French philosophies of the romantic period

Front matter

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A University Centennial itt from Professor Allen R. Benham University of Washington Library

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Preface

The following essays on French philosophies of the Romantic Period attempt to study the philosophic background of one of the most interesting political and cultural periods in French history. Politically France was adjusting herself to normal life after the upheaval of the Revolution; she was experimenting with new and indeed unheard of political fashions. One of the steadiest dynasties in Europe was to be replaced by a series of short-lived governments, differing not only in structure from their predecessors but in the very ends which informed them. Culturally France was no less the scene of experimentation. If the zesthetic revolution did not appear so soon as the political, it was no less intense and there were times when it looked as if it might be almost as bloody. What was called first “ the new spirit ” and later “‘ romanticism ”’ divided the world of art into sects as hostile to one another as émigrés and Jacobins.

Behind the political and zsthetic changes lay certain beliefs. Whether the beliefs determined the changes or the changes the beliefs we shall not take upon ourselves to settle. What this book is concerned with is making the proper correlation. Such a concern has had an unfortunate effect. It has neglected at times the philosophies to the advantage of the motives behind them or before them and given the philosophers the air of men ix x PREFACE who were not wholly sincere in the carrying out of their life’s interest.

The pages which follow have another characteristic which may prejudice philosophers against them. They do not form what is often called a “‘ critical exposition ” of their subject matter. I have not been blind to the logical errors of these men’s thinking; nothing would have been easier than to point some of them out. But only when the pompousness or insolence of the author grew intolerable have I yielded to the temptation of suggesting how little ground there was for his selfappraisal. I have not been interested in the truth and falsity of these ideas; I have been interested in their rise and decline. This book is a portrait, not intentionally a caricature, and has no moral purpose. It is addressed not only to students of philosophy but to students of civilization in general. If anyone wishes to pursue his investigation of these philosophies further, the footnotes will suggest ample material to be examined.

Begun in 1921 this manuscript was completed in 1924. Were I to begin it now I should undoubtedly attack the problem differently, emphasizing certain points which are here obscured, obscuring perhaps certain which are not here emphasized. Some of the chapters would have new footnotes referring the reader to publications which have appeared since I ended actual writing. But on the whole I find little in it which I should feel inaccurate,

PREFACE xi

My warmest thanks are due to my friend and colleague, Professor A. O, Lovejoy, who, though he would not agree with some of the opinions expressed here, has aided me in every way to get them into print; to Professors Charles Cestre and Lévy-Bruhl of the Sorbonne for their numerous kindnesses to me and to their fellows in France who helped make my stay in their country pleasurable and profitable.

Gab:

BALTIMORE, May 1925.

Chapter One The Philosophical Situation After The Revolution

One of the first things which Napoleon attempted when he knew that his power was assured was to undermine the prestige of the revolutionary changes in France’s internal economy and to strengthen those forces which would favor a personal dictatorship. One of the first groups to suffer was naturally the philosophers, for on their shoulders lay the blame for overthrowing the monarchy, and in the perpetuation of their teachings was the perpetuation of democratic ideas. How just the blame is has been a matter of dispute to this day. For it is not easy to determine in just what responsibility for a political event consists. In all fairness opinion may be said to divide on this particular question as follows: the negative, those who admire the Revolution, but not the philosophers; those who admire the philosophers but not the Revolution; the affirmative: those who admire the Revolution and the philosophers; those who admire neither the Revolution nor the philosophers.’

It was popular as early as the Revolution itself to call the philosophers its founders. Certainly the burial of

1The extent of this dispute is well indicated in the preface to Roustan; “Les Philosophes et la Société Frangaise au XVIII° Siécle,” P. 191.

2 I

Voltaire and Rousseau in the Panthéon is evidence that the people thought—falsely or truly—that they were somehow connected causally with the events then going on. As for the lesser lights, a report of the Prefecture of Police of the 4th of Vendémiaire, Year IX (26 September 1800) when the Revolution was calming down, reads, “ There is going to appear under the title, ‘Etrennes de l'Institut national et des Lycées,’ a literary review of the Year VIII, 1 vol. in-12, 204 pages, printer Molfer. At the head of this collection is a very satirical letter to the Institut which is utterly outrageous. It would seem that this organization is merely an assembly of men conspiring against sane morals, enemies of true philosophy (very evidently that according to the author to which royalism attributes the birth of the Revolution) ; in short a crowd of atheists, etc., etc.” ” A year after the Prefecture of Police is less friendly. It reports, “ The philosophers are complaining that people are trying to attribute to them all the evils of the Revolution and the destruction of their former institutions. They are saying that the scorn which people affect towards them is discouraging talent and knowledge, and that it will end by delivering them over to the indiscretion of the priests, who even now are not sparing their feelings in their speeches and who soon will point them out to the people as the authors of all the evils which they have suffered, and that, in this way, they will draw to them the general hatred of the

* Aulard; “ P. sous le Consulat,” P. 1903, I 675.

public. Following such complaints they permit themselves most often remarks against the government.” *

Some men of course had sense enough to see that a philosopher or even several, cannot make a popular movement. The Décade, the philosophical review of the time, protested on the ground that the philosophers had suffered too much from the Revolution to have been responsible for it—a strange argument—and La Minerve Francaise (Vol. III), the paper of Benjamin Constant, in a review published some years later of the Abbé Georgel’s “ Mémoires pour servir a l’histoire des événements de la fin du 18° siécle,” protests that the guilt of kings, of the upper classes, of the ministers had more to do with starting the Revolution than the philosophers had. But perhaps the justest remark on this subject is by Professor Aulard made in another connection but applicable here, “If they tried to destroy Christianity, it was not because Voltaire had said, ‘Ecrasez l’infame,’ or because the Abbé Raynal had constructed the theory of the rights of the State upon individual conscience: It was because the Catholic priest was conspiring with the enemy from without.” *

If the philosophers were to suffer from Napoleon’s rise, the Church was to benefit. For the Church had always been the friend of the monarchy. What was

°7d., II 590, Report of the 5th of Brumaire, Year X.

* Aulard; “Le Culte de la Raison et le Culte de l’Etre Supréme,” 3d ed., P. 1909, p. 15. See also Roederer’s defence of philosophy, quoted by Picavet; “Les Idéologues,” P. 1890, p. Teena needed in France, as Napoleon saw it, was men who would teach that the enduring commands respect and obedience, that the passing is of no moment. It was on the Eleatic rock that the Church had founded her power far more than on the restless lake of Galilee, and as she had been the foe of the philosophers from Voltaire to Destutt de Tracy, so she was the friend of whatever power would make for order, for stability, for permanence, for unity.

In reading the works of the philosophers of the Revolution, of either the intellectualists or the sentimentalists, one is puzzled to know whether their opposition to the Church was the effect of their philosophies or whether it was the inspiration. Both might easily be true.

The followers of Condillac, the Idéologues, believed in the cognitive primacy of sensations, which—as Cabanis was going to show—varied with age, sex, temperament, climate, diet, health, and the like. He had laid out his work as early as 1798 before the Second Class of the Institut, in a memoir read on the 7th of Pluvidse, “Considerations on the Study of Man, and Upon the Relations of His Physical Organism to His Intellectual and Moral Faculties.” To such men ideas were merely compounds of sensations, and when they wished to un-: derstand an idea, they analysed it into the sensations of which it was composed.* Early in the Revolution one of their group, Arbogast, has proposed that this method

* See Destutt de Tracy’s memoir on the metaphysics of Kant,

“Mem. de I’Institut National des Sciences et Arts: Sciences Morales et Politiques,’ IV 578.

should be used even in composing elementary school books. It alone, he felt, could keep the youth of the land from the shadowy method of abstract principles, of vague and general ideas which had reigned hitherto.’ A section of the Institut existed for no other purpose than the breaking down of ideas into their elementary parts.

If all ideas were made of such matter, then the ideas of God, freedom, and immortality, or, if you choose, divine right, authority, hereditary rule, might be inferred to be nothing more than sensory complexes. Habit, repetition, might be seen to have fixed them in the minds of men, so that they had no more enduring value than any other habit, that of wearing wigs or carrying swords. To be sure, if it could be shown that some sensation corresponded to them, as the sensation

* Arbogast; “Rapport et projet de décret sur la composition des livres élémentaires destinés a l’instruction publique,” P. n. d. “ Analysis is to the sciences, it is to teaching, what liberty is to political institutions; both make a man feel his worth and contribute to his perfection. Analysis pertains to all the branches of human knowledge; throughout it is the instrument which guides one to inventions and discoveries; it alone gives that rectitude of judgment, that feeling for truth which characterizes the man who is truly educated.

“The analytic method should, then, reign everywhere in well ordered studies. One should never offer a single idea, a single word, unless analysis has made it exact and precise. One should never present any result which does not derive from a preceding analysis. Let us beware of that shadowy method which has ruled in the greater part of text-books, of those abstract principles which have misled men up to the present, of those vague and general ideas which have been too often realized, although they do not exist in nature.”

of a color corresponds to our idea of a color, the case might be easier. But the Church, for one, did not wish the truth of its doctrines to be based on anything as personal as sensations which one might or might not have. It had made that clear in its constant opposition to all forms of mysticism. The State was in the same situation. What could the Church do in such circumstances? What happened to such doctrines as vicarious atonement, the Trinity, inherited guilt, whose dependence upon a realistic logic had been well enough illustrated in the twelfth century? What happened to the privileged position of the Clergy, their supervisory power over education, their monopoly of truth? Their high estate depended upon their peculiar knowledge of God and His ways, and if that dwindled to a mosaic of sensations, colored by age and temperament and attainable by the least clerical of souls, what was to become of them?

The followers of Rousseau, the sentimentalists, shrank in horror from this sensationalism. Something in their hearts told them that God dwells in the beauty of the landscape and in the vastness of the sky. Robespierre himself, not their least picturesque adherent, cried out in the Assembly that he would have been lost in the struggles and intrigues of politics if he could not have lifted his soul to that Eternal Being who seemed to him “to watch over the French Revolution in an especial manner.” * The mystics, who may be grouped

"Quoted in Joyau; “La Philos. en Fr. pendant la Rév. (1789-1795),” P. 1893, p. 256. ;

with the sentimentalists, followed the same lead. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Saint-Martin as well, both named by the supposedly atheistic Assembly as guardians for the Dauphin, were on the best of terms with the Deity. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre saw His hand even in the shaping of melons for the knife; Saint- Martin saw little besides Him in the world.* Robespierre had no great difficulty in making the Convention decree that “the French people recognize the existence of the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul.” So our own Benjamin Franklin, author of a treatise in defence of polytheism in his youth, pleaded for the offering of prayers in the Continental Congress, on the ground that God—who had won the war for the colonists—had been wronged by their omission.”

But in spite of their pronounced opposition to atheism, this group too was hostile to the Church. The same decree of the 18th of Floréal, Year II, which recognizes that God exists, adds that the cult worthy of Him is the practice of manly virtues. It says nothing about Catholic worship. It was no concession to the Clergy. In presenting it for consideration, Robespierre turned towards the ecclesiastical representa-

* But see Franck; “ Philos. Mystique en Fr. a la Fin du 18° siécle,” P. 1866, esp. ch. vi.

®*From a contemporary reprint. The text can be found in Aulard; “Le Culte etc.,” ch. xxiii.

See “ The Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 etc.,” reported by James Madison, ed. Hunt and Scott, N. Y., 1920

(Pub. of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace), p. 181.

tives and cried, “ Fanatics, hope for nothing from us ... ; ambitious priests, do not expect that we shall work to re-establish your empire.” How could men who saw God in their hearts accept the revelations of a priesthood? For them the source of religious insight was within the individual; it was a personal affair ; its authority came from the feelings of the believer; its Church was the Church Invisible. For the Catholic, religion is a social affair; the individual is subject to error in reading both his Bible” and his heart;” its authority comes from the institution of which Christ’s vicar is the head; its church is visible and militant.

Thus the Church found both her theory of knowledge and her religious discipline assailed.

But there were reasons other than those of logical consistency which made it probable that any philosophy formulated as an expression of the Revolution would be anti-clerical. If the monarchy was to go, the Church must go. That was obvious to political leaders of almost all philosophical persuasions. When one saw how thoroughly the Church had grown over the State, like ivy over an ancient tree, one did not need to be told in order to see that to cut down the tree was to cut down the vine.

“ Quoted in Aulard; “Le Culte etc.” p. 272 n. 1.

* Denziger’s “Enchiridion” (ed. of 1921), no. 1429, the Errors of Quesnel (no. 79) ; cf. no. 1606, 1608 and the Encyl. of Gregory XVI, Inter. praecipuas, no. 1630.

*Td., Index systematicus, I c.

It has been held that the aim of the Revolution was above all to de-christianize France,“ and when one remembers that the civil constitution of the Clergy was passed before the King was beheaded, one sees some reason in the charge. But even if this had not been its aim, it could scarcely have beén avoided. How to de-christianize France and have anything left was a problem easier to state than to solve. Where was the State and where the Church? The Church was not merely a religious institution. Her members had peculiar economic privileges and political power. She alone had buildings in which to hold divine service; a book attacking her could not be published in France; she controlled the education of the youth; she owned, according to popular belief, one-fifth of the land of France; her revenues from all sources, including perquisites, were nearly two hundred million livres; the property of the Clergy was exempt from taxation and the only contribution which they made to the State was voluntary gifts, consisting of a quinquennial grant of sixteen millions, used in large part to pay debts contracted at an earlier date.” Her peculiar wealth had, for that mat-

“See Joyau; Op. cit., which criticizes it harshly on that account; Michelet, who praises it for the same reason. Paul Janet; “La Philos. et la Rév. Fr.,” P. 1875, p. 94, says that for Michelet there are only two periods of history, the Christian and the Revolutionary.

1° Pressensé; “l’Eglise et la Rév. Fr.,” P. 1867, p. 8. Pressensé refers his readers to Rodot’s “La Fr. avant la Rév., son état politique et social en 1787” and to “La Fr. ecclésiastique ” for 1788, for the facts about the quinquennial grants.

I should like to add the more accessible volume of Robinet, “Le Mouvement Relig. a P. pendant la Rév.,” P. 1896, I 151.

ter, been satirized long before the Revolution. The Persian Letters are not dumb on the subject and Usbek writes to Rhedi that the Catholic dervishes never cease taking and never begin giving.” No other institution, it is needless to say, enjoyed such a position.

That was more antipathetic to the reformers than the beliefs of the Church. For years before the Revolution scepticism seems to have been fashionable and no dignitary of the Church of any importance was simple-minded enough to show the world more than the form of Christianity. The Archbishop of Narbonne, for instance, is said to have explained the resistance of the upper clergy in ‘91 as due not to their faith but to their honor as gentlemen.” It was not, then, the mere religious scepticism of men of whom only a part were sceptics, which overthrew the Church; for if the weight of scepticism had been enough, the Church would have crashed to earth with no propulsion from without. French society owed her a grudge. Scepticism and the philosophers helped to articulate and sanction it.

Accordingly one finds that Catholicism is given as hard a blow as the monarchy which it seemed to support. But it is Catholicism as a political institution, and not as a religion, which the Revolution tried to over-

“Letter cxvii.

“Taine; “Les Origines de la Fr. Contemporaine: l’Ancien Régime,” IT, liv. iv, ch. iv. The reader should be warned, of course, against Taine as an historian—see Aulard; “ Taine,

Historien de la Réy. Fr.,” P. 1907. I do not find ans particular assertion, however, Gouteadiered by Aulard.

AFTER THE REVOLUTION II throw at the start. “ The idea of attacking the dogma, of trying to destroy Catholicism, was made popular only in that so critical period from April to December 1793, when the Revolution had to struggle at once against the Vendée and against Europe. It was then believed that religion was the soul of the coalition against France,” says Professor Aulard.” Up to that time the estates of the Clergy had been sold (10 October 1789) and the Civil Constitution of the Clergy passed (12 July 1790), but as late as June 1793 the Convention decreed that “the salary of the Clergy is part of the public debt.” Law means little when not observed, to be sure, but it is important to note what it was thought good to include in the law.

It is only thereafter that there comes measure upon measure to destroy not only the outward manifestations of Catholicism in buildings, in art, in ceremony, but the very faith of the people. Priests are encouraged to marry, the church bells are made into cannon, the gold and silver of the altars are taken to the Mint, and finally the churches are turned into temples where first Reason, then the Supreme Being, are worshipped.” But this story is worn thread-bare and has no place here. We should not forget however that the methods of the Revolutionists were not new. Many of the de-

The story of the rise of the revolutionary cults is best and most briefly told in Aulard: ‘Le Culte etc.” But no one, wishing to read the whole story should omit Mathiez: “La

Théophilanthropie et le Culte Décadaire,” P. 1904 nor the work of Pressensé already cited.

crees of the Convention are paralleled by analogous decrees in the Theodosian Code.” In fact, one does not have to go to Rome for a precedent. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was no less one. It ordered that all places of worship of the Protestants be demolished ; forbade assemblies of any sort for the exercise of Protestant worship; forbade the practice of Protestant worship in one’s own house individually ; ordered all ministers of Protestantism to embrace Catholicism or leave France within two weeks; offered apostate ministers a continuation of certain exemptions from taxation; offered inducements for such ministers to take the degree of Doctor of Laws; forbade schools for the instruction of children in Protestantism; ordered all children born of Protestant parents to be baptised and educated in the Catholic faith under a minimum penalty of five hundred livres fine; returned property to Protestants who came back to France within four months after the publication of the Revocation and confiscated that of those who did not; and forbade all Protestants to leave the country.

One might venture to say that any attempt to supplant one religion by another in a legal way would afford as close if not so piquant an analogy. The attempted destruction of Catholicism is like a reproduction of the attempted destruction of paganism, and

” De Apostatis and de Judaeis, Caelicolis, et Samaritanis, “Theodosiani Lib. XVI,’ ed. Mommsen and Meyer, Berlin 1905, I xvi 7 and 8. Cf. Dill; “Roman Society in the Last

Century of the Western Empire,” 2d ed. rev., Lond. 1919, ch. i and ii, just as the old Italian peasant illegally worshipped in isolated shrines the nymphs of his woods and streams, so the Breton peasant stole off under cover of darkness to confess to his priest or to have his marriage solemnized. In the one case the destruction was fairly thorough and took centuries to be completed. In the other it seemed superfical and endured for half a decade.

It fell to Napoleon’s lot to play the réle of Julian the Apostate. And characteristically enough he played it with greater effect than his Roman prototype.

He turned first to the philosophers. The sentimentalists were easy enough to conquer. Their vague ruminations were hardly worth noticing. The President of his Legislature and later Grand Master of the University, Fontanes, as early as 1786 had seen how weak a head was Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s,” the professor who, in the words of Anatole France, “ retired after his first lecture to find out what he had to say and never came back to the platform.”” The Emperor had little to fear from him. Appreciating his ability as a writer, he gave him a pension of six thousand francs to prove it. But he said that he should have been chased out of the Institut for having written on the harmonies of nature. He knew that this man was harmless and left him to enjoy his young wife, his

Letter to Joubert in “Les Correspondants de J. Joubert,” P. 1883, p. 47.

72«T © Génie Latin,” p. 238. This should be corrected by Maury; “Etude sur Bernardin de Saint-Pierre,” P. 1892, pp. 200-206.

garden, his pension, and his cross of the Legion of Honor. There was, moreover, a certain bond of sympathy between the Emperor and the poet-philosopher. They both hated the descendants of Condillac.”

This group he railed at without end. They were

39 66

“these miserable metaphysicians,” “ inexhaustible nonsensemongers.” * He railed at them because he feared them. As a member of his Conseil d’Etat, Pelet de la Lozére, says, he feared them and the Republicans much more than the Royalists. Theirs was the work he must undo. And as they were neither Royalist nor Jacobin and could give him no cause to guillotine them or to deport them, he vented his spleen in diatribes and in using Destutt de Tracy’s name, Idéologue, as a synonym for all that was vain and trivial, a meaning which it has kept to this day.” But his sneers left his victims unharmed.

* The development of his unfriendly sentiments towards the Idéologues is coincident with his rise to power. As a young lieutenant of artillery, he had sworn to obey the constitution of the National Assembly.“ As a young general fresh from the Egyptian

*° Maury; Op. cit. 224.

* These remarks were originally written in the Journal de P., 15 pluvidse IX and republished in Fontanes’s journal, le Mercure de Fr. on the following day. They are constantly quoted and can be easily found in Picavet; Op. cit. p. 23 or Gauthier ; “Mme. de Staél et Napoléon,” P. 1902, p. 64.

* Lerminier; “De I’Influence de la Philos. du XVIII° Siécle sur la Legislation et la Sociabilité du XIX°,” P. 1833, p. 277.

* Conveniently quoted in Fournier; “Napoleon I,” tr. by Annie Elizabeth Adams, N. Y., 1911, I 36.

Campaign he had been by no means unwilling to accept membership in the Institut and humbly had gone to Auteuil to pay his respects to the widow of Helvétius.” In this early period he had been on terms of friendship with Destutt de Tracy, whom he had invited to accompany him to Egypt. After the Treaty of Campo- Formio he replied to Garat’s compliments, “The true victories, the only ones which leave no regrets, are those over ignorance. The most honorable as well as the most useful occupation for nations is to contribute to the extension of human ideas. This was well enough for a modest and precocious officer fresh from

39 28 foreign wars, when simplicity of demeanor would excite the enthusiasm of the masses. But later when he saw that his love of ideas might not be compatible with his love of power, his attitude changed. He grew to see in the Idéologues a set of sanctimonious dreamers, incapable of fruitful action, Yet without their aid, their planning and preparing, their moderate liberalism, their willingness to experiment, their freedom from prejudice, their optimism in the face of discouragement, not even the 18th of Brumaire would have succeeded.”

7" Picavet; Op. cit. p. 221 n. 2. See Jules Bertaut; “ Mme. Helvétius,” R. de la Semaine, VI, 30 June 1922, for a lively account of this charming woman. For a more careful study, see Guillois; “Le Salon de Mme. Helvétius,” P. 1894.

*T translate from the text in Garat’s paper, le Conservateur, No. 122, 11 nivése VI (31 Dec. 1797), p. 972. It is also quoted by Picavet; Op. cit, 221.

»® Fournier ; Op. cit. II 248.

As a young lieutenant of artillery Napoleon had sworn to obey the constitution of the National Assembly. But under the Constitution of the Year VIII the Declaration of the Rights of Man has disappeared. Two years later personal prerogatives begin to accrue to him ; he appoints senators and has the power of pardon ; he names the presidents of the assemblées de canton. Again two years and he is Emperor of the French with his power hereditary in his male descendants and derived not only from the constitutions of the French Republic but from the grace of God. Meanwhile he has closed the Ecoles Centrales, the invention of the Idéologues, and has substituted for them the Imperial University.”

“ My principal aim,”’ he said in 1806, “in establishing a teaching body, is to have a means of directing political and moral opinion.” “ The decree of March 17, 1806, is a good illustration of how he thought it should be achieved. “ All the schools of the Imperial University,” it reads, “ will take as the basis of their teaching, first, the precepts of the Catholic religion ; second, fidelity to the Emperor, to the imperial monarchy, depository of the happiness of peoples, and to the Napoleonic dynasty, conserver of the unity of France and of all the liberal ideas proclaimed by her constitutions; third, obedience to the statutes of the teaching body which has for its object uniformity of

*° Picavet; Op. cit. 20.

** Pelet de la Lozére; “Opinions de Napoléon . . . recueuillies par un membre de son conseil d’état,’ P. 1833, Séance du 20 mars 1806, p. 167.

instruction and which tends to mold for the benefit of the state citizens attached to their religion, their prince, their country, and their family ; fourth, all the professors of theology will be held to conform to the provisions of 1682 concerning the four propositions contained in the declaration of the Clergy of France of that year” (1. e., Gallicanism).”

The idea of uniformity of instruction and of mold-’ ing the young according to a preconceived plan was utterly different from that which informed the schools of the Idéologues. In them written lectures were forbidden and after the discussion by the lecturer, the students debated the problems involved in his talk.” The words “liberal ideas” in Napoleon’s plan alone suggest this régime. So changed is everything else that their presence must be a cynical joke. Whereas the Ecoles Centrales, again, had men as different as Volney and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre on their teaching staff, the Imperial University had a catechism prepared with the collaboration of the Papal Legate. The catechism, which is worth reading begins: