I. INTRODUCTION#
The French Revolution (1789–99) often stunned onlookers who watched the unimaginable happen before their eyes. Accounts of:
Untamed riots and pitiless massacres
Contorted, lifeless heads on pikes
Creaking carts hauling “traitors” to their deaths by guillotine
provoked feelings of consternation and disgust as well as outright fear and horror among many people both inside and outside of France. Other contemporaries rejoiced because the alleged aristocratic “traitors” to the French Republic were receiving their “just” punishments.
A stupefied Wilhelm von Schirach, editor of Hamburg’s Politisches Journal, lamented, “The pen quivers in the hand of the historian who takes hold of it in order to try to portray the scenes of a year [1793] which seem to have surpassed human powers of description and feeling and which future generations will hardly believe actually took place.”
A. The Fall of the Bastille - July 14, 1789#
On July 17, 1789, a boisterous crowd of working people (including chimney sweeps, beggars, and fishwives) accompanied French king Louis XVI (1754–93) from the Chateau of Versailles to the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, where he met Sylvain Bailley, the mayor of the city. From the vast crowd, relatively few cries arose of “Vive le Roi” but there came the repeated cry, “Vive la Nation, Vive Messieurs Bailly, La Fayette!”
Louis XVI was no longer the father of his people; if anything, he had become an ordinary father trying to protect his own children from an uncertain fate.
A few days earlier, on July 14, 1789, members of the gardes françaises had joined Parisians (the 954 “conquerors of the Bastille”) in the taking of the Bastille prison, thought to hold munitions the government could use in a preemptive strike against the “people” of Paris. In the assault, ninety-one people were killed.
Seven prisoners were released. Governor de Launay, the commander of the Bastille, was taken prisoner, paraded in the streets, and decapitated, and then his head was triumphantly held aloft on a pike. The Bastille was demolished, pieces of it sold as souvenirs. No longer would the Chateau of Versailles be the center of French life. Paris with its revolutionary governments had assumed that role.
Like the Bastille itself, the Ancien régime (“Old Order”), collapsed in a near heap in 1789. The already weakened authority of Louis XVI, France’s divine right monarch, crumbled. Revolutionaries declared that the sovereignty of the nation resided not with the king, but with “the people” who were “citizens” and only secondarily “subjects” of the king. This was indeed a revolution.
B. Interpreting the French Revolution#
For more than two centuries historians of various ideological stripes and nationalities have attempted to identify the long-term and proximate “origins” of the French Revolution, to explain the forces that impacted its unfolding, and to weigh its influence not only on European political, social, and economic institutions but also on Christianity’s role and status in nineteenth-century Europe.
Of particular note, Marxist and socialist-leaning historians such as Jean Jaurès (1859–1914), Albert Mathiez (1874–1932), and Georges Lefebvre (1874–1959) viewed the revolution as a major step on the path of world history toward socialism, if not communism. The revolution under the banner of capitalism represented the victory of the bourgeoisie over the Bourbon monarchy, the nobility, and feudalism. Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Leon Trotsky viewed the French Revolution as a guide for their own revolutionary activities.
C. The Contested Role of the “Bourgeoisie”#
Did the “bourgeoisie” orchestrate the French Revolution? Many historians believe such is the case. They argue that in the 1780s elite nobles continued to block wealthy members of the bourgeoisie from having access to social and political offices and privileges commensurate with the bourgeoisie’s increasing wealth.
Between February 22 and May 25, 1787, the Assembly of Notables, consisting of leading nobles caught up in an “aristocratic reaction,” claimed they were the “only authentic representatives of that nation.” They refused to approve the levying of new taxes to remedy the ominous debt problem caused in part by France’s earlier support of the American Revolution.
Louis XVI was obliged to call the Estates-General (First Estate —the clergy, Second Estate — nobles, Third Estate — “the people”) to meet in May–June 1789 to address the issue of the worsening fiscal crisis. In 1787 France was tottering on the brink of a financial collapse. A precipitating cause of the French Revolution, therefore, was fiscal insolvency.
For that year alone, her imports equaled 611 million livres, whereas her exports were 542 million. This created a significant trade imbalance.
In the eighteenth century, the bourgeoisie along with peasants nursed a common hatred of aristocratic nobles. The bourgeoisie were agitated in part by the publication of Jacques Necker’s flawed but significant report (1781) on the nation’s finances. It revealed that even though France was encumbered by a massive and growing debt, the king continued to dispense huge pensions to his favorite nobles.
Peasants were disturbed by the continued oppression perpetrated by their noble lords. Many were suffering badly from the effects of a drought and a disastrous harvest (1788) that created the context for flour and bread shortages and higher prices. Famine became a haunting specter, for bread was the essential staple of peasants’ diets. Between March and May 1788, peasants in certain provinces engaged in revolts against their lords. Louis XIV gathered troops in Paris.
After the fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, large numbers of peasants were also seized by feelings of panic (the “Great Fear” during the last third of July). The Great Fear was stimulated in part by false rumors that the armies of nobles were prowling the countryside, trampling crops, and seeking revenge on those sympathetic to the revolution.
During the week of August 4–11, the National Constituent Assembly (June 1789 – September 1791) with a sizeable bourgeois contingent dramatically subverted the power of the nobles.
On the night of August 4 it stripped nobles of the feudal privileges and fealty rights with which they had oppressed peasants.
The National Constituent Assembly indicated that henceforth society would have one law applying equally to all citizens who enjoyed liberty
On August 26, 1789, the National Constituent Assembly spelled out these rights further in the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.”
The National Constituent Assembly also delivered rude blows to the Gallican church. On August 11 it struck down the dîme, a hated tax that peasants and others were obliged to pay to the church. In November the assembly made the Gallican church responsible for paying the national debt. Following the proposal of Charles-Maurice Tallyrand-Périgord, bishop of Autun, it placed the lands of the church “at the disposal of the nation.”
The National Constituent Assembly also set up property requirements for people to vote, thereby allegedly revealing its intention of keeping power for propertied members of the bourgeoisie.
In 1789 the majority of French people remained monarchists. The cult of the king, however, was giving way to the patriotic cult of the nation among more radical revolutionaries, especially after Louis XVI’s attempt to escape from France (the flight to Varennes, June 20–21, 1791). Louis XVI was now deemed a traitor, one who should be put on trial. Many of France’s people no longer wanted to be Louis XVI’s subjects; they wanted to be citoyens (citizens).
Marie Antoinette, disguised as a Russian baroness, and the king, disguised as her business agent, were recognized, apprehended, and escorted back to Paris.
II. REVOLUTIONS: “WESTERN DEMOCRATIC,” “SOCIALIST,” AND “MARXIST”#
Some historians place the French Revolution in a context of a series of revolutions that shook and transformed European society. These revolutions were very important for the histories of their respective countries. Before the French Revolution, revolutions took place in North America and Europe; after the French Revolution, they erupted in Europe and Latin America.
The rise of socialist and Marxist ideologies provided additional rationales to justify a revolution. Radical revolutionaries appealed to the authority of socialists such as Henri Comte de Saint-Simon, Pierre Joseph Proudhon, and Marx (after a revolution in 1848) to justify their attacks on capitalists of industrial societies who “exploited” the “people,” members of the lower economic classes.
Marx indicated that “religion is the opiate of the people.” That is, religion dulls the sensitivities of the people to the ways capitalists exploit them. By contrast, a number of revolutionaries and social activists, in the name of Christ and the gospel, sought to ameliorate the plight of the people and to overthrow or reform repressive social, political, and religious institutions.
A. Democratic Revolutions#
For the European Christians living in that “democratic” revolutionary age, the French Revolution, albeit very important, constituted only one of many revolutions.
From 1783 to 1787, revolutionaries in the United Provinces attempted to thwart the stadthoulder from converting his position into a hereditary kingship.
In Switzerland, democratic revolts (1768, 1782) in Geneva were put down.
France experienced the revolutions of 1789, of the Napoleonic era, of 1830, and of 1848.
Germany witnessed revolutions in 1830 and 1848. In 1849, Vienna, Austria, faced three revolts.
Italian states experienced revolutions in 1798–99 and 1848.
After an initial revolt in 1821, Greece gained independence from Turkey in 1827–28.
Poles engaged in unsuccessful revolts against the Russians in 1794 and 1831.
In North America, the American Revolution took place between 1775 and 1783.
In South America, the countries Bolivia, Peru, Chile, and Uruguay declared their independence from Spain, with Brazil declaring independence from Portugal in 1822.
In Central America, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Mexico declared independence from Spain in 1821.
Other countries were convulsed by revolutions, Britain constituting a notable exception.
B. Defining a Revolution#
During the period 1770–1848 the turmoil, fears, and hopes of “revolutions” created an important backdrop for understanding the beliefs, attitudes, and actions of both professed Christians and non-Christians.
The word revolution did not bear the same connotations for all Europeans. Until the late eighteenth century the meaning of revolution was:
Often derived from astronomy and signified “the return of previous forms of existence.”
It could refer to “vicissitudes in human life, extraordinary changes in public affairs, reversals in the fortunes of nations.”
Relying on the first definition, a number of observers viewed the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England and the American Revolution as “a return to a previous form of existence” — the restoration of English rights that had been lost.
French revolutionaries generally abandoned the identification of the word revolution with the concepts of return or restoration. Rather, they indicated that a revolution signified the initiation of a new order, a totally new beginning. They dared to imagine that the society they were inaugurating would totally replace and constitute a clean break with the Old Order of Europe.
On September 21, 1792, the era of the monarchy ended. The era of the republic began the next day.
On November 23, 1793, revolutionaries of the Convention abandoned the Gregorian calendar; they established a revolutionary calendar that began on September 22, 1792, as 22 Vendémiaire, Year I.
Louis de Saint-Just (better known as St. Just), a radical revolutionary, thought that the French Revolution had indeed given birth to a new era of happiness for humanity. Because the Christian faith constituted one of the principal molds in which the Old Order of Europe had been cast, revolutionaries often singled out its defenders for especially bitter criticism.
III. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION: RELIGIOUS ORIGINS?#
Jacobin revolutionaries believed they should excise Christianity’s influence from French culture. Their campaign had only limited success. They themselves used words such as regeneration (a Christian expression) to describe what they hoped France would experience politically and socially. Their “dechristianization” campaign of 1793–94 did not eradicate the Christian faith.
After the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, the lingering influence of the Christian religion remained evident in France — even if only to provide motifs that revolutionaries secularized. But this influence had more heft than that. A considerable percentage of counterrevolutionary forces both in the Vendée (western France below the Loire River) and on France’s borders were Catholics alienated not only by the Terror but by the ostensibly anti-Christian agenda of Robespierre and his Jacobin colleagues in the Convention.
In The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil Constitution, 1560–1791 (1996) Professor Dale Van Kley adds the further intriguing point that the French Revolution itself issued in part from Jansenist and Jesuit debates over the nature of grace and the Eucharist.
Nor does he dispute the roles Voltaire, Rousseau, and other philosophes played in “secularizing” some Europeans’ thinking.
he does demonstrate that developments in Catholic theology gave many Frenchmen a needed vocabulary and political examplars with which to justify opposition to the monarchy of Louis XVI.
Some French people began to express their loyalty to the nation-state in language they may have earlier reserved for describing their sacrificial loyalty to and adoration for God. They sometimes did so in a surging wave of pamphlets published before the revolution that contested repressive aspects of French life.
A. French Christians and the Revolution#
Initially, many French Protestants and Catholics supported the French Revolution.
They thought that the revolution was compatible not only with patriotism and liberty but with the gospel.
They initially assumed that the revolutionaries and Louis XVI would reach an accord from which a constitutional, Christian monarchy similar to that of the English monarchy would emerge.
French Protestants also believed that the revolutionaries might remove remaining restrictions on their civil rights.
Their hopes were rewarded.
The National Constituent Assembly gave Protestants the right to access public office.
On September 27, 1791, the later Republican Convention afforded Jews citizenship.
Slave-owning planters from the Caribbean initially were able to thwart efforts in the National Assembly to free slaves, but the Republican Convention abolished slavery.
As the French Revolution veered toward its more radical phases, a number of professing Christians became distraught about a perceived “anti-Christian” orientation of the revolutionary governments. Influential revolutionaries had quickly turned away from any form of divine right monarchy. Instead, they wanted to build a new social order on the basis of a social contract between free individuals.
The National Constituent Assembly completed a first draft of “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” that was “accepted by the King.” Under “the auspices of the Supreme Being,” the assembly gave as its goal to set forth the “natural, inalienable rights of man.” The action of the National Constituent Assembly that turned many Catholics decisively against the revolution was its issuance of the “Civil Constitution of the Clergy” (July 12, 1790).
The constitution stipulated that bishops and priests should be elected by electors. This provision overthrew Catholic teaching that priests’ authority issued from their ordinations. Priests now became servants of the state.
The constitution also outlawed any subservience of the Gallican church to foreign churchmen, including the pope. It cut back the number of bishoprics from 130 to 83. It ordered that the clergy of France should swear an oath of allegiance to uphold the constitution. This last measure placed members of the clergy in a difficult quandary:
If they became jurors, they could be perceived as supportive of the revolution
If they became nonjurors, they could be deemed hostile to the same revolution and loyal to the papacy.
Approximately 55 percent of the clergy took the oath.
In February 1791 Pope Pius VI condemned both the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” and the “Civil Constitution of the Clergy.” France responded by annexing the papal territories of Avignon and Comtat Venaissin (where inhabitants voted to join France).
Refractory priests in France refused to take the oath of allegiance to the “Civil Constitution of the Clergy” and appeared to further the cause of the counterrevolutionaries. Emigrant nobles including the Comte d’Artois (later Charles X) and the Prince de Condé had earlier left France and formed counterrevolutionary movements in towns such as Coblenz and Mainz, Germany, and Turin, Italy. These nobles attempted to raise armies with which to invade France. During the revolution some 25,000 Catholic clergy (one sixth of the total) went into exile or were deported from France.
The Legislative Assembly (October 1791 – September 1792) replaced the National Constituent Assembly. On April 20, 1792, it declared war on Austria, which had earlier made a defensive alliance with Prussia. Members of the Legislative Assembly worried that many Catholics would not accept the sacraments from those juristic priests who had sworn allegiance to the “Civil Constitution of the Clergy.”
On August 26, 1792, the assembly ordered all nonjuring clergy to leave the country. Between September 2 and 7, anticlerical mobs in Paris slaughtered 230 priests and 3 prelates and possibly 1,500 or more lay prisoners (the “September Massacres”).
On September 20 the Legislative Assembly took away record keeping of births, marriages, and deaths from Catholic priests and legalized divorce. It also began to send out “Representatives on Mission” to destroy “external signs” of the Christian faith.
These actions only intensified antagonism between revolutionaries and Catholics who wanted to remain true to the king and the papacy. In time, angry Catholic peasants fought the Vendée War (1793–96) against the revolutionary armies of the Convention, the political assembly that had in turn replaced the Legislative Assembly. As members of the “Catholic and Royal Army,” these peasants proudly put the words God and King on their flags.
At one time, the majority of the Departments of France raised the standard of revolt against the Convention with centers of hostility evident in the Vendée, Provence, and Normandy and in sections of Paris. Royalists temporarily controlled the cities of Lyon, Marseilles, and Toulon. A young Napoleon Bonaparte eventually suppressed the revolt at Toulon.
B. The Terror#
Interpreting revolts — especially the one in the Vendée —as an extension of an “aristocratic plot,” Jacobin revolutionaries in the Convention took even more draconian measures to defeat the revolution’s external and internal foes. Gripped by a “siege mentality,” on August 23, 1793, they attempted to draft larger armies (levée en masse) of citizen soldiers to protect the republic from foreign foes
On September 20, 1792, the Legislative Assembly also tried to eliminate France’s internal foes by the use of terror. Some historians view the execution of Louis XVI as its opening bloody act. After putting Louis XVI (Citoyen Louis Capet) on trial for the alleged treachery in plotting with France’s enemies, the members of the Convention on a fourth vote decided the king’s fate: 380 votes in favor of the death penalty, 310 against.
On October 16, 1793, the Austrian-born queen of France, Marie Antoinette, was also executed. During her trial an accuser declared that she “from the beginning of her sojourn in France, has been the scourge and bloodsucker of the French people.” On October 31, twenty-one Girondins (moderate republicans) were put to death.
The revolutionaries, especially the Jacobins with 2,000 clubs having 100,000 members, terrorized “suspects” by hauling them before revolutionary tribunals. “Suspects” included anyone who “either by their conduct, their contacts, their words or their writings, showed themselves to be supporters of tyranny, of federalism, or to be enemies of liberty.” If a suspect were found guilty, he or she could be guillotined, deported, or imprisoned.
Between March 1793 and July 1794 a half million people were arrested and some 16,600 executed. The bloodiest months for the Terror from revolutionary trials ran from December 1793 to July 1794, when Robespierre ruled as a dictator of France. But it should be recalled that revolutionary army troops who suppressed the Vendée rebellion resorted to mass deaths by drowning suspects and the burning of homes. Priests were drowned in the Loire River and nuns murdered.
C. The Dechristianization Campaign#
In 1793 the Jacobins, radical activists in the Convention led by Robespierre, thwarted the Federalist Revolt. After a trial, Girondins suspected of federalism were purged from the Convention. The “Committee of Public Safety,” made up of hardened Jacobins, wanted to establish a centralized dictatorship thought necessary to defend the revolution. For them the use of terror was “rational”; it was a means to eliminate counterrevolutionaries who threatened the revolution.
So-called “Federalists,” who ostensibly appreciated the Constitution of the United States, called for a more decentralized form of government and restrictions on voting rights.
Robespierre assumed the role of central dictator, the “absolute master of France.” Even as he prosecuted the Terror without mercy against France’s alleged foes, he portrayed himself as a defender of liberty and equality.
Under Robespierre’s malevolent direction, the Convention in Paris abetted not only the Terror but a movement of “dechristianization,” a campaign designed to thwart the activities of suspected Christian opponents of the revolution.
“Dechristianizers” rejoiced when on November 6, 1793, Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Gobel, the elected constitutional archbishop of Paris, abdicated his ministry. Gobel’s act of renunciation provided a model for other clerics to follow. The same day the Convention ordered the Departments of France to suppress parishes. On November 10, 1793, some anti-Christian revolutionaries, inspired by journalist Jacques Hébert, participated in a great festival dedicated to the Cult of Reason at Notre Dame Cathedral. An actress was “worshiped” as the Goddess of Reason.
On November 13 the Convention ruled, “All constituted authorities are authorized to receive from ecclesiastics and ministers of every cult, the declaration that they abdicate their function.” Cloaked in the Convention’s authority, a number of representatives on mission sought to oblige Catholic priests and Protestant pastors to abdicate their functions as clerics, assure the closing of Christian churches, and confiscate the churches’ gold and silver utensils of worship and clocks for the coffers of the revolution. Those clerics who refused to comply with the dictates of the representatives on mission risked arrest and even execution.
Out of the 114,500 Catholic clergy (in 1790), 20,000 to 25,000 emigrated or were deported; 3,000 to 5,000 were executed; 20,000 abdicated; and 25,000 had discontinued their ministries for diverse reasons.
The success of certain representatives on mission was quite spectacular.
Convention deputy Jean Borie claimed that the Departments of Gard and Lozère had “spontaneously” accepted his demands: 268 priests and pastors abdicated, and 233 “Temples of Reason” were erected.
Nearly all of the 103 Protestant pastors of Languedoc in 1794 ceased their ministries.
For all practical purposes, formal worship services of the Reformed churches ceased.
Whatever gatherings did occur, whether Protestant or Roman Catholic, were sometimes held in secret.
Robespierre believed that religion could serve as an essential bond to unite the French people. Because the Cult of Reason was largely rejected by the general population, he ordered (decree of 18 Floréal) that it be replaced by the Cult of the Supreme Being. Robespierre oversaw a grandiose festival celebrating the Supreme Being in Paris.
A number of members of the Convention suspected that Robespierre planned to guillotine them. They preemptively turned on the “tyrant.” On July 28, 1794, Robespierre, who had tried to commit suicide, was guillotined. Two days later, sixty of his supporting colleagues met the same fate. The revolution was adept at devouring its own.
D. The Thermidorian Reaction and the Directory (1794–99)#
Robespierre’s Reign of Terror ended on 9 Thermidor, Year II. On that day the cry “Down with the tyrant” echoed through the Convention. By 4 Brumaire (October), Year IV (1796), the Convention collapsed and was eventually replaced by the Directory. The intervening time between the two dates of the revolutionary calendar represented an era in which the people of France engaged in a full-scale reaction against the “tyrant” (Robespierre), against those who prosecuted the Terror (“drinkers of blood,” “cannibals”), and against the mayhem of the Terror.
The Convention attempted to dismantle the Terror. It ordered the selective release of prisoners and arranged for the trials of terrorists like Jean-Baptiste Carrier and members of the revolutionary committee of Nantes who had drowned so many peasants in the Vendée. On November 16, 1794, Carrier was guillotined.
In 1794–95, fears, suspicions, and retributions haunted French life. With worries about both anarchy and despotism, “bourgeois” elites formed a new government, the Directory (1795–99). Its leaders often promoted republican cults such as the deistic-oriented Theo-philanthropy.
During the revolution, French armies occupied numerous countries and regions in an effort to set up sister republics. Sometimes the French were greeted as liberators by factions that supported their “democratic and republican” ideology. On other occasions, they were scorned as invading oppressors.
The French attempted to support revolutionaries in a failed revolt in Ireland (1798)
They helped create the Batavian Republic (1795–99)
In Holland they annexed what would later become Belgium, where many resented their presence (1795)
They overran territories on the west bank of the Rhine (1798)
They annexed cantons of Switzerland (1798)
Napoleon Bonaparte seized Milan (1796) and invaded the Papal States. On February 15, 1798, the French troops entered Rome. They deposed Pope Pius VI and brought him back to France as a prisoner. On August 29, 1799, the pope died in Valence. With his demise, the future of the papacy appeared very bleak indeed. In Rome, revolutionaries attempted to win the populace to a form of republican patriotism.
Given the suffering, the humiliation, and the loss of lands the Roman Catholic Church experienced during the French Revolution, the popes of the nineteenth century understandably had to think long and hard regarding what stance they should take toward any self-proclaimed, “democratic” revolutionary movement.
IV. CONTEMPORARY ASSESSMENTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION#
Traumatized by the shock of the French Revolution, writers from Copenhagen to Rome launched a barrage of critiques. Speculative conspiracy theories abounded about the origins of the “godless” revolution that had culminated in the Terror. Multiple jumbled versions of these theories surfaced in pamphlets, books, and gossip throughout Europe.
Among well-known critiques were writings from the Irish Edmund Burke, the English John Wesley and Hannah More, the French Joseph de Maîstre and Louis de Bonald, and the Swiss Jacques Mallet du Pan.
In his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), whereas Edmund Burke believed the English Revolution of 1688 and the American Revolution were legitimate because they restored lost rights, he viewed the French Revolution as illegitimate because it promoted a theoretical form of so-called natural rights that subverted worthy past traditions and institutions and lacked a prerequisite grounding in Trinitarian Christianity, “the basis of civil society.”
For Burke, so-called natural rights can lead to tyranny unless recognized as God-given. Burke declared that English people considered the Anglican Church “as the foundation of their whole constitution, with which, and with every part of which, it holds an indissoluble union. Church and State are ideas inseparable in their minds, and scarcely is the one ever mentioned without mentioning the other.”
Radical Unitarians were also unhappy with Burke. They viewed him as a former liberal, now a turncoat, who upheld the Test Acts and the authority of the Anglican Church when they, along with some Dissenters, had hopes of disestablishing the church. Burke in time blamed the “atheism” of the revolutionaries for the revolution’s excesses.
For his part, John Wesley also stood out as a defender of the English monarchy, worried about civil unrest at home and disturbing news coming from France. During the time of the American Revolution, Wesley had pointed out that he was a “High Churchman” who supported the British monarchy, whatever sympathies he may have had for the cause of the American revolutionaries.
The Methodist Conferences of the 1790s called on their faithful to submit to the king’s authority. A number of Methodist pastors claimed that it was their preaching of submission to the king that helped prevent a violent revolution similar to the one in France from erupting in England.
In 1793 Hannah More (1745–1833), a very popular Christian author of the “Cheap Repository Tracts,” published Village Politics “to counter the pernicious doctrines, which owing to the French Revolution, were then becoming seriously alarming.” This work was directed to readers from the working classes in England and reiterated in a more popular rhetoric a number of Edmund Burke’s themes.
In the United States, many Christians roundly criticized “Republican” Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, both of whom were deists and both of whom had spent time in revolutionary Paris and had spoken well of the revolution. The French government had declared Paine (1737–1809), who was a tireless pamphleteer, an honorary citizen. Paine’s radical ideas circulated widely in England and in the United States. In his immensely popular The Age of Reason (1794–96) Paine roundly criticized the truthfulness of Holy Scripture: “It is a book of lies, wickedness and blasphemy; What is it the Bible teaches us? rapine, cruelty, and murder.” Paine wrote, “My own mind is my own church.” Many Christians both in England and in the United States vilified Paine as a “filthy” atheist.
V. NAPOLEON, REVOLUTION, AND EMPIRE (1799–1815)#
Born in Ajaccio, Corsica, Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) received an excellent military education at the École Militaire in Paris. He gained fame by deftly using artillery in defeating royalists with their English allies during the siege of Toulon and by putting down summarily a rebellion in Paris (1795) with “a whiff of grapeshot.” After military campaigns in Italy and Egypt, Napoleon, with the help of Tallyrand and Sieyès, engineered the coup d’état of 18 Brumaire (November 9–10, 1799), overthrowing the Directory.
In the new government of the Consulate, Napoleon served as First Consul. Initially, he attempted to project an accommodating attitude toward the Roman Catholic Church in France. After lengthy negotiations, on July 15, 1801, he signed the concordat with Pope Pius VII
Recognized Roman Catholicism’s dominant role in France without establishing it as the state church.
Sllowed Jews and Protestants to practice their religion and enjoy civil rights.
But then, without the pope’s approval, Napoleon added the Organic Articles (April 1802) to the concordat that limited further the papacy’s ability to intervene in France’s religious affairs. In the Napoleonic Code he reduced more than a thousand disparate French laws into one rational code.
On May 18, 1804, Napoleon was declared the emperor of France. On December 2, at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, with his wife Josephine looking on and Pope Pius VII presiding, Napoleon crowned himself Emperor of the French. In 1806 Napoleon indicated to Pius VII that he would permit freedom for the Papal States but stipulated that “Your Holiness is Sovereign of Rome, but I am Emperor. All my enemies must be his.”
Napoleon invaded Rome in 1808. Pius VII refused to abdicate, and the next year he was arrested and imprisoned in France and Italy. He was not released until 1814. The pope’s resolve and endurance during these trying circumstances increased his political stature in Europe.
Napoleon won notable military victories against the Austrians at Marengo (June 14, 1800) and Austerlitz (December 2, 1805). In time, Napoleon’s military exploits allowed him to control much of western Europe. Napoleon set up his relatives as kings in newly created occupied states:
Jerome Bonaparte, King of Westphalia (1807–13)
Joseph Bonaparte, King of Naples (1806–8) and King of Spain (1808–12)
Louis Bonaparte, King of Holland (1806–10)
Napoleon declared himself the Protector of the Rhenish Confederation in Germany.
By 1806, Napoleon’s control of the Confederation and other German regions and his decisive defeat of the Prussian armies at Jena sped up the demise of the Holy Roman Empire. On August 6 Holy Roman Emperor Francis abandoned his claims to the crown of Germany. On October 27 Napoleon himself entered Berlin.
For a time England remained one of the few major powers in a position to thwart French expansionary policy. After the defeat of a Spanish-French fleet on October 21, 1805, at Trafalgar by the English Admiral Horatio Nelson, Napoleon basically abandoned plans to invade England. Instead, from Berlin in 1806 he promulgated the “Continental” system that forbade countries under his control from trading with England. He hoped to ruin England economically by cutting off her trade. This policy became doomed by its frequent violation.
On July 7, 1807, Napoleon made peace with the Russian Tsar Alexander I at Tilsit. But angered that the tsar was permitting violations of the Continental system, Napoleon in 1812 decided to invade Russia.
On June 24, 1812, portions of his “Great Army” (Grande Armée) of 500,000 French and other European troops (another 250,000 left in reserve) crossed the Neman River into Russian territory. The army had to fight a number of costly battles on its way to Moscow.
At the Battle of Borodino (September 7, 1812), for example, 44,000 Russians and 30,000 French were killed in a single day.
On September 14 Napoleon did indeed capture Moscow, portions of which were ablaze. The Russians, however, would not surrender.
Retreating to the west, the French army experienced staggering losses of troops, owing to early snowstorms, bitterly cold weather (on occasion 38 degrees below zero), lack of food, and Cossack attacks. The ranks of the Great Army were decimated. Only 20,000 troops survived the punishing ordeal and straggled back to their homelands.
A number of factors spelled Napoleon’s complete ruin:
His ill-advised invasion of Russia
The resistance of Spanish rebels (1808–14)
The capture of Paris by the Allies on March 31, 1814
His abdication on April 4 and exile on the island of Elba
His brief return to power in Paris as emperor on March 21, 1815 (“The 100 Days”)
The defeat of his forces at Waterloo by British and Prussian forces under the leadership of the Duke of Wellington and Gebhard von Blecher respectively (June 12–18, 1815)
On May 5, 1821, Napoleon died of cancer in exile on Saint Helena Island in the South Atlantic.
Voraciously ambitious and unquestionably a military genius, Napoleon, the “Little Corporal” with hand in vest, asserted that his chief motive was to “purify” the French Revolution. A number of observers have accepted Napoleon’s assessment that he staved off at least temporarily a Bourbon restoration.
VI. RESTORATION AND THE CONGRESS OF VIENNA#
By no means did all Europeans subjected to French rule think that Napoleon’s intentions were generous and altruistic, that he sought their good. The existence of seven different coalitions of allies attempting to defeat his armies underscores this point. The seventh coalition (1815) included Great Britain, Russia, Sweden, Prussia, Austria, the Netherlands, and various German states. By the First Treaty of Paris, Louis XVIII accepted the directive that France should return to her 1792 borders.
At the Congress of Vienna (beginning in September 1814), Robert Castlereagh (Britain), Tsar Alexander I (Russia), Metternich (Austria), and Tallyrand (France) along with many princes, kings, and diplomats pursued a number of goals:
to achieve a balance of power in Europe
to have France respect her 1792 boundaries
to set up means whereby any future French expansion could be checked
to restore “legitimate” monarchies to power
Splicing and pasting together pieces of the map of Europe, the major powers negotiated with an eye to furthering their own interests in the larger context of these goals.
The accomplishments of the Congress of Vienna, given its agenda, were noteworthy. Genuine steps took place toward the restoration of lands and thrones.
By the Second Treaty of Paris, France was obliged to stay within her 1790 borders and pay reparations of 700 million francs.
The buffer states of the Kingdom of Sardinia and the Kingdom of the Netherlands were constituted to block French expansion.
Austria received the independent states of Italy, whereas the Kingdom of Poland came under the control of Russia.
Due to the brilliant diplomacy of Cardinal Ercole Consalvi, a close associate of Pope Pius VII, the papacy received back the Papal States, and its overall prestige was enhanced.
The “Quadruple Alliance” of Austria, Prussia, Russia, and Great Britain was created. It was followed in 1818 by the “Quintuple Alliance” (France added). Participants agreed to submit international disputes to a group of nations for adjudication, the so-called “Congress System.” Even though the Congress System fell apart rather rapidly, no European war engaging the governments of the entire continent would take place until World War I (1914–18).
In addition, on September 25, 1815, Tsar Alexander I, allured by the mystical thought of Baroness von Krudener, initiated a “Holy Alliance” with Emperor Francis I of Austria and King Frederick William III of Prussia. These rulers pledged to follow the principles of the Christian religion (justice, love, and peace) in their interactions with each other and in their own lands. The Holy Alliance received the lip-service backing of most crowns and diplomats of Europe (except the English king and the pope). Indeed, for many Europeans, restoration meant reinvigorating Christianity’s role in their particular countries after the political trauma and bloodshed of the last quarter century. Moreover, on August 14, 1814, the papacy restored the Society of Jesus, some 600 strong.
Earlier, in 1802, François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848), having recently returned from rationalistic unbelief to the Christian faith of his pious mother (“I wept and I believed”), had published The Genius of Christianity. This apologetic buttressed the faith of many Roman Catholics and spurred them on in their restoration efforts. Turning away from rationalistic argumentation, Chateaubriand emphasized the beauties of the Christian faith.
Political and religious conservatives who sought to reinvigorate the Christian faith’s influence and restore certain European institutions of the Old Order to a pre-1789 status often underestimated how powerful the messages of “republicanism” and “Bonapartism” had been. Nor did some of those politicians and diplomats who spoke the language of restoration and legitimacy intend to destroy the “advances” associated with the revolution and Napoleon.
Many Europeans resented the way the Great Powers had cavalierly manipulated the map of Europe with little concern about the welfare of the peoples affected. They despised imposed elites, some of whom ruled as foreigners over nations and ethnic groups to which they did not belong. They abhorred the obvious widespread social, political, and economic inequities of post-1815 Europe.
As the productivity of industry increased, the “bourgeoisie’s” interest in making money appeared insatiable. Critics found this development deplorable because the bourgeoisie were often profiting at the expense of workers but cared little for their welfare.
Other critics protested the prevalence of crime, venereal disease, prostitution, and poverty among vast segments of city dwellers. Overcrowding in the cities had become an immense problem. Critics rued the fact that so many Europeans even up to 1831 were excluded from voting because they failed to meet property, money, religious, or gender qualifications: having the right to vote were
620,000 English from a population of 16.5 million
167,000 French from 33 million
40,000 Belgians from 4 million
The critics deeply resented “foreign” powers occupying their lands. Some “nationalists” in particular were prepared to rebel. Political “liberals” who advocated the freedom of individuals and the creation of constitutions often opted for attempts at reform rather than recourse to revolution.
Conservative forces defending the Old Order often ruthlessly repressed democratic movements between 1815 and 1850. The Restoration’s watchdogs of eastern Europe — Metternich of Austria and Tsars Alexander I and Nicholas I of Russia — not only barked but bit.
VII. REVOLUTIONS FROM 1815 TO 1832#
A. The Greek Struggle for Independence#
Not every revolution that ensued was directed against a “Christian” European state. From 1821 to 1832, Greeks fought a costly bloody war for independence from the Ottoman Empire. As a people they had been subjected to Turkish rule since the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Resisting conversion to the Muslim faith, Greeks generally remained true to Orthodox beliefs.
During the Greek war, tens of thousands of civilians perished when Greeks and Ottomans massacred each other and Jews. The Greeks who sought liberation from the Turks benefitted:
From an ideology calling for the preservation of Hellenic culture
From the negative effects of a weakened economy on the Turkish military
From the assistance of secret revolutionary societies such as the Filiki Eteria (“Friendly Society,” that is, Society of Friends) in Odessa, Russia (which apparently wanted to create an Orthodox Balkan state using Greek as its language)
From the daring exploits of leaders such as the pro-Russian commander Theodor Kolokotronis
From the military support of the French, English, and Russian governments whose ships trapped and then set on fire the Turkish-Egyptian navies on October 20, 1827
With the Treaty of Adrianople (1829), the independence of Greece and Serbia was assured, and Romanian principalities came under Russia control. On April 24, 1830, the Ottoman government under military pressure from the Russians recognized the independence of Greece. Briefly, a president ruled over the newly established Greek democracy, but he was assassinated. Otto of Bavaria (1815–67), who had supported the struggle for independence, in turn became the Greek king.
Greece was the first modern European state to emerge in the post-Napoleon era.
B. The French Revolution of 1830#
The Charter of 1814 established a constitutional monarchy in France with Louis XVIII, a Bourbon, as king (1814–24). The new monarch faced rising dissension between:
Émigrés nobles who sought the restoration of their properties
Political liberals in the Chamber of Deputies (the legislature) who wanted to preserve the “gains” of the revolution and the Napoleonic era
Charles X (1824–30) attempted to turn back the royal clock to pre-1789 days, if judged by his coronation (May 29, 1825).
The archbishop of Reims anointed him (sacre) in the cathedral of Reims.
Charles participated in a healing service for those afflicted with the “King’s disease” (scrofula).
Prime Minister Joseph, the Comte de Villèle, and other conservative Catholics known as Ultras pushed through a bill restoring the Roman Catholic Church as the church of France.
The Ultras gained control over the educational system of France and passed the “Law of Sacrilege,” which stipulated that anyone who defaced the sacraments could be put to death. The agenda of the Ultras deepened anticlerical sentiments in various corners of the French public.
In 1830 Charles X further antagonized many Frenchmen by promulgating the “Four Ordinances,” which limited freedom of the press, and by dismissing the Chamber of Deputies. Likening their actions to the revolutionaries of the English Revolution of 1688, liberals and bourgeois revolutionaries joined workers in the streets of Paris in a revolt of three “Glorious Days.” Charles X abdicated, thereby ending the rule of the Bourbon family.
In the elections of 1830, political liberals won a majority of seats in the Chamber of Deputies. Charles X tried to stymie them by ordering that the chamber be dissolved and new elections held.
The victors of the Revolution of 1830 created the “July Monarchy” and installed Louis Philippe (1773–1850) of the Orléans family as the King of France (1830–48). François Guizot, Louis Philippe’s very influential Protestant minister of instruction (1832–37) and premier (1847–48), indicated that the “promise” of the July Monarchy was “order and liberty” reunited under a constitutional monarchy. Guizot firmly opposed universal suffrage because it allegedly brought about “the ruin of democracy and liberty.”
The upper middle class with the right to vote and with great money displaced royalists and the old nobility in the process. The wealthy built multistoried, luxurious homes in Paris, the very top floors of which were reserved for servants, who lived in squalid, unhealthy conditions. The wealthy sometimes feared the common people and viewed them as depraved and “barbarians.”
Hugo described the bourgeois king as “one of the best princes who ever sat on the throne.” Some of the poor people of Paris thought otherwise. In June 1832, at the time of the funeral of General Lamarque, a republican hero, they took to the streets and erected barricades in a failed insurrection. Hugo captured the story of their struggle for freedom in his poignant novel Les Misérables (1862). Their economic plight had not improved under the “liberal bourgeois” government of Louis Philippe.
Hugues-Félicité Robert de Lamennais, perhaps the foremost advocate of the restoration of Roman Catholicism in France, became convinced that his church should enjoy independence from the monarchy. Initially he approved the July Monarchy of Louis Philippe. On October 16, 1830, with Charles de Montalembert and Henri Dominique Lacordaire, Lamennais published the first edition of L’Avenir (The Future), a journal devoted to the message of “God and Freedom” — that is, religious belief and political liberty are compatible concepts. Lamennais advocated “the total separation of church” (from the state), freedom of education, freedom of the press, and other measures. On August 15, 1832, Pope Gregory XVI, in the encyclical Miravi Vos (“On Liberalism and Religious Indifferentism”), condemned appeals of this kind.
Lamennais also penned Words of a Believer, in which he attacked the rich for their exploitation of the poor and extolled the brotherhood of mankind. Published in 1834, the provocative book became a huge bestseller. The papacy condemned the book as “immense in perversity.” By 1836 Lamennais had decided to give up his Roman Catholic beliefs.
C. The Belgium Revolt (1830)#
Like revolutionaries in Paris, other Europeans dreamt of political liberty and freedom. They remembered earlier successful revolutions.
On August 25, 1830, rioting broke out in Brussels. Spectators who had been attending Daniel Auber’s opera La Muette de Portici about earlier Spanish revolutionaries became agitated and took to the streets. A successful revolt led by political liberals and Catholics ensued in the southern region of the Netherlands. The revolutionaries formed the second modern European state, Belgium. Its liberal constitution (1831) sanctioned freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and freedom of education.
Benefitting from the political turmoil in Spain and Portugal, revolutionaries in South America had earlier mounted independence movements that resulted in the creation of a number of nations:
Columbia between 1810 and 1825 (led by General Simon Bolivar, 1783–1830)
Argentina in 1816 (led by soldier-statesman José de San Martin, 1778–1850)
Chile between 1810 and 1818 (San Martin)
Peru in 1821 (San Martin)
D. Poland and Russia: The Suppression of Revolutions#
By no means were all revolutions successful. Poland’s nationalistic revolutionaries often suffered grievously.
In 1764 Catherine the Great of Russia imposed Stanislaw Poniatowski on the country. Prussia and Russia eventually partitioned Poland three times (1772, 1793, 1795). These same powers put down several efforts by Poles in 1794 and 1830 to gain their liberation from foreign domination.
In 1794 Thaddeus Kosciusco, a veteran of the American Revolution, attempted to establish a republic in Poland only to have the Russians and Prussians crush the rebellion. Thousands of Poles lost their lives in the conflict.
In Russia, when Tsar Alexander I died in 1825 (the rumor existing that he had faked his death), reforming aristocrats and members of a Moscow regiment of the military staged a revolt in Saint Petersburg in an attempt to block the succession of Nicholas I. They intended to establish Constantine, Nicholas I’s brother, as a constitutional monarch. Caught off guard by the rebellion, Nicholas I dramatically wrote in December 1825, “In the early hours of the day after tomorrow, I shall either be a sovereign or a corpse.” He survived. Troops loyal to him put down the “Decembrist Revolt.”
Not only did Tsar Nicholas I (1825–55) seek to expand Russia at the expense of the Ottoman Turks (1828–29), but he also supported efforts to suppress revolutionaries in Europe, thereby earning the title of the “gendarme of Europe.” In 1830–31, his forces brutally suppressed Polish revolutionaries.
Nicholas professed a desire that the Poles might enjoy “security of persons and property, liberty of conscience, and all the laws and privileges of towns and communes.” In fact, Polish nationalists attempted to launch another revolution in 1863–64.
In Russia, Nicholas ruled what was tantamount to a police state. His government attempted to propagate the theory of “Official Nationality” — “Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality.” This program struck a national and deeply spiritual chord with some Russians. So-called “Slavophiles” promoted a return to the rural and monastic values of Russia that supposedly existed before Peter the Great had “westernized” it. Government spies and the secret police of the “Third Section” kept a watchful eye for anyone who appeared to oppose the regime’s autocratic policies.
Russian intellectuals, so-called “Westernizers,” were often atheists. They loved Russia, but also appreciated various western European cultures. They sometimes reacted strongly against what they perceived to be the folding back of Russian culture into itself. In the 1830s, sharp debates broke out between Slavophiles and Westernizers.
People suspected of holding revolutionary sentiments were sometimes arrested and sent to Siberia.
VIII. LABOR UNREST AND REVOLUTIONS (1832–48)#
Even though many western European countries remained essentially agrarian deep into the nineteenth century, the “Industrial Revolution” continued to transform daily life for millions of workers. Labor unrest, whether in England, France, Germany, Italy, or elsewhere, became a prominent feature of urban life.
While some labor leaders openly disdained the Christian religion, others consistently referenced Christian values in their appeals for justice for workers. They often railed at “Democratic Liberals.” The utopian socialist Henri Comte de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) believed that Europe was like a body and could only become “healthy” when all of its members, including the “poorest and most numerous class,” enjoyed more of the fruits of their labor.
Unfortunately, the self-serving goal of some liberals was to “overthrow every possible government so that they can take over themselves.” The followers of Saint-Simon urged the upper classes to forsake egoism and for workers and others to show Christian love to each other. Other liberals such as Pierre Leroux (1797–1871) attempted to give their forms of Christian socialism intellectual heft.
A. The Revolutions of 1848#
From 1848 to 1850, like delayed timing of bursts in a spectacular fireworks display, rounds of revolutions went off, lighting up the European countryside at different moments. The initial burst came from the French in February 1848. Soon, news of their revolution spurred peoples such as Germans, Magyars, Czechs, and Italians to revolt. Some revolutionaries cried out in a utopian spirit, “All change!” Regimes were overthrown, and intoxicating talk of national unity and of new eras of freedom of speech, press, and religion wafted through the air.
In the end, however, the forces of restoration generally succeeded in extinguishing most of the revolts. Interestingly enough, Marx and Friedrich Engels published their Communist Manifesto in 1848.
B. France#
In France, dissatisfaction with the liberal government of Louis Philippe simmered. Based on guidelines from the Napoleonic era, public education no longer specifically supported the Catholic faith.
Social critics complained that the governments of Louis Philippe continued to ignore the grinding poverty of workers and seemed only too intent in protecting the economic interests of the upper classes. This attitude appeared substantiated in 1847, when the government refused to extend voting rights to a greater number of the populace.
As members of the “petty bourgeoisie,” students and workers began holding banquets where they discussed in an animated fashion the need for “reform.” When in 1848 the government outlawed these banquets, they took to the streets and confronted the French military. Elsewhere in the streets of Paris, barricades were hastily erected, fierce fighting broke out, and blood was shed.
After republican and socialist rebels seized the Hôtel de Ville, Louis Philippe abdicated and went to England. Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869) established the Provisional Second Republic. Property requirements for voting were abolished, but the demands of workers were not met to their satisfaction by Lamartine’s government.
Once again, they revolted. This time the French army put down the rebellion. In December 1848, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was elected the president of the French Republic. In a coup of 1852 he took the title Emperor Napoleon III and was in fact the dictatorial head of the Second Empire.
C. Germany#
After the Congress of Vienna, thirty-five monarchs and four independent Free Cities formed the German Federation as a replacement of sorts for the German Empire that had collapsed in 1806. This loose federation, the results of Metternich’s efforts to restore the old order, did not satisfy the desires for German unity evident particularly among students.
At the Wartbergfest in October 1817, students celebrating Martin Luther’s nailing of the Ninety-five Theses and a victory over Napoleon at Leipzig called for “Honor, Freedom and Fatherland” and chose for their flag the colors black, red, and gold and the emblem of a black eagle.
On various occasions (1830, 1832, 1833, 1837), nationalistic rebellions occurred in portions of Germany with revolutionaries calling for the freedom of the press, the right of assembly, elective representation of the people, and other liberties. None of these stirrings led to great change, however.
In 1848 many students and professors, enthused by news of the fall of Louis Philippe’s regime in France, anticipated that finally the moment of German unity had arrived and that repressive German regimes would be overthrown.
A popular uprising in Austria involving Magyar, German, and Czech nationalists that forced Metternich to seek exile on March 13, 1848. In the same month a number of German states had adopted liberal constitutions. After bloodshed occurred in a crowd demanding reform, Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia initially appeared ready to accept a liberal constitution.
At a meeting at St. Paul’s Church in Frankfurt, learned delegates of a national assembly gathered on May 18, 1848, with the goal of establishing a liberal constitution for Germany. Disputes ensued, however, over whether Germany should be large or small (with Austria or without).
The restoration of conservative aristocrats (Otto von Bismarck) to power in Berlin by the fall of 1848, the Austrian emperor’s decision to create an Austrian Hapsburg state including Hungary and portions of Italy and the Balkans (March 1849), and Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s refusal to accept the national assembly’s offer of the crown of Germany (April 3, 1849) contributed to the collapse of efforts to establish a politically liberal Germany.
A good number of German intellectuals, very disappointed by these developments, emigrated from Prussia in consequence, some like Carl Schurz (1829–1906) pursuing distinguished careers in the United States. Schurz served as a U.S. Senator, as the Secretary of the Interior (1877–81), and as the editor of a number of influential newspapers.
D. The Papacy and Revolutions in Italy (1848)#
The French Revolution and the Age of Napoleon constituted traumatic eras for the papacy: papal condemnations flaunted, popes imprisoned, papal lands seized. It is understandable that after 1815 the restored papacy often viewed with suspicion revolutionary movements that heralded the virtues of nationalism and republicanism.
Gregory XVI (1831–46), a beneficiary of archconservative Metternich’s support, criticized freedom of conscience and spoke out against Italian nationalism, only to have a revolt break out in the Papal States. Austrian troops were needed to quell the unrest and eventually occupied the Papal States for seven years.
By contrast, Pope Pius IX (1846–78) initially attempted to accommodate the democratic republican aspirations of certain Italians with Roman Catholic Church teachings. Upon learning in early 1848 that Ferdinand II of Naples had permitted a constitution, the pope followed suit by creating a constitution for the Papal States. Then news reached Rome that the Austrian Metternich had fallen and various Italian cities had erupted in revolutions seeking to throw off the yoke of Austrian rule. Pope Pius IX decided not to give full support to Italian revolutionaries in their campaign for liberation. After all, the Austrians were likewise Roman Catholics.
A revolution broke out in Rome, and Pius IX felt forced to flee. Giuseppe Mazzini and other revolutionaries who sought the unification of Italy established the “Roman Republic,” only to have their regime overthrown in turn by French troops. In 1850 a chastened Pope Pius IX returned to Rome from exile, disabused of pro-democratic or republican sympathies.
Pius IX generally demonstrated overt hostility toward “liberal” political movements in the remaining years of his pontificate. Moreover, he understood very well that his own rule in Rome depended on the presence of French bayonettes.
IX. CONCLUSION#
The “Age of Democratic Revolutions” (1770–1848) witnessed waves of revolutions that swept through portions of Europe and the Americas at different times.
For many revolutionaries the “gospel of republican democracy” was antagonistic to the gospel of Jesus Christ.
For other revolutionaries, the gospel of Jesus Christ and republican democracy were mutually supportive.
For many nonrevolutionaries, defending the “Old Regime” was tantamount to defending the Christian religion.
After the publication of The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels in 1848, revolutionaries arose as “evangelists” for the Marxist gospel that challenged not only the Christian gospel but the “gospel” of Western political liberalism. Then again, Luddites, the followers of the mythical figure Ned Ludd, espoused a form of destructive anarchism that gave no quarter to institutions whether political or commercial.
Although the forces of restoration emerged as apparent victors from the revolutions of 1848, they could not block the unification of Italy and Germany later in the century. Moreover, after 1848 they could not ultimately shelter the Christian religion itself from the impact of another kind of revolution, one of changing worldviews.
This “change in men’s beliefs” contributed to derailing efforts, especially among many intellectuals, to restore Christianity to the central role it had enjoyed in European culture before the French Revolution of 1789.