Politics
in the nineteenth century centred on the fate of the monarchies whose supremacy was restored but then gradually undermined by the three great movements of the age—Liberalism, Nationalism, and Socialism. Generally speaking,
despite some notable casualties, the monarchies survived intact. There were more ruling heads on sacred thrones in 1914 than a hundred years earlier. But they only survived by profoundly modifying the nature of the bond between rulers and ruled.
SYLLABUS
O
N
8 December 1864 Pope Pius IX published the encyclical
Quanta cura
together with a ‘Syllabus of the Most Important Errors of our Time’. The documents had been in the Vatican pipeline for more than fifteen years, and had been revised several times. They had already sparked a furore in 1862 when an anticlerical journal in Turin, //
Mediatore
, had published a selection of their leaked contents.
The Syllabus is divided into ten thematic sections, each containing several clauses. Since the purpose is to expose errors, the Roman Church’s position on any particular issue can be reached by prefacing the relevant clause with the words ‘It is not true that’:
Atheism and Absolute Rationalism
1. God does not exist.
2. Divine revelation can be used to oppose all science or philosophical speculation.
On Moderate Rationalism
Indifferentism
15. All religions and religious denominations are equal.
On Political Societies
18. All socialist, communist, secret, bible-reading, and clerico-liberal societies are permitted.
The Rights of the Church
24. The Church has no temporal power.
26. The Church can be denied the right to hold property.
28. Bishops may only promulgate apostolic letters by governmental consent.
30. The Church’s rights derive from Civil Law alone.
32. The clergy’s exemption from military service may be rescinded.
33. The Church may be denied the right to teach sacred doctrine.
37. National churches may be established free of papal control.
The Rights of the State
39. The State is the sole fount of social authority.
43. The State may rescind concordats unilaterally.
44. Civil Law is superior to Canon Law.
45. The State’s right to determine educational policy is absolute.
46. The State may exercise ultimate control over seminaries.
49. The State may deny the Hierarchy free communication with Rome.
50. Lay bodies have the sole right to appoint or to depose bishops.
54. Kings and princes may be exempted from the laws of the Church.
55. The separation of Church and State is necessary.
Ethics
56. Human laws need not conform to natural or to divine law.
58. Only powers rooted in matter are to be acknowledged.
63. It is permissible to rebel against legitimate princes.
Christian Matrimony
66. Matrimony is not sacramental in nature.
67. The matrimonial bond is dissoluble, and hence divorce
sensu stricto
can be permitted by the State.
68. The State alone may define the impediments to matrimony.
The Pontiff’s Temporal Powers
75. Faithful Catholics may dispute the Pontiff’s temporal or spiritual powers.
76. The Church would benefit by relinquishing its temporal powers.
Liberalism
77. It is no longer expedient that Catholicism be the sole denomination.
78. Immigrants to Catholic countries should be entitled to the public exercise of all religions.
80. The Roman Pontiff can and should reconcile himself and harmonize with ‘progress’, ‘liberalism’, and ‘modern civilization’.
1
The origins of the Syllabus lay in the demands of Italian bishops for guidance in the maelstrom of debate surrounding the creation of the Kingdom of Italy. The Papacy was an active participant in the political struggle, and many of the clauses, though presented in universal terms, were dictated by very specific local conditions. This grave failing led to many misunderstandings. For example, the apparently blanket condemnation of all ‘clerico-liberal’ societies in Clause 18 was taken to be an attack on all enlightened clerics from Montalembert onwards. Its intention had merely been to curb that part of the clergy in Piedmont which was supporting government plans to dissolve the monasteries.
Reading the text carefully, it is clear that on the majority of issues the Vatican was simply reserving its position. By saying ‘It is not true that the Pontiff should harmonize with modern civilization’, the Syllabus was only stating the obvious: that the Church was guided by the timeless principles of its religion, and would not bow to fashionable slogans.
But the impression created was rather different. Several of the key clauses were lamentably drafted, and should not have been included. Once the double negatives had been bandied around in a hostile press, many people were convinced that the Roman Catholic Church was implacably opposed to all toleration, to all rational thought, to all forms of matrimonial separation, to all national self-determination, and to all forms of social charity.
On the political front, it is extraordinary in retrospect that the Vatican’s lawyers could have lumped all socialists, communists, secret societies, independent bible-readers, and liberal clerics into the same ring of Hell. But that was a sign of the times. Other highly intelligent conservatives elsewhere in Europe thought in the same way. Fyodor Dostoevsky, arguably the greatest mind of the age, might have approved of Clause 18 as far as it went. Except, from his peculiarly Russian standpoint, he would have been tempted to add ‘and all Roman Catholics’.
2
Liberalism
developed along two parallel tracks, the political and the economic. Political liberalism focused on the essential concept of government by consent. It took its name from the
liberales
of Spain, who drew up their Constitution of 1812 in opposition to the arbitrary powers of the Spanish monarchy, but it had its roots much further back, in the political theories of the Enlightenment and beyond. Indeed, for much of its early history it was indistinguishable from the growth of limited government. Its first lasting success may be seen in the American Revolution, though it drew heavily on the experiences of British parliamentarian-ism and on the first, constitutional phase of the Revolution in France. In its most thoroughgoing form it embraced republicanism, though most liberals welcomed a popular, limited, and fair-minded monarch as a factor encouraging stability. Its advocates stressed above all the rule of law, individual liberty, constitutional procedures, religious toleration and the universal rights of man. They opposed the inbuilt prerogatives, wherever they survived, of Crown, Church, or aristocracy. Nineteenth-century liberals also gave great weight to property, which they saw as the principal source of responsible judgement and solid citizenship. As a result, whilst taking the lead in clipping the wings of absolutism and in laying the foundations of modern democracy, they were not prepared to envisage radical schemes for universal suffrage or for egalitarianism.
Economic liberalism focused on the concept of free trade, and on the associated doctrine of
laissez-faire
, which opposed the habit of governments to regulate economic life through protectionist tariffs. It stressed the right of men of property to engage in commercial and industrial activities without undue restraint. Its energies were directed on the one hand to dismantling the economic barriers which had proliferated both within and between countries and on the other to battling against all forms of collectivist organization, from the ancient guild to the new trade unions.
Liberalism is often categorized as the ideology of the new middle classes; and it certainly appealed to that wide and expanding social constituency which lay between the old privileged nobility and the propertyless industrial masses. Yet its appeal cannot be so closely confined. It also reached to a wide variety of interests that were not essentially social or economic in their motivation—to the widespread
Burschenschaften
or student associations of the 1820s, to freemasonry, to cultural dissidents, to educational and prison reforms, to aristocratic British Whigs and Polish magnates, even to groups such as dissident army officers in Russia, the ‘Decembrists’, who in 1825 dared to plot against the evils of autocracy.
Given England’s precocious development, it is not surprising to find the most cogent exposes of liberalism in English writing. In economics, the
Principles of Political Economy
(1817) of David Ricardo (1771–1823) completed the work of the classical economists started by Adam Smith. Ricardo’s disciples took practical
action in the activities of the Anti-Corn Law League and in the campaigns of the Manchester School, the advocates of free trade headed by Richard Cobden (1804–65) and John Bright (1811–89). In political philosophy, the works of John Stuart Mill (1806–73) stand as the supreme monument to a tolerant and balanced brand of liberalism, where some of the starker principles of earlier advocates were refined and modified in the light of recent debates and experience. Mill defends
laissez-faire
economics, for example, but only if the power of capitalist employers is matched by the rights of employees’ trade unions. He endorses the ‘greatest happiness’ principle of the Utilitarians—as proclaimed by his philosopher father, James Mill (1773–1836)—but only if happiness is not confused with pleasure. In his essay
On Liberty
(1859) he produced the standard manifesto of individual human rights, which should only be restricted where they impinge on the rights of others. ‘The sole end where mankind is warranted … in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number’, he wrote, ‘is self-protection.’ In
The Subjection of Women
(1869) he made the clearest of arguments for the feminist cause, maintaining that there is nothing in the many differences between men and women that would justify their possession of different rights.
The central political drama over liberalism, however, was bound to be played out in France, the home of the frustrated Revolution and the scene of the most developed, honed, and diametrically opposed political opinions. French politics were characterized not merely by the entrenched positions of conservative Catholic monarchists and of radical anticlerical republicans. They were complicated by a number of paradoxical figures, such as the ex-Jacobin republican and ‘Citizen-King’, Louis-Philippe (r. 1830–48), or the would-be liberal and revolutionary turned Emperor, Louis-Napoleon (Napoleon III, r. 1848–70).
The result was a see-saw history of alternating conservative and liberal regimes interspersed with a series of violent revolutionary outbreaks. The Bourbon Restoration of Louis XVIII (r. 1815–24) and Charles X (r. 1824–30) was overthrown by the July Revolution of 1830. The July Monarchy of Louis-Philippe was overthrown by the Revolution of 23 February 1848. The short-lived Second Republic was overthrown by its original beneficiary, who proceeded to proclaim himself Emperor. The Second Empire (1851–70) was overthrown amidst the humiliation of the Franco-Prussian War, and the violence of the Paris Commune. The Third Republic, inaugurated in 1870, survived for 70 years; but it was marked by the extreme instability of its governments, by the extreme liveliness and futility of its public debates, and by the extreme animosity of the opposing camps. The notorious affair of Captain Dreyfus which gripped France between 1894 and 1906 was proof that the liberal and anti-liberal passions of the French had still not found a
modus vivendi
.
Similar swings of violent fortune prevailed in Spain, which served as a sort of laboratory of liberalism. An unbridgeable gulf yawned between the
exaltados
or ‘extreme radicals’ and the
apostolicos
, the extreme, Church-backed monarchists. From 1829 many of the latter supported the claims of the royal pretender, Don Carlos (d. 1855) and his heirs, who commanded a loyal following among the
Basques and Catalans. A succession of impoverished and debauched monarchs— Ferdinand VII (r. 1814–43), Isabella (r. 1840(3)-68), Alfonso XII (r. 1874–85)— bent to every breeze that blew. As a result, liberal constitutions were annulled as frequently as they were introduced—in 1812, 1820, 1837, 1852, 1855, 1869, 1876. Clerical intrigues, excesses, and civil war were the order of the day. After the brief reign of Amadeo, Duke of Aosta (r. 1870–3), a brief republic existed. After 1876, under Alfonso XIII (r. 1885–1931), the liberal centre was at last strong enough to maintain a constitutional monarchy until the 1920s,
[PRADO]
Portugal endured an 80-year constitutional struggle that ended with the abolition of the monarchy. The constitutional Charter was granted in 1826, soon after Brazil had established its independence, and King Pedro had decided to stay on as Emperor of Brazil. But all manner of stratagems were used to obstruct the Charter’s implementation. Until 1853 the absolutist court of Maria II and her two sons held sway. Under Carlos (r. 1889–1908), the
rotativos
or ‘revolving ministries’ of the Progressive and Regenerator Parties dominated the Cortes, and combined to exclude the growing body of republican sentiment. The reign culminated in a brief royal dictatorship, and in the assassination of the King and Crown Prince. The last King of Portugal, Manuel II (r. 1908–10), retired to England when the armed forces backed the revolution of 5 October 1910 and declared a Republic.
Each of France’s ‘Revolutions’ had repercussions right across Europe. In 1830 the ‘July days’ in Paris sparked the August rising in Brussels, and the November rising in Warsaw (see below). In Paris, the sight of Lafayette at the head of the rebels led to the abdication of the reactionary Charles X and his
parti prêtre
, and the election of Louis-Philippe by the Chamber of Deputies. In Brussels, the seizure of the Hotel de Ville and the failure of the Dutch army to restore order led to the election of Louis-Philippe’s son, the Due de Nemours, as prospective King of the Belgians. The Belgian provinces of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands had resented their subordination to Dutch interests ever since 1815. Belgian independence was acceptable to the Powers, who approved the creation of a model constitutional monarchy. But it was Leopold I of Saxe-Coburg (r. 1831–65) who emerged as King, not the Due de Nemours.
[GOTHA]