Conscience and Conversion: Religious Liberty in Post-Revolutionary France by Thomas Kselman

Author:Thomas Kselman [Kselman, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, France, Religion, Modern, 19th Century
ISBN: 9780300235647
Google: TbBIDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: YaleUP
Published: 2018-02-06T20:44:59+00:00

Conclusion

Lamennais’s disciples abandoned him in the 1830s, choosing to remain within the Catholic Church that he rejected. His life and thought were nonetheless influential, first of all in the short run, for the language of liberty that he made central to a defense of the church continued to shape the arguments of Lacordaire, Montalembert, and others as they battled for Catholic education against the state monopoly throughout the 1840s. This campaign would eventually contribute to a major victory with the Falloux law of 1851, though by this point Lamennais was no longer in favor of a clerical role in education.112 From a longer perspective, Lamennais’s insistence that Catholicism needed to embrace political democracy can be seen to anticipate the development of Christian democracy in the twentieth century, and his commitment to social justice establishes him as one of the founding figures of social Catholicism.113 Ernest Renan, one of the most astute critics of Lamennais, called attention to his political legacy in a review of his life and work that appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1857. Renan judged Lamennais a crucial innovator for establishing Catholicism as a force to be reckoned with in the world of democratic politics that was emerging in the nineteenth century: “Many others before him had put passion and intrigue at the service of their religious faith; the bold innovation of Lamennais was to make Catholicism a party.” Drawing on the ironic sense that was central to his own religious identity, which will be explored in a later chapter, Renan argued that Lamennais, despite his expulsion from the church, had in fact triumphed, for even if the church rejected his version of liberalism, it had embraced the need to play politics in regimes that were evolving toward mass democracy. According to Renan, it was Lamennais’s achievement “to have invented all the machinery of war that the catholic party has so usefully employed.” He was in the end a polemicist, “looking always for arguments to support his cause, rather than the truth, a powerful intellectual machine working over a void.”114 Renan’s hostility toward someone who, like himself, abandoned a clerical career to become a leading force opposed to the church is surprising. But Renan never imagined a progressive political role for the church and retained a nostalgic view of Catholicism, rooted in fond memories of the folk practices and simple belief of his Breton childhood, a generation after Lamennais’s troubled upbringing. Renan’s critique reflects as well his deep suspicion of democratic politics, precisely the development in which Lamennais placed his hope for the future. For all its vitriolic character, Renan’s point is worth pondering, for Lamennais’s movements into and then away from Catholicism were inextricably bound up with his positions on the evolving political and social order, an entanglement that both reflected and contributed to the church’s intense engagement with democratic politics in the modern age. Lamennais’s particular agenda was rejected, at least in the short run, but he stands as a key figure in

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