“If the Revolution is disorder,
the Counter-Revolution is the restoration of Order.
And by Order we mean the peace of Christ in the Reign of Christ.
That is, Christian civilization, austere and hierarchical, fundamentally sacral, anti-egalitarian, and anti-liberal.”
Revolution and Counter-Revolution, the work inseparably linked to the name of Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, appeared in April 1959, on the occasion of the one hundred and first issue of the magazine Catolicismo.1
The word “Revolution”, that originally indicated the heavenly movement of the stars, assumed a new meaning in the eighteenth century, especially after the French Revolution. Since then the latter has been the archetype of all revolutions, even of those that preceded it historically. The study of revolutions is a basic theme of political thought today.2 “Revolution” the philosopher Augusto Del Noce states “is the key word for understanding our age”3 and “analysis of the idea of revolution is the main problem of philosophy”.4 Wars and revolutions, observes Hannah Arendt, “have thus far determined the physiognomy of the twentieth century”.5 But, whereas wars belong to the more ancient phenomena of the past, “revolutions, properly speaking, did not exist prior to the modern age; they are the most recent of all major political data”.6
It is with the Enlightenment that the term “revolution” changes its meaning, and comes to signify a phenomenon of epochal nature destined to deeply condition the course of history. Voltaire often speaks of a “revolution of spirits”, a revolution of minds, of which the philosophers, the Enlightenment thinkers, were sowing the seeds. In 1769 he writes: “It has already been happening for the last 15 years; and in another 15, after such a beautiful morning, the full day will come”.7 This concept of a real regeneration or palingenesis of society takes on its modern significance thanks to what happened in France between 1789 and 1795.8
For Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, the Revolution does not mean the subversion of any established order, nor is the Counter-Revolution a generic reactionary attitude against a reality which one opposes. He wants to give these words the precise meaning which they were given, starting from the French Revolution, by the Pontifical Magisterium and that fruitful line of Catholic thought that, inspired by it and often anticipating it, was called “counter-revolutionary”.9
The most famous author is Count Joseph de Maistre,10 the thinker from Savoy to whom we owe one of the first reflections on the Revolution of 1789. But this school of thought had a much larger range of names than those to which it is usually referred. Even before de Maistre, the Jesuit Pierre de Clorivière11 sensed the depth of the French Revolution, drawing a surprising picture of it: In 1794 he writes “The Revolution we saw break out shows, as foreseen by the Sacred Scriptures, three main characteristics: it was sudden, it is great, it will be general.”12 Along these lines, in the nineteenth century, we come across authors such as Louis de Bonald,13 Juan Donoso Cortés,14 Karl Ludwig von Haller,15 Cardinal Edouard Pie,16 Bishop Charles Freppel17 and, at the beginning of our century, Mgr Henri Delassus,18 a gallant apologist whom Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira held in particular esteem. We should not forget that next to these authors there was also the teaching of the Popes, especially that of the venerable Pius IX and of St Pius X, whose letter Notre Charge Apostolique of 1910, which contains all his thinking, can be defined, according to Dom Besse, as “the Counter- Revolution in action” .19
The thinking of the Counter-Revolutionaries is, in this sense, related to, but distinct from, that of the Conservatives20 who have Edmund Burke21 as their precursor, and is rather commingled with that of the so-called “Ultramontanes”, rivals of Catholic Liberalism and intransigent defenders of the Papal Primacy during the nineteenth century. These included Louis Veuillot22 in France, St Antonio Maria Claret23 in Spain and, in England, the great converts such as Cardinal Henry Edward Manning24 and Father Frederick William Faber.25
To these many names of intellectual exponents, we must add at least that of a statesman who symbolizes the Catholic Counter-Revolution of the nineteenth century: the president of Ecuador, Gabriel García Moreno,26 whose figure is rich in analogies with that of Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira.
Revolution and Counter-Revolution is thus part of a Catholic trend that has its own history and physiognomy within modern history. This line of thinking is characterized by a complete adhesion to the Pontifical Magisterium in all its expressions and by an in-depth meditation on the historical process initiated by the French Revolution. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira’s work is not however a repetition of the previous Counter-Revolutionary thought, but a masterful reworking and development of it, that makes the author an authentic “doctor” of this school in the twentieth century. In fact, he, on the one hand, reworked and arranged, with an extraordinary capacity for synthesis, the previous thinking; on the other he enriched it with new and unexplored dimensions.
Notes:
1. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, Revolução e Contra-Revolução, Campos, Bôa Imprensa Ltda., 1959. The work had four editions in Brazil and numerous editions in the Spanish-speaking world, in France, in Germany, in the United States (Revolution and Counter-Revolution, 3rd edn., York (PA), The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property, 1997), in Canada and in Italy. It was also distributed in Australia, the Philippines, the Republic of Ireland, South Africa, and in the United Kingdom.
2. Cf. among others Karl Griewank, Der neuzeitliche Revolutionsbegriff. Entstehung und Enwicklung Europäische Verlagsanstalt, Frankfurt a. Main 1969; Jean Baechler, Les phénomènes révolutionnaires, Paris, PUF, 1970; Roman Schnur, Revolution und Weltbürgerkrieg, Berlin, Duncker u. Hamblot, 1983; L’Europa moderna e l’idea di Rivoluzione, edited by Carlo Mongardini and Maria Luisa Maniscalco, Rome, Bulzoni, 1990; Charles Tilly, European Revolutions 1492- 1932, Oxford, Blackwell, 1993.
3. A. Del Noce, Lezioni sul marxismo, (Milan, Giuffré, 1972), p. 8.
4. A. Del Noce, Tramonto o eclissi dei valori tradizionali, (Milan, Rusconi, 1971), p. 156.
5. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, (London, Faber and Faber, 1963), p. 1.
6. Ibid, p. 2.
7. François Arouet de Voltaire, letter of 2 March 1769 in Oeuvres, edited by the se of Condorcet, Société Litteraire Typographique, (Kehl 1785-89), vol. XLVI, p. 274.
8. On the French Revolution, apart from the classical summary by Pierre Gaxotte, La Révolution française, new edition edited by Jean Tulard, Bruxelles, Complexe, 1988 (in English: The French Revolution, translated and with an introduction by Walter A. Philips, London-New York, C. Scribner’s & Son, 1932), Cf. the reprints of the studies by Augustin Cochin (1876-1916), La Révolution et la libre pensée, Paris, Copernic, 1976 (1924), and Les sociétés de pensée et la démocratie moderne, Paris, Copernic, 1978 (1925), which influenced the historical “revision” by François Furet, Penser la Révolution française, Paris, Gallimard, 1988; F. Furet – Mona Ozouf (edited by), Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution française, Paris, Flammarion, 1988. On the cultural origins of the French Revolution: P. Hazard, The European Mind; ID., La pensée européenne au XVIII siècle, de Montesquieu à Lessing, 3 vols., Paris, Boivin, 1946; Daniel Mornet, Les origines intellectuelles de la Révolution, Paris, Colin, 1933; Bernard Groethuysen, Philosophie de la Révolution française, Paris, Gallimard, 1956. On the religious aspect, Cf. the important work of Jean de Viguerie, Christianisme et Révolution, Paris, Nouvelles Editions Latines, 1986.
9. There is no organic and deep exposition of Catholic Counter-Revolutionary thinking; the subject is dealt with a heterogeneity of positions by: Fernand Baldensperger, Le mouvement des idées dans l’émigration française (1789-1815), 2 vols., Paris, Plon, 1925; Dominique Bagge, Les idées politiques en France sous la Restauration, Paris, P.U.F., 1952; Jean- Jacques Oechslin, Le mouvement ultra-royaliste sous la Restauration: son idéologie et son action politique (1814-1830), Paris, Librairie générale de droit et de jurisprudence, 1960; Jacques Godechot, La contre-révolution, doctrine et action (1789-1804), Paris, P.U.F., 1961; R. Rémond, Les Droites en France, Paris, Aubier-Montaigne, 1982; Stéphane Rials, Révolution et Contre-Révolution au XIX siècle, Paris, Albatros, 1987; E. Poulat, Antireligion et Contre-Révolution, in ID., L’antimaçonnisme catholique, Paris, Berg International, 1994. Great use can also be made of a series of articles written by Prof. F. Furquim de Almeida “Os católicos franceses no século XIX”, Catolicismo, from no. 1, January 1951 up to no. 80, August 1957.
10. The writings of Count Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) are collected in the Oeuvres complètes contenant ses oeuvres posthumes et toute sa correspondance inédite, 14 vols, ed. ne varietur, ibidem 1924-8, Lyon, Vitte et Perrussell, 1884-6. In spite of the abundance of bibliography on the author, there is no complete study on De Maistre. For an introduction Cf. The works of Joseph de Maistre, ed. by Jack Lively, New York, Macmillan, 1965. Cf. also E.D. Watt, “The English Image of Joseph de Maistre”, European Studies Review, 1979, vol. 4, pp. 239-59; Richard Lebrun, Joseph de Maistre: An Intellectual Militant, Kingston-Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988.
11. Of Father Pierre Joseph Picot de Clorivière (1735-1820), the Etudes sur la Révolution, in Pierre de Clorivière, contemporain et juge de la Révolution, edited and with introduction by René Bazin, Paris, J. de Gigord, 1926 (now P. de Clorivière, Etudes sur la Révolution, Escurolles, Fideliter, 1988). Cf. also the large section on Pierre Monier-Vinard, S.J., Clorivière, in DSp, vol. II (1953), col. 974-9. Clorivière was the last Jesuit to have pronounced his solemn vows in France before the suppression of the Society of Jesus and he was to its restorer after 1814. The cause for his beatification has been introduced.
12. P. de Clorivière, Etudes sur la Révolution, p. 115.
13. On Viscount Louis-Ambrois de Bonald (1754-1830), of whom the Oeuvres Complètes in three volumes (Paris 1859) have come out with Migne, Cf. the classic volume by H.Moulinié, De Bonald. La vie, la carrière politique, la doctrine, Paris, F. Alcan, 1916; also Mary Hall Quinlan, The Historical Thought of the Viscount de Bonald, Washington, Catholic University of America Press, 1953; Robert Spaemann, Der Ursprung der Soziologie aus dem Geist der Restauration. Studien über L. G. A. de Bonald, Munich, Kösel, 1959; C. Constantin, sub voce, in DTC, vol. II,1 (1910), col. 958-61.
14. On Juan Donoso Cortés, Marquess of Valdegamas (1809-53), see the introductory study that Carlos Valverde premised to his edition of the Obras completas, Madrid, BAC, 1970, vol. I, pp. 1-166 (with an ample bibliography). The letter addressed by Donoso Cortés to Cardinal Fornari on 19 June 1852 may be considered one of the clearest manifestos of the Catholic Counter-Revolution of the nineteenth century. The original text is in J. Donoso Cortés, Obras completas, vol. II, pp. 746-62.
15. Karl Ludwig von Haller (1768-1854) is the author of the Restauration der Staats-Wissenschaft, oder Theorie des natürlich geselligen Zustands; der Chimäre des Küstlich-bürgerlichen entgegensetzt, 6 vols, Winterthur, Steiner, 1816-1834. On Haller, see Michel de Preux, Ludwig von Haller. Un légitimiste Suisse, Sierre, A la Carte, 1996.
16. Of Cardinal Edouard-Louis Pie (1815-80) the Oeuvres de Monseigneur l’Evêque de Poitiers (10 editions, the last in Paris, 10 vols., J. Ledars 1890-4). Cf. also Mgr Louis Baunard, Histoire du Cardinal Pie; Evêque de Poitiers, 2 vols., Poussielgue, Oudin, 1886, and the studies by Etienne Catta, La doctrine politique et sociale du Cardinal Pie, Paris, Nouvelles Editions Latines, 1959 and by Theotime de Saint-Just, La royauté sociale de Notre-Seigneur Jésus-Christ, d’après le cardinal Pie, Chiré en Montreuil, Ed. Sainte Jeanne d’Arc, 1988.
17. Bishop Charles Freppel (1827-91) was adviser to the Vatican Council I, where he upheld the infallibility of the Pope, and from 1869 bishop of Angers where in 1875 he founded the Catholic University. Cf. his Oeuvres polémiques, in 10 vols. (Paris, Palme, 1874-1878) and La Révolution française, Paris, Trident, 1987 (1889).
18. Mgr Henri Delassus (1836-1921), ordained to the priesthood in 1862, he exercised his ministry in Lille where, from 1874, he was owner, director and principal editor of the “Religious weekly of the diocese of Cambrai” which, with the creation of the diocese of Lille took the name of “Religious weekly of the diocese of Lille” and “he made it one of the bastions of the struggle against liberalism, modernism and all the forms of the Anti-Christian conspiracy in the world’” (E. Poulat, Intégrisme et catholicisme intégral, (Tournai, Casterman, 1969), pp. 258-59). He was a member of “Sodalitium Pianum” and St Pius X raised him to domestic prelate in 1904, to apostolic protonotary in 1911 and to the role of dean of the chapter of the Cathedral of Lille in 1914, acknowledging, on the occasion of his priestly jubilee, his zeal in defending Catholic doctrine (Actes de Pie X, (Paris, Maison de la Bonne Presse, 1936), t. VII, p. 238). His main works are Le problème de l’heure présente: antagonisme de deux civilisations, cit., then reworked in La conjuration antichrétienne: le temple maçonnique voulant s’élever sur les ruines de l’Eglise catholique, 3 vols, with a letter of introduction by Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val, Paris, Desclée, 1910.
19. Dom Jean Martial Besse, L’Eglise et les libertés, (Paris, Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1913), 53.
20. Cf. Pieter Viereck, Conservatism, in EB, vol. 27 (1986), pp. 476-84; ID., Conservatism from John Adams to Churchill, Westport, Greenwood Press, 1978; John Weiss, Conservatism in Europe, 1770-1945, London, Thames and Hudson, 1977; Klaus Epstein, The Genesis of German Conservatism, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1966; Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: from Burke to Eliot, Washington (DC), Regney, Gateway, 1986 (1953).
21. The official birth of international conservatism dates to the publication of the work by Edmund Burke (1729-97), Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790. On Burke there is a vast amount of literature. We confine ourselves to mentioning the works by Alfred Cobban, E. Burke and the Revolt against the Eighteenth Century, London, Allen and Unwin, 1978 (reprint of the 1929 edition), and The Debate on the French Revolution (1789-1800), (2nd edn.), London, Adam and Charles Black, 1960, and recently Crawford B. Macpherson, Burke, New York, Oxford University Press, 1980; Michael Freeman, Edmund Burke and the critique of political radicalism, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1980.
22. On Louis Veuillot Cf. note 41 of chap. II, and among his works, “L’illusion libérale”, in Oeuvres, vol. 10, pp. 315-61.
23. St Antonio Maria Claret (1807-70). Founder of the Congregation of the Missionary Sons of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, archbishop of Cuba (1849-57), confessor of Queen Isabel II in Madrid, then among the protagonists of Vatican Council I, where he defended Papal infallibility. He was beatified by Pius XI in 1934 and canonised by Pius XII on 7 May 1950. Escritos autobiograficos y espirituales, Madrid, BAC, 1959 and the entry for Giuseppe Maria Viñas, in BSS, vol. II (1962), col. 205-10.
24. On Cardinal Henry Edward Manning (1808-92), David Newsome, The convert cardinals: John Henry Newman and Henry Edward Manning, London, Murray, 1993.
25. On the Oratorian Father Frederick William Faber (1814-63), Ronald Chapman, Father Faber, London, Burn and Oates, 1961.
26. Gabriel García Moreno (1821-75), during his presidency he signed a concordat with the Holy See (1863), considered the model for the Catholic Concordats of the nineteenth century and he consecrated the Republic of Ecuador to the Sacred Heart (1873). “His existence was a constant battle against the opposing political powers who tended towards de-christianization and for this he was the object of profound hatred by his enemies who had him assassinated at the entrance to the Cathedral of Quito” (Silvio Furlani, sub entry, in DTC, vol. V (1950), col. 1936). Cf. also Alphonse Berthe, C. SS. R, Garcia Moreno. Président de l’Equateur, vengeur et martyre du droit chrétien, 2 vols., Paris, Téqui, 1926.