The origins of conservatism
Review of Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
McMahon subscribes to the liberal/Marxist position that the French Terror was a “necessary” response to counterrevolutionary opposition and was not the original program of the revolutionaries. However, a close examination of historical documents and events contradicts the standard Marxist analysis, as we have documented in Chapter 22.
The counterrevolutionary argument against the French Revolution consisted of highlighting the peril of confusing freedom with license, appeal to the patriarchal family as the source of social order, elevation of recent history of France as a time of order and high literary accomplishment, criticism of the theory of abstract rights as opposed to concrete social realities, and the need for religious support for monarchy. McMahon characterizes the counterrevolution as extremist and unwilling to compromise, fearing that the ideas of the philosophes would imperil the social order. McMahon characterizes the French ounterrevolution as modern, for tradition up to this time had been unexamined and undefended by conservative political theory.
Although the conservatives opposed free speech and freedom of the press as revolutionary strategies, they also engaged in pamphleteering and publishing as a counter to the revolutionary literature. This French Catholic critique of Enlightenment found its way to Eastern Europe, Latin America, Italy, and Spain and was the foundational literature for modern right-wing ideologies.
As early as 1750 the critique of Enlightenment doctrines preoccupied writers of Catholic journals. One reason for the violent opposition to the philosophes was their rhetoric, which included personal defamations as well as rational arguments. Conservative salons and presses existed, but they are not well documented in the historical record. Membership consisted of aristocrats as well as priests, bureaucrats, and professional conservative pamphleteers. This opposition was weak and disunited. The conservative arguments against the philosophes sound familiar as they are often repeated against the Left today:
- The doctrine of materialism was inadequate to explain either the material world or man;
- a morality based on self-interest and pleasure could only dissolve the social fabric and leave the innocent at the mercy of scoundrels;
- radical individualism and love of self would lead to denial of social responsibility;
- both government and society would be sacrificed to the whims of individuals, destroying the social order.
The anti-philosophes believed that radical doctrines emerged from pride, involved endless speculations that were erroneous and heretical, and were based on nothing more than fragile and ever-changing speculations, not reason per se. The anti-philosophes at first embraced the criticisms of Rousseau, who held to a more conventional morality, bewailed the corruption of the age, and elevated sentiment and emotion as vital human faculties.
By 1775, the clergy were alerted that a cult of atheism hostile to religion had formed, who intended to engage in every sacrilege and destruction in open war. The danger of this sect was elevated to a greater threat than presented by any previous heresy as its aims were to overrun and govern the entire world. Once passions were inflamed against the Church and the revolutionaries were inculcated with love of money and sex, all moderation would be lost and the revolution would give rise to monsters. The proposed radical social contract theory was viewed as an assault on the foundations of social order. Divorce by contract and establishment of children’s rights would break the great chain of authority stemming from God to the state to the family and transform sober and devout citizens into depraved and corrupt brigands promoting anarchy. Liberty and equality were seen as slogans promoting dissolution, and sovereignty placed in the people as mere rhetoric for schemes of destruction and terror. The result would be murder, massacre, carnage, patricide, sons murdering fathers, regicide, and a river of blood. Such predictions were common in the decade of the 1780s.
The abbe Barruel in Memoires pour sevir a l’histoire du jacobinisme wrote that the sect of the philosophes had been working for over fifty years to undermine the monarchy and religion. The masters of the sect used unwitting agents in their secret conspiracy. Barruel publicized the Illuminati plot as early as the 1770s. The abbe Gerard in Comte de Valmont also chronicled the conspiracy against God and king. The abbe Crillon in Memoires philosophiques du Baron described secret meetings, initiations, and treacherous plots of the philosophes. The abbe Bertrand Capmartin de Chaupy also published a work in 1788 warning of the system of libertinism and impiety of Voltaire under the control of his agent d’Alembert. Capmartin warned of half of France drowning in a river of blood and the other half falling prey to foreign enemies.
The Catholics were not the only ones who were aware of the conspiracy. Rousseau in his Dialogues warned of a sect plotting to achieve European supremacy, engaged in secret intrigues and subterranean machinations, propagating their ideas through young students initiated into their secrets. A large network of accomplices kept watch over one another, preventing publicity and making sure that all remained faithful to the plot. Rousseau knew the philosophes personally, so his revelations cannot be dismissed as the ravings of a misguided lunatic.
This body of literature supports the contention that enemies of the Revolution were prepared well in advance and gave fair warning of the disaster that was about to befall France, even before the first meeting of the Estates General. Others who echoed this warning of conspiracy and violence included Antoine Sabatier, F.X. Feller, Simeon-Prosper Hardy, and the archbishop of Paris, Antoine-Elenore-Leon Le Clarc de Juigne. Augustine Chaillon de Joinville warned that nothing sacred would remain in the crown or church. These warnings were reaffirmed by early revolutionary activities appealing to the authority of the philosophes.
With the passage of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in August, 1789 and the assault on the Catholic church that followed shortly thereafter, the counterrevolutionary theorists had all the confirmation they needed that the plot was now going into effect. The philosophes had directly inspired the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the anti-Catholic sentiments. Conservatives veiwed the Declaration’s guarantees of tolerance as only a sham to introduce persecution of religion. The French people had been corrupted by the philosophes, and now there was no hope that morally corrupt leaders would be able to rule effectively. Demagogues and propagandists would deceive the people, undermining any claim to a natural sovereignty in public opinion.
Various voices warning of conspiracy named as revolutionary agents the Jansenists, the Protestants, the Illuminati, the Rosicrucians, the Freemasons, and the philosophes. The Jacobins were only the last to join the conspiracy. The Counter-Reformation had already warned against granting religious tolerance to Protestants and had linked the Jansenists with the Protestants as potential revolutionaries. The Jansenists were prominent in the National Assembly at the time of the persecutions against the Catholics.
As Diderot wrote: “The people would only be happy when the last king had been hung by the entrails of the last priest.” Were the people made happy by the regicide and the holocaust against the Church? Perhaps some were, but Diderot failed to mention the river of blood that would follow aimed at the citizens of France. And so here we have the fallacy of the doctrine of revolution, the incitement of the masses to violence aimed at corrupt authorities without suspecting that they themselves would also be the target of violent control by the new authorities.
In the decades before 1790 the masonic lodges were hotbeds of agitation for radicalism, rationalism, constitutionalism, and anti-Catholicism. Others who agreed to this theory of masonic conspiracy included the abbe Maury and the Count of Antraigues, who were active in the National Assembly. Pope Pius VI denounced the masonic plot in 1791.
In Germany the scholar Johannes Rogalla von Bieberstein was one among many conservatives who traced the antisocial doctrines from the philosophes, Freemasons, Jews, liberals, and socialists. Pope Pius IX denounced liberalism as one of the principal errors of the modern world in his Syllabus of 1864. The charge of conspiracy contained the idea that the revolutionaries presented themselves as milder than they really were.
By 1791, when the new Civil Constitution of the Clergy required an oath of allegiance and the revolutionaries moved Voltaire’s remains to the Church of Sainte-Genevieve in order to worship him as a god, the conspiracy theorists could claim that they had been right all along.
In 1792 the Paris mob invaded the city’s prisons and massacred over 1100 opponents of the revolution, including over 200 priests. The next day the National Convention proclaimed France a republic, and within a few months it had declared war on Great Britain, the Dutch Republic, and Spain. In 1793 King Louis XVI was sent to the guillotine. France fell into civil war as the revolutionaries hiked taxes and instituted the draft. 16,000 were executed by guillotine in the Terror of 1793-1794, most of them innocent peasants and workers. Thousands more were killed without trial by ghastly methods, including dynamiting prisoners in caverns and on boats.
The revolutionaries replaced the Christian calendar with one of their own invention, attempted to remove all outward manifestations of France’s Christian past, and invented new pagan festivals to replace Christianity. Notre Dame Cathedral became the Temple of Reason, where revolutionaries worshipped Franklin and Voltaire before the altar of philosophy. Tens of thousands of Catholics fled France. The counterrevolutionary polemicists had proven prophetic.
Liberal historians continue to insist that the principles of the revolution were laudable and had been subverted by Robispierre and a handful of bloodthirsty terrorists. Jean-Thomas Richer-Serizy wrote that the philosophes and encyclopedists needed to explain how thirty tyrants were able to find 300,000 executioners, and his answer was, “your writings are in their pockets.” J.M.B. Clement further added that, to condemn the Terror in its aftermath without condemning the principles upon which it was founded was a mask of hypocrisy. Joseph de Maistre observed that “Voltaire made Marat, and it is certain he did more evil than him.”
Rousseau had been placed in the Pantheon in 1794, and the conservatives soon included him in their invective. The abbe Barruel compiled quotes from their works and their private correspondence showing incontrovertibly that the philosophes had conspired to destroy Christianity once and for all.
Freron warned in 1772, “If the wise philosophes of the century, who demand tolerance with so much ardor and interest…were ever themselves at the head of government, armed with the sword of sovereignty or of law, they would perhaps be the first to deal severely with those who had the audacity to contradict their opinions.” Rousseau had predicted that, if the philosophes became masters, they would be the most intolerant of men.
But mere words could not stop the plans for continued Terror. When Babeuf attempted to overthrow the Directorate in 1797, he again appealed to Rousseau, Diderot, and Helvetius for his planned Conspiracy of Equals. The anti-revolutionary argument then spread to Spain, Italy, Portugal, and South America, as did the revolutionary doctrines. In 1789 a conspiracy was uncovered in Brazil; the revolutionaries were found to possess works by Voltaire, Condillac, Raynal, and Diderot.
The anti-revolutionary warnings first came from Catholic writers, but Protestants soon joined their cause. John Robison’s Proofs of a Conspiracy remains to this day one of the foundational documents of modern conservatism. Edmund Burke’s criticism of the French Revolution and defense of the English parliamentary system originated the stream of conservative thought that had the most appeal in the United States.
Edmund Burke wrote to the abbe Barruel in 1797 that “I have known myself, personally, five of your principal conspirators; and I can undertake to say from my own certain knowledge, that so far back as the year 1773, they were busy in the plot you have so well described. Barruel’s four-volume work exposing the origins of Jacobinism was translated into English, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, and Russian. It became one of the most widely read books of the time.
John Robison’s Proofs of a Conspiracy was translated into French, German, and Dutch. In America, Timothy Dwight, President of Yale University, denounced the plot hatched by Voltaire, Frederick II, the Encyclopedists, and the Illuminati to destroy the Christian religion and the French monarchy. Alexander Hamilton charged the republicans in general and Thomas Jefferson in particular with links to the Bavarian Illuminati. This controversy was of chief importance during the presidency of John Adams, and historian Gordon Wood believes America was brought to the verge of civil war in 1798 as a result of the feelings engendered by these charges.
Former philosophe Jean-Francois La Harpe published Du Fanatisme dans la langue revolutionnaire in 1797, in which he charged that the revolutionaries’ redefinition of religion as fanaticism was one way they had redefined language to justify their extremism. The plastic nature of the definition of abstractions such as liberty and equality was another example. Chateaubriand argued that, without a religion to temper the passions of men, every village would need a police force, prisons, and an executioner to deal with the unrestrained selfish passions of men. Human happiness and social stability could not be built upon the foundation of the profane. The substitution of abstractions for sentiments could only desiccate the soul; the elevation of reasoning, computation, and combination must replace the charm of good sentiments and healthy actions.
The counterrevolutionaries managed to make a compelling argument for prejudice, repression, and censorship. Since the reputations of leading figures in France had been falsely libeled by a free press, there was danger in this freedom. Licentious works had encouraged the people in irresponsibility; such works deserved to be purged from the libraries. Tolerance had become a slogan suggesting virtue but was really indifference to truth and a code for barbarism. Literary societies had been the basis for revolutionary groups; to protect the nation, they needed to be suppressed. Prejudice, defined as the accumulated wisdom of the centuries, was superior to the call to question authority on every matter, which could only lead to anarchy.
The counterrevolutionary philosophy was an organic view of society in which each institution supported the rest for the good of the whole. The elevation of individual freedom as the highest value could only result in human misery as these institutions broke down or fell under the control of tyrants. The counterrevolutionaries found a golden age of high culture in the age of Louis XIV, when Racine, Corneille, Pascal, and La Rochefoucauld were writing elevated thoughts in high elegance and good taste. The desolate doctrines of the philosophes could only lead to a decadence in literature corresponding to the social disorder they promoted.
The Catholics believed France needed to be reclaimed for the Church, and this activity accelerated in the 1820s. In 1821 the Church of Sainte Genevieve was restored to religious worship and the remains of Voltaire and Rousseau were removed. Statues were repaired, churches rebuilt, and crowds numbering in the tens of thousands gathered to reconsecrate sacred sites and hear condemnation of the revolutionaries. The works of the philosophes were burned in public fires, and a system of libraries was established to inoculate the faithful against the reintroduction of the doctrines of the philosophes. This system failed financially, however, within a few years. Hopes for a rapproachment between the Church and the throne of France were dashed with the reign of the last Bourbon, Charles X. Revolutions in Spain, Portugal, and Italy served notice that the battle between liberalism and conservatism would become a long and epic war.
Babuef drew from the same revolutionary doctrines, as documented in Nicholas Bunarroti’s History of the Conspiracy of Equals, published in 1828. Buonarroti organized revolutionary activities in Germany, Spain, and France until the 1840s, when Karl Marx took over The League of Just Men and renamed Illuminism as Communism. The history of Illuminism from 1800 is well documented in Fire in the Minds of Men by James Billington, historian of revolution and our current Librarian of Congress. The aims of revolution have remained the same to the present day — duping the innocents to support a mafia devoted to control over the whole world, by whatever means necessary to achieve total control.
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