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Hilaire Belloc: Jacobite and Jacobin

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Hilaire Belloc [OP]

2005-11-06 21:51 | User Profile

Hilaire Belloc: Jacobite and Jacobin

John P. McCarthy, a Professor of History at Fordham University, Lincoln Centre, New York, is author of * Hilaire Belloc: Edwardian Radical, and the Chairman of Fordham’s annual Chesterton Conference.*

A discussion of Hilaire Belloc might appear timely on the one hand and inopportune on the other and for the same reason, namely, the recent appearance of the biography by Andrew Wilson.[1] The book has been generously applauded and reviewed in most of the important literary and book sections of our major newspapers and periodicals, a circumstance which, at first glance, might suggest that we are on the eve of a Belloc revival. Unfortunately, regardless of their impression of the Wilson book, the reviewers almost unanimously have used the occasion to savage Belloc.

Perhaps the most brutal was John Carey in the Sunday Times, who saw Belloc’s energy as that which “drove him to prominence,” but as an energy, which was “less accompanied by self-criticism or depth of thought,” and which gave him “the appearance…..of a hyperactive windbag.” His certitudes were “tediously simple and few” and between them “lay muddle and emptiness.” His political radicalism was “skindeep”, and his hatred of capitalism and of financiers was based on the unfortunate investment experiences, both his mother’s and his own. His political involvement is dismissed as backing “the wrong horse with dogged persistence.” He is pictured as a careless admirer of Mussolini, and his own economic policy of Distributism is dismissed as the advocacy that everyone own “three acres and a cow.”[2]

Vernon Young, the Philadelphia Inquirer reviewer, saw Belloc “as a bigot in religious matters, a shockingly perverse partisan in the political struggles of the ‘30’s, a bad loser, and an inexcusable adherent – early and late – of anti-Semitism.[3] The reviewer curiously asserts that Wilson locates Belloc’s anti-Semitism in “the traditional Catholic doctrine Belloc had absorbed from Cardinal Henry Edward Manning [sic],” which says something about how closely Wilson’s book was read by Mr. Young.

Robert Bernard Martin, a professor emeritus of English at Princeton University, reviewing Wilson’s book for the Washington Post, describes Belloc as “a religious fanatic, a social snob, and a political turncoat.”[4] Possibly the most appreciative view of the philosophical and psychological consistency in the religious and socio-political writings of Belloc was that of the weekday New York Times reviewer, Michiko Kakutani, who, in addition to noting that Belloc “was one of the finest writers of English prose around,” insists that [QUOTE] behind Belloc’s evolution from early radicalism to disillusioned conservatism, behind many of his literary quarrels, even behind his passionate avowal of Catholicism, there lay an appreciation for the glories of the past, and enduring sense of loss.[/QUOTE] Kakutani reflects a more charitable response to the disappointments and losses in Belloc’s life(the early death of his father, his failure to win an All Souls Fellowship, parliamentary frustration, mounting financial pressure, and the premature death of his wife) as intensifying with “a dose of bitterness and spleen” the conviction which Belloc shared with Yeats that “man is in love and loves what vanishes.”[5]

I, also, have reviewed the book and understandably have responded differently. Accepting the book’s honesty and thoroughness, I see the weaknesses of Belloc as inseparable from his genius, a genius which Wilson appreciates much more than do the reviewers of his book, most of whom, one suspects, used the book for material with which to assail Belloc.[6] But while Wilson captures man aspects of Belloc’s personality, especially some striking instances of spiritual turmoil and growth such as his marriage, his wife’s death, and his visit to the Holy Land in 1935, he demonstrates insufficient understanding of the consistent strain linking the surface contradictions in Belloc’s political perspective.[7] He does, however, come much closer to understanding Belloc than any of the aforementioned reviewers and closer, too, than Belloc’s earlier biographer.[8]

What we hope to do in this analysis if to forge that link between the apparently contradictionary labels, Jacobite and Jacobin, which can equally be applied to Belloc. Perhaps a hint of compatibility between the two attitudes might be gleaned from Connor Cruise O’Brien’s thoughtful introduction to a recent issue of that important book for thoughtful conservatives, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. O’Brien emphasizes Burke’s Irish origins and his sympathy with the grievances of the Catholic population in a land whose governance they were excluded. These feelings contrast with Burke’s link to the English establishment and to the Whig oligarchy, not to mention his condemnation of the French Revolution. O’Brien insists that it was not so clear that at bottom Burke was an extreme conservative. Instead: [QUOTE] He was an outsider, from a land in which his people were oppressed; a land whose prevailing system of government he never ceased to undermine. These are not conditions in which conservatism becomes “normal behavior” of the mind…..[Burke] never became a revolutionist but there continued to smoulder in him, in relation to Irish matters, a badly suppressed rebel. It is not a peculiarity of temperament, but the peculiarity of his situation – what I have called the Jacobite-Whig situation – that shapes his form of conservatism…the contradictions in Burke’s position enrich his eloquence, extend its range, deepen its paths, heighten its fantasy….part of the secret of his power to penetrate the processes of the revolution derives from a suppressed sympathy with revolution, combined with an intuitive grasp of the subversive possibilities of counter-revolutionary propaganda, as effected the established order in the land of his birth.[9] [/QUOTE] In Burke, the inner tensions was between the Jacobite spirit – that is, the sympathy with the Stuart kings, but deeper still, with a Catholic order in Ireland that was put down by the new Protestant ascendancy – and the Whig spirit, that is, the championing of the social order of the oligarchy that had become guaranteed by the very victory that had defeated Catholic Ireland. But the Whig victory was also the victory of a balanced constitution, legal due process, and respect for property, the order in England which Burke championed.

In the genesis of Hilaire Belloc’s thinking, there was no element at all of Whiggism. Rather he was torn by the rival extremes of Jacobitism ( that is, with the romantic defense of an older order that had been replaced by a newly established oligarchy) and Jacobinism (that is, support for the democratic revolutionary forces which deposed monarchy in France). Unlike Burke, who was torn between what was really an ultra-reactionary or revolutionary-conservative sentiment and a conservatism in defense of existing institutions, Belloc was torn between the revolutionary conservatism of the Jacobites and the outright revolutionary spirit of the Jacobins. Furthermore, the Jacobin strain was more pronounced in Belloc’s younger years while the Jacobite strain prevailed in his later life. But at the same time, there was no substantial change in principle. Instead, there was a disillusionment with what he saw as the opportunist and essentially statist character of the reformist liberalism with which he had been earlier associated and under whose banner he had even been elected to parliament (1906-1910).

Belloc’s first serious historical works were biographies of Danton and Robespierre.[10] As late as 1910, he could expound on the theory of popular sovereignty, the theory from which the French Revolution proceeded: [QUOTE] a political community pretending to sovereignty, that is, pretending to a moral right of defending its existence against all other communities, derives the civil and temporal authority of its laws not from its actual rulers, nor even from its magistracy, but from itself.[11] [/QUOTE] Such theory, according to Belloc, was given “imperishable expression” by Rousseau in his Social Contract, “the formula of the Revolutionary Creed.” Furthermore, though no man, perhaps has put the prime truth of political morals so well, that truth was as old as the world.

But, even while hailing Rousseau and the democratic doctrine of the revolution, Belloc could lament the decline of a medieval system, the representative or parliamentary system that sprang up in the Middle Ages from the influence of the Church and the monastic orders. In the centuries immediately before the French Revolution, vigourous representative institutions had in England “narrowed and decayed” and had become “a mere scheme for aristocratic government,” while in France, they “had fallen into disuse,” although “an active memory of [them] still remained” so that “at crucial moments when a constitution of the whole people was required…the corporative initiative of the whole people must be set at work in order to save the State.”[12] Such is the background for the recall of the Estates-General and for its subsequent transformation into a constituent and then into a national assembly. No wonder Belloc would dismiss Burke, the champion of oligarchic Whiggery, as being [QUOTE] essentially and advocate in mind, ready, when they had once been proposed to him or forced upon his masters, to understand the defense of causes which he could never have discovered by his unaided genius.[13][/QUOTE]

As would be the appropriate for a descendent of the radical philosopher-scientist, Joseph Priestly, and the grandson of the radical political organizer, Joseph Parkes, Belloc identified himself with the Liberal and anti-imperialist forces in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Political and social democratization and hostility toward privilege were the essential themes of such a vision and many of their objectives had been achieved by the beginning of the century. The Radical Liberals, however, had also been the party of economic freedom; that is, of free trade, of freedom of contract, of anti-monopoly and of government retrenchment, especially in view of the oligarchy’s and the establishment’s having historically been the recipients and beneficiaries of activist government. There is a parallel between the Radical Liberal suspicion of government as the agent of the powerful and the Jeffersonian suspicion of a strong central government. What happened to English Radical Liberalism during Belloc’s brief political career was comparable to what happened to Jeffersonian Democracy during the New Deal. That is, it moved in a statist direction, which, as Belloc prophesied in his The Servile State, would transform the proletariat, the class without property, into a comfortable and secure servile class under command of a reinforced and protected state-capitalist ownership class. I will not go into the validity of his fears here.

Belloc’s Radical Liberalism differed from that of his Unitarian maternal forbears because of his Jacobite strain. Their historical perspective would have hailed the parliamentary-Roundhead cause in the mid-seventeenth century and would have applauded the Glorious Revolution of 1688 for going in the right direction but stopping short of the democratic ideal later raised by John Wilkes, Tom Paine, Joseph Priestly and Joseph Parkes. However, Belloc sensed an incompleteness in that vision in no small part because of its Little England provincialism.

Belloc’s French and more especially, his Catholic perspective enabled him to broaden that radical critique of privilege. That broadening in no way diminished his radical sense of outrage at injustice. However, instead of an essentially Whiggish view of history (the view of things continually progressing) Belloc saw a better time in the past. This did not imply a conservative hostility to change; rather it suggested a radical restoration.

The period which he idealised was the Later Middle Ages when the guild system was at its strongest and the constraints of feudalism were being loosened. The common man was approaching propertied status with its implications of full economic freedom. Then, taking a cue from such diverse sources as the early nineteenth-century populist radical, William Cobbett, and the twentieth-century Guild Socialist, R.H. Tawney, he interpreted the socio-economic implications of the English Reformation as a “land grab” of monastic properties by an emerging new aristocracy. Their economic and political dominance was achieved in the subsequent constitutional struggles of the seventeenth century and confirmed in the Hanoverian era with the defeat of the Stuart and Jacobite cause. Thus came about the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, with the masses increasingly free politically, but without property, a state of affairs which Belloc labeled capitalism. Furthermore, it was under such abnormal circumstances that the industrial revolution took place.[14] Although Belloc criticized the “abnormal circumstances,” he had no objection to the Industrial Revolution itself. As Alzina Stone Dale has put it, Belloc and Chesterton are not so much neo-medievalists as they are “post-industrial, nineteenth century radicals.”[15]

From his youthful days as an admirer of Cardinal Manning for his intervention on behalf of the strikers in the dock strike of the late 1880s, Belloc was attuned to social injustice. But as much as he condemned industrial capitalism, he remained, appropriately for a Victorian Radical Liberal, wedded to property rights and to the free economy. The only problem was that he wanted as widespread as possible a distribution of productive property rights in order that the predominant mass of men might become real actors in the free economy; in other words, he supported the distributist programme which Andrew Wilson has so correctly seen as drawn from the Papal social encyclical, Rerum Novarum.[16]

Belloc feared the servile-state implications of the new direction which Liberalism was taking, with its advocacy of compulsory social insurance, mandatory labour arbitration, and even the guaranteed compensation of business men. But his fears had a political conspiratorial note as well, as his observations of parliament from the inside convinced him that parliamentary and party politics were a sham, all ultimately serving what was now a financial oligarchy and the job ambitions of politicians. His involvement in the exposure of the Marconi vase, which would make Watergate seem like child’s play, was an aspect of disillusionment. The same disillusionment prompted Belloc, who was a student at Oxford had headed a group who at the height of late Victorian imperialism dared to call themselves “Republicans”(in the Jacobin sense), to turn full circle and to advocate in the 1920s and 1930s a revived and strengthened monarchy and a diminution of parliamentary institutions. How appropriate that, at this point in his life, Belloc would undertake the writing of his numerous biographies of kings, especially the Stuarts; and, in doing so, give full rein to his Jacobite instincts.

Also broadening Belloc’s perspective (and giving him a sense of the role and value of a landed aristocracy against a financial oligarchy as a source of permanence and tradition) was the influence of his close tory friend, George Wyndham who was certainly not an opportunist. Wyndham’s principled conservatism and Belloc’s populist Distributism dovetailed in Wyndham’s championship and his completion, as Irish General Secretary, of the process of Irish land reform which transformed Ireland into a nation proprietors a full decade before the nationalist uprising of 1916.[17]

By the late 1920s and the 1930s, Belloc’s preoccupations had gone far beyond the simple critique of an economic system or its political or constitutional structures. Naturally, as a Catholic apologist, his energies had been directed against that kind of anti-Catholicism which was almost at the core of English national consciousness. Now, however, he turned his attention to a much deeper assault on Catholic life than that put forth by Protestantism, which indeed shared much with Catholicism. By the 1920s and 1930s the Church and Western culture were under assault by the absolutist claims of nationalism and, especially in what had been Catholic countries, of anti-clericalism, as well as of a fashionable intellectual and, what we would call, media conformity to the Modern Mind. Belloc succinctly noted how the anti-clerical assaults on Church institutions end as “a gross violation of the most fundamental principle in which the “Liberalism” of the Anti-Clerical was, at first, rooted.”[18] The weapons of all three, nationalism, anti-clericalism, and “Modern Mind” conformity, included the servile-state elimination of economic liberty, increased compulsory control of human activity, particularly in matters such as education which has historically been left to the authority of the Church and family. The reality of Communist and Nazi totalitarianism came to be the most extreme manifestation of this assault. But graver dangers were yet ahead, although their full brunt would be borne in Belloc’s own lifetime.

The “New Arrivals”, as he labeled them, were outside the Catholic and the Christian brotherhood in a sense that the nineteenth-century skeptics and higher critics never were. These were neo-pagans “who like discord in music…who prefer the ugly in paint and stone…who openly despair…who willingly share their wives…who laud what we used to call perversion of sex.”[19] The ultimate development of the neo-pagan state would entail, he feared, [QUOTE] certain laws repugnant to the Catholic conscience, laws concerning marriage or property, or domestic habits in eating and drinking, or concerning the freedom of labour, or any other function of the dignity of man. It proposes…what is call the “sterilization of the unfit”, or compulsion in the matter of hours and wage…or “eugenics” or any other nastiness.[20][/QUOTE] Might not our own age with its preoccupation with discouraging cigarette smoking, imposing mandatory automobile seat belts, state-supported and encouraged day-care centers for toddlers and niggardliness toward private education, not to mention abortion-on-demand and state sanction for homosexuality, seem to bear out Belloc’s fears? One suspects that he would, if alive today, be in forefront of the right-to-life campaign, and of the cause of private education, and he would, very possibly, be demanding state-provided comparable pay, rather than day-care centres, for the mothers of young families and not just single-parent families.

It is to be hoped that potential readers of Andrew Wilson’s book will not be discouraged by reviewers hostile to Belloc either from reading the biography or from going on to read Belloc himself. It would be sad for them to miss the wealth of Bellocian thought with its insights into the components of political and economic liberty, as well as with its unashamed acceptance and championship of the institutional Church.

1. Andrew Wilson, Hilaire Belloc(New York, 1984)
2. Sunday Times, April 22, 1984
3. Philadelphia Inquirer, August 26, 1984
4. Washington Post, July 22, 1984
5. New York Times, July 24, 1984
6. Reflections, Fall, 1984
7. Andrew Wilson, Hilaire Belloc, pp. 69-70, 209-213, 338-339
8. Robert Speaight, Hilaire Belloc(London, 1957)
9. Connor Cruise O’Brien, “Introduction,” Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France(Baltimore, 1969)
10. Hilaire Belloc, Danton(London, 1899); Robespierre(London, 1901)
11. Hilaire Belloc, The French Revolution(London, 1911), pp.1-7
12. Hilaire Belloc, The French Revolution(London, 1911), pp.10-11
13. Hilaire Belloc and John Lingard, The History of England(New York, 1915) II:159
14. Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State (Indianapolis, 1977), pp 85-106
15. Alzina Stone Dale, The Outline of Sanity(Grand Rapids, 1982), pp. 208-209
16. Andrew Wilson, Hilaire Belloc, pp.24-28
17. Andrew Wilson, Hilaire Belloc, pp.136-137, 183
18. Hilaire Belloc, Survivals and New Arrivals (London 1929), pg.172
19. Hilaire Belloc, Survivals and New Arrivals, pg.227
20. Hilaire Belloc, Survivals and New Arrivals, pg. 242

Hilaire Belloc

2005-11-06 21:55 | User Profile

One reason why I myself admire Belloc so much is because I too have this certain ideological duality in me; on the one hand being a reactionary Jacobite and at the same time be a radical Jacobin. :)

Well here's another summary of Belloc's non-conformist political perspectives(which again would easily apply to me as well):

“At first glance, Belloc’s political ideas seem extradinarily befuddled. He became an advocate of monarchism, appreciated the strong hand of dictatorship, yet called himself a democrat and republican….In general, Hilaire Belloc is a very difficult thinker to categorize. His great love for Republicanism and the radicals of the French Revolution certainly set him apart from much of the French Right. He was profoundly Catholic, yet outside the conventional Church philosophy, and was never completely accepted by the official Catholic Social Movement. He cannot be linked with the radical French Catholics, and he remained entirely outside English political conservatism in his later and more extremist years…And despite his contempt for representative government, Belloc held to what might be called an anarchistic democratic ideal, which, like Rousseau’s, asserted that democracy could only be realized in small unindustrialized communities. Belloc’s Republicanism, like his love of democracy, was probably also an ideal. To him, Republicanism was a system of government which could only operate effectively only after evil elements had been purged from the body politic.” --Jay P. Corrin G.K. Chesterton & Hilaire Belloc: The Battle Against Modernity pg.17; 21-22