69 years ago The Tablet, at that time a solidly Catholic publication and the leading Catholic newspaper of this country, could acknowledge the resistance offered by Catholic laymen against various errors of the modern age to be “largely, if not entirely due to Hilaire Belloc.” An article published on July 27th, 1940, in honour of Belloc's 70th birthday, entitled Hilaire Belloc and the Counter-Revolution, likened him to "Joseph de Maistre and his successors in France.”
Belloc was born in France, but raised in England. Educated at the Oratory School in Edgbaston he became, at that time, only the second student to pass its London Matriculation Examination with honours. After leaving school he was privileged to be granted somewhat of a personal formation by Cardinal Manning who received the young Belloc's visits on numerous occasions during the year 1889. After having undergone military service with a French artillery regiment Belloc returned to England to study history at Oxford.
Belloc was the young man whom, after graduating with a First Class honours degree in history from Balliol College, famously put his trust in Heaven rather than with Fallen Man and placed a statue of Our Lady on the table at his interview for a greatly sought after History Fellowship at the prestigious, but anti-Catholic, university. He was promptly turned down! Undeterred, and still trusting in Heaven rather than Fallen Man, he later drew out his rosary beads in front of a hostile crowd whipped up by the opposition Tory slogan "Don't Vote for a Frenchman and a Catholic," during an election campaign in Salford, and found himself promptly elected to Parliament! Belloc was the man to whom the English hierarchy turned and chose as their emissary to Pope Saint Pius X in order to advise His Holiness regarding the political situation in relation to the fight for Catholic education in England. He later addressed a 60,000 strong crowd upon the matter in Hyde Park.
In 1934 his voluminous writing and myriad action in defence of the Faith and Catholic Civilisation was recognised with the Papal Order of St. Gregory the Great, Knight Commander with Star.
With credentials like that it should be unnecessary to have to present a defence of Belloc in terms of his Catholic orthodoxy but there exists one aspect of Belloc's historical and social analysis that has been severely neglected by his biographers. Unfortunately such neglect has led to Belloc's good name being brought into disrepute in recent times. It has been neglected simply because his biographers do not see with the clear Catholic mind that Belloc, and orthodox Catholics of his generation, possessed. Hence they misinterpret what Belloc wrote in regard to the French Revolution. Quite incredibly Belloc is perceived, by modern-minded liberals and conservatives alike, to have held the false ideas of the Revolution as his own!
Belloc's liberal biographers consider his analysis of the subject as being of little consequence and, hence, tend to pass by it with superficial reference. His conservative biographers tend to hold a received antipathy towards the French Revolution and either fall over themselves to ignore, in embarrassed silence, what they perceive to be an unfortunate and unfathomable contradiction in Belloc's worldview, or they blindly react against his good name with vitriolic and calumnious condemnations.
The Modern Mind holds that the better known royalist Jacobite-orientated Belloc was at the same time a socialist Jacobin-orientated Belloc. It holds that the better known religiously orthodox Belloc was at the same time a religiously liberal and progressive Belloc. Whilst that may in itself be an accurate illustration of the intellectual somersaults that the Modern Mind is capable of exhibiting, it most certainly does not apply to Hilaire Belloc.
The perception is false, and the alleged contradiction is raised upon that falseness. The truth is simple, and it is simply this: Belloc was thoroughly Catholic and saw with a clarity that comes from the mind of a Catholic formed to think from first principles. As he wrote himself in Survivals and New Arrivals in regard to the Modern Mind: "What are you to do with a man who does not recognize his own first principles?"
The Background
As well as his numerous works defending Catholic monarchy Belloc wrote a number of historical studies of the French Revolution including character studies of some of its better known protagonists. His works on the subject are not texts of Catholic apologetics or polemics in the manner of many of his other books. They are secular historical studies that acknowledge, but do not analyse or make rhetorical appeal to, the underlying philosphies of the combatants. In his book entitled The French Revolution he clarifies that the book is of such a nature and asserts that although philosophical and theological conflict "is certainly explanatory of all human quarrels... it is evident that history, properly so called, cannot deal with it" and that "... you may say that the Revolution was the work of antichrist;- but with that kind of reply, I repeat, history cannot deal."
In 1892, the year that Belloc finished his military service in France and returned to England, Pope Leo XIII had issued the encyclical Au Milieu des Sollicitudes calling on French Catholics to make peace with the Republic in terms of it being a legitimate form of government whilst distinguishing between good and evil legislation and calling upon them to continue fighting the latter. His Holiness wrote that: "These regrettable differences would have been avoided if the very considerable distinction between constituted power and legislation had been carefully kept in view. In so much does legislation differ from political power and its form, that under a system of government most excellent in form legislation could be detestable; while quite the opposite under a regime most imperfect in form, might be found excellent legislation."
In 1898, aged 28, Belloc joined the resurrected La Ligue des Patriotes which was led by a family friend, Paul Déroulède. From an association of intellectuals belonging to La Ligue des Patriotes, known as La Ligue de la Patrie Francaise, came the foundation of the royalist l'Action Francaise of whose newspaper Belloc regularly read. La Ligue was set up in response to the catalyst of the Dreyfus Affair but its primary objective was to oppose the work of the liberal La Ligue des Droits de l'Homme which campaigned for greater implementation of erroneous ideas stemming from the Revolution.
In 1899 Belloc published his first character study, Danton, concerned with the subject of the French Revolution, and several more historical studies of the subject appeared over the years including The French Revolution in 1911.
Perhaps one minor fault of these historical studies is that Belloc neglects to record with any detail the fact of the organised conspiratorial role of secret societies in planning and executing the Revolution. He only mentions in passing that Freemasonry was the most strongly organised of the anti-clerical forces at work. The reason for that omission appears to be due to a general reaction that Belloc maintained against a plethora of works of the time that in his view over-emphasised the importance of the role of conspiratorial planning and action.
Belloc would no doubt have argued that, in general, no matter how carefully something is planned it very rarely works out in exactly the way that the planners intend. He appears to have believed that history is determined just as much by the chaotic element of chance, due to the frailty of fallen human nature and particular circumstance, as it is by general planning. He writes in The French Revolution that "the folly of this statesman, the ill drafting of that law, the misconception of such and such an institution, the coincidence of war breaking out at such and such a moment and affecting men in such and such a fashion - all these material accidents bred a misunderstanding between the two great forces, led into conflict the human officers and the human organizations which directed them; and conflict once established feeds upon, and grows from, its own substance” One of his biographers, Robert Speight, records that Belloc wrote in personal correspondence to a friend that "... there is a type of unstable mind which cannot rest without morbid imaginings, and the conception of a single cause simplifies thought. With this good woman it is the Jews, with some people it is the Jesuits, with others Freemasons and so on. The world is more complex than that."
Political Theory: Republic and Democracy
In his preface to The French Revolution Belloc makes clear that "If a personal point may be noted, the fact that the writer of these pages is himself a Catholic and in political sympathy strongly attached to the political theory of the Revolution, should not be hidden from the reader.”
That and similar statements found throughout the book such as “There was no quarrel between the theology of the Catholic Church and the political theory of the Revolution", or "Historically and logically, theologically also, those who affirm a necessary antagonism between the Republic and the Church are in error", or again, "They cannot call the [political doctrine of the] Revolution a necessary enemy of the Church, nor the Church of democracy" are enough for the Modern Mind to condemn Belloc as being a disciple of Rousseau, and that it "qualifies him as a liberal." In order to complete Belloc's defamation one of his modern-minded critics even provides a definition: "Liberal is a term that comes from the acceptation of that revolutionary liberty. By extension, the liberal accepted other consequences of the French Revolution, such as the separation of Church and State, secular education for children and youth, civil marriages, and mainly, the idea that equal status should be given to all religions before the civil law."
Belloc's defence begins with him defining, on the very first page of the first chapter of The French Revolution, what constitutes the political theory of the French Revolution to which he is "in political sympathy strongly attached". It is "...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." He continues: "Those words 'civil' and 'temporal' must lead the reader to the next consideration; which is, that the last authority of all does not reside even in the community. It must be admitted by all those who have considered their own nature and that of their fellow beings that the ultimate authority in any act is God. Or if the name of God sound unusual in an English publication today, then what now takes the place of it for many (an imperfect phrase), the 'moral sense.'"
He comes back to the subject later in the book: "... only those Democrats who know little of the Catholic Church can say that of its nature it forbids democracy; and only those Catholics who have a confused or imperfect conception of democracy can say that of its nature it is antagonistic to the Catholic Church... Thus, though there be no conflict demonstrable between the theology of the Catholic Church and the political theory of the Revolution, yet there may be necessary and fundamental conflict between the Persons we call the Revolution and the Church, and between the vivifying principles by which either lives."
Thus Belloc makes it abundantly clear that it is first principles that he is concerned with defending and not the "political blunders" and "intellectual accidents", as he describes them elsewhere, that separated the philosophical and theological thought of the French Revolution from Catholicism. In other words Belloc correctly contends that the Republic, as a form of government, and democracy, as a form of social organisation, cannot be condemned per se but only per accidens. They cannot be condemned in themselves, for they are something legitimate, but only by those external things that attach to them and give them erroneous expression. In the same manner he contends correctly that liberty, equality and fraternity are not things condemnable per se, but only per accidens. The principle of each is legitimate. The erronous expression is condemnable.
Archbishop Lefebvre instructs us about the Church's teaching on the subject of democracy in Chapter VII of They Have Uncrowned Him. Clearly there is no conflict between that type of democracy which Belloc favoured and that which the Archbishop describes below:
"I admit that a non-liberal democracy is a rare species, vanished today; but it is still not at all an idle fancy, as shown by by the Republic of Christ the King, that of Ecuador of Garcia Moreno in the last century.
Here are the characteristic traits of a non-liberal democracy:
1. First Principle. The Principle of Popular Sovereignty: first it limits itself to the democratic regime, and respects the legitimacy of a monarchy. Then it is radically different from that of the Rousseauist democracy: the power resides in the people, well and good, but neither originally nor finally. Thus it is from God that power comes to the people, from God as the author and from the social nature of man, and not from the individual-kings. And once those in power are elected by the people, these last do not keep the exercise of the authority.
First consequence: it is not a shapeless multitude of individuals that governs, but the people in established bodies: its heads of families (who will be able to legislate directly in some very small States, like that of Appenzell in Switzerland), its peasants and merchants, industrialists and workers, big and small property owners, military men and magistrates, religious, priests and bishops; that is, says Mgr. de Segur, 'the nation with all its living forces, established in a genuine representative manner, and capable of expressing its wishes through its true representatives, of freely exercising its rights' ....
Second consequence: elected governments, even if they are called, as by St. Thomas, 'vicars of the multitude,' are such only in the sense that they do for it what it cannot do itself, that is, govern. But power comes to them from God, 'from Whom all paternity in heaven and on earth draws its name' (Eph. 3:15). The people in power are therefore responsible for their acts first of all before God, whose ministers they are, and only after that before the people, for whose common good they govern.
2. Second Principle: The Rights of God (and those of His Church, in a Catholic nation) are set down as the base of the constitution. The decalogue is therefore the inspirer of all legislation.
First consequence: the 'general will' is null if it goes against God's rights. The majority does not 'make' the truth; it has to keep itself in the truth, under penalty of a perversion of democracy. With reason Pius XII underlines the danger, inherent in the democratic regime, against which the constitution must react: the danger of depersonalisation, of massification, and of manipulation of the multitude by pressure groups and artificial majorities.
Second consequence: democracy is not secular, but openly Christian and Catholic. It conforms to the social doctrine of the Church, concerning private property, the principle of subsidiarity, education left to the care of the Church and of the parents, etc...
To sum up: democracy, no less than any other governmental form, must bring about the social reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Democracy must, all the same, have a King: Jesus Christ."
St. Thomas Aquinas further explains in the Summa Theologica (Ia IIae, 105,1) that no dilemma exists between the principles of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy but, on the contrary, a commonwealth that expresses a harmonious balance of these principles is the best form of government:
"I answer that, Two points are to be observed concerning the right ordering of rulers in a state or nation. One is that all should take some share in the government: for this form of constitution ensures peace among the people, commends itself to all, and is most enduring, as stated in Polit. ii, 6. The other point is to be observed in respect of the kinds of government, or the different ways in which the constitutions are established. For whereas these differ in kind, as the Philosopher states (Polit. iii, 5), nevertheless the first place is held by the 'kingdom,' where the power of government is vested in one; and 'aristocracy,' which signifies government by the best, where the power of government is vested in a few. Accordingly, the best form of government is in a state or kingdom, where one is given the power to preside over all; while under him are others having governing powers: and yet a government of this kind is shared by all, both because all are eligible to govern, and because the rules are chosen by all. For this is the best form of polity, being partly kingdom, since there is one at the head of all; partly aristocracy, in so far as a number of persons are set in authority; partly democracy, i.e. government by the people, in so far as the rulers can be chosen from the people, and the people have the right to choose their rulers."
Thus, again, it can clearly be seen that Belloc, whose historic sympathy for the old kingdoms and kingships is well enough known, and whose sympathy for monarchical leadership in modern Republics such as France, Italy and Spain during his own lifetime is also well enough known, was faithfully following the social doctrine of the Church.
Rousseau's Social Contract
The attack of the Modern Mind upon Belloc is further extended by the claim that by identifying Rousseau's The Social Contract as "the formula of the Revolutionary Creed", and by stating that "no man, perhaps, has put the prime truth of political morals so well", and that "it is not too much to say that never in the history of political theory has a political theory been put forward so lucidly, so convincingly, so tersely or so accurately as in this short and wonderful book”, Belloc "pretends that the French Revolution is praiseworthy and should be supported by Catholics", and that "Far from being a model for Catholics... [he] appears to be a fifth column assigned to introduce the poison of the French Revolution and admiration for its Deist founder among well-intentioned Catholics."
Notwithstanding the fact, a fact completely ignored by the Modern Mind, that Belloc makes perfectly clear in the same pages of The French Revolution that in treating of religion Rousseau possessed a "confused" and "insufficient" comprehension of religious truth, the quotations used in order to libel Belloc only appear shocking when utterly torn from the context in which Belloc placed them.
The Modern Mind appears, first of all, to be unable to make the simple distinction between a treatment of political theory as such, and insists upon equating and confusing a treatment of political theory in itself, with a treatment upon philosophy and theology. Secondly, the Modern Mind appears incapable of comprehending the context presented by Belloc in The French Revolution and from which he presents his historical study.
The historical context from which Belloc treats of both Rousseau and the French Revolution is one where, he writes, "... the country squire, the noble, the lawyer, the university professor of the generation immediately preceeding the Revolution had, as a rule, no conception of the Catholic Church. With them the Faith was dead...".
Just as, in our own time, major upheavals do not spontaneously arise out of the blue but are the result of cause and effect, so it was that the French Revolution could only have happened because of an enabling cause. Belloc describes at some length the state of affairs that made the Revolution possible: French society had become thoroughly corrupt and stale; it had largely lost the practice of the Catholic religion and with it that general sense and application of unity and supernatural bond expressed between Lord and Commoner in the Middle Ages. The landed and mercantile class in France had become almost completely infected with either Rationalism or the Determinism of the Calvinist Huguenots and, to compound the problem, the Monarchy and much of the Hierarchy in France had, from the time of Louis XIV, neglected the universal nature of the Catholic Church in favour of a tendency towards, for all practical purposes, a National Church wed to the apparatus of the State.
Belloc begins to explain thus: "It did not shock the hierarchy that one of its Apostolic members should be a witty atheist; that another should go hunting upon Corpus Christi, nearly upset the Blessed Sacrament in his gallop, and forget what day it was when the accident occurred. The bishops found nothing remarkable in seeing a large proportion of their body to be loose livers, or in some of them openly presenting their friends to their mistresses as might be done by any great lay noble round them... Unquestioned also by the bishops were the poverty, the neglect, and the uninstruction of the parish clergy; nay - and this is by far the principal feature - the abandonment of religion by all but a very few of the French millions, no more affected the ecclesiastical officials of the time than does the starvation of our poor affect, let us say, one of our professional politicians. It was a thing simply taken for granted.
The reader must seize that moribund condition of the religious life of France upon the eve of the Revolution, for it is at once imperfectly grasped by the general run of historians, and is also the only fact which thoroughly explains what followed. The swoon of the Faith in the eighteenth century is the negative foundation upon which the strange religious experience of the French was about to rise. France, in the generation before the Revolution, was passing through a phase in which the Catholic Faith was at a lower ebb than it had ever been since the preaching and establishment of it in Gaul."
He eventually concludes that "Such, then, was the position when the Revolution was preparing. Within memory of all men living, the Church had become more and more official [i.e. National, and part of "executive Government" ], the masses of the great towns had wholly lost touch with it; the intelligence of the country was in the main drawn to the Deist or even to the purely sceptical propaganda, the powerful Huguenot body was ready prepared for an alliance with any foe of Catholicism, and in the eyes of the impoverished town populace - notably in Paris, which had long abandoned the practice of religion - the human organisation of the Church, the hierarchy, the priesthood, and the few but very wealthy religious orders which still lingered on in dwindling numbers, were but a portion of the privileged world which the populace hated and was prepared to destroy.
It is upon such a spirit and in such conditions of the national religious life that the Revolution begins to work."
Such was the historic situation of France at the time, and such was the endemic loss of Faith and the powerful influence held over French society by an even worse atheistic Rationalism, that Belloc writes that "in a time when the problem represented by religion was least comprehended, when the practice of religion was at its lowest, and when the meaning, almost, of religion had left men's minds" it was "remarkable" that Rousseau "should have allowed as he did for religious sentiment" and to "attempt to define that minimum or substratum of religion".
Clearly, Belloc's analysis that the Deistic religious sentiment expressed within the pages of The Social Contract was preferable to its alternative, that of French society being subjected to an atheistic State, is perfectly legitimate when taken in the context that he provides and Belloc himself is very far, indeed, from being, as the Modern Mind accuses, "a strong promoter of one of the worst representatives of the Deist ideal of a pan-religion submitted to the State." How could he be when he plainly asserts that "Rousseau's view of religion in the State" was "insufficient" and laments that Rousseau's Deist pluralism "unfortunately became the commonplace of the politicians" ?
The Terror
Belloc is finally accused by the Modern Mind of supporting the great injustices of The Terror simply because he records it historically as being an act of martial law established by the revolutionary government's Committee of Public Safety in order to prevent further anarchy.
"Those months, which may be roughly called the months of the Terror, were, as we shall see later in this book, months of martial law; and the Terror was simply martial law in action – a method of enforcing the military defense of the country and of punishing all those who interfered with it or were supposed by the Committee to interfere with it”, he writes. Of its victims he is criticised for writing that "most were men or women who had broken some specific part of the martial code which the Government had laid down."
Belloc is further castigated for the use of occasional adjectives to describe some particular actions or traits of revolutionary characters as being "honest", "sincere", "well-intentioned", "patriotic" and so on, whilst "On the contrary, those who defended the Church and Christian Civilization – such as the counter-revolutionaries of the Vendée and Brittany - are referred to as 'rebels.' On this point, Belloc, who presents himself as a genuine Catholic author, appears more like a man without a conscience. He displays a cold indifference, with a drop of ridicule, when it comes to the struggle of those simple people of the Vendée and Brittany who rose in arms to defend the King and restore Monarchy fighting under the banner of the Sacred Heart of Jesus."
Suffice it to say that once again the Modern Mind excels in the use of the selective quotation, taken out of context, in order to present a propaganda designed to defame rather than to present an honest summary or historical critique of anything that Belloc wrote. The Modern Mind concludes with such inanity as: "Now then, this frequent praise of the French Revolution and the egalitarianism it promoted, as well as the violence of the Terror, was made by Belloc in books written just prior to the Russian Revolution of 1917. I ask: Wouldn’t these works help prepare the ideas and the environment for the victory of Communism?... I am a little uncertain as to whether I should keep the title of this series as Hillaire [sic] Belloc: the Liberal, or change it to Hillaire [sic] Belloc: the Socialist, or perhaps even to Hillaire [sic] Belloc: the pre-Communist."
Completely ignored are those passages in which Belloc gives lie to such an accusation; his recording of the piety and religious devotion of the murdered King, the cruelty and terror of the anti-Catholic persecution with its vast number of martyrdoms, and his affirmation to the enemies of Catholicism that the Church and the Faith is strengthened by persecution and the blood of the martyrs. In such circumstances it is only fitting to make appeal to Hilaire Belloc, himself, to provide the final words of this essay and to witness for his own defence and that of the truth.
Of the personal character of the King, he writes:
"It was, indeed, a singular thing for a man of his position at such a time to hold intimately to religion, but Louis held to it. He confessed, he communicated, he attended Mass, he performed his ordinary devotions - not by way of tradition or political duty, or State function, to which religious performance was now reduced in the vast majority of his wealthy contemporaries, but as an individual for whom these things had a personal value."
Of the Terror:
"With the crash of the 10th August the persecution began: the true persecution, which was to the growing bitterness of the previous two years what a blow is to the opening words of a quarrel... From this date to the end of the Terror, twenty-three months later, the story of the relations between the Revolution and the Church, though wild and terrible, is simple: it is a story of mere persecution culminating in extremes of cruelty and in the supposed uprooting of Christianity in France.
The orthodox clergy were everywhere regarded by this time as the typical enemies of the revolutionary movement; they themselves regarded the revolutionary movement, by this time, as being principally an attempt to destroy the Catholic Church.
Within seven months of the fall of the monarchy, from the 18th March, 1793, the priests, whether non-juring or schismatic, might, on the denunciation of any six citizens, be subjected to transportation.
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 of the time."
And of the Church:
"The Catholic Church was not dead, and was not even dying. It was exhibiting many of the symptoms which in other organisms and institutions correspond to the approach of death, but the Catholic Church is an organism and an institution quite unlike any other. It fructifies and expands immediately under the touch of a lethal weapon..."
