Page:EB1911 - Volume 23.djvu/523

Rh too much; it clung as closely as Napoleon himself to the idea of a State Church, taking its orders from the government. In this way Gallicanism, which had once stood for all that was national and progressive, now came to mean subservience to a feeble autocracy already tottering to its fall. “A free Church in a free State” became the motto of the group of brilliant men, led by Lamennais, Montalembert and Lacordaire, who started up as soon as the July Revolution of 1830 replaced Charles X. by Louis Philippe. They felt that Catholicism was strong enough to stand alone, without artificial support. For the Revolution had not “abolished Christianity,” even among the educated classes, quite so thoroughly as it imagined. Many were only kept back from going to church by the fear that their neighbours would think them superstitious or narrow-minded. But in 1802 Chateaubriand had published his epoch-making Génie du Christianisme, in which he declared that of all religions Christianity was “the most poetical, the most human, the most favourable to freedom, art and letters.” If that were so, no one need be ashamed to profess it; and the younger generation of Frenchmen began to gravitate back to the Church. Meanwhile, Germany was being profoundly influenced by the great aesthetic revival known as the Romantic Movement, which began with the worship of medieval art and literature, and ended with the worship of medieval religion. And even Italy and Spain presently began to play their part in the Christian reaction. Rosmini in one country, and Balmes in the other, “brought piety to the learned, and learning to the pious.”

These writers, however, only touched the few; and the great aim of Lamennais and his friends was to reach the mass of the people. Immediately after the accession of Louis Philippe they started their famous newspaper, L'Avenir, hoping thereby to reconcile the Church with democracy, and make the pope the leader of the party of progress. The enterprise was hazardous, since democracy had hitherto brought nothing but ill to Rome. In 1798 French troops had entered the papal states, proclaimed a republic in Rome, and kept Pius VI. a prisoner till his death (1799). In 1808 Napoleon arrested his successor, Pius VII., threw the papal states into his new Italian kingdom, and dragged Pius about from prison to prison till the eve of his own fall in 1814. When the congress of Vienna gave the pope back his dominions, the one thought of the broken old man was to restore, as far as possible, the ancient order of things. But the traditional methods of Roman administration were deplorably ineffective; on the accession of Gregory XVI. (1831-46), the powers presented a memorandum strongly urging reform. Some reforms of detail were introduced; but Gregory declared that to grant a constitution to the States of the Church would be incompatible with the principle of the papacy. Such a man was hardly likely to listen to the plans of Lamennais. In 1832 the Avenir was condemned, and the disgusted Lamennais left the Roman Church. Lacordaire and Montalembert, however, continued their democratic campaign, by no means without success; for the revolution of 1848, which drove Louis Philippe from the throne, was far less hostile to Catholicism than that of 1830. Under the short-lived Second Republic (1848-52) the position of the Church grew even stronger, for the introduction of universal suffrage brought to the polls great masses of new voters strongly clerical in sympathies. In 1850 was passed the Loi Falloux, which broke down the Napoleonic idea of a state-monopoly of teaching, and allowed the opening of voluntary schools. Of this concession the religious orders took full advantage.

Meanwhile in Rome things had gone from bad to worse. Gregory XVI.'s refusal to grant a constitution called forth a series of sporadic outbursts, inspired by Mazzini and the “Young Italian” party, between 1832 and 1838. These were put down by-French and Austrian arms, with the result of focusing the hatred of Young Italy on the pope. One last attempt was made to save him. In 1843 the Piedmontese priest Gioberti brought out a remarkable book, in which he

urged his countrymen to combine into an Italian confederation with the pope at its head. For a moment it seemed as though Gioberti's dream were about to translate itself into reality. In 1846 Gregory died, and was succeeded by Pius IX., one of the youngest of the cardinals, and well known for his popular sympathies. He at once granted an amnesty to political prisoners, of whom the Roman gaols were full; two years later (March 1848) he issued a constitution to the papal states, and seemed about to throw in his lot with the forces making for Italian independence. But the first step thereto was deliverance from the Austrian yoke; and Pius, the Italian prince, was grievously hampered by his position as head of the Church. How could a pope make war on Austria, the one power that had never faltered in its allegiance to the Church? Accordingly Pius soon drew back, and his popularity waned. In the autumn the revolutionary fever, which had swept through all Europe earlier in the year, spread to Rome. The pope's prime minister, Count Rossi, was murdered, and Pius himself, escaping to Gaeta, threw himself under Neapolitan protection. In Rome Mazzini proclaimed a republic. Once more France and Austria intervened; in 1850 Pius went back to Rome, and ruled there under the shadow of foreign bayonets. Meanwhile the Second Republic had come to an end in France; in 1852 the prince-president, Louis Napoleon, was elected emperor. At first he greatly needed the support of the clergy to secure him on his precarious throne; But, as he grew stronger, his desire for their good opinion paled before an overmastering propensity to meddle in the affairs of foreign nations. He allied himself with Victor Emmanuel, and marched into Italy in 1859, with the object of expelling the Austrians from the peninsula. This expedition led directly up to the unification of Italy. Two years later Victor Emmanuel was master of the whole country, except Venice and the “Patrimony of St Peter.” This last—about one-third of the papal states—was all that was left to Pius; and even this was only held for him by French troops. When Napoleon withdrew his garrison in 1866, Garibaldi immediately raised a body of volunteers to march on Rome; and

Napoleon was obliged to send back his troops. Three years later, the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War (July 1870) led to their recall. In the following September, ten days after the final collapse of Louis Napoleon at Sédan, the troops of Victor Emmanuel entered Rome; and the temporal power of Pius came to an end.

Pius might no longer rule over the papal states; but there was consolation in the thought that, within the realm of conscience,

his power had increased by leaps and bounds. The whole history of the 19th century is one vast conspiracy to exalt the importance of the papacy. At its opening both the intellectual and administrative guidance of the Church was entirely in French and Italian hands; and the first instincts of those countries is to lean on an all-sufficing government. The French Revolution had supposed itself to be fighting for the “rights of man”; really it was trying to replace an autocratic kingship by an equally autocratic “general will” of the multitude. And it failed because no general will could make its voice rise above the conflict of particular inclinations. Thankfully did men bow before Napoleon, who undertook to relieve them of the responsibility of having to make up their minds. Nor did the emperor's fall by any means entail the fall of his ideas; Count Joseph de Maistre, the great orator of ultramontanism, did little more than transplant them on to the ecclesiastical domain. Bossuet and the old-fashioned divines had believed in an elaborate system of checks and balances—popes, councils, bishops, temporal sovereigns each limiting and controlling the other—just as Montesquieu and Alexander Hamilton had believed in a careful separation of the executive from the legislative power. Napoleon swept away the checks and balances, and made the will of a single man the one and only sanction of government. In like manner de Maistre proposed to sweep away the ecclesiastical checks and balances, and vest the whole of the Church's authority in