Charles Forbes, Comte de Montalembert, was of English descent. He was educated by his maternal grandfather, a Protestant deeply infected with liberalism. Montalembert conceived the illusion that Ultramontanism, which he sincerely and ardently supported, could be reconciled with the seeds of liberalism received during his education and implanted in his mentality.
An aristocrat to the marrow of his bones, he could not accept Henri Lacordaire’s democracy or Félicité Lamennais’ republic. But the government program that L’Avenir advocated in an 1831 series of articles corresponded to all his aspirations. This program retained much of Lamennais’s ideology. This fact is unsurprising since the revolutionary paper was, nonetheless, cautious in expounding its reform plans.
As envisioned, this program would preserve the monarchy, but the country’s elites would control actual power. Most of these elites possessed a worldview more in line with the Revolution. The administrative departments would be abolished. France would once again be divided into provinces and communes. Those were more natural divisions, considering geographical and social realities. The inhabitants of each commune would elect a council of notables from among the most honest, enlightened and capable. This council, presided over by a royal commissioner, would administer the commune.
In turn, the communes’ notables would elect notables of the provinces. These, in turn, would delegate their powers to a commission. That body would govern the provinces under the presidency of a royal commissioner. Every six months, the notables of each province would meet to outline the regional government’s guidelines. The royal commissioners would have a moderating role. They would ensure the execution of laws. They would also work to curb abuses by notables against the people that elected them.
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The central power would have two branches—legislative and executive. The legislature would have two chambers. The notables of each commune would elect the commons. The provincial notables would elect the Senate. Executive power would rest in the hands of the king. He would appoint the royal commissioners, direct the army and navy, and deal exclusively with foreign policy.
Montalembert imagined that the notables chosen to lead this government advocated by L’Avenir would naturally be Catholics and aristocrats. If these did not fail in their mission, France would be saved. That would require that French Catholics abandon Gallicanism entirely. Catholic doctrine would be taught again in all its purity, and the aristocracy would shake off the lethargy into which it had sunk.
During the reign of Louis Philippe, Montalembert enthusiastically devoted himself to rebuilding the Catholic ranks and the nobility. He was a peer of the kingdom and undisputed leader of the Catholic Party. His work was of incredible magnitude, his performance was magnificent, and his Ultramontanism was sincere. Indeed, after he defected to liberal Catholics, Ultramontane leaders such as Louis Cardinal Pie, Dom Prosper Guéranger and Louis Veuillot could only refer to him with regret at having suffered such a great loss.
The 1848 revolution was the beginning of Montalembert’s downfall. He so believed in his dreams of liberty that the onset of the republic threw him into despondency. Louis Veuillot tried to encourage him not to abandon the fight. Nothing better reflects his state of mind than the letters he wrote to his friend and confidant, Dom Guéranger.
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When Dom Guéranger congratulated him on his election to the Chamber of Deputies, Montalembert responded:
“My friend, plenus sum sermonibus [I am full of words]. It has been three months, and every time I think of you, I have a lot to say and succumb under the weight of everything I’d like to pour into your heart as a monk and a friend. To have wished for my election, you must have misunderstood the February Revolution. I was devastated from the beginning and grew increasingly dismayed as I contemplated the Assembly and the situation. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, I can do in this horrible and shameful debacle. Deep down, I am neither a man of struggle nor Revolution; I am a man of study and reconstruction if need be. My time has passed; my career is over. I have nothing else to do but plunge into a retreat if the world still allows it, and there make, unmake and remake my Monasticon. I might ascend to the Chamber’s tribune, but convinced that I will suffer a much sadder failure than Father Lacordaire’s.
“You see, my friend, nothing else stands in this country. Behold that famous universal suffrage has judged it. I believed in good faith in the transition between the past and the future, common sense and madness attempted by the July monarchy and the Restoration. Now everything is destroyed, and I fear nothing else is possible. Excessive evil and material ruin may bring an appearance of monarchist reaction, but no moral regeneration can arise from it. I think we will gradually roll to the bottom of the abyss where the Greeks of the Lower Empire, Asia Minor, Africa, and the Spanish republics of America await us.
“Yes, the Church remains, as you say so well. I love and appreciate more than ever that imperishable homeland that will not be stolen from us. But I am alarmed by the clergy. Haven’t you seen the speeches by Paris parish priests calling Our Lord Jesus Christ a ‘divine republican?’ It is always the same spirit of servile worship of secular forces and victorious power. Unfortunately, the Gallican spirit has become complicated and poisoned by demagogic tendencies that infected the clergy to an unsuspected degree. However, I hope and believe that the Church will emerge triumphant from this new test.
“How can you and your pusillus grex of Solesmes withstand such a storm? And Pius IX? I have a lot to tell you but will never be able to. I only ask that you pray a lot for me and write as often as possible. You cannot imagine how depressed I am. I absolutely need to change my motto (‘neither fear nor hope’) because I am terribly afraid of the future and completely discouraged. My wife is much braver than me. Soon we will all be swept away by communists or a dictatorship. Farewell, my friend, know I count on your affection and need it more than ever.”
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Don Guéranger did not fail to encourage his friend. He reminded him of his role, his vocation as an apostle, the Church’s need for his assistance, and his ever-increasing influence. Don Guéranger tried every possible way to lift Montalembert’s morale. In response to Dom Guéranger, Montalembert even predicted his own remarkable return to Ultramontanism.
“I didn’t think about all this [career, influence, etc.] in 1830 when I joined the fray to defend the Church and true freedom. Today, I no longer want to think about these things. I never had but one purpose: to serve and profess the truth at the expense of my ambition, interests, and tastes. As in 1830, I do not separate truth from freedom, but today I know what I did not know then: that freedom—true, holy freedom, freedom to do good, the only one the Church authorizes and defends—is incompatible with democracy and Revolution; in a word, with the modern spirit.”
Unfortunately, however, at that moment, Father Félix Dupanloup, future Bishop of Orleans, composed his famous distinction between hypothesis and thesis. Montalembert came to prefer Father Dupanloup’s advice to that of Dom Guéranger. Henceforth, the champion of French Ultramontanism—its leader until 1848—became a soldier of “liberal Catholicism.” By the time of his inglorious death in 1870, he mockingly called the pope a ‘Vatican idol.’