RELIGION AND THE RELATIONS OF CHURCHES AND STATES

Abstract

‘A free church in a free state.’ The maxim of Cavour, which was to become the most influential principle of the relations of church and state in Europe during the latter half of the nineteenth century, had too much novelty to win its way easily to general acceptance. The French Revolution indeed had shaken altars no less than sceptres within the sphere of its direct conquests and even beyond; and had broken the traditional association of church and state. Consequently in England, where émigrés from across the Channel, both clerical and lay, were received with sympathy, the clergy of the established church, as portrayed in the novels of Jane Austen, assumed a new character and importance as commissioned officers in the army of the church militant against Jacobinism and atheism. A contemporary French historian, Professor A. Latreille, indeed has fortified this interpretation by arguing that the principles of 1789 were a portent of the modern conflict of the totalitarian state with Christianity. ‘Thence came the demand for total obedience, comparable to a religious obedience, to the State and the Law, and thence the fanatical determination, in case of resistance, to secure the triumph of the principles necessary for social order.’ If the meaning of the French Revolution were to involve the translation of the maxim of Gambetta, ‘Clericalism—there is the enemy’, into ‘Christianity—there is the enemy’ then the nature of the ecclesiastical reaction which followed the defeat of Napoleon may be more easily understood, if not exculpated. In France the restored Bourbon monarchy espoused the closest possible alliance with the church: altar and throne were to be indissolubly bound together; whilst to Rome itself and to the Papal States the Papacy returned in the baggage train of the victorious allies.