The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Foreword
• Preface to the Liberty Fund Edition
• Introduction
• I: Before 1789
• II: The Revolution and the Rôle of History
• III: From 1789 to the Trial of Louis Xvi
• IV: The Trial of “le Stuart Français”
• V: The Aftermath

V

The Aftermath

1

Republican Qualms

The counter-revolutionary use of Hume’s History of the Stuarts as a bible of unshakeable prophecies, complacently illustrating the irrationalism and ineradicable sins of human nature, the implacable “force of things,” and the inevitable failure of all revolutions, continued with perhaps even greater intensity in the last five years of the century. Disheartening to some revolutionists too was the fact that political events as they progressed seemed to lend a new respectability to the fashionable science of historical analogies as more and more of the royalist predictions were, in appearance at least, fulfilled.

On the whole, however, few republicans showed signs of discouragement. Although leaders of the Right flattered themselves with the hope of restoration and pointed again and again to the failure of the English republican experiment, those on the Left, now publishing parallels of their own, staunchly denied the validity of such royalist hopes.

Much of this republican optimism seems to have been based on the belief that the established church, acknowledged as the throne’s chief support, was now gone forever. Such, for example, is the opinion of Jean-Jacques Leuliette, writing in 1797: “. . . if I could hazard an opinion, I would say that the return of the monarchy is impossible in France, that its very foundations have been overturned, that if this colossus were to rise again one day, it would stand, like the statue of Nebuchadnezzar, only on feet of clay. James Stuart once uttered a profound maxim: no Bishop, no King and there is no likelihood that the reign of superstition will be easily restored. . . .”1

Republicans were generally confident on this last point. Neither the Church nor the monarchy could ever return to power. Also writing in 1797, the idéologue Roederer explained just why there was no need to fear a religious revival. His reasons, given only a few years before the appearance of the Génie du Christianisme and the ratification of the Concordat, are worth noting and invite certain reflections on the advantages held, temporarily at least, by the empirical conservatives of the opposing camp who spoke so lovingly of the inertia in the nature of things and who went on making their hopeful historical parallels:

Confidence in the future of the new Republic and the reasoned hope that it would consolidate its forces now that the days of anarchy were over thus seem to have been the prevailing attitude on the Left at this time. Some republicans, however, despite such assurances, did in fact worry about the Stuart parallels. Typically concerned was Antoine Boulay de la Meurthe, a member of the Conseil des Cinq-Cents, who in December 1797 became president of the Assembly. Although Boulay had himself narrowly escaped the Terror, he became in this post-Terror period a strong advocate of harsher measures against refractory priests and against members of the nobility who had not emigrated. Such measures are best described as indicative of his own pronounced fears of a counter-revolution. At his suggestion even, a special promise not to aid in attempts to restore the monarchy was added to the oath of civil officers at this time.

It can safely be said, I think, that much of Boulay’s preoccupation with the dangers of a counter-revolution came to him from his study of Stuart history.

The English republic had not survived because, obviously, the English had made mistakes. But what were those English mistakes? As an answer to this question, Boulay published in 1798 his popular essay showing the causes of failure in the English revolution.3

The basic implication of Boulay’s work is that the art of revolution is a difficult one—more difficult certainly than was admitted by those who had nursed France’s great social experiment through its earliest years. The English had faced the same original problem. They too had overthrown the monarchy in hopes of destroying despotism: “One of the more immediate causes of this revolution was monarchical despotism, elevated to a great height by the princes of the House of Tudor and imprudently sustained by the House of Stuart that followed.”4 They had failed to maintain their republic, however, because of rigorous extremism. The English republic would have survived if patriots had steered a middle course between the servile policies of the royalists—which Hume, Boulay asserts, despite all his airs of impartiality, obviously supports—and the fanatical conduct of the extreme Left wing. Boulay admits, of course, that some harsh measures were necessary at the time:

But having gone this far, Boulay warns, leaders of revolutions must be careful to go no farther. Harsh measures must be restricted to what is absolutely necessary: “The fine art of revolution is to attain your goal while doing the least possible harm.”6 The delicate trick of survival entails giving only a half-turn to the political wheel, which must come to rest at precisely the right point, that is, before the necessity of reaction sets in. There are implications in the following passage which make it possible for us to understand how republicans were soon able to reconcile in their minds both the Revolution and the arrival of Bonaparte—however much they were to murmur eventually at the title of Emperor:

Disagreeing with Boulay de la Meurthe’s position on several points but supporting basically his view that extremism could only harm the Revolution, the young republican Benjamin Constant in an earlier work had also invoked Stuart history to warn France of the dangers of counter-revolution.

First of all, Constant maintained, it was a mistake to say that the English revolution had failed. Confusion had arisen on this question because it was assumed that the French and English revolutions had had similar goals:

Even though an ideological identity did not exist, there were important lessons to be learned from Stuart history by those who wished to maintain the Republic in France:

Stuart history shows, according to Constant, that the greatest difficulties are encountered when one attempts to restore to its just and moderate limits a revolution that has gone too far. The political pendulum swings an equal distance in both directions. Repressive reaction equal to former excess is a constant threat. It was to warn against the dangers of such a reaction that Benjamin Constant added his own remarks to Boulay’s treatment of the English revolution. Boulay had described the oppressive extremes of the English revolutionaries; he had not, however, sufficiently emphasized the greater horrors perpetrated by those who subsequently restored the monarchy. This was, Constant urged, the lesson of Stuart history that called for France’s immediate attention:

To prove these points, Constant proposed to quote authorities who could not be suspected of republican bias. He deftly agrees to leave aside Mrs. Macaulay’s account and promises to use the royalists Clarendon and Hume. Even these historians, he implies, had found it impossible to veil the atrocities of the bloody Jefferies and Kirkes. What is more, the force of this English lesson had to be multiplied several times over for proper application to circumstances in France, since conditions in England had been of such a nature as to soften the violence of counter-revolution.

As we have already noted, not all republicans were as worried about the Stuart parallels as Constant and Boulay seem to have been. Commenting in the same year on Boulay’s work, J.-B. Salaville objected that such a show of uneasiness was bad for the morale of republicans generally, and politically most unwise. Boulay had no doubt been well intentioned in his desire to warn the French by citing the failures of the English revolution. But however laudable his motives were, he was guilty in effect of telling his compatriots that much of what they had already accomplished was somehow invalid and that the course of the revolution would have to be changed. Was this not, Salaville asked, the very line preached by French royalists who also liked to talk about the revolutionary failures of the English? Had not Boulay unwittingly played into the hands of the counter-revolutionaries? “I am assured,” Salaville asserted, “that your work has had an effect quite different from what you expected; that it has discouraged republicans, the sincere friends of liberty; that, conversely, it has singularly revived the hopes of royalists because of the resemblance they think they can see between the English revolution and what has just taken place here, a conformity that sufficiently guarantees in their eyes the counter-revolution they yearn for.”12

France’s republicans had to be encouraged, not told that their efforts had been wasted. Royalists, on the other hand, had to be stripped of any comforting and politically dangerous illusions. The best way to effect both of these salutary measures was, in Salaville’s opinion, to prove that the English and French revolutions, which even republicans now seemed to see as “perfectly similar,” were in fact quite dissimilar and that nothing at all could be concluded from the one to the other except perhaps that re-establishment of the monarchy in France, in any form whatever, was henceforth an impossibility.

To begin with, the English would not have had a revolution had it not been for the disagreement over religion. This in itself, Salaville maintained, was enough to show that the French and English revolutions were quite different. England’s quarrel over religion could have been resolved without a political revolution. France’s revolution, on the other hand, had grown out of the vicious socio-political structure of the ancien régime; a political revolution had been absolutely necessary to change that structure.

Salaville also repeated—only a few months before the 18th Brumaire—the arguments so popular with those members of the Convention who during Louis’s trial had rejected the Stuart parallel:

The 18th Brumaire was, of course, and very soon, to spoil even this splendid example. Once again we are forced to think, with all our advantages of hindsight, of Roederer and the warm sense of security he felt as he contemplated the two million copies of Voltaire, Helvétius, et cetera, that existed in France, providing an “insurmountable” barrier to the religious revival! The makers of parallels frequently showed, it must be admitted, less innocence at least in their empirical prophecies. Innocence too is perhaps the word that best characterizes Salaville’s apparent inability to equate more meaningfully the factor of religion in the seventeenth century with that of politics one hundred and fifty years later. He illustrates the deficiency well in the following criticism of Boulay:

With the concluding thought that Salaville, even for his day, was perhaps too exclusive in his application of the terms bigot and fanatic, let us turn now to those whom he described as sighing for the counter-revolution and as excessively comforted by the belief that what had happened in England was happening even then in France.

2

Waiting for General Monk

The Abbé Duvoisin in his Défense de l’ordre social contre les principes de la Révolution Française (1798) gives, along with the usual history-inspired theocratic account of the origin of society, perhaps the most precise expression to the royalists’ counter-revolutionary hopes at this time. God is the author of society in the sense that he made man a social creature. Hereditary monarchy gives the best demonstration of this natural form of government; the “force of things” as evidenced in the reassuring example of Stuart history must inevitably return the French to their old régime:

Duvoisin then provides hints, drawn from his knowledge of Stuart history, as to how France’s government would become legal once more:

That the counter-revolution would be the work of a few men was also the opinion of Joseph de Maistre in his famous Considérations sur la France, published in 1796, two years before Duvoisin’s work.

Benjamin Constant had warned republicans that a counter-revolution would be bloody and vengeful, and he had cited Hume’s History to prove this. De Maistre, also writing with the pages of Hume’s Stuarts open before him, sees the exact opposite to be the case. He soothingly reassured his republican enemies that the restoration would be forgiving:

A return to the monarchy, far from producing such evils, would put an end to the maladies afflicting France. Only the forces of destruction, de Maistre blithely asserts, would be destroyed. Were there foolish sceptics among his readers who still remained unconvinced? For these he marshals his weightiest arguments, the evidence of history:

After citing that impartial historian David Hume as his source, de Maistre in aphoristic style defines the one great truth he wished the French to make theirs: “The restoration of the monarchy, which is called a counter-revolution, will not be a contrary revolution, but the contrary of the revolution.”20

De Maistre saw Stuart history, properly interpreted, as a marvellous specific against the unfounded fears of even the guiltiest republicans. They had no need to be anxious about a future restoration of the monarchy. That Stuart history could also give unique hope and assurance to long-suffering royalists is made equally clear by the last chapter in de Maistre’s book, the title of which is self-explanatory and needs no further comment. It is called, quite simply, “Extract from a History of the French Revolution, by David Hume.”21

There was little doubt in the minds of most royalists that the French revolution was going exactly the way of its English predecessor. The only question that remained involved the length of time the whole inevitable process would take. Was it necessary, for example, for the French Republic to pass through the Cromwell phase? Was it not possible that the Cromwell era had already occurred? We remember that Duvoisin had seen the Directoire in 1798 as the equivalent of Cromwell although, earlier still, others had maintained that Robespierre was Cromwell and that counterrevolutionary France had to make itself ready to welcome its General Monk.

Much offended, Cromwell disagrees and scornfully points out that Robespierre is nothing more than a “minor rabble-rouser, a market- stall schemer”:

Robespierre:

“All the same, people back on earth openly compare me to you.”

Cromwell:

“That is because people back on earth are obsessed with making comparisons; and most of those who put you on the same footing with me know me only by name. . . . If France ever has a Cromwell, he will be an army general, a great leader, a statesman, an orator, and above all, a man blessed with good fortune.”

Robespierre:

“And who, pray, will this fortunate person be? Quite obviously, it must, as they say, end with a master.”

Cromwell:

“Time will tell. . . .”22

Time would indeed tell. Mallet du Pan, perhaps the wisest royalist spokesman in this period, indicated in December 1798 that the answer to de Villers’s question was close: “The Directoire,” he stated, “is now at the stage Cromwell was in when he drove out Parliament. There is no Cromwell in France, but the similarity of situations requires a similar outcome.”23

Not long after this, however, he began to express important doubts about the tactical wisdom of counting on such parallels: “To try to throw light on the history of the revolution by these means is to demonstrate that one is quite ignorant of its true character.”24 Not only were there bad analogies involved; politically speaking, the parallels made the counter-revolution seem just a little too easy: “It is asking much to suggest to the individual who has barely managed to save his life and his few rags from Robespierre’s executioners that he should once more trust his fate to the hazard of events! It takes a rare combination of circumstances to retemper a man’s spirit once it has been broken.”25 The Stuart parallel was especially harmful if, as seemed to be the case, it encouraged royalists merely to sit back and wait complacently for the English restoration to be duplicated automatically in France. Much active preparation had to be carried out:

Mallet du Pan, himself an active agent of the counterrevolution, is probably one of the few royalists at this time who, for various reasons, felt it was necessary to abandon the fashionable parallel. Speaking of this current “abuse of similitudes,” he made the following objection:

Mallet du Pan’s warning about the potential dangers of such comparisons seems to have had little effect. English-French parallels, almost all foretelling the imminent appearance of a French General Monk, became the hackneyed prediction and commonplace hope of much émigré literature, threatening even to grow to the proportions of an elegant literary genre. Sometimes the treatment was very light indeed, as can be seen in the following passage, judged by its author Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Nougaret as a “curious and intriguing piece, worthy of being considered part of our history”:

Admittedly, we are not dealing here with the most ponderous examples of the genre, and Nougaret derived few great prophecies from his observation that both Round Heads and Jacobins had the bad taste to be cosmetically below standard. Other parallels pretended, however, to greater things. Chateaubriand in his Essai sur les Révolutions (1797) states that the Jacobins directly imitated the English execution of Charles I when they put Louis XVI to death: “I dare to go even further: if Charles had not been decapitated in London, Louis, in all probability, would not have been guillotined in Paris.”29 Supporting such claims, Rivarol complained at the turn of the century that only the leftist leaders had taken the trouble to learn from previous revolutions. He affirmed, even, that he had personally seen members of the Constituent Assembly in 1789 reading Stuart history for the first time “to see how the Long Parliament dealt with Charles I.”30

The 18th Brumaire, immediately viewed by many royalists as a first step in the long-awaited fulfilment of the great prophecy, rallied immensely the hopes of those who had been carefully tending their parallels: “Royalists are thinking of Monk,” wrote Rivarol, “and are more in favour of Bonaparte than the democrats; meanwhile, he is fawned over like Necker, Lafayette, and Pétion.”31 Even the head of the counter-revolutionary party, Louis XVIII, at first expressed the hope that Napoleon would be magnanimous enough to play the rôle of Monk. On Bonaparte’s refusal to be so generous and after a later counter-proposal from the French consul à vie that Louis XVIII renounce his claim to the throne in exchange for certain indemnities, the latter turned to an equally common practice of the day, that of calling Bonaparte a Cromwell. As the French monarch in exile explained to Cardinal Maury in 1803: “. . . if Cromwell, after conquering Jamaica, had offered it to Charles II, he could not have accepted it: it would have implied recognition of the Protector’s legal existence. My case is the same. . . .”32

Bonaparte’s own “republican” admirers felt that all the modern parallels were too confining when it came to describing the greatness of the French Consul. The younger Lacretelle, for example, made this sentiment dramatically clear in 1802:

The truth is, of course, that the epithet Cromwell was still seen as highly insulting by everyone in France at this time. Jean-Baptiste Say, writing in La Décade in 1801, indignantly took to task Sir Francis d’Ivernois for having made the “comparison, so threadbare and so false, between our Bonaparte and Cromwell. The name Cromwell,” he added, “has always been used to stigmatize the friends of every kind of reform. During the American war it was applied to Washington; even before our revolution it became the appanage of Fox, and during the Constituent Assembly, if I’m not mistaken, the label was applied to Lafayette, who deserved it even less than the others.”34

Decidedly the tag of Caesar was better. There would be no rest ahead for the French if Bonaparte was a Cromwell. Cromwell inspired fear; Bonaparte inspired admiration and hope. “The one destroyed,” wrote Lacretelle in 1802, “the other heals.”

Conclusion

We shall end here our considerations on the influence of Stuart history, and more particularly David Hume’s History of the Stuarts, in France from the ancien régime to the counter-revolution.

Although the high point of critical French interest in the English revolutionary period had passed by the time Napoleon made his dramatic appearance on the scene, the force of Hume’s enormous influence over a subject which was so remarkably suited to exploitation by pundits and prophets of the Right was by no means entirely spent. Rivarol before his death in 1801 gave a fair indication of how it would be possible, for some time yet, to continue playing the merry game of parallels. His French projection of Stuart history, well worth quoting here, provided in fact an advance outline of many similar future speculations which events of the following thirty years seemed to justify: “There is a singular parity between the English revolution and that of France; the Long Parliament and the death of Charles I; the Convention and the death of Louis XVI; Cromwell and Bonaparte. If there is a restoration will we see another Charles II dying in his bed and another James II leaving his kingdom and then a different dynasty? It’s as good a prediction as any.”35

Whatever the true merits of Hume’s presentation of the English revolution, it is undeniable that the case he put to the French during the critical years from roughly 1760 to 1800 had had profound and far-ranging effects. It is no exaggeration to say that his particular interpretation of that revolution, in a sense almost written for France, had become an integral part of the French historical consciousness and had imposed etiological categories which the vast majority of Frenchmen on the political Right and even a fair number on the moderate Left felt obliged to follow when giving explanation to what were seen as similar political processes in their own country. Admittedly, much of the detailed use made of Hume’s History was purely polemical. That the greater part of it cannot be dismissed as such, however, seems obvious. We have only to look into a work such as De l’usage et de l’abus de l’esprit philosophique durant le dix-huitième siècle by Jean-Etienne-Marie Portalis to see the permanent importance of Hume’s total impact at this time on the thinking of French rightists.

Portalis’s book was written between 1798 and 1800. It did not exert the influence or enjoy the reputation of Chateaubriand’s more frothy production, the Génie du Christianisme, perhaps because its message came too late. It appeared first as a posthumous publication in 1820, thirteen years after its author’s death. It nevertheless represents one of the few truly important end-of-the-century French rejections of the Enlightenment and was motivated not by the cramped and brutal spirit of some of Joseph de Maistre’s formulas, but rather by a certain wise science of man which Hume himself, on whose writings some of it is based, would probably not have disavowed.

Portalis approved of the eighteenth century’s love of philosophical history and Hume, he felt, had surely written his history of England “as a philosopher.” The French philosophes, on the other hand, had not produced an equivalent history of France. Voltaire, it is true, had boasted of writing philosophical history but had succeeded, like Gibbon, only in writing history that was anti-ecclesiastical.36

The eighteenth century had prided itself on having no religious superstitions. It had nevertheless ended up being politically superstitious. It was an eighteenth-century superstition, not shared by Hume, to imagine that any political act was good provided it was committed in favour of liberty: “In politics, all factional crimes are canonized for fear of violating the rights of peoples. . . . Some have dared to accuse Hume of bias because he criticized the excesses committed during England’s revolutions.”37

Thinking no doubt of histories like that of Catherine Macaulay, so highly praised by the Mirabeaus, Condorcets, and Brissots, Portalis pointed out that not only had revolutionary opinion dared to question Hume’s impartiality, it had attempted as well to make history over again into an arsenal of political propaganda: “Some philosophers now regard historical facts as nothing more than a basis on which to construct the most arbitrary systems.” But history, wrote the man of the Concordat, could not be denied, nor could its true function, which was to present “an immense collection of moral experiments carried out on the human race,”38 be frustrated.

Such history damns forever all a priori political theorists: “All of our false ideas, our exaggerated principles concerning the rights of man, his independence, all of our ranting speeches against civil and political institutions, derive initially from the notion we have fashioned for ourselves of a so-called state of nature. . . . Let us abandon all systems if we wish to be philosophers; let us renounce our wanderings in the land of illusion. . . .”39

History never confronts us with a state of nature; society does not exist by reason of any social pact. It cannot therefore be dissolved at will like a business arrangement simply because of an alleged breach of contract. Society is not a pact but a fact:

Men are united in society because such is the wish of nature which made them social creatures. Of course, nothing is immutable; time brings the necessity of change and adaptation, but a society, in its transformations, must be very careful that it does not put its very existence to the test: “It thus requires very great, very extreme, highly intolerable evils, before the idea of change—always devastating, always marked by the most violent turmoil—can be authorized, before a revolution that attacks the very wellspring of legitimacy can be legitimized.”41 Politics is not the art of the ideal but of the real: “Let us not feed on false notions, let us take care not to seek in human institutions a perfection that is foreign to them.”42 If man were a totally reasonable creature such perfection would be possible. The sad truth is, however, that he is not so constituted. The human cogitative aspect is probably of less importance in our practical behaviour than the sensitive parts of our nature. Man’s sentiment, his irrationalism, is as basic and natural to him as his reason. Politically man is a creature of emotion, habit, opinion, and prejudice. When political reforms prove necessary, these less flexible elements must not be forgotten. Reforms must be approached with circumspection: one does not tolerate everything, nor must one destroy everything:

One can hear echoes of Hume’s own science of human nature in Portalis’s important manifesto of revolt against some of the more transient bursts of illumination emitted by the siècle des Lumières. One also notes, of course, the influence of Burke; but it should be remembered that Burke himself was probably influenced by Hume to an extent greater than his Christian Whig principles may have cared to admit. Soon, completing the image and contributing to the destruction of what were seen as Enlightenment excesses in non-political fields, a new Hume was to enter France via Kant’s Germany. Hume the philosopher as opposed to Hume the philosophe was destined to make the world almost forget that there had ever been an “English Tacitus.”

But Hume’s radically empirical History, which some modern scholars have tended to view as quite unrelated to his radically empirical philosophy, was not yet completely dead in France. Quite to the contrary, after the Restoration, during the reign of Louis XVIII, its importance seemed still great enough to ultra-royalists for several of their number to set about editing a completely revised translation preceded by a long study of Hume’s life and works by the French academician Vincent Campenon.45 Needless to say, the foreword of this new edition begins by reverently calling Hume nothing less than “the most impartial and the most judicious historian who has ever lived.”46

Other editions of this work were to follow but as France’s political events evolved toward more liberal goals, Hume’s great historical reputation and influence fell. A different, although not necessarily a more serious, conception of history was being born. Guizot in 1826 triumphantly proclaimed the new era: “Today . . . the history of the English Revolution has taken on a different complexion: Hume was once the arbiter of European opinion on that subject; and in spite of Mirabeau’s support, Mistress Macaulay’s declamations never managed to shake his authority.”47

Europe, Guizot was happy to announce, had at last recovered its independence. Two pages farther on, he voiced the judgement that seems to have endured among many historians of the “English Revolution” ever since: “Hume no longer satisfies anyone.”

The typeface used for this book is New Baskerville, which is based on the types of English type founder and printer John Baskerville (1706-75). Baskerville is the quintessential “transitional” face: it retains the bracketed and obliqued serifs of “old style” faces such as Caslon and Garamond, but in its increased lowercase height, lighter color, and enhanced contrast between its thick and thin strokes, it presages “modern” faces.

This book is printed on paper that is acid-free and meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48-1992.(archival)

Book design by Martin Lubin Graphic Design, Jackson Heights, New York Typography by Brad Walrod/High Text Graphics, Inc., Brooklyn, New York Printed and bound by Edwards Brothers, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan

[1. ]Des Emigrés Français ou Réponse à M. de Lally-Tollendal, Paris, 1797, pp. 104-5.

[2. ]Journal d’économie politique, de morale, et de politique; rédigé par Roederer de l’Institut national de France, Paris, 1797, II. 370. It is curious to note that Montesquieu’s conservatism, although it was often attacked during the Revolution, was also very often “explained away” as representing nothing more than the exoteric principles of a basically radical but prudent political thinker who was obliged to use the subterfuge of a double doctrine under the oppression of the ancien régime. See, for example, Destutt de Tracy, M. de Tracy à M. Burke, p. 9; La Décade, 1795, V. 468; Brissot, Le Patriote Français, No. 915, 11 February 1792, pp. 167-68; Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man, 1791, Part I, p. 75.

[3. ]Essai sur les causes qui, en 1649, amenèrent en Angleterre l’établissement de la République; sur celles qui devaient l’y consolider; sur celles qui l’y firent périr. Par Boulay (de la Meurthe), Représentant du Peuple, Paris, An VII.

[4. ]Ibid., p. 4.

[5. ]Ibid., p. 121.

[6. ]Ibid., p. 122.

[7. ]Ibid., pp. 126-27.

[8. ]De la force du gouvernement actuel de la France et de la nécessité de s’y rallier, 1796, p. 95, note f.

[9. ]Des réactions politiques, An V, pp. 2-3.

[10. ]Des suites de la contre-révolution de 1660 en Angleterre, Paris, An VII, pp. viii-ix.

[11. ]Ibid., pp. 77-80.

[12. ]J.-B. Salaville, De la Révolution Française comparée à celle de l’Angleterre ou Lettre au Représentant du peuple Boulay (de la Meurthe), sur la différence de ces deux révolutions; pour servir de suite à l’ouvrage publié par ce Représentant sur celle de l’Angleterre, Paris, An VII, p. 2.

[13. ]Ibid., p. 26.

[14. ]Ibid., pp. 29-30. Salaville rather than Mirabeau is sometimes credited with the publication in 1789 of Théorie de la royauté, d’après la doctrine de Milton, par le comte de M******* (see supra, p. 140, n. 89).

[15. ]Oeuvres complètes de Duvoisin, p. 1302.

[16. ]Ibid., pp. 1307-8.

[17. ]Oeuvres complètes de J. de Maistre, I. 113.

[18. ]Ibid., I. 121-22.

[19. ]Ibid., I. 153-56.

[20. ]Ibid., I. 157.

[21. ]See supra, p. 90, n. 16. Royalists were immensely pleased with this clever bit of editing. (See, for example, the Spectateur du Nord, July-September 1797, pp. 93-94.)

The influence of Hume on de Maistre is undeniably profound but defies simple analysis. He quotes the “orthodox” Hume often, as, for example, in the following attack on a priori constitutions: “The principle that the people are the origin of all just power is noble and specious in itself, but it is belied by all history and experience.” (Oeuvres complètes de J. de Maistre, I. 286-87.) He also quotes (or misquotes) Hume’s authority on the origins of European government (I. 440-41); against the alleged superiority of English eloquence (I. 194, 527); on the Council of Trent (II. 28-29); against the Reformation: “Hume who held back nothing since he believed in nothing, openly admits that the true foundation of the Reformation was the desire to ‘make spoil of the plate and all the rich ornaments which belonged to the altars.’ ” (II. 413, 521); against so-called English tolerance in religion: “How much patience did England—which is always haranguing other nations on the subject of tolerance—itself show when it thought its own religion was under attack? Hume has reproached it for its Inquisition against Catholics, worse, he states, than that of Spain, since it exercised its whole tyranny though without its order.” (III. 359); against the Enlightenment heroes Bacon and Locke (IV. 272, 375; VI. 44-45, 56-57); and on the worthy rôle of the Church in preserving civilization during the Dark Ages (VI. 473-74), et cetera.

On the other hand, it is also clear that David Hume represented for de Maistre perhaps the most frightening example possible of human wickedness: “Who has not heard of David Hume, cui non notus Hylas? I think, everything considered, that the eighteenth century, so fertile in the genre, produced no enemy of religion equal to him. His icy venom is far more dangerous than Voltaire’s rabid frothings. . . . If ever among men who have heard the Gospel preached there has existed a true atheist (a question I shall not take it upon myself to decide), it is he. I have never been able to read any of his anti-religious works without experiencing a kind of terror, without asking myself how was it possible for a man who possessed every capacity for discovering the truth to fall to such depths of degradation. I have always felt that Hume’s hardness of heart, his insolent calmness of mind, must be the ultimate form of punishment, beyond mercy, for a certain rebellion of the intellect that God punishes only by withdrawing.” (III. 386-87.) The long letter against Hume from which this quotation is taken, along with several other passages in de Maistre’s works, indicates a quite extraordinarily ambivalent attitude to the Scottish historian whose political conservatism attracted traditionalists with much the same force as his religious scepticism repelled them. De Maistre nevertheless insisted that the David Hume Fragment remain in later editions of his noted counter-revolutionary work.

Also influenced by Hume but in a more straightforward manner is Joseph de Maistre’s fellow theoretician of the counter-revolution, Louis de Bonald. De Bonald and de Maistre shared similar views concerning the prophetic significance of English history and on many other subjects as well: “Is it possible, Monsieur,” de Maistre wrote to his friend in 1818, “that nature has been pleased to tighten two strings in such perfect harmony as your mind is with mine! They are in perfect unison, a truly unique phenomenon. . . .” (From Turin, 18 July 1818, ibid., XIV. 137.) De Bonald too attacks a priori politics and maintains that constitutions are as natural as gravity and can never be “pocketable.” History is the sole validating principle of all political speculation. Like de Maistre, de Bonald also attacks Hume for his irreligion but cites his authority against Calvinism, English republicanism, et cetera. (See, for example, Oeuvres complètes de M. de Bonald, Paris, 1859, II. 224: “Hume rightly remarks that in England since the last revolution, public freedom and independence, from which individual security is derived, have been more uncertain and precarious.”) He too applauds Hume’s impartiality and fairness to France: “Monsieur Hume notes with respect to the rivalry between our two nations, that the French hate the English much less than the English hate the French” (ibid., II. 509). De Bonald even found Hume less “English” in his prejudices than the historian Lingard, who was not only a Catholic but a member of the Catholic clergy (ibid., III. 917). He also invokes Hume’s authority against the physical determinism of Montesquieu (ibid., II. 28-29) and against divorce (ibid., II. 113, 121, 125).

In many ways the use of these “orthodox” themes taken from Hume by de Maistre, Duvoisin, de Bonald, and others, although it represents a fresh reading of the Scottish historian in the counter-revolutionary context, consists of little more than a routine repetition of material already exploited to the hilt by such historical conservatives and anti-anglomanes of the pre-revolutionary period as Gerdil, Bergier, the editors of the Mémoires de Trévoux, Lefebvre de Beauvray, et cetera. It would deserve a more lengthy treatment here were it not for the fact that we have already given a good deal of attention to the writings of these others in our first chapter.

[22. ]“Dialogue entre Cromwel et Robespierre,” Le Spectateur du Nord; journal politique, littéraire et moral, Hambourg, July-September 1798, VII. 76-85.

[23. ]Mercure Britannique ou notices historiques et critiques sur les affaires du tems, par J. Mallet du Pan, Londres, 25 December 1798, II. 23.

[24. ]Ibid., 25 April 1799, III. 31.

[25. ]Ibid., 10 August 1799, III. 481.

[26. ]Ibid., III. 482-83.

[27. ]Ibid., III. 483-85.

[28. ]Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Nougaret, Parallèle de la Révolution d’Angleterre en 1642, et celle de France, Metz, p. 13 [see Hume, History of England, VII. 501].

[29. ]Oeuvres complètes, Paris, 1834, I. 153.

[30. ]Pensées inédites de Rivarol, Paris, 1836, pp. 80-81.

[31. ]Ibid., p. 92.

[32. ]Letter of 10 August 1803, from Warsaw, in Correspondance diplomatique et mémoires inédits du Cardinal Maury, annotés et publiés par Mgr Ricard, Lille, 1891, II. 271.

[33. ]Parallèle entre César, Cromwell, Monck et Bonaparte: Fragment traduit de l’Anglais (published anonymously by Charles-Jean-Dominique de Lacretelle, Paris, 1802), p. 2.

[34. ]La Décade, XXVIII. 281.

[35. ]Rivarol, op. cit., p. 111.

[36. ]Portalis, op. cit., seconde édition, Paris, 1827, II. 24-26.

[37. ]Ibid., II. 28.

[38. ]Ibid., II. 39.

[39. ]Ibid., II. 299.

[40. ]Ibid., II. 301.

[41. ]Ibid., II. 334.

[42. ]Ibid., II. 363.

[43. ]Portalis, though fully aware of Hume’s religious scepticism, believed along with a number of other French conservatives that Hume regretfully bore his disbelief as an unwholesome burden. He makes some of the same distinctions we have already encountered in Trublet and opposes religious sceptics to the eighteenth-century atheists: “In truth, these sceptics do not pass censure on religious institutions. They want free access to religion for those who feel uplifted by it; they even seem to complain of their own philosophy, which prevents them from believing. We sense, they say, that unbelievers are less fortunate, that nothing can fill the void in the human heart that a lively faith in religion would otherwise satisfy. And so it was that J.-J. Rousseau would say to his friends: ‘I would rather be a believer than a philosopher.’ Similarly, Hume, after one of those touching and sublime scenes that only religion can present so wondrously, cried out: ‘I would have been much happier had I never doubted!’ ” (Ibid., II. 191-92.) Portalis is not the only victim at this time of a purely fictional anecdote concerning Hume; the “Story of La Roche,” contributed by Henry Mackenzie to the Scottish publication The Mirror in 1779 but which, perhaps not too strangely, received wide circulation in France after the Revolution. We find it reproduced in La Décade in 1796 (VIII. 554-62); the Bibliothèque britannique in 1798 (VII. 199-215); and in the Spectateur du Nord (VII. 297-312) also in 1798.

The long sentimental anecdote which shows the sceptic Hume weeping almost religiously at his own incredulity (so different a picture from Joseph de Maistre’s icy sketch!) helped to reinforce occasional efforts to rehabilitate the whole Hume in the eyes of those orthodox thinkers who warmly appreciated his “politics” but who were dismayed by his “philosophy.” Similarly his “social” ethics—often opposed to the “egotistic” moral philosophy of the materialists—had invariably seemed a redeeming feature in the eyes of such men as Gerdil, Bergier, Barruel, de Bonald, and Portalis. Hume’s moral views were even adduced on one occasion as sufficient proof that he was not the guilty party in the quarrel with Rousseau! Of course, the essential feature of Hume’s image in the eyes of the Right remained his political conservatism. Religious disbelief was not always seen, moreover, as incompatible with royalist sentiments. (See Jean-Joseph Mounier, De l’influence attribuée aux Philosophes, aux Francs-Maçons et aux Illuminés sur la Révolution de France, Tübingen, 1801, p. 70.) Hobbes versus Milton was a good case in point and, although Hume might very well be an unbeliever, he was, in the words of the Spectateur du Nord, “the best of the unbelievers.”

[44. ]Portalis, op. cit., II. 503-4, 512.

[45. ]Histoire d’Angleterre depuis l’invasion de Jules-César jusqu’à la révolution de 1688 par David Hume et depuis cette époque jusqu’à 1760 par Smollett. Traduite de l’anglais. Nouvelle édition, revue, corrigée et précédée d’un Essai sur la vie et les écrits de D. Hume, par M. Campenon de l’Académie Française, Paris, 1819.

[46. ]Ibid., I. v.

[47. ]Histoire de la Révolution d’Angleterre depuis l’avenèment de Charles Ier jusqu’à la restauration de Charles II, Première partie, Paris, 1826, I. xvii.