Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (137 page)

Napoleon had a genius for the public gesture. In 481 King Childeric, father of Clovis, the first Christian king of what became France, had been buried in what is now the city of Tournai. Childeric's richly furnished grave was rediscovered beside a Roman fort in 1653, becoming the subject of Europe's first detailed archaeological report. Among the many precious objects recovered were hundreds of little gold-and-garnet bees (some think that they were actually badly drawn eagles); they had probably decorated a rich cloak or horse-covering. Most of them disappeared in a burglary in the nineteenth century, but before that the bees caught Napoleon's imagination, and he adopted them as his dynastic emblem because he could thus identify himself with a French monarch who predated but had literally fathered the ancient Christian monarchy so recently destroyed by the French Revolution. The Bonapartes' bees could thus upstage the old French royal family's symbol of the fleur-de-lys; it was an adroit attempt to remould traditional Christendom, rather like the Concordat itself. Napoleon had grasped a truth which had eluded the Revolutionaries whose commitment to the Enlightenment spurred them to abolish the past: tradition and history had their own authority, which could become the ally of change, and at the heart of that tradition in western Europe was Christianity.
⁸¹

Popular enthusiasm greeted Pius VII on his visit to Paris in 1804. That surprised everyone, but it was all of a piece with the fierce resistance to the Revolution in parts of France, and with the fury which had confronted the Emperor Joseph II's attempted monastic confiscations in the Austrian Netherlands. This was the beginning of a new era of popular Catholic activism, increasingly directed towards a charismatic papacy. The popular mood was only strengthened when Napoleon seized papal territories in Italy in 1809, and the Emperor effectively imprisoned Pius for four years. The papacy's sufferings at the hands of the Revolution transformed the Pope from ineffectual Italian prince to a confessor for the Faith, pitied throughout Europe. Significantly, even in Protestant England, centuries of anti-papal prejudice were weakened by sympathy for the enemy of England's enemy. Already refugee Catholic priests and monks had been welcomed to England as victims of the Revolution, something inconceivable before 1789.

A further catastrophe for the Church indirectly benefited the Pope. In 1803 all the ecclesiastical territories in the Holy Roman Empire ruled by prince-bishops and abbots were turned over to secular governance, and huge amounts of Church property confiscated; henceforth more than half of German Catholics were under the rule of Protestants.
⁸²
Often these prelates, secure in their ancient privileges, had shown scant respect for His Holiness. Now they were gone, and in 1806 the Pope also saw the end of that traditional counterweight to papal power, the Holy Roman Empire itself, when the Emperor Francis II remodelled himself as the Emperor Francis I of Austria. Without much public fuss, in 1814 the Pope reconstituted the Society of Jesus. The future of the Catholic Church was veering towards monarchy, as a result of the revolution which had aimed to overthrow all monarchs. This was one of the many paradoxes of the century between the downfall of Napoleon in 1815 and the outbreak of the First World War, the last century in which the fabric of Christendom might be said to be intact. Although that period was to bring further revolutions in both Western politics and consciousness, Christianity worldwide is still trying to make what it can of the Enlightenment, and of the French Revolution which was its unexpectedly violent experiment.

AFTERMATH OF REVOLUTION: A EUROPE OF NATION-STATES

In 1815 a combination of the Revolution's victorious enemies among the great powers of Europe confirmed the restoration of the senior surviving Bourbon as King Louis XVIII of France. Yet it is never possible to recreate the past. In two significant respects, the victorious allies did not try when they met at the Congress of Vienna to remap Europe. Since the Habsburgs no longer wanted their recently renounced title of Holy Roman Emperor, it was not revived, and neither were any of the ecclesiastical territories within the empire - the only clergyman to regain his temporal jurisdictions (with a few subtractions) was the Pope in Italy. However effective governors the imperial clergy had been - and generally their record had been good - the Enlightenment had destroyed their credibility in government. Thus ended one component of Christendom which had been in place for a thousand years. For a century afterwards, Europe avoided a repetition of universal war, but when it came in 1914, it was to damage the concept of Christendom irreparably. During that hundred years, Western Christianity experienced both renewal and challenges to its faith and practice as fundamental as anything that happened in the 1790s.

Throughout Europe, the rhetoric of revolution and the traumas of war left in their wake new possibilities, particularly the possibility of ordinary people having a say in shaping their own destinies. As the industrial revolution based on steam power spread from its original base in Britain through economically suitable enclaves as far away as Russia, large populations were drawn to new manufacturing communities, which might grow as large as any traditional city. More and more people had the experience of building up their own lives without traditional resources of family or custom, though often amidst demoralizing poverty and lack of alternatives. It was a pattern which was to spread through the rest of the world and continues now. The movements of peoples, their conversations and the spread of ideas became all the easier because (beginning in the 1830s in Britain) the map of Europe was covered with a network of steam railways, the most spectacular leap in the speed of transport since humankind had first mastered horse-riding. There were far greater sudden lurches of speed to come. During the nineteenth century, first the electric telegraph and then the telephone made communication instant over long distances, at least for those who could pay for it. Now the history of Christianities, previously fairly easy to distinguish as three separate stories of non-Chalcedonians and Western and Eastern Chalcedonians, began to merge and interact far more closely.

The established Churches of Europe, and Churches throughout the world which sprang out of them, had to adjust to these new realities, to compete with new messages which the revolutionary years spread from the elegant tracts of
philosophes
into a much wider public domain. So much could not be unsaid: the French Revolution's slogan of 'liberty, equality, fraternity' could not be forgotten. The French National Assembly had created a citizen army, whose soldiers were the State, and who therefore had a right to a direct say in it (some voices suggested that their wives might have the same rights). That implied a new type of politics, different from the traditional view of political representation which survived, for instance, in early-nineteenth-century British parliamentary life, where privilege, wealth or the possession of property was still the main qualification for having a voice in the kingdom's affairs. The French Revolution had overtaken a dynastic kingdom which had seemed as powerful as Britain, and with a far more coherent and ancient ideology of sacred monarchy. As a substitute, it had decreed into existence a nation-state, whose project was to replace a patchwork of jurisdictions, dialects and loyalties by a centralized government, a single French language to be spoken by all, and a shared sense throughout the population that this was the only way to live - the ideology known as nationalism.
⁸³

This idea of a nation became the chief motor of politics in nineteenth-century Europe: varied struggles to create nations, where often no comparable political unit, common culture or mass consciousness had ever previously existed - and equally, varied struggles by surviving traditional governments to resist this process. For many in the nineteenth century, nationalism became an emotional replacement for the Christian religion. It might imitate the French example, but many of the lands which the French revolutionary armies had overrun in the 1790s gained a full sense of national unity through their resentment at this violation. On that basis, Belgium, Italy and Germany all built up national identities during the nineteenth century, in the process also overturning ancient political structures. Their rhetoric of national resistance in turn provided a model for the twentieth-century struggles of non-European colonial peoples against the rule of those same nation-states.

Alongside nationalism was an economic revolution, which brought the struggle of a new elite against an old. The industrial revolutions were as important as the French Revolution in challenging aristocracies whose wealth and power were based mainly on land and agriculture. Even in pre-industrial France, the main impulse to overthrow the
ancien regime
had come from groups outside the landed class: lawyers, journalists, businesspeople, urban workers with specialist skills - what is clumsily but unavoidably called the middle class. In the more decorous politics of Britain as much as in mainland Europe, middle-class groups now sought to legislate into being political institutions to give themselves voices in national affairs appropriate to their wealth and talent, at least to share power with the landed aristocracy. They aimed to create structures designed to reward ability and personal achievement rather than birth, and to gain the right to express their political and religious opinions as they wished. This was the politics of liberalism.

Liberals looked to the Revolution's rhetoric of liberty and equality. It was not enough. The early nineteenth century was chastened by the memory of what had happened when Enlightenment ideals were put into practice, and that led to a general shift in mood among western Europeans towards what was styled romanticism. People who cared about the restructuring of Europe in the wake of events from 1789 to 1815 respected the rationalism of the Enlightenment less than a new expression of emotion and a search for individual fulfilment. Romanticism became a major colouring for political movements in Europe, whether looking to the past or to the future. In a chastened age after Napoleon's fall, it provided multiple opportunities for Europeans to posture. Fraternity, the third element of the revolutionary trinity, became the watchword of groups who envisaged a brotherhood of all oppressed people against both old and new oppression, confronting both Europe's surviving monarchical pattern and the newly wealthy elites of the industrial revolution. Quite suddenly in the 1830s, radical politics in Britain and France acquired a new word: 'socialism'.

'Socialists' asserted that without the distortions of inequality or poverty, people would naturally behave to one another as brothers (once more, sisters were not then greatly considered). This was a restatement of Enlightenment optimism, but socialists often sought to co-opt the love ethic of Jesus Christ and occasionally even of his Church, though generally in the face of deep lack of sympathy from Church hierarchies.
⁸⁴
Robert Owen, one of the chief personalities in the movement, who from 1816 turned theory into remarkably productive practice in his New Lanark cotton mills in Scotland, detested established Churches, but he certainly did not lack religious seriousness, which included his own fervent belief in an age of human perfection to come.
⁸⁵
Sometimes those who admired Owen's commitment to social engineering rejected the industrial society which he had embraced, channelling their efforts into setting up new agriculturally based communities which would not be tainted by industrial misery. The favoured destination was North America, where Owen's export of his proto-socialism had been defeated by the sturdy individualism of the people of Indiana. In America, there was available land (discounting the Native American population) and, among immigrants, none of the social inequalities of Europe. Such efforts usually ended in failure, like Owen's own ill-starred venture across the Atlantic, and could easily be dismissed as romantic and backward-looking. Not surprisingly, the hard-pressed governments of early-nineteenth-century Europe felt that such groups were less of a threat to their survival than the more radical forms of liberalism.

This was a mistake: a new generation of theorists transformed socialism. In France, Louis Blanc presented a vision of a national state run by the people to implement socialist policies, and he became a member of the brief and fragile revolutionary 'Second Republic' regime of 1848, which almost gave him a chance to see what the reality might be. In the 1840s Friedrich Engels used his personal connections with English industry to construct an accurate description of the social injustice of contemporary English society, going on to identify both cause and solution in class conflict. His friend Karl Marx applied to socialist ideas and rhetoric a newly rigorous system and a philosophy of both the past and the future. The latter, a vision of the inevitable consummation in what he termed the dictatorship of the proletariat, was no less a prophetic and apocalyptic vision than anything that Christianity had produced in its two millennia.

Yet while Marx prophesied in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, what was distinctive about this new phase of socialism was its commitment to materialism and rejection of religions of revelation. This echoed one of the greatest influences on Marx: the rejection of religious consciousness in the writings of Ludwig Feuerbach (see p. 833). As early as 1844, Marx was writing of the need to abolish religion, since it was a distraction from the task of freeing workers from their burdens. When he and Engels took over a socialist organization called the League of the Just in 1847, they changed its name to the League of Communists and its slogan from 'All men are Brothers' to 'Proletarians of all Countries - Unite!'
⁸⁶
Henceforth, the growing proportion of socialists looking to Marx's prophetic scheme of the future regarded Christianity as an obstacle rather than an ally in their confrontation alike with liberalism, nationalism and the remains of the
ancien regime
. Christians must now decide who were their enemies indeed.