Nineteenth-Century French Catholics’ Challenge to Integralism
Vermeule’s integralism proves so tempting because it means the state will enforce communal “salvation” without any of the discomfort of reformation on the individual level. . . . Convenient, perhaps, but a deeply un-Christian attitude. As the Catholic Church has taught, century after century, we must embrace the great “both, and” of individual salvation and communal salvation; to pursue the communal aspect without the individual would render both null.
Plundering of a Church during the French Revolution of 1793 by Victor-Henri Juglar, oil on canvas, ca. 1885. (Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
In 2019, Sohrab Ahmari and David French engaged in an infamous debate that culminated in a discussion of drag queen story hours. Both men agreed that exposing children to drag queens is immoral; however, while French argued that the First Amendment protects drag queen story hours, Ahmari argued that such activities are harmful to society and ought to be suppressed by the government. Whatever your opinion about the morality of drag queen story hours, the Ahmari-French debate reveals a major disagreement in conservatism about the very definition of freedom. Does freedom necessitate tolerance for wrongdoing?
Legal scholar Adrian Vermeule lands firmly on the side of “no.” A Catholic convert (like Ahmari), Vermeule argues that religion and liberalism are inherently opposed to each other, and that the government should only permit individual freedom insofar as it will facilitate actions deemed righteous by religious authority figures. To support his theory of the necessary antagonism between liberalism and the Catholic Church, Vermeule appeals to numerous historical sources, including nineteenth-century French Catholic Joseph de Maistre. But is it true that liberalism and Catholicism are inherently opposed to each other? It turns out that de Maistre was not the only French Catholic of the nineteenth century, nor should his views be considered representative of all Catholic thought on the matter. In fact, in an age when religion was in decline due to both a loss of faith on the individual level and institutional interference (sound familiar?) some Catholics latched onto liberalism as a lifeboat for the Church itself.
Here we should pause and acknowledge that the word liberal has immensely varied meanings. Broadly speaking, liberal as applied to political regimes emerged in the nineteenth century as a way to describe the rights-based republics sprouting up during and after the French Revolution. For the purposes of this essay, it is fair to say that at a basic level, Vermeule’s issue with liberalism seems to be its emphasis on tolerance. In a 2017 article in First Things entitled “A Christian Strategy,” Vermeule outlined an argument that runs like this: liberalism is founded on tolerance, tolerance permits undesirable behavior, and at the same time forbids anyone from publicly objecting to that undesirable behavior, becoming more and more restrictive and intolerant in its efforts to quash those objections. In the end, according to Vermeule, “liberal intolerance represents not the self-undermining of liberalism, but a fulfillment of its essential nature.”
“In an age when religion was in decline due to both a loss of faith on the individual level and institutional interference (sound familiar?) some Catholics latched onto liberalism as a lifeboat for the Church itself.”
Vermeule argues that this liberal intolerance inevitably targets the Church. In that same First Things article, Vermeule wrote that “both politically and theoretically, hostility to the Church was encoded within liberalism from its birth.” He even assigns this conflict Biblical dimensions by equating liberalism with the serpent in Genesis 3:15 and the dragon in Revelation 12:1–9. It is true that the Church found itself at odds with one version of liberal tolerance in the last years of the eighteenth century and during the entry to the nineteenth. The history here is complex, but it is true that revolutionary France turned to convent-burning and altar-desecrating within a decade.
It is also true that the popes condemned various liberal regimes throughout the nineteenth century. But was all of this baked into the cake of liberalism from the beginning?
Once again, as is usually the case in history (though not always in political theory), the contingencies are complex. It should be noted, however, that the way we understand tolerance today (you go to your church, I’ll go to mine, and we won’t kill each other or try and stop each other), was de jure for Catholics and Protestants in France after the Edict of Nantes in 1598. The nineteenth-century Church was not critical of this kind of tolerance. The Church was, however, critical of “religious indifferentism,” the claim that a people cannot be free as long as religion holds sway over their minds. In the words of Diderot, “the people can never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.” It seems to me, at least, that at the time of the Founding, American liberal tolerance was much more like the former than the latter.
But where are we today? Is Vermeule correct that we have inevitably drifted toward that more extreme form of “liberal intolerance”? Do Americans seek the total destruction of religion? I do not think it’s as bad as all that. But if it ever gets to the point that the government is taking steps to suppress religion entirely—as happens in many places around the world, including the notable bastions of illiberalism Venezuela and China—why must we conclude this is the necessary consequence of, rather than the perversion of, a more legitimate form of tolerance? Historical correlation (between the Edict of Nantes and the Terror, separated by three hundred years) is not causation.
There are good reasons to think the causation does not exist; for one thing, many Catholics of the nineteenth century saw in liberalism and tolerance not only a tolerable circumstance but a positive good for the Church and its mission. At the same time de Maistre was penning his treatise against liberalism, three other French Catholics were pioneering a new paper called L’Avenir, “The Future.” Félicité Lamennais, Charles de Montalembert, and Henri Lacordaire were three devout French Catholic liberals, who had no desire to return to the Old Regime. But if de Maistre and Vermeule are correct and liberalism is inherently antagonistic to religion, why did these three Catholics not only accept liberalism but fervently defend it?
In 1815, the French Revolution was over and Napoleon had finally been banished to a remote island. The first generation of Frenchmen who had no direct memory of the Revolution was just beginning to come of age and faced the immense task of picking up the pieces of a society in the midst of an identity crisis. A Bourbon king was back on the throne, which was shocking enough for a country that had symbolically executed his brother only a few decades earlier. King Louis XVIII tried to ease the transition by allowing several revolutionary-era reforms to remain in place, including the limits of a constitution and a parliament.
For many Catholics, the mere thought of a king on the throne seemed like a huge victory. Many of these Catholics had witnessed the atrocities committed by revolutionaries in the name of religious indifferentism in the Vendée, including retributive mass drownings of civilians. But some conservative Catholics wanted to push even further and strike at the liberal reforms that limited Louis XVIII’s power. In his Essay on the Generative Principle of Constitutions, de Maistre argued that the only proper form of government is one in which a king may suspend written law for the sake of the common good. In other words, the common good must take precedence over written laws that admit toleration of undesirable behavior. The Church and the king should work closely together to know exactly what laws ought to be suspended and when. Though he may prefer a religious oligarchy rather than a monarch, Vermeule agrees with de Maistre and claims that, two hundred years later, de Maistre’s work presents a “sharp blow to the liberal vision […] that was never successfully parried.”
But not all nineteenth-century Catholics felt that liberalism, and the tolerance it brought with it, was getting in the way of the common good. For these Catholics, liberal policies were the guarantors of the Church’s freedom, and a free Church ultimately brought about the common good. Freedom of the Church was a major concern in restoration France. The Concordat signed by Napoleon was still in effect, making Church officials salaried employees of the state and obliging clergy to swear an oath of loyalty to the French state. Historic Church lands were still in the possession of the state, and the state monopolized education. The Church and state seemed to be working closely together, but it was hindering the Church.
In the newspaper L’Avenir, Henri Lacordaire argued that the Church needed “to rid itself of all solidarity with a power [the French state] that was not animated by [the Church’s] spirit, and to seek the exercise of the freedoms promised to every citizen.”[1] Lacordaire argued that the French state was not acting in consonance with the Church’s best interests. Critically, his proposed solution is not immediately conforming the state to serve the Church’s interests but rather granting proper freedoms for every citizen. In his view, the state ought to allow the Church to function freely and fulfill its mission. This approach hearkens back to Augustine’s claims in City of God that the task of the state is to maintain peace so that the Church can function. This is very different from Vermeule’s integralist model. Rather than an elite religious group enforcing very particular moral standards from the top of the government, the state would promote tolerance and allow the Church to educate the citizenry and care for their souls. Only then would the people be virtuous, and when their virtuous interests were represented by their government, the laws would in turn become more virtuous and serve the common good.
In Lacordaire’s view, as long as the state had, in principle, the power to suppress individual rights for the purposes of promoting Catholic ends, it also had the power to oppress the Church. The French state seemed to benefit the Church by bankrolling its officials, but the salaries came with strings attached, including state interference in Catholic education. Lacordaire took umbrage with this particular infringement and, with the help of Lamennais and Montalembert, opened an unsanctioned Catholic school for boys in Paris. Shortly after its opening, state officials came to close the school and seize the building. Lacordaire was forced to send the boys home and he only barely retained the building by claiming it as his residence and pointing to his sleeping mat in the corner of the classroom.[2]
The solution, for Lacordaire, was not a return to an integrated Catholic monarchy, but to free the Church from the state. The Church, he argued, “always had the words reason and liberty on her lips when the inalienable rights of the human race were threatened.”[3] Lacordaire might have been inclined to agree with Joseph Ratzinger’s later explanation of liberty as “having to do with being given a home.” It was through the Church that an individual could reach his true home and true liberty, and in order to fully participate in the Church—to receive a Catholic education, for example—the state ought to adopt a policy of tolerance. Thus there are two kinds of “liberty” at play here: the one is the theological liberty of membership in the Church, and the other is a sort of political tolerance, or willingness to allow a political regime to remain agnostic on certain questions, at least temporarily.
Crucially—here Lacordaire’s liberalism differs from a kind of libertarianism that admits no vision of a common good—the separation of Church and state does not mean that religious values must always remain absent from the law. Ultimately, once individual souls have been gathered into the Church, their moral interests will be represented in popular government and therefore the positive laws of the state will accord more closely with morality. This is a process to be undertaken, and it relies upon the conversion of souls; it is not a top-down fix predicated upon an all-knowing religious elite at the top of government foisting their views upon the hoi polloi.
When Lacordaire took Alexander de Tocqueville’s vacant seat in the Académie Francaise, an American reporter remarked that it was strange to see “a man so thoroughly imbued with the worship of the Catholic religion defend, before the world […] liberty and equality.”[4] As Lacordaire took the seat dressed in full Dominican habit—he had helped refound the Order of Preachers in France after its abolition during the Revolution—he saw no contradiction. At his induction, he delivered a powerful address affirming the consistency of sincere faith with tolerance, proclaiming his wish to “die a repentant religious and an unrepentant liberal.”
The conflict in nineteenth-century France brings to mind the Investiture Controversy. The Investiture Controversy centered around whether the state ought to act as an intermediary between the people and the Church. The triumph of Gregory VII under the banner of libertas ecclesiae set a precedent for a separation of church and state for the Church’s particular benefit. Debates may be had whether this move was historically beneficial for Christendom. However you land on that side of the debate, we no longer live in medieval Christendom. A state as the intermediary of the Church—particularly in a place as religiously diverse as the United States—would necessarily lead to unprecedented levels of coercion. This was as true in the nineteenth century as it is today. Lacordaire’s point seems to be that such coercion violates the very liberty that the Church seeks to give every person as a matter of dignity. Rather than political coercion, the state should back out of the way, give the Church room to function, and thereby educate the citizens to craft their own righteous laws.
The points raised by Lacordaire and the writers of L’Avenir highlight a trend of Catholic thought that does not view liberalism and Catholicism as inherently antagonistic. The story of the reception of their ideas in the hierarchy of the Church is a complicated story for another time. Fundamentally, Lacordaire and the writers of L’Avenir believed that the separation of Church and state, and yes, even political tolerance, would provide the room necessary for the Church to lead her people to true liberty and then lead the representatives of that virtuous people to craft virtuous laws. The integration of Church and state and other methods of undermining tolerance would be a practical hindrance to such efforts by giving the state too much authority over the Church as well as an illegitimate spiritual shortcut; rather than converting real individual, immortal souls, such an approach would rely on pure coercion that would win no souls for Christ and would risk incredible scandal. Liberalism, then, insofar as it describes religious tolerance, is not inherently anti-Church, and in fact, because of its appreciation for individual dignity and the otherworldly character of the Church, is a genuine fruit of the Church itself.
So is liberalism powerless to stop drag queen story hours? Must freedom necessitate tolerance for wrongdoing? The answer to both of these questions, based on the work of these nineteenth century Catholics, is no. A liberal society, if it so chose, could in fact stop drag queen story hours. Such a move would follow a process of moral education that would be reflected in the laws crafted by the members of society. Insofar as such laws conformed to true morality, that society, which already possesses “liberty” in the sense of tolerance, would also gain the more fundamental form of liberty that comes not only with moral actions but also with a moral character. In an integralist, top-down model, neither form of liberty would materialize, since there would be no tolerance and there would be no individual character development.
Vermeule’s integralism proves so tempting because it means the state will enforce communal “salvation” without any of the discomfort of reformation on the individual level. It teaches that you can stop drag queen story hour without ever having to get to know a drag queen yourself, how convenient! Convenient, perhaps, but a deeply un-Christian attitude. As the Catholic Church has taught, century after century, we must embrace the great “both, and” of individual salvation and communal salvation; to pursue the communal aspect without the individual would render both null.
This essay was previously published in The Hillsdale Forum.
Endnotes
[1] Gabriel Ledos, Lacordaire (Paris: Libraire des Saints-Pères, 1902), 80. All quotations from Ledos are my translation.
[2] Carol E. Harrison, Romantic Catholics: France’s Postrevolutionary Generation in Search of a Modern Faith (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), 127–28.
[3] Henri-Dominique Lacordaire, “Letters to Young Men,” quoted in Carol E. Harrison, Romantic Catholics: France’s Postrevolutionary Generation in Search of a Modern Faith (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), 27.
[4] “Our Foreign Correspondence: From Paris. American Topics in the French Journals Father Lacordaire and the French Academy M. Guizet The Bonaparte-Patterson Trial No Agents for South Carolina,” The New York Times (February 19, 1861).