The Recent Events in France (1800's)

THE RECENT EVENTS IN FRANCE

[From the Catholic World for December, 1871.]

We have no occasion to dwell on the disastrous events of the war of the second French empire with Prussia, nor on the still more disastrous results of the feeble efforts of the improvised republic to drive back the German armies from French soil. They are too painful to be dwelt on, and are, probably, as well known to our readers as to ourselves. We may, however, remark that we regard it as a mistake to represent the war as unprovoked by Prussia. The party that declares the war is not always responsible for it. Prussia, by her duplicity, her aggressive spirit, and her menacing attitude to France, gave to the French government ample reason, according to what has long been the usage with European nations, for declaring war.

We have never been the partisans of Louis Napoleon ; but it is only simple justice to say that by his concessions of January, 1870, he had ceased to be the absolute sovereign of France, and had become a constitutional monarch, like the queen of Great Britain and Ireland, and the declaration of war against Prussia in July of the same year was not his personal act, but the act of liberal ministry and the French people, influenced, not unlikely, by the secret societies that had sworn the emperor's destruction. Perhaps, when the facts are better known, it will be clearly seen that the emperor had really no alternative but war with Prussia, or the loss of the French throne for himself and dynasty. Though unprepared, he chose the war, as offering at least a chance of success, and it is not improbable that the result would have been less disastrous both for him and the nation if he had been loyally sustained by the French people, and had not had a more formidable enemy in his rear than in his front. The influences that compelled him to consent to the declaration of war were unfriendly to him, and both before and after the declaration were, not unlikely, indirectly controlled by that astute but unprincipled diplomatist, Bismarck, at present chancellor of the new German empire, and through whose adroitness Germany has been prussianized.

It now also appears that the disaster of Sedan was far less the fault of the emperor than of his marshals, who acted without his orders, and without concert with one another. If Marshal MacMahon had fallen back on the capital, as Trouchu says he advised, instead of attempting to relieve Metz, and given the nation time to rally and concentrate its forces, it is probable the empire would have been saved, and the Prussians been ultimately defeated and driven beyond the Rhine. Even after the disaster of Sedan, the integrity of French territory might have been saved, and peace obtained on far less onerous terms than those which were finally imposed by the conqueror after the surrender of Paris, but for the Parisian mob of the 4th of September, which compelled the corps legislatif to pronounce, illegally, of course, the escheat of the emperor and the empire, to proclaim the republic, and to suffer a so-called government of defence to be improvised. The disaster of Sedan was great, but it was a mere bagatelle in comparison with that of the revolution effected by the Parisian mob acting under the direction of the secret societies, whose destructive power and influence were so well and so truthfully set forth by Disraeli in his Lothair, one of the most remarkable books recently published, and which shows that its author fully understands the great questions, movements, and tendencies of modern society. That revolution was the real disaster, and Paris, not Prussia or Germany, has subjugated France. The French, excepting a few lawyers, journalists, literary dreamers, and the workingmen of the cities and towns, who demanded la republique democratique et sociale, had no wish for a republic, and were, and are, decidedly anti-republican at heart. The men composing the so-called government of defence were, for the most part, men who had not, and could not inspire, the confidence of the nation, were men without faith or solid principle, theorists and declaimers, utterly destitute both of civil and military capacity, distrusted, if not detested, by all Frenchmen who retained any sense of religion or any love of country surpassing their love for their own theories. France, perhaps, could have been saved by a loyal support of the empire, and hearty cooperation with the imperial government under the empress-regent, even after the disaster of Sedan, but not by overthrowing it, and plunging the nation into the revolutionary abyss. The government of defence only hastened the catastrophe by defaming the imperial government, calumniating it, and publishing every sort of falsehood against it that malice could invent or render plausible, as the event has proved, and all the world is beginning to see and admit.

But for the socialistic revolution, it is now known that, even after the surrender of the emperor, the imperial government could have obtained peace without any mutilation of French territory, and on terms, if hard, at least such as could be borne. France would have suffered the mortification of defeat, and would have been compelled to indemnify, as a matter of course, Prussia for the expenses of the war ; but she would have suffered no loss of territory, and would have remained, defeated indeed, but not conquered. Europe would have mediated effectually in her favor, for the balance of power requires her preservation ; but the European nations could not intervene in favor of a revolution which was a menace to each one of themselves, and Prussia would not and could not treat with a revolutionary committee that had no legal existence and no power to bind the nation.

The insurrection of Paris on the 18th of March, 1871, against the Versailles government, was only the logical continuation of that of the 4th of September against the empire. The same party that made the one made the other. An omnibus would hold nearly all the republicans in France that differ essentially or in principle from the Paris commune, and its suppression after a fearful struggle is the condemnation of the revolution that overthrew the empire, and also of the government that suppressed it. Its suppression, so absolutely necessary if France or French society is to subsist, was simply the revolution condemning and killing itself. No government can be founded on the revolutionary principle, for that principle is destructive and can found nothing ; and hence it is that every revolution is compelled to devour itself ; and to be able to reconstruct and maintain political or social order, it must deny its own principle, and as far as possible undo its own work. Yet the commune is only "scotched, not killed," and will rear its head again in the first moment a new political crisis comes. A republic of law and order, respecting and maintaining the rights of person and property, such as we regard our own, is at present impracticable in every nation in Europe, with the single exception of Switzerland, for it has no basis in the interior life, the antecedents, the manners, customs, and usages of the people. It was by the aid of non-republican France that the Parisian insurgents were put down. There is in Europe no political via media practicable as yet between the absolutism of Caesar and the absolutism of the people. Either Caesar is in the place of God, or the people ; and the only religion this nineteenth century tolerates is either monarchial absolutism or popular absolutism ; and European society, as we see, only swings like a pendulum from the one to the other, and finds no liberty or chance for free development under either. Its real progress is suspended.

At this moment, France lies prostrate with the iron heel of the conqueror on her neck, and that conqueror, Prussia, a power that never was known to have a noble or generous sentiment, and that has 1806 to avenge. Prussia has not yet relaxed her hold on her prostrate foe, and will not of her own accord, so long as a single sign of life remains. France has now no legal government, no political organization, and, what is the worst, recognizes no power competent to reorganize her society, and reconstitute the state, and has recognized none since the revolution of 1789. Since that world-wide event, she has had no government which she felt herself bound in conscience to obey, or towards which she had any genuine sentiment of loyalty. No government has been able to count on the national support if it became unfortunate, and ceased to gratify the national pride or vanity. The principles of 1789, avowedly accepted as the basis of his government by the emperor, are destructive of the very sentiment of loyalty, and deny the obligation in conscience of the people to obey authority any longer than it suits their convenience. If a plebiscitum or the popular vote could create a legal government, Louis Napoleon was and is still the legal sovereign of the French people, and, through them, of France. But the nation never had any sentiment of loyalty towards him, and abandons him as it did his greater uncle the moment he becomes unsuccessful. It never felt that it owed him allegiance, and how could it since he professed to hold from it? His government was based on plebiscitum, and could it bind the nation ? It was created by the people, was their creature, and can the creator be loyal to or bound by his own creation ? The nation can be bound only by a power above itself and be loyal only to an authority that comes from a source independent of the people.

Louis Napoleon held from 1789, and had the weakness to believe in plebiscitums. He seems never to have understood that universal suffrage can only create an agency, not a government. He was a disciple of the political philosophers of the eighteenth century, who erected revolution into a principle. These philosophers of the eighteenth century made no account of the continuity of the national life, of national habits, customs, and usages, and assumed that the convention might draw up an entirely new constitution according to an abstract and preconceived theory, without regard to the antecedents or past life of the nation, and without any support in the spiritual or supernatural order above the nation, get it adopted by a plurality of votes, and safely rely on Vinteret bien entendu, or enlightened self-interest, to preserve it and secure its successful practical workings as the fundamental law of the nation. The whole history of France for nearly a century, without any reference to our own experience, refutes the absurd theory of the philosophers, or sophists, rather. A French gentleman, still living, told us, before the recent collapse of the second French empire, that he had witnessed seventeen revolutions or changes of government in his native country, and he is in a fair way of living to see the number increased at least to a score. No government created by and held from the people can govern the people ; and, if reason alone or the calculations of interest were sufficient to sustain a government, no government or political constitution would be necessary. Paper constitutions are worthless, save so far as they express the living constitution of the nation. "Constitutions," Count de Maistre has well said "are generated, not made" ; and the merit of the American constitution is in the fact that it was born with the American people, not made by them.

France was originally constituted by the king, the nobility, the church, with some feeble remains of the old Roman municipalities, subsequently revived and expanded into the tiers etat. The balance of her original constitution had been disturbed, it is true ; the church and the nobility had been greatly enfeebled by the inordinate growth of monarchy on the one hand, and the expansion of the communal power on the other ; but these four fundamental elements of her national constitution still subsisted in more or less force down to the revolution on 1789. That revolution swept away king, church, and nobility, and proclaimed the tiers etat the nation, without any political organization or power to reconstitute legal or legitimate government. No nation is competent to constitute itself, for till constituted it is only a mass of individuals, incapable of any legal national act. Since then France has been trying in vain to make something out of nothing, and been continually alternating between the mob and despotism-despotism suppressing the mob, and the mob deposing despotism. She at this moment has no legal government, and the French people recognize no power able to reconstitute the state. Her old monarchical constitution, tempered by the church and her old nobility, and restrained by provincial customs, usages, privileges, and franchises, is swept away, and nothing remains of her political life that can serve as the germ or basis of reorganization, or the reestablishment of authority, competent, legally or morally, to bind the nation, restore order and protect liberty.

Worse than all else is the fact that 1789 swept away the church as a power in the state, and left the state it wished to constitute without any moral support, or power not dependent on the nation to sustain it. It threw the management of public affairs into the hands of men and parties that had no faith in God, who hated or despised religion, and believed only in themselves and the perfectibility of the species. This was the greatest evil of all. A nation may be politically disorganized, and yet be able to recover and reestablish a legal government, if it retains religion as an organized power, independent of the nation ; for it then retains a power that has its source in the supernatural, above the people. and able  to bind the national will in conscience, and give consistency and a divine sanction to the national ordinations. The first Napoleon had sense enough to see something of this, and to understand that he could not reorganize disorganized France without calling in religion to his aid ; he therefore solicited a concordat from the Holy See, and reestablished the church. But he had not sense enough to see and understand that even the church could not aid him if holding from himself, or if subjected in her administration to his own or the national will. He committed the usual mistake of secular sovereigns, that of insisting on keeping the control of the ecclesiastical administration in their respective dominions each in his own hands, of using the church to control his subjects, but allowing her no authority over himself.

Nothing can exceed the shortsightedness of secular sovereigns in seeking to keep religion in their respective dominions subject to their will as an adjunct of the police, rather than an independent power holding from God, and alike supreme over sovereigns and subjects. The present hostility to the church, even in old Catholic nations, is in no small measure owing to the fact that the sovereigns have sought to use her to preach submission, resignation, and patience to their subjects, and to uphold the authority of the government, however forgetful of its duties, tyrannical, or oppressive. They have sought to make her their instrument in governing or, rather, misgoverning their subjects, without the liberty to exercise the power which, as the representative of the divine authority on earth, she holds from God, to remind them of their duty to govern their subjects wisely and justly, to rebuke and place them under interdict, and even to declare their power forfeited when they persistently violate the law of God and oppress the people. They thus render her odious to the lovers of freedom. Hence we see the revolution far more bitter against the church than against the sovereigns, who, having rendered her odious by denying her the freedom and independence which are her right, and without which she can render no service either to power or to liberty, have everywhere abandoned her to the tender mercies of her enemies, in the vain hope of conciliating the revolution and saving their own heads. They throw her now as a sop to Cerberus.

The power of religion to sustain authority against the insurrection and rebellion of subjects, and liberty against the tyranny of the prince, is in her being an organic power in the nation, but independent of the national will, holding from God, not from the nation or its sovereign, and free to declare and apply the divine law alike to prince and people. Nationalized, she has no support outside of the nation, no power not derived from it, and can give the nation only what it already has in itself. It must follow, not lead the nation, and share its fate, which it has no power to avert. What can the Russian church do to restrain the tyranny of the czar? Or the church of England to check the progress of the revolution now going on and threatening to sweep away king, nobility, and the church first of all ? What can it do before the democracy become omnipotent ? Why is it that no gentile nation has ever shown any recuperative energy, but because gentilism, as the name implies, is nationalism, and the nation has in it only a national religion, and nothing outside, above, or independent of the national authority ? The gentile religion, deprived of catholicity, had to follow the nation, and to share its corruption and its fate. When the nation fell, it fell with it ; and the nation, when it fell, fell for ever, and disappeared from the list of nations. Protestantism in its essential principle is a revolt against catholicity, and the subjection of religion to the national will. It is essentially a revival of nationalism, or gentilism, and hence a Protestant nation has no recuperative energy, and, were it to fall, its fall would be like that of a gentile nation, a fall without the power to rise again. So it must be with every nation that has only a national or a nationalized religion.

Napoleon, who wished the church only as an adjunct of his own power, never understood any thing of all of this. He saw that the church was more conservative than Protestantism, and in fact so by virtue of her catholicity, that she had a stronger hold on the French people, and could serve him better than any Protestant sect ; but he did not see that the church, sought for a political end, is necessarily powerless even to that end, and that she serves a political end only when she is sought for her own sake, recognized and supported for a religious end, or as the free and independent kingdom of God on earth. Not understanding this, he refused her unrestrained liberty, and sought by his own legislation to subject her in his own dominions to his own will, and to compel her either to support his policy or to feel the full weight of his vengeance. She must support him, wear his livery, do his bidding, hold his enemies to be her enemies, or he would not tolerate her at all. She, as the church of God, could not accept this position and sink into a mere national church, however powerful the nation. She asserted her independence, and her independence alike of him and those he professed to govern. He commanded her to obey him : she refused. He quarrelled with her, dragged her supreme pontiff from his throne, despoiled him of his estates, imprisoned him, was excommunicated, became powerless before his enemies, was defeated, lost his throne, and was sent by his conquerors to fret his life away as a prisoner of England on the barren isle of St. Helena, leaving French society hardly less disorganized than he found it.

The restoration which followed was a return toward legitimacy, and under it France actually recuperated with a rapidity which seems marvellous to unbelievers. But it humiliated the nation, because it was imposed on it by foreign bayonets, and its work of reparation and expiation necessarily made it unpopular with all who had profited by the plunder and confiscations of the revolution, or by the wars of the empire. The spirit of 1789 still possessed a large portion of the population. The Bourbons returned, also, with the old Gallican traditions of the relation of church and state which had lost the monarchy, and prepared the people for the old revolution. They would have the church, indeed, but they would never recognize her rightful supremacy ; and, though giving France really the best government she had had for a long time, they at length fell before the intrigues of a younger branch of the family, supported by the combined factions of the Bonapartists, republicans, and socialists.

The monarchy of July or the Barricades was, notwithstanding the pretences of the juste milieu, or doctrinaries, a purely revolutionary government, improvised in the interests of disorder, without a shadow of legality, and without any thing, in the nation or in religion, on which it could rest ; and from the first it was spurned by the legitimists, the old national nobility, by the peasantry, the larger part of the republicans, and supported only by the bourgeoisie, or business classes, and the Bonapartists, the latter of whom hoped to make it a stepping-stone to the restoration of the Napoleonic empire. It had no hold on the nation, no power to reconstitute it on a solid and permanent basis ; and so, as a new generation appeared on the stage, it fell without a struggle before the Parisian mob, It was indifferent rather than avowedly hostile to the church, but it gave free scope to the infidel press, warred against the Jesuits, and maintained the infidel university in the monopoly of education. It, however, indirectly served the cause of religion by the little court favor the bishops could obtain, and who, in consequence, retired, and looked after the interests of religion in their respective dioceses, so that when a Parisian mob overthrew the citizen-king in February, 1848, and proclaimed the republic, the church was really more influential in France than she had been since 1682. She had influence enough to displace the party that made the revolution from the control of public affairs, to defeat and crush the reds and communists in the terrible days of June, 1848, to save French society from utter dissolution, and maintain order under a republic proclaimed by the friends of disorder. We are far from being convinced that, if the bishops and clergy had continued to show the energy in supporting the republic that they did in wresting it from the control of the infidels and destructives, they would not have been able to reconstitute French society on a Catholic and a republican basis, to the advantage alike of religion and society.

Certain it is, the church, though not officially supported by the republic, and with many and bitter enemies in France, was freer under it than she had been since the great western schism, and had a fair opportunity to prove to the world that she is wedded to no particular form of government or political organization, and can subsist as well, to say the least, in a republic as in a monarchy. We thought at the time, and we still think, though no enemy to monarchy and no blind defender of republicanism, that the French bishops and clergy committed a grave blunder in abandoning the republic and surrendering French society to the nephew of his uncle-a member of the Carbonari, a known conspirator against the pope in 1832, and a favorite with the red-republicans and socialists. It would be difficult to estimate the damage they did to France and to the cause of religion throughout the world. It will cost, perhaps, centuries of bitter struggle and suffering on the part of Catholics, to repair the sad effects of that blunder. But French Catholics had for ages been accustomed to rely on royal support, and they lacked the robust and vigorous habits under God of self-reliance. The bishops and clergy could easily have marched to a martyr's death, but they had with all their experience never learned the folly of putting their trust for the church in princes. They remembered the reign of terror ; they remembered, also, the flesh-pots of Egypt, and shrank from the hunger, thirst, and fatigue of the desert.

The new emperor found the French people divided into three principal parties-the church or Catholic party, which included the Bourbonists and the better party of the Orleanists ; the republican party, properly so-called ; and the socialistic or extreme radical party, represented in the recent civil war by the communists of Paris and of all Europe. His policy on commencing his reign was avowedly to keep the control of all these parties in his own hands, by leaving each party something to hope from his government, and allowing no one to gain the ascendency, and, as far as possible, engrossing the whole nation in the pursuit of material goods. He acknowledged the sovereignty of the nation, professed to hold from 1789, and favored universal suffrage, which was in accordance with the views of the republican party ; he adopted measures to secure employment to the working-men of the cities and towns, among whom was the great body of the socialists, or communists, by his encouragement of expensive national and municipal works ; and, to retain his hold on them and to protect himself from the assassins of the secret societies, he made his Italian campaign, drove the Austrians out of Italy, and prepared the way for Italian unification, and for despoiling the Holy Father of his temporal possessions and sovereignty ; raised the salaries paid to clergy as servants of the state, and repaired churches and abbeys as national monuments at the national expense, to please and secure the church party. But he suppressed the freedom the church had enjoyed under the republic, maintained the "organic articles" of his uncle, and all the old Gallican edicts and legislation against the freedom and independence of the church in full force, trusting that she would see a compensation for her loss of liberty in the increased pomp and splendor of her worship or the gilded slavery to which he reduced her.

The recrudescence of infidelity, atheism, or materialism was a marked feature under the second empire, and the influence of religion daily and hourly declined ; all the wisdom and energy of the government seemed exerted to despiritualize, if we may be allowed the word, the French nation, to extinguish whatever remained of its old chivalric sentiments and its old love of glory, once so powerful in every French heart, and to render the nation intent only on things of the earth, earthy. His policy, being always that of half-measures, disguised as moderation, was not suited to make him true friends. His Italian campaign against Austria was pushed far enough to make Austrians his enemies, but not far enough to make friends of the Italians. His consent to the annexation to Sardinia of the Italian duchies, the Neapolitan kingdom, and the AEmilian provinces of the Holy See, was enough to alienate the friends of international law, and to offend all conservatives and Catholics who had any sense of right or religion ; but not enough, so long as he protected the Holy Father in the sovereignty of the city of Rome, to gain him the good-will of the infidels, communists, secret societies, or of the partisans of Italian unity. His policy of never pushing matters to extremes, and of winning and controlling all parties, by leaving each something to hope from him, but never what any one specially desired, necessarily resulted, as might have been foreseen, in offending all parties, and in gaining the confidence of no one. He had by his half-and-half measures succeeded in alienating all parties in France, and, by his Crimean war, his Italian policy, and his half-league with Bismarck to drive Austria out of Germany and increase the territory and power of Prussia, had succeeded equally well in losing the confidence of all the European nations with which he had any relations, and in finding himself without an ally or a friend.

The elections of 1869 disclosed the very unsatisfactory fact that he really had no party in France, and no support but his own creatures, and if he still retained a feeble majority in the popular vote, say of five hundred thousand votes out of an aggregate of six millions and a half, it was a dread of another revolution, rather than from any attachment to him personally or to his government. This led him to a new line of policy, to abandon personal government, and to throw himself into the arms of the apparently moderate liberals, as distinguished on the one hand from the church party, and on the other from the socialists, communists, or destructives, that is, of the feeblest and least popular party in France, and consenting to the war against Prussia as his only chance of recovering, by military success, if he gained it, his popularity with the nation. His military expedition having failed, because he had, so to speak, unmartialized his empire, and because he was not really backed by the French people, he was obliged to surrender himself a prisoner of war with his army at Sedan, and his dynasty was expelled by a mob. He had abandoned the Holy Father in order to serve the liberals at home and abroad, deserted the cause of God, and God, and even the liberals, deserted him.

France is to-day not only prostrate under the iron heel of the Prussian, but is without any government in which any party in the nation has any confidence, and, if she recovers at all, her recovery must be slow and painful, and subject to numerous relapses. Prussia, as we have said, will not readily let go her hold, and never, so long as she can help it, suffer her to rise from her present condition. The remote cause is 1789, or rather the causes that led to that uncalled-for and most disastrous revolution ; but the proximate cause we must look for in the lack of wise and practical statesmanship in Louis Napoleon, who sought to govern France according to a preconceived theory, worked out in his closet or solitary studies. When he took the reins of government, the Catholic party were really in the ascendant ; and, he had been a wise and practical statesman, he would have seen that the only chance of reorganizing and governing France was not in laboring to maintain an equilibrium of parties, but in throwing himself resolutely on the side of the Catholic party, in studying and sustaining, without any compromise with the enemies of God and society, real Catholic interests, and in surrounding himself by thorough-going Catholic statesman. Catholicity alone offered any solid basis for the state or for authority, order, or liberty. The other parties in the nation were all, in varying degrees, the enemies alike of authority and liberty, and none of them offered any solid basis of government. He should, therefore, have placed his whole confidence in Catholic France, and set them aside, and, if they rebelled, have suppressed them, if necessary, by armed force. Had he done so, and acted in concert with the Holy Father and the religious portion of the nation, he would have reorganized France, given solidity to his power, and permanence to his throne. But from policy or from conviction he chose to hold from 1789, and was incapable of understanding that no government that tolerates the revolutionary principle, or is based on infidelity or the rejection of all spiritual or supernatural authority above the nation, can stand. So-called self-government, without the church of God, teaching and governing all men and nations in all things spiritual, is only a delusion, for the nation needs governing no less than the individual.

But as we have already hinted, there are remoter causes of the present condition of France, and, we may add, of all old Catholic nations ; and Catholics must not throw all the blame of that condition on the governments or the revolutionary spirit of 1789, still so rife. They have been and still are the great majority in all these nations, and why should they not be held responsible for the prevalence of the revolutionary spirit, and for the bad secular governments they have suffered to oppress the church? Why have they suffered an anti-Catholic public opinion to grow up and become predominant? Why have they suffered the rights and interests of religion to be sacrificed to the falsely supposed rights and interests of the secular order? Can they pretend that no blame attaches to them for all this?

France has, at least since the death of Philip II. of Spain, been the foremost Catholic nation of the world, and for a much longer time the leader of modern civilization ; and in her we may see the causes that have produced her own fall and that of other old Catholic nations. France, in this her supreme moment, has not, we believe, a single Catholic in the administration. The president is a believer in no religion ; the minister of foreign affairs is no Christian, and besides is a man of very small abilities ; the minister of worship and instruction says he is moral, but he is certainly no Catholic. The transition government, opposed as it is by all other parties in the nation, of course must at present seek to gain the support of the bishops and clergy, or what we call the church party. In Spain, though the majority are Catholics and have votes, the government is in the hands of the enemies of the church. In Italy, a handful of infidels and miscreants are able, though the great body of the people are Catholics and have votes, to control the nation, to violate with impunity every principle of private right and of international law, to confiscate the property of the church and of religious orders, and to despoil the Holy Father, take possession of his capital, and hold him a prisoner in his palace. Why is this suffered? Why is France and every other old Catholic nation ruled by men who have no regard for the church and are opposed to her freedom and independence? Whence in modern times comes this undeniable political inanity of Catholics? Why is it that popular literature, science, and public opinion are throughout the world decidedly anti-Catholic?

Certainly this is not owing to the inaptitude of Catholics as such ; for, through all the ages from the fall of the western Roman empire to the taking of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in the fifteenth century, Catholics were the governing class, and in no period of human history have civilization and the progress of society so rapidly advanced as during this period, which Digby calls the Ages of Faith. It is not, again, owing to any loss of life or vigor in the church herself, as is evinced by the success of her missions in Protestant nations and among savage and barbarous tribes. It is only in old Catholic nations that the church loses ground, and this proves that the cause is not in her. It can be traced to no Catholic cause, but must be traced to some defect in the Catholic administration in these old Catholic nations themselves. Catholics protect Catholic interests better, and have more influence in public affairs in Prussia, in Great Britain and Ireland, in Holland, and the United States, than in Austria, France, Spain, or Italy. Why is this?

One reason we may perhaps find in the failure of pious and devout Catholics to consider the difference between their duties in a Catholic state and what were their duties in the early ages under the pagan emperors. Under the pagan emperors, power was in the hands of their enemies, as it is in infidel, heretical, and schismatical nations now, and they had no political responsibility. All that was incumbent on them was to cultivate the private virtues, to do their best to sanctify their souls, to obey the constituted authorities in all things not contrary to the law of God, and, when the laws of the empire or the edicts of the emperors commanded them to do what the Christian law forbids, to refuse obedience and submit cheerfully to the penalty of disobedience, which in most cases we know was martyrdom. But when the empire became Christian, and especially when Christendom was reconstituted by the conversion of the barbarian nations that succeeded to the empire, the position and duties of Catholics or Christians in some respects changed. Power passed to their hands, and they became responsible for its exercise, and it was their duty to keep it in their own hands, and conform the national legislation and administration to the law of Christ. Catholics then incurred as Catholics a political responsibility which they had not under the pagan emperors, and which they were not free to throw off. The popes always understood this, and acted accordingly ; but the ascetic discipline which enjoined detachment from the world was by many devout and earnest souls construed to mean detachment from all part or interest in the political order or the government of Christendom. In consequence, the affairs of state fell, as under the pagan empire, into the hands of Caesar, or of those who were more ambitious to acquire honors and power than to protect and promote the interest of religion.

This has been more especially the case since the opening of modern history or the rise of Protestantism ; and we find among devout Catholics intent on saving their own souls a feeling that there is an incompatibility between politics and religion, and that he who would serve God must leave the affairs of state to men of the world ; which is, in effect, to deliver them over to the control of men who are servants of Satan rather than servants of God. The state has, therefore, been given over to the Enemy of souls, because Catholics were led, through a one-sided asceticism, to neglect to keep it in their own hands, and the church has been suffered to be despoiled, her pontiffs, priests, and religious have been suffered to be massacred, for the lack of a little resolution and energy on the part of Catholics to defend their religion and the sacred rights of their church and of society intrusted to their courage and fidelity. Thus a handful of Jansenists, Protestants, Jews, and infidels in France were permitted to establish a reign of terror over twenty-five millions of Catholics, exile their bishops, massacre or banish their priests and religious, suppress religious houses, close the churches, prohibit Catholic worship, abolish religion itself, decree that death is an eternal sleep, and substitute for the worship of the living God the idolatry of an infamous woman, placed upon the altar and adored as the goddess of reason. All this time, while all these horrors were enacted in the name of the nation, the twenty-five millions of Catholics, except in Brittany and La Vendee, made hardly a show of resistance, and suffered themselves to be led as sheep to the slaughter, forgetful that they owed it to France and to Christendom to sustain and govern their country as a Christian or Catholic nation. It is a duty to pray, and to pray always, but sometimes it is a duty for Christians to fight, and to have not only the courage to die in the battle for a holy cause, but to generous soul the far more difficult courage, the courage to kill. We have observed among French Catholics no lack of courage against a foreign foe, even in a war of more than doubtful necessity or justice, but a fearful lack of courage against the domestic foe, as in the late communist insurrection of Paris. They seem restrained by scruples of conscience.

Another reason may probably be found in the fact already hinted, that the mass of Catholics have been trained and accustomed to rely on external authority ; to look for protection and support not to God and themselves, but to the secular government. They have not been accustomed to rely on spiritual authority alone, but on the secular sovereign as a sort of episcopus externus. This had no evil consequences so long as the secular sovereign was faithful, and acted only under the direction and authority of, and in concert with, the supreme pontiff ; but it had a most disastrous effect when the sovereign acted in ecclesiastical matters in his own name, and when he turned against the pope, and sought to subject the church in his dominions to his own control or supervision, which was not seldom the case. But the clergy and people, accustomed to look to the secular authority to guard the fold against the entrance of the wolves, became slack in their vigilance and remiss in acquiring habits of self-reliance, and, with the inspirations of the Holy Ghost, of self-defence. Consequently, when kings and princes ceased to keep guard, or when they turned wolves themselves, as in the Protestant revolt, the flock was powerless, knew not to whom to look for support, and had no resource but to yield themselves to be devoured by schism, heresy, or apostasy. This is now the case with the great body of the Catholic people in all old Catholic countries. With the vain hope of conciliating the revolution and preserving their thrones, the sovereigns of Europe, without a single exception, have abandoned or turned against the church, and there is not one on whom the Holy Father can count. He is alone, with the kings and princes of the earth either hostile or indifferent to him, while the old habit of relying on the secular authority for support, for the moment at least, paralyzes nearly the whole body of Catholics in all old Catholic nations.

Another reason, growing out of the last, may be found in the habit that has grown up since the rise of Protestantism, of relying on the external almost to the exclusion of the internal authority of the Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost dwells in the church, and teaches and governs through her as his external organ ; he dwells also in the souls of the faithful, and inspires and directs them, and gives vigor, robustness, and self-reliance to their piety. Protestantism assailed the external authority of the church, and made it necessary for Catholics to turn their attention to its defence, and to show that no spirit that disregards it, or that does not assert it and conform to it, can be the spirit of truth, but is the spirit of error, in reality Antichrist, who, the blessed Apostle John tells us, was already in his time in the world ; yet it may be that the defence of what we call the external authority of the Holy Ghost, or authority of the church as a teaching and governing body, has caused some neglect in the great body of the faithful of the interior inspirations and guidance of the Holy Ghost in the individual soul. No Catholic will misunderstand us. We appreciate as much as any one can the external authority of the church, her supremacy, her infallibility ; we accept ex animo the supremacy and infallibility of the successor of St. Peter in the see of Rome, as defined in the recent Council of the Vatican, and should be no better than a Protestant if we did not ; but that external authority is not alone, or alone sufficient, as every Catholic knows, for the soul, and its acceptance is not sufficient for salvation. The Holy Ghost must dwell in the individual soul, forming "Christ within, the hope of glory." We do not mean to imply that any of our ascetic writers or spiritual directors overlook the need of the interior inspirations and guidance of the Holy Spirit, or fail to give it due prominence, but that its authority has not had due prominence given it in our controversial literature and in our expositions of Catholic faith intended for the public at large.

All these reasons have combined to reduce France, so long the foremost Catholic nation in the world, to her present pitiable condition, hardly more pitiable than that of Italy, Spain, Austria, and the Spanish and Portuguese states of this continent. What is the remedy, or is there none? We do not believe there is no remedy. We do not believe it, because the church proved her power in France under the republic of 1848, which originated in hostility to her still more than to monarchy ; we do not believe it, for we see Catholicity still able to convert the heathen ; we do not believe it, because we see Catholicity vigorous and flourishing, and every day gaining ground in Protestant nations, where the church has no external support, and receives no aid from the state, and is thrown back on her own resources as the kingdom of God on earth, as she was under the pagan emperors. These facts prove that she is by no means effete, or incapable of making further conquests. Her decline in old Catholic nations is no sign of weakness or decay in her, but is due to the imperfect training, to the timidity and helplessness of her children, deprived as they are of their accustomed external supports.

The remedy is not, as La Mennais contended, in breaking with the sovereigns and forming an alliance with the revolution ; but in training her children to those interior habits and robust virtues that will enable them to dispense with the external props and supports of society, and in asserting for herself in old Catholic nations the freedom and independence she has here, or had in pagan Rome, though it be done at the expense of her temporal goods and of martyrdom. The people of God, under the old law, sought support in an arm of flesh ; the arm of flesh failed, and they were carried away into captivity. The arm of flesh fails the people of God again. There are Christians, but there is no longer a Christendom. Modern society is hardly less pagan than the ancient society the church found when she went forth from Jerusalem to convert the world. There is no reliance to be placed in the horseman and chariots of Egypt. The whole world is to-day, as in the time of the apostles, a missionary world ; and, perhaps, the greatest embarrassment of the Holy Father is encountered in the fact that Catholics in old Catholic nations cannot see it, but persist in being trained and governed as they were when there was a Christendom. Everywhere the church is by the defections of the governments become again in all nations a missionary church, and her bishops and priests need everywhere to be trained and formed to be wise, persevering, and effective missionaries. Catholics must everywhere be made to understand that it is not the church that needs the state, but the state that needs the church.

France without the church has no power to reorganize the state. She has not yet subdued the revolutionary elements which have so confused her, nor loosed the hold of the conqueror upon her throat, and her present impoverished government deserves the confidence of no party in the nation. In itself, the Thiers government is utterly powerless. It needs the church, and cannot stand without her. French Catholics should understand this, and boldly assume the lead of public affairs, if they are men and love their country, and make, as they now can, the republic, under an emperor, king, or president, it matters not much which, a truly Catholic republic, and France, now so low and weak, may become again the nucleus, as under Clovis and St. Clotilde, of a reconstructed Christendom, constituted differently as to politics, it may be, but unchanged as to religion from that which has now passed away. The church never dies, never changes, and cannot be other than she is ; but the political organization of Christendom may change with time and events. It changed when the barbarian nations displaced the Roman empire ; it changed when Charlemagne closed the barbarous ages, and opened the way for the feudalism of the middle ages ; it changed again when, through the revolution inaugurated by Luther, absolute monarchy succeeded to feudalism in Catholic hardly less than in Protestant Europe ; and it may change again when order succeeds to the present revolutionary chaos. It is not likely that Christendom will be reconstructed on its old political basis, whether it is desirable that it should be or not, and, for ourselves, we think that all who hope to see it so reconstructed are sure to be disappointed. We think it not improbable that, when Christendom is reconstituted, it will be politically, on a republican and anti-monarchial basis. Pure absolutism, whether that of Caesar or that of the people, is incompatible with the recognition of the divine sovereignty, and consequently with religion. Neither form of absolutism can form the political basis of a reconstructed Christendom ; but the probabilities are that, when things settle into their places, and the new order begins to emerge, it will be based on some form of republicanism, in which the organic people will take the place of the monarch.

The present condition of things is certainly sad ; but we see nothing in it that should lead us to despair of the future. Catholics in old Catholic nations have needed, and perhaps still need, to learn that the church can subsist and conquer the world without any external support of the secular government, but that secular government cannot subsist and discharge properly its duties to society without the church. We who live in Protestant countries, and see society daily dissolving before our eyes, have no need to be taught that lesson ; we have already learned it by heart. But the mass of Catholics in old Catholic nations, even of the educated as well as the uneducated, as yet only imperfectly understand it, and consequently render it difficult, if not impossible, for the church to adopt fully and promptly the measures she might judge the most proper to meet the wants of the times. They do not see that the old Christendom has gone, beyond the hope of recovery. Providence, it seems to us, has permitted the present state of things as necessary to disembarrass the church of their inopportune conservatism, and to force them to learn and profit by the lesson which every day becomes more and more necessary for them to heed, if the prosperity of religion is to be promoted, the salvation of souls to be cared for, and the preservation of society assured. The measures taken are severe-very severe, but there are scholars that can be made to learn only by the free use of the ferula. Especially do the Catholics of France need to learn this lesson, for in no other country have Catholics made their religion so dependent on the secular order.

The fall of France, notwithstanding the faith, piety, and charity of so large a portion of her people, will probably prove only a temporary injury to Catholic interests. France has fallen because she has been false to her mission as the leader of modern civilization, because she has led it in an anti-Catholic direction, and made it weak and frivolous, corrupt and corrupting. Providence is severely punishing her, but has not, we trust, cast her off for ever. She has in her bosom still millions of Catholics, and these have only to come forward in the strength of their religion, displace the enemies of God, take themselves the management of the affairs of the nation, and show the wisdom and energy they did in 1848, when they put down the red-republicans and socialists. They will then enable France, in spite of the grasp of the conqueror and the fierce opposition of the destructives, to recover, slowly and painfully, it may be, but nevertheless to recover, and to prove herself greater and more powerful than ever. When France becomes once more a really Catholic nation, the revolution will be extinguished, infidelity will lose its popularity, atheism will no longer dare to show its head, and a reaction in favor of the church will take place, so strong and so irresistible that the whole world will be affected by it, and the nations that have so long been alienated from unity will be brought back within the fold.

The only obstacle to this grand result which we see is in the timidity, in the lack of energy on the part of Catholics in the assertion and defence of their religion, or in their want of courage to confide alone in God for success. Adversity, we think, can hardly fail to reform and reinvigorate them, and to direct their attention to their true source of strength as Catholics or the children of God. They will learn from it to adhere more closely to the chair of Peter, and to rely more on the internal direction of the Holy Ghost, and less on the aid of the secular order. No doubt, the present state of things imposes additional labors as well as sufferings on the bishops and clergy in old Catholic nations, and requires some modifications of the education of the priesthood now given in our seminaries. Our Levites must be trained for a missionary world, not for an old Catholic world ; but this need alarm no one ; for the greater the labors and sacrifices in the service of God, the greater the merit and the reward.