager.

Matthew Chominksi admires the aesthetic of Chateaubriand and Ratzinger as “A Frenchman and a German Walk the Path of Beauty”.

John Beaumont considers “The Case of Adolf Retté: A Great French Convert and Catholic Apologist”.

Lisa Salinas teaches “A Lesson in Trust at the Feet of Millet”.

Ken Clark offers his impressions of “Monet’s Rouen Cathedrals”.

Susan Treacy scales the heights of the “Requiem Aeternam: Gabriel Fauré’s Vision of Rest”.

James M. Wilson follows Raïssa Maritain into the mystical depths.

Brendan D. King translates Rainer Maria Rilke.

Fr. Dwight Longenecker joins C. S. Lewis in condemning the hideous strength of the “N.I.C.E. New World”.

James Bemis praises the classic movie, The Life and Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

Kevin O’Brien is aghast as “The Germans Invade St. Louis” and recalls when he was Jung at heart!

Fr. Benedict Kiely discusses “The Real Moral Equivalence” with regard to the Islamist slaughter of Christians.

New Biography of Lafayette

Frederick Brown reviews a new biography of the Marquis de Lafayette in The Wall Street Journal:

In 1824, at President James Monroe’s invitation, Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette, took a triumphal tour of America. In New York, 6,000 guests walked through a Roman arch at Manhattan’s Castle Garden to assemble in his honor under a canopy decorated with the flags of the world and surmounted by a bust of George Washington. More galas awaited him in other cities. Every town paraded for the general; artillery salutes punctuated his journey; musicians composed adulatory songs; eulogists wrote odes. The 67-year-old reveled in his enshrinement, as he had every reason to do.

Lafayette’s reputation at home had been subject to more vicissitudes. During the French Revolution, he had championed constitutional monarchy and in due course found himself obliged to flee the Terror. Despised as an aristocrat by regicides loyal to Robespierre and as a traitor to his class by aristocrats loyal to the Bourbon dynasty, he was more often caricatured in hostile journals than idealized in civic sculpture. Laura Auricchio deals admirably with this trans-Atlantic career in her well-written, well-furnished biography, “The Marquis: Lafayette Reconsidered.” Her subject straddled not only two continents but two centuries. Born in 1757, at the end of Louis XV ’s reign, he died in 1834, four years after the July Revolution, which brought a constitutional monarch to power in France.

From the excerpt on line at Random House, it appears to be a very well written book:

If pleasure-loving Parisians enjoyed the novelty of these New World republicans, many military men saw the Americans’ cause as an opportunity for revenge. The army had been nursing its wounds since 1763, when the French and Indian War (known in France as the Seven Years’ War) had ended with France ceding its Canadian colonies to Great Britain. By helping to wrest thirteen valuable colonies from British control, a humiliated French officers’ corps hoped to redeem itself. So pervasive was enthusiasm for the American fight that the economist and author André Morellet—an astute social observer who often accompanied Franklin on his rounds—quipped in 1777 that “there is more support for American independence in Paris than in the entire province of New York.”

Yet there was something uncommon about Lafayette’s commitment to America. His devotion was deeper than his countrymen’s, his drive more intense. While other Frenchmen sailed for the New World seeking riches or retribution, Lafayette sought nothing short of a new life. Earnest, enthusiastic—as optimistic as Voltaire’s naïf Candide—Lafayette was out of place in the glittering Parisian world of wit and cynicism that the urbane Franklin so effortlessly mastered.

Lafayette had married into one of the best-connected families of the French court, but he hailed from the Auvergne region of south-central France, and the uncontrived manners of that rural area marked him as a stranger in the refined circles of his in-laws. At Versailles, even Lafayette’s rugged appearance counted against him. The young marquis was large for his time: five feet, nine inches tall and endowed with a broad frame that one contemporary described as “decidedly inclined to embonpoint.” In other words, he tended to be stout. As Lafayette grew older, his bold features would be called distinguished, but as a youth he was not widely perceived as handsome. He had a long, oval face with a prominent aquiline nose, gray-blue eyes that peered out from a pale complexion, and a shock of unfashionably red hair atop a high, sloping forehead. Friends and admirers saw Lafayette’s open and frank expression as a window to his soul, but this transparent credulity placed him at a disadvantage in the dissimulating games of intrigue that passed for sociability at Versailles. 

Having visited Lafayette's grave in Cimitiere Picpus, with the U.S. flag so proudly waving, I think that Auricchio is correct when she speaks of Lafayette as being naive about not only Mesmerism, but about the French Revolution. His wife's family suffered greatly, and when I toured Cimitiere Picpus to see the place where the remains of the Carmelite martyrs of Compiegne were dumped after their executions, I pondered the significance of the site of his grave--right outside the wall that divides the tombs from the mass graves. His mother-in-law and sister-in-law are buried behind the wall, while he and his wife, the great Adrienne de Noailles rest together--she certainly deserves her own updated biography, that brave, faithful Leonore!

Even in Fiction, the Queen Dies

From Modern Library Classics:

Paris, 1793, the onset of the Terror. Brave Republican Maurice rescues a mysterious and beautiful woman from an angry mob and is unknowingly drawn into a secret Royalist plot—a plot revolving around the imprisoned Queen of France, Marie Antoinette, and her enigmatic and fearless champion, the Knight of Maison-Rouge. Full of surprising twists, breakneck adventure, conspiracies, swordplay, romance, and heroism, The Knight of Maison-Rouge is an exhilarating tale of selflessness, love, and honor under the shadow of the guillotine. Dumas here is at the very height of his powers, and with this first and only modern translation, readers can once again ride with the Knight of Maison-Rouge.

On October 16, 1793, Marie Antoinette was beheaded by the guillotine at what is now Place de la Concorde in Paris. Elena Maria Vidal provides details of her death here.

Alexandre Dumas' The Knight of the Maison-Rouge (1845) tells the story of an attempt to save the queen by substituting an impostor in the Conciergerie. Dumas used the attempt of the Chevalier le Rougeville to communicate with Marie Antoinette with a message hidden in the petals of a carnation as a detail in the novel. Dumas does not contradict history by having the plot succeed, and the queen rides from the left bank to the right bank to die--with a most pathetic scene of her poor little dog Thisbe, following her cart.

Buckfast Abbey on the BBC

Buckfast Abbey was featured on the BBC's Choral Evensong programme last week and the Vesper service is still on-line today. It was recorded for the Feast of the Transfiguration:

Choral Evening Prayer from Buckfast Abbey, Devon during the 2014 Exon Singers’ Festival – recorded Thurs 31st July (rpt Sun 10th Aug)

Introit: An Introit for Transfiguration (Robin Holloway) (First performance)

Responses: Plainsong

Office Hymn: O vision blest of heavenly light (Coelestis gloriae)

Psalms: 97, 121 (Plainsong; Robin Holloway)

First Lesson: 2 Peter 1 vv16-19

Anthem: Christus Jesus splendor Patris (Massaino)

Second Lesson: Matthew 17 vv1-9

Homily: The Rt Revd David Charlesworth, Abbot of Buckfast

Canticle: Magnificat quarti toni (Palestrina)

Lord’s Prayer (Toby Young ) (First performance)

Motet: Ave Maria (Josquin)
Final Hymn: ‘Tis good, Lord, to be here (Carlisle)

Organ Voluntary: Hymne d’Actions de graces: “Te Deum” (Langlais)

Richard Wilberforce (Music Director)

Jeffrey Makinson (Organist) 

Buckfast Abbey was founded first in the 11th century as a Benedictine abbey, and then Cistercians took over. They surrendered the abbey in 1540 and it was used as a quarry after Thomas Cromwell's Court of Augmentations granted it to  Sir Thomas Dennis of Holcombe Burnell. French Benedictines returned to the site in 1882 and built a new abbey, officially opened in 1902, with the abbey church pictured above (from Wikipedia Commons) completed in 1938. Buckfast Abbey sells a tonic wine and raises bees to be self-sufficient.

More information about the Exon Singers' Festival here.

Ending the Terror: The Carmelites of Compiegne

From my article on the Carmelites of Compiegne of OSV's The Catholic Answer Magazine last year:

Their deaths were orderly, calm and holy. Each Carmelite paused before their prioress and asked permission to fulfill her vow.

They sang together, chanting the Salve Regina, the Te Deum and Veni, Sancte Spiritus on their way to the guillotine, and then intoned the psalm Laudate Dominum, omnes gentes (“Praise the Lord, all peoples”); each stroke of the guillotine silenced another voice until at last the prioress walked up the steps to die. The usually cheering mob was unusually silent.

Read the rest here.

Last month, the Royal Opera at Covent Garden in London performed Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites and Tim Wong told the true story of the Carmelites on his blog for The Telegraph:

Forty people had their heads chopped off on 17 July 1794, 16 of whom were Carmelite nuns from the small city of Compiègne in Northern France. The Order of the Carmelites itself dates back to the 12th century, and has a strong tradition of Marian devotion. Their spiritual focus of the Order is contemplation.

Enlightenment intellectuals argued that such a passive activity as contemplation served no practical purpose for society. By the time of the French Revolution, both the monarchy and the Church came under attack – for their power and wealth in the face of a starving and angry nation.

It was a time of unprecedented upheaval in daily life, where all things Christian were swept away. The seven-day week was scrapped in favour of a ten-day one. A prostitute "Goddess of Reason" was installed in Notre Dame to perform lewd songs. The remains of past French Kings were dug up from the Royal Basilica at Saint-Denis and thrown into a common pit. In September 1792 alone 225 priests and bishops were slaughtered.

It’s perhaps no surprise, against this backdrop, that 16 Carmelite nuns were declared "enemies of the people". Poulenc’s opera broadly follows what actually happened – but there are some significant differences. . . .
 
Poulenc’s central character in Dialogues des Carmélites, the fictional Blanche de la Force, is modelled on Mother Marie – one of the two or three who escaped. Mother Marie resembles Blanche not only in age (she was in her thirties) but also in her aristocratic background: she was the illegitimate orphaned daughter of the Prince of Conti, who was considered to be a legitimate descendant of the monarch (a "prince du sang"). Both Blanche and Mother Marie's music is often cast in C major – forthright, pure, depicting innocence. Poulenc seems to imply that there's an unspoken affinity between these two characters.

Mother Marie was away when the sisters were arrested: William Bush informs us that she was in Paris sorting out a pension left by her father. Upon hearing the arrest she fled the capital with Madame Lidoine’s 78-year old mother and settled in Franche Comté for good. There was no record of her pleading with the chaplain to be allowed to join her sisters. Neither did her brother plead with her to return to the family – a key scene in the opera . It was in fact Sister Constance’s brother who turned up to ask the young nun to abandon her Order, which request she declined.

That was the climax of the Reign of Terror, for 10 days after the nun’s execution the regime was overthrown and Robespierre himself died on the guillotine. The sisters of Compiègne were beatified in 1906. Perhaps one day they will be declared saints. Certainly, in the eyes of many Catholics, they already are.

Dawson on The French Revolution

Also announced for publication by Catholic University of America Press is a new edition of Christopher Dawson's The Gods of Revolution (January 2015):

In The Gods of Revolution, Christopher Dawson brought to bear, as Glanmor Williams said, "his brilliantly perceptive powers of analysis on the French Revolution. . . . In so doing he reversed the trends of recent historiography which has concentrated primarily on examining the social and economic context of that great upheaval."

Dawson underlines the fact that the Revolution was not animated by democratic ideals but rather reflected an authoritarian liberalism often marked by a fundamental contempt for the populace, described by Voltaire as "the 'canaille' that is not worthy of enlightenment and which deserves its yoke." The old Christian order had stressed a common faith and common service shared by nobles and peasants alike but Rousseau "pleads the cause of the individual against society, the poor against the rich, and the people against the privileged classes." It is Rousseau whom Dawson describes as the spiritual father of the new age in disclosing a new spirit of revolutionary idealism expressed in liberalism, socialism and anarchism. But the old unity was not replaced by a new form. Dawson insists the whole period following the Revolution is "characterized by a continual struggle between conflicting ideologies," and the periods of relative stabilization such as the Napoleonic restoration, Victorian liberalism in England, and capitalist imperialism in the second German empire "have been compromises or temporary truces between two periods of conquest." This leads to his assertion that "the survival of western culture demands unity as well as freedom, and the great problem of our time is how these two essentials are to be reconciled."

This reconciliation will require more than technological efficiency for "a free society requires a higher degree of spiritual unity than a totalitarian one. Hence the spiritual integration of western culture is essential to its temporal survival." It is to Christianity alone that western culture "must look for leadership and help in restoring the moral and spiritual unity of our civilization," for it alone has the influence, "in ethics, in education, in literature, and in social action" sufficiently strong to achieve this end.

I have a copy of an out-of-print edition with an introduction by Arnold Toynbee, who declares that "However often the subject has been dealt with by his predecessors, Dawson's handling throws new light on it." When I read this book several years ago, it completely opened my mind to the truth about the French Revolution--I had just my high school history course to go on and it had been depicted as a great crusade for the common good (aka Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity) with some unfortunate unintended consequences (The Reign of Terror), but Dawson cleared that error up for me. After his book, then Susan Dunn's book Sister Revolutions: French Lightning, American Light continued my education.

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.

French Romantic Catholics

Romantic Catholics: France's Postrevolutionary Generation in Search of a Modern Faith is due out from Cornell University Press next March:

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.

The Table of Contents:

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

Looks fascinating.