Two Catholic Conservatives. The Ideas of Joseph de Maistre and Juan Donoso Cortes.pdf

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Two Catholic Conservatives: The Ideas of
Joseph de Maistre and Juan Donoso Cortes
-by Rafael E. Tarrago
University of Minnesota
The prophetic voice of Cortes offers the insight that the violent social
upheavals in the modern world parody Christianity; however, Christian
solidarity is a far cry from socialism. Human solidarity in Catholicism offers
more hope than social and liberal reforms. Both writers take into account
original sin and defend authority.
In most histories of 19th century conservatism, the figure of Joseph de
Maistre is a prominent one. Some authors who see an Anglo-American brand
of conservatism distinct from what they call
continental conservatism
present
the Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke as the founder of their Anglo-
American conservatism, and Joseph de Maistre as the embodiment of the
continental brand of conservatism, which they oftentimes describe as
autocratic, Catholic, and backward looking. The purpose of this essay is to
suggest that whatever the accuracy of this neat division of 19th century
conservatism in the western world, it is not accurate to portray all non-English
conservative thought of the 19th century as a footnote to the thought of Joseph
de Maistre.
The influence of Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) in continental Europe
during the first three decades of the 19th century is an undeniable fact.
1
In
France he had his most influential follower in Vicomte Louis Bonald (1754-
1840), but he also influenced the Austrian Prince Clemens von Metternich
(1773-1849), and the Spaniard Juan Donoso Cortes (1809-1853). It cannot be
said, however, that all non-English conservative thought of the 19th century
derived from him. In Spain, Jaime Balmes (1810-1848) developed a different
kind of conservative political thought.
2
Although influenced by de Maistre,
Donoso Cortes developed his own kind of conservatism, accepting free will and
advocating human solidarity and social responsibility.
3
De Maistre was born to the minor nobility of Savoy (then a component of
what was called the Kingdom of Sardinia, a conglomerate of territories
including the island of Sardinia but with its political center in the Italian
Piedmont, at Turin). After the armies of the French Republic forced him into
exile in 1793, he began his career as a counter-revolutionary political writer.
Tarrago 167
In the year he published
Letters of a Savoyard Royalist,
followed by two
unpublished anti-Rousseaunian works
(On the State of Nature
and
On Popular
Sovereignty,
of 1795),
Considerations on France
(1797), and
Essay on the
Generative Powers of Political Constitutions
(1809).
Letters on the Spanish
Inquisition,
the celebrated
On the Pope,
and his unfinished
Dialogues of St.
Petersburg
were published after his death.
4
Most of these works were
translated into English and modern translations of them are still in print. Exiled
in St. Petersburg between 1795 and 1815, de Maistre became influential among
the circles of royalists from France and Italy who, in the capitals of Austria,
Prussia, and Russia, plotted for the restoration of their legitimate sovereigns
and the
status quo ante
in their homelands.
There is some truth to the characterization of the political views of Joseph
de Maistre as autocratic and backward looking. Originally a critic of the
excesses of 18th century royal absolutism, after suffering from the excesses of
the French Revolution which overthrew it, he became a eulogizer of divine-
right monarchy, with its presuppositions of a birth-aristocracy's monopoly of
political power, and of the unquestioning acceptance of the royal will by
subjects without right to resist or even demand responsible behavior from the
sovereign. In other words, he proposed a return of socio-political life in Europe
to what it had been in what is now called the
Ancien Regime.
De Maistre thought that the support of the Catholic Church was essential
for the restoration
of that Ancien Regime,
by its influence as a religious force,
and as the provider of education in most of Catholic Europe.
5
In his treatise
On
the Pope,
he emphasizes the monarchial organization of the hierarchy of the
Catholic Church, and the absolutist nature of the papacy, counseling the
cooperation of European monarchs with the pope in order to bring back the
political order and the society of estates predominant in most of Europe before
the French Revolution of 1789.
6
Here he also understates the importance of
historical conflicts between European monarchs and the popes and does not
mention natural law.
7
It is puzzling that nowhere in the works of de Maistre—a professed
Catholic—can one find the Catholic concept of natural law—a law present in the
heart of each human being and established by reason, consisting of universal
precepts, and whose authority extends to all men, providing the indispensable
moral foundations for building the human community and the necessary basis
for the civil law. In his two anti-Rousseaunian tracts, de Maistre criticizes
Rousseau for the naivete of his belief in the natural goodness of humankind,
accuses him of fostering immorality with his works debunking social
hierarchies and morals, and shows indignation at his proposing in
The Social
Contract
that Christianity cannot serve as a civic religion. But de Maistre
nowhere criticizes Rousseau for his dispensing with natural law. It has been
argued that in his anti-Rousseaunian treatises he is closer to Rousseau than their
168
Catholic Social Science Review
superficial reading might suggest.
8
It has been said that de Maistre agreed with
Rousseau in considering that man's first need is that his nascent reason be
curved and lose itself into a general will, and he made no attempt to criticize
Rousseau's controversial chapter on civic religion.
9
Donoso Cortes is not as well known in the English-speaking world as de
Maistre. In 1991 his early work,
Lecciones de derecho politico
(1836-1837),
was published in English as
A Defense of Representative Government
by
Captus University Publication, but most of his works have not been translated
into English. The most recent translation of his major
Essay on Catholicism,
Liberalism, and Socialism
was published in 1925. In 1967, the
Intercollegiate
Review
published Frederick Wilhelmsen's perceptive article "Donoso Cortes
and the Problem of Political Power," and in 1974 John T. Graham published an
imaginative essay on the Spanish publicist, but no other major article or book-
length work on him was published in English until two years ago when R.A.
Herrera published his
Donoso Cortes. Cassandra of the Age.
10
Born in a family of the Spanish provincial gentry, Donoso Cortes
distinguished himself as a scholar at an early age. Before he was thirty he
entered Spanish politics in the Moderate Liberal Party, formed after
constitutional monarchy was established in Spain upon the death of King
Ferdinand VII (1784-1833). Later he held an important diplomatic post in
Paris, during the reign of King Louis Philippe (1830-1848), and in 1849 he was
Spanish Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotenciary to Prussia.
He was again posted to Paris, this time as Ambassador, during the presidency
of Louis Napoleon and the beginning of the Second Empire, and he died in that
city in 1853. During his lifetime, he influenced prominent statesmen, gaining
praise from Metternich, who declared that "after Donoso Cortes, one has to put
down one's pen, for nothing more and nothing better can be said on the
historical transition we are witnessing."
11
The political ideas of Donoso Cortes take into account original sin and
defend authority, like de Maistre's. But Donoso Cortes defends an authority
legitimized both by performance and origin, and he uses the concept of natural
law in his definition of what is legitimate authority.
12
He will accept the
overthrow of an ineffective legitimate government by an organized sector ofthe
governmental hierarchy if it is the only alternative to its violent overthrow by
anonymous popular forces. His speech on dictatorship before the Spanish
parliament in 1849, where he said the above, is often misinterpreted as a
defense of dictatorship, but in context it was a defense of that act when no other
alternative except popular revolt remained.
13
Like de Maistre, Donoso Cortes
was a monarchist, but even after he became disillusioned with constitutional
monarchy after 1849, he did not advocate unquestioning obedience to power
holders, and demanded responsible behavior from them~as he showed in his
scathing attack of December 1851 against the dictatorial regime of General
Tarrago 169
Narvaez, known as
Discurso sobre la situation de Espafia.
14
The aristocracy
that Donoso Cortes favored in his latter years was open to men of merit and
enterprise, and he had social concerns. In a letter that he wrote in 1851 to his
friend the Queen Mother Maria Cristina, he said that the rich had betrayed their
Christian duty of charity to the poor, and predicted social revolution unless the
united Christian monarchs of Europe stated a new age of social ethics by
helping the poor and restraining the excesses of the rich.
15
After going through a period of personal turmoil and political disillusion,
Donoso Cortes adopted the political views he died upholding. In 1851, he
published the work in which he expresses his definite socio-political thought,
his
Essay on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.
In his
Essay,
he is more
convincing in his critique of liberalism and socialism—actually, what he means
by liberalism is present-day United States' libertarianism, and under the term
socialism he refers to communists and anarchists—than he is in his argument for
the universal embrace of what he calls the
Catholic system.
Donoso Cortes
seems to assume that Catholic citizens, rich and poor, and public officers of all
ranks, will always act justly, as they ought. But he is formidable in his critique
of 19th century liberalism and socialism. With uncanny foresight he predicts
the overthrow of weak liberal regimes by socialist groups disturbingly like the
German National Socialists of the 1930s and the International Socialists who
for so long ruled over Russian and Central Eastern Europe.
16
Donoso Cortes criticizes liberals for attributing the origin of all evils to
political systems and for seeing the only remedy to all evils in politics. He
criticizes them also for their deification of
legitimate
government, which he
claims they define as government of the middle classes and professionals, and
their incapacity for seeing a legitimate government as capable of doing wrong.
17
His major criticism of socialists is their belief that man is perfect and society
corrupt, with the corollary call for men to destroy all social institutions.
18
Donoso Cortes condemns both for not acknowledging that the main problem
in society is the flawed character of human nature, wounded by original sin.
The middle class liberalism criticized by Donoso Cortes had become
established in most of southern Europe and in Belgium in the 1830s, and came
to a crisis in 1848. He justly diagnosed its shallowness and self-contradictions
because, while these liberal governments claimed to be harbingers of freedom
and espoused popular sovereignty, they imposed property and income
qualifications to suffrage. In his opinion socialism had sounder logical basis
than liberalism, but viewed it less as a secular ideology than as an incipient new
theology or secular religion.
19
Donoso Cortes believed that both liberals and
socialists had replaced religion and traditional authority with mass authority,
claiming that they were increasing human freedom. He refuted them on that
claim, with the counter claim that their ending of religious and traditional
checks would leave political power unchecked, and would thereby produce not
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Catholic Social Science Review
freedom but despotism.
20
In his
Essay,
Donoso Cortes breaks new ground with his Catholic argument
for human solidarity. Based on the dogma of human descent from Adam and
the deduction that each human being is responsible for every fellow human
being, he defines what he calls Dogma of Solidarity as the substantial unity of
the human race and the close relationship of all human beings to each other,
which demand all Catholics to be concerned about their neighbor, and forbid
them to be indifferent to the needs of others.
21
Implicitly he asserts that
Catholics are obligated to act upon the dogmas of their faith, which tell them
that fellow human beings are brethren, irrespective of accidental differences
such as social position, economic power, and race. Donoso Cortes challenges
liberals, who profess a belief in the rights of man, and socialists, who profess
to believe in the equality of all human beings, to tell him on what material
grounds they base those beliefs, when so many daily experiences show human
inequalities, oppression, and strife.
22
Thus, he emphasized how arbitrary are the
bonds of humanity if they are not supported by the fact that there is a God,
creator of all, and father of humankind.
The political views that Donoso Cortes expressed in his
Essay
of 1851 are
very different to those he expressed in his
Lecciones de derecho politico
of
1836-1837 (when he was a Moderate Liberal). However, both works have a
common underpinning: respect for the Catholic Church as a divinely inspired
institution. In the
Essay
he denies the capability for sound reasoning of fallen
man and the genius of representative government which he had defended in
Lecciones.
In the latter period of his political life, he came to despair of human
institutions, disillusioned by the aftermath of the European revolutions of 1848,
which overthrew moderate liberal regimes which he had supported; until that
year he favored constitutional monarchy and a liberalism moderated by
Catholicism.
Donoso Cortes expressed his early views on representative government in
Lecciones,
but he gave the historical reasons why an evolutionary constitutional
monarchy tempered by religion and respect for law was appropriate for Spain
in his
De la monarquia absoluta,
of 1838. In this essay on the origins of
absolutism in Spain, he also argues the transitory and necessity-oriented nature
of political systems, saying that while absolute monarchy ought to disappear
from Spain at the time of his writing and give way to constitutional monarchy,
it was not because absolutism was intrinsically bad, but because it had been
appropriate for a type of society that no longer existed in Spain. This was
typical of a man who condemned claims of perfection by any political system,
because he believed that societies are in continuous flux, and will require
different political systems according to the signs of the times.
23
In
De la monarquia absoluta,
Donoso Cortes portrays the Spanish state as
one with religious and populist foundations, having risen from dioceses and
Tarrago 171

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