MORAL CONDITIONS OF SOCIAL PEACE IN FRANCE.
The political conditions which I have just specified are indispensable
to the re-establishment of social peace in France; but they alone will
not suffice. Such a work requires something more than a good
organization of powers; it requires a certain measure of prudence and
virtue on the part of the people themselves. It is a gross delusion to
believe in the sovereign power of political machinery. The free will of
man plays a great part in social affairs, and the success of
institutions must in the end depend on the men who live under them.
Much has lately been said about Christianity, and the name of Jesus
Christ has been frequently introduced into the harangues of demagogues.
God forbid that I should suffer my mind to dwell long on these
profanations,--this hideous mixture of cynicism and hypocrisy. I shall
only suggest one question--If the French nation were sincerely and
practically Christian, what would be its conduct in the midst of the
terrible difficulties by which it is agitated and perplexed?
The rich and great of the earth would earnestly and perseveringly labour
to alleviate the distresses of those beneath them. Their intercourse
with the poorer classes would be active, affectionate, morally and
physically beneficent. The various sufferings and perils of humanity
would call forth corresponding associations, endowments, and works of
charity.
The poor and humble would be submissive to the will of God and the laws
of society. They would seek the satisfaction of their wants in regular
and assiduous labour, the improvement of their condition in good conduct
and provident habits, and consolation and hope in the futurity promised
to man.
These are the Christian virtues--they are called Faith, Hope, and
Charity. Is this the conduct men are exhorted by the preachers of
Democracy to pursue? Are these the sentiments which these men, who
affect a veneration for the Founder of Christianity, try to rekindle in
the hearts of the people?
I doubt whether they can carry the impudence of mendacity so far as to
answer in the affirmative; and if they dared to do so, I am sure that,
spite of the credulity of the public, they would receive a universal
contradiction.
But these monstrous attempts, whether the result of fraud or of folly,
will not succeed. Christianity will not be disfigured or degraded so.
Nothing can be more anti-Christian than the ideas, the language, or the
influence of the present race of reformers of social order. If Communism
and Socialism prevailed, Christianity must become extinct: if
Christianity were more potent, Communism and Socialism would soon sink
into the chaotic mass of obscure and forgotten extravagances.
I wish to be perfectly just; and while attacking notions which are the
disgrace and the curse of our times, I would acknowledge whatever germ
of morality they contain, and show what virtuous pretexts or benevolent
instincts may delude their advocates or seduce their converts.
There is a sentiment, noble and beautiful in itself, which has been much
and often appealed to throughout all the perturbations and convulsions
of society in France; this sentiment is, enthusiasm for mankind--the
enthusiasm of confidence, sympathy, and hope. This feeling reigned
supreme among us in 1789, and gave its resistless impulse to that epoch.
There was no virtue that was not ascribed to man--no success that was
not hoped and predicted for him. Faith and hope in man took the place of
faith and hope in God. The trial was not long deferred. The idol did not
long retain its power. Confidence was soon convicted of presumption, and
sympathy ended in social war and the scaffold. The hopes that were
fulfilled appeared insignificant, compared to those that had vanished
like dreams. Never did experience advance with such rapid strides to
confront and overthrow pride.
Yet it is to this same sentiment that our modern reformers of social
order appeal. It is this same idolatrous enthusiasm for human nature
that they invoke. At the same time that they rob man of his sublimest
emotions and loftiest prospects, they exalt without measure his nature
and his power: rather, I ought to say, they miserably degrade them, for
they promise him nothing beyond this earth; but while there, their
belief in him is blind and implicit--their hope from him, and for him,
boundless.
The most melancholy reflection is, that this insane idolatry is their
only excuse; the only one of their ideas which springs from a source of
the smallest elevation, or possesses the smallest moral value. If they
had not a blind faith in man, and a servile adoration of humanity, they
would be nothing more than the propagators of a rapacious, brutish, and
lawless materialism.
“If man exalteth himself,” says Pascal, “I abase him; if he abaseth
himself, I exalt him.” We ought continually to bear in mind and to apply
these admirable words. Certainly man is a being worthy to inspire us
with respect and love, and with high hopes of his future condition. To
those who were insensible to the nobleness of his nature and his
destiny--to himself, if he forgot it--I should say with Pascal, “If man
abaseth himself, I exalt him.” But to those who promise themselves
everything from him, by promising him everything; whose expectations
from him are as boundless as those they labour to excite in him; to
those who, goaded by their own pride, are constantly striving to inflate
his pride; who forget, and try to make him forget, the frailty and
wretchedness of his nature, the supreme laws by which he is bound, and
the support of which he stands in need,--to those men I would say with
Pascal, “If man exalteth himself, I abase him.” And facts,--recent,
glaring, incontrovertible facts,--say it far more impressively than I.
It is impossible to restore France to the state of things which
prevailed in 1789--to rekindle that enthusiasm of presumptuous
confidence and hope with which the nation was then drunk--an enthusiasm
which then was genuine as well as general, had the ardour and
spontaneity of youth, and was rendered excusable by inexperience, but
which now would be only a false and factitious excitement; a thin, an
ineffectual veil thrown over bad passions and insane dreams. By what
incurable arrogance could we reject the lessons which God has lavished
upon us for the last sixty years? He does not require of us to despair
of ourselves and of our species, to abandon all efforts for its
progress, or to shut our hearts against a tender sympathy in its weal
or woe; but He does forbid us to exalt our own nature into an idol. He
commands us to see it as it is; without illusion and without coldness;
and to love and serve it according to the laws He has established. I
have certainly no desire to extinguish any of the small portion of moral
ardour still remaining in the world, nor to infuse additional doubt and
indifference into hearts already so lukewarm and uncertain. But neither
can I add to their delusions. It is not by retracing its course toward
the sources of the revolution, that France will walk with a firm and
animated step: those fountains are all dry, and our generation will not
go to slake its thirst or refresh its spirit at them. You complain of
its languor; you want to see the faith and the moral energy, which are
the soul and strength of nations, revive among us: but it is vain to
seek them in the revolutionary spirit, which is wholly incapable of
inspiring them. It is a fire which has still power to consume, but can
neither warm nor enlighten. Instead of reviving and invigorating our
belief in the great truths which are the wholesome stimulants as well as
the true guardians of society, they can only diffuse doubt and
perplexity. Certainly France wants to be morally elevated and
strengthened; she wants to regain her faith in, and attachment to, fixed
and undisputed principles. But the revolutionary spirit can do nothing
to appease these wants; the scenes and the harangues, the predictions
and the recollections which it suggests, can only retard the work. The
honour of its accomplishment is reserved for other moral powers and
other intellectual tendencies.
Among the foremost, are the domestic sentiments and morals. The Family
is now, more than ever, the first element and the last rampart of
society. Whilst, in general society, everything becomes more and more
mobile, personal, and transient, it is in domestic life that the demand
for permanency, and the feeling of the necessity of sacrificing the
present to the future, are indestructible. It is in domestic life that
the ideas and the virtues which form a counterpoise to the excessive and
ungoverned movement excited in the great centres of civilization, are
formed. The tumult of business and pleasure, temptation and strife which
reigns in our great cities, would soon throw the whole of society into a
deplorable state of ferment and dissolution, if domestic life, with its
calm activity, its permanent interests, and its fixed property, did not
oppose solid barriers throughout the country to the restless waves of
this stormy sea. It is in the bosom of domestic life, and under its
influences, that private, the basis of public, morality is most
securely maintained. There too, and in our days there almost
exclusively, the affections of our nature,--friendship, gratitude, and
self-devotion,--all the ties which unite hearts in the sense of a common
destiny, grow and flourish. The time has been when, under other forms of
society, these private affections found a place in public life; when
devoted attachments strengthened political connexions. These times are
past, never to return. In the vast and complicated and ever-moving
society of our days, general interests and principles, the sentiments of
the masses, and the combinations of parties, have the entire possession
and direction of public life. The private affections are ties too
delicate to exercise any powerful influence over the conflicts of that
pitiless field. But it is never without serious injury that one of the
vital elements of human nature is uprooted out of any of the fields of
human action; and the complete absence of tender and faithful
attachments in that almost exclusive domain of abstract ideas and
general or selfish interests, has robbed political life of a noble
ornament and a great source of strength. It is of incalculable
importance to society that there should be some safe retreat in which
the affectionate dispositions--I would almost say passions--of the heart
of man may expand in freedom; and that, occasionally emerging from that
retreat, they may exhibit their presence and their power by some
beautiful examples in that tumultuous region of politics in which they
are so rarely found. But these social virtues must be nursed in the
bosom of domestic life; these social affections must spring from family
affections. Home, the abode of stability and morality, also contains the
hearth at which all our affections and all our self-devotion are
kindled; it is in the circle of the Family that the noblest parts of our
nature find satisfactions they would seek for else in vain; it is from
that circle that, when circumstances demand, they can go forth to adorn
and bless society.
Next to the spirit of family, the political spirit is that from which
France has now the greatest services to expect, and which she ought to
foster with the greatest care. The political spirit shows itself in the
will and the power to take a regular and active part in public affairs,
without employment of violence or risk of disturbance. The greater the
spread and cultivation of the political spirit, the more does it teach
men the necessity and the habit of seeing things as they are in their
exact and naked truth. To see, not what exists, but what they wish; to
indulge complacently in illusions about facts, as if facts would, with
equal complacency, take the form that they desire,--is the radical and
characteristic weakness of men still new to political life, and the
source of their most fatal errors. To see things as they are, is the
first and very excellent fruit of the political spirit, and gives birth
to another not less excellent, viz.--that, by learning to see only what
is, we learn to desire only what is possible; the exact appreciation of
facts begets moderation in designs and pretensions. The political
spirit, true and sincere to itself, becomes prudent and reasonable
towards others. Nothing inclines men more to moderation than a full
knowledge of the truth; for it is rarely that she throws all her weight
into one scale. The political spirit is thus naturally led by prudence,
if by no higher morality, to that respect for rights which is not only
its fundamental law and essential merit, but the sole basis of social
stability; since, where law ceases, nothing remains but force, which is
essentially variable and precarious. The respect for rights supposes, or
produces, the respect for law, the habitual source of rights. The real
and the possible, rights and law, such are the subjects upon which the
political spirit is constantly exercised, and which become the habitual
objects of its inquiry and its veneration. It thus maintains, or
re-establishes, a moral principle of fixity in the relations of
individuals, and a moral principle of authority in those of the state.
The more the value for family ties shall increase at the expense of the
selfishness of an isolated existence, and the more the political shall
gain upon the revolutionary spirit, the more tranquil will the society
of France become, and the more firmly will it rest upon its
foundations.
Nevertheless, neither the domestic nor the political spirit would
suffice for the task. They need the assistance of another and a higher
spirit, whose influence penetrates more deeply than they can do into the
human soul. It is peculiar to religion that she has a language for every
individual; a language which all can understand, the high as well as the
humble, the happy as well as the unhappy; and that she ascends or
descends, without an effort, into every rank and region of society. And
it is one of the admirable features of the constitution of the Christian
church, that her ministers are not only scattered over, but form an
integral part of, the whole of society; living as near to the cottage as
the palace; in habitual and intimate intercourse with the highest and
the lowest; equally the monitors of greatness and the consolers of
misery. This tutelary power, spite of the abuses and the faults into
which it has been led by its very force and extent, has for ages
exercised a more vigilant and energetic control over the moral dignity
and the dearest interests of man, than any other. Nobody would be so
averse as I should, for the sake of religion herself, to see a revival
of the abuses by which she has been disfigured or corrupted; but I
confess that I do not fear this at the present day. The principles of
lay supremacy and freedom of thought have definitively triumphed in
modern society: they may still have some enemies to repel, and some
conflicts to sustain, but their victory is certain; they have in their
favour the prevailing institutions, manners, opinions, and passions; and
that general and overwhelming current of ideas and events which flows on
through all diversities, obstacles, and perils, in the same direction,
at Rome, Madrid, Turin, Berlin, and Vienna, no less than at London or
Paris. For modern society to fear religion, or to dispute her influence
with acrimony, would therefore be a puerile alarm and a fatal error. You
are surrounded by an immense and excited multitude; you complain that
you want means to act upon it, to enlighten, direct, control, and
tranquillize it; that you have little intercourse with these men, save
through the tax-gatherer and the policeman; that they are given over,
without defence, to the inflammatory declamations of charlatans and
demagogues, and to the blind violence of their own passions. Dispersed
among them, you have men whose express mission and constant occupation
it is to guide their faith, to console their distresses, to show them
their duties, to awaken and elevate their hopes, to exercise over them
that moral influence which you vainly seek elsewhere. And would you not
second these men in their work, when they can second you so powerfully
in yours, precisely in those obscure enclosures where you so rarely
penetrate, and where the enemies of social order enter continually, and
sap all their foundations?
There is, it is true, a condition attached to the favour and the
political efficacy of the religious spirit; it demands sincere respect,
and liberty. I will even confess that the fears and desires of the
religious party often render them unjust, captious, suspicious,
rancorous, and exacting; that they sometimes fall into the vortex of
those false, anarchical and chimerical ideas which it is their peculiar
vocation to combat. I will make as large concessions as can be required,
as to the injustice you must expect to submit to, and the precautions
you will have to take; yet I shall say at the conclusion, as I said at
the beginning, Do not hold up acrimonious disputes with religion; do not
fear her influences; allow them space and liberty to expand and to act
in the largest and most powerful manner. On the whole, they will
certainly be more in favour of tranquillity than of strife, and will
assist more than they will embarrass you.
If we were under that proximate necessity of acting, which affords a
light indispensable to those who want to do more than lay down general
principles of action, it would be our business to inquire by what
practical means, by what positive institutions or laws, the domestic,
the political, and the religious spirit might be duly strengthened and
developed in our country. At present I shall only add one word. We
cannot treat with great moral forces as if they were mercenary and
suspected auxiliaries. They exist by themselves, with their natural
merits and defects, their unavoidable benefits and dangers. We must
accept them, such as they are; without pretending to be either their
slaves or their tyrants, without giving up everything to them, but also
without trying to withhold their just portion. The religious, the
domestic, and the political spirit are more than ever beneficent, more
than ever necessary, in our society. Neither social tranquillity, nor
stability, nor order can dispense with their co-operation. Seek then
that co-operation with sincerity; receive it with a good grace, and
resign yourselves to pay the price of it.
Societies, no more than individuals, are exempted from the necessity of
purchasing advantages by efforts and sacrifices.