A fellow traveller of aristocratic and Germanic origin was asking me the other day why it is that Hilaire Belloc, so aggressive and militant a Catholic writer, evinced such an enthusiasm for the French Revolution. “Well” I responded “in the end it all comes down to Romanitas. For him the political ideal was the Augustan Principate, the regime under which the Saviour was born. Not as it was in fact but as it was in theory: a Republican Monarchy. This had been corrupted in part by the despotic instincts of the Hellenistic Greeks and in part by the blood-monarchy and aristocracy of the invading Germanic barbarians. When the people overthrew the monarchies and aristocracies of Europe at the end of the eighteenth century it was just the long overdue revolt of the oppressed Roman population of the Mediterranean against their ghastly barbarian rulers.” My aristocratic interlocutor was not pleased with this analysis and its implicit inversion of his worldview and sense of worth. “Neminem regem non ex servis esse oriundum, neminem non servum ex regibus.”
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November 4, 2011 at 10:08 pm
I just read a lovely passage in Christopher Hollis’s Seven Ages where Belloc is arguing about the authenticity of the Gospels, and this leads him to a discussion of the French Revolution:
“He maintained that the Revolution deprived no one of anything that they had a right to possess. In the corner of the room sat a meek little man. Nobody quite knew who he was or why he was there. ‘Heads?’ he asked in a quiet, soft voice. Belloc continued his oration…”
Incidentally, are you thinking of any particular passage in Belloc’s work that supports your claim? As far as I can remember from skimming B’s book on the revolution, his chief argument for its legitimacy is based on Rousseau’s theory of the social contract.
November 4, 2011 at 10:59 pm
I was principally thinking of his argument in ‘Europe and the Faith’ for the essential continuity of the Republica through the centuries of its identity with the Church and of the Church’s identity with Europe. Also of his claim in the same work that WWI was a rematch of the völkerwanderung. It is very hard indeed to maintain enthusiasm for the revolution (however abstract) in the face of the actual conduct and character of its protagonists. Would you not concede that there is a real sense in which 1789 became an attempt to undo 476? Such claims were certainly made at the time both by Artois and Sieyès.
November 5, 2011 at 7:15 pm
I certainly agree that the revolutionaries thought of themselves as classical heroes throwing off the domination of barbarians. They thought a great deal of nonsense.
I should read Europe and the Faith.
November 5, 2011 at 11:02 pm
Ah yes….. but the Second Estate also periodically justified its position by claiming a right of conquest as Franks over the Third as Gauls (e.g. Henri de Boulainvilliers). Artois invoked the idea of the war-band of the Frankish Kings as justification for the privileges of the Second. It also came up in the ‘Memorandum of the Princes of the Blood’ justifying the Second’s tax exemption (which prompted the famous rejoinder “was then the people’s blood mere water?”). Napoleon’s joke about the royalists of the Faubourg St. Germain being the ‘Germanic League’ was an allusion to the theory, and Sieyes played with the idea in ‘Qu’est ce que le Tiers Etat?’
http://exlaodicea.wordpress.com/2011/02/22/arthurian-republicanisim/
In a sense the claim is clearly true. The nobility as a class in Europe is derived from the distinction between the descendants of the tribal conquerors and their Roman subjects. Even if the genes are entirely mingled, the origin of the two classes lies here. The first instance of the ‘three estates’ idea I’ve seen is in the writings of Alfred the Great. So it is old enough to reach back to a time when the distinction really was founded in descent. I’ve heard it claimed that the racism of the nineteenth century and later goes back to the ideas of de Boulainvilliers but I don’t know how certain that claim is.
November 6, 2011 at 10:07 am
I hadn’t read the Sieyès quote before. Of course, not all nonsense is unprovoked nonsense–some of it is quite amusingly ironic nonsense.
How would you like to do a seminar on ‘Arthurian Republicanism’? There are a great many things we could read…
January 20, 2012 at 6:34 pm
[...] then Hillaire Belloc was famously a great defender of the Revolution, and even Aelianus of Laodicea seems to agree with him up to a point. The French Revolution, it would seem, is a bit [...]
January 20, 2012 at 10:33 pm
[...] for Voegelin the Revolution was above all a rematch of the Fronde, whereas for Belloc it was a rematch of the Völkerwanderung. The advantage of the butter/olive oil account is that it shows how it could actually have been [...]