Monarchist Profile: Louis-Gabriel Ambroise, Vicomte de Bonald

Louis-Gabriel Ambroise de Bonald stands out as one of the best known French counterrevolutionary thinkers. He was born on October 2, 1754 in Le Monna (Millau) in what was then Rouergue (today Aveyron). His Catholic faith and desire to serve the French monarchy characterized his life almost from the very beginning. He was given a top education by the Oratorians at the College of Juilly and after graduating served in the elite and famous Guard Musketeers. After King Louis XVI dissolved that unit in 1776 Bonald returned home where he earned a reputation for intelligence, fairness and soon enjoyed widespread respect. As a result, he was elected mayor of Millau in 1785 and in 1790 was appointed to the departmental Assembly representing Aveyron. However, Bonald was disgusted by the revolutionaries and could see that their hold on France was only growing. Like many, Bonald at first hoped that the Revolution might be somewhat beneficial and his primary aim was to maintain law and order rather than resisting on ideological grounds. That came to an end with the Civil Constitution of the Clergy which aimed to make the Church subservient to the State. He refused to force priests in his area to take the oath that went along with it, thus forfeiting his office. A year later, thoroughly disgusted with the Revolution, he decided to emigrate but he was certainly not running away. He immediately enlisted in the royalist army of the Prince of Condé. When that force was disbanded he retired to the German town of Heidelberg.

It was in Heidelberg in 1797 that Bonald wrote his first significant work on politics and religion which was of a sufficiently counterrevolutionary flavor to be condemned and banned by the Directory in France. His retired life was not to last long as he could not bear to remain outside the country while France was being torn apart by revolutionary extremism. Using the alias Saint-Séverin he returned to France and wrote more books on the social order, divorce and the legislative process. Pardoned by Napoleon in 1802 he was able to come out of hiding and work openly again. In collaboration with Joseph Fiévée and the vicomte de Chateaubriand he edited and contributed articles to the “Mercurede France” in 1806. These were later published in a book as well in 1819. In 1808 he declined the offer of membership on the Council of the Imperial University (founded by Napoleon, today the University of Paris) but in 1810 put his dislike of Bonaparte aside and accepted the post. His reputation had grown so great that Bonald had been asked to oversee the education of the son of Louis Bonaparte, King of Holland, and even the Prince Imperial, Napoleon II, King of Rome. He turned down both positions, being a monarchist of the royalist rather than imperialist persuasion.

As a staunch royalist, he was properly pleased when the Bourbon dynasty was finally restored to the French throne and was promptly appointed to the council of public instruction and became a deputy in the French National Assembly. In that body he became well known for his ardent, and fiercely reactionary, speeches defending royal authority, the place of the Church and, most famously, favoring censorship and even advocating for those found guilty of extreme acts of sacrilege to be put to death. Today, of course, many (especially in Europe) would view this as a shockingly extreme position. However, it is important to remember that this man had lived through in era in which people were executed for simply whispering a politically incorrect opinion, daring to disagree with the revolutionary government or simply being insufficiently zealous in their praise of the republic. Certainly that should be seen as the more outrageous use of capital punishment compared to certain, very specific, cases of insulting the Savior of mankind. In 1822 he was appointed Minister of State and was the presiding officer on the censorship commission. In 1823 his noble title was restored to him (he had lost it for refusing to take the 1803

He collaborated with other counterrevolutionaries in a series of works before finally retiring to private life. Throughout his life, Bonald stood out as a statesman who was always unchanging in his views. As Jules Simon said, “There is not to be found in the long career, one action which is not consistent with his principles, one expression which belies them.” Few others could say the same. He had served throughout the Bourbon restoration, supported King Charles X but refused to serve under King Louis Philippe, opting for retirement instead. He died in Paris on November 23, 1840. His legacy was of a deep-thinking intellectual and it is a shame his works are often reduced as simply reactionary opposition to anything liberal or progressive. Uniquely, he wrote about language being of divine origin and as the backbone of tradition and social development. This could be read and appreciated especially today. Language, communication in every form, regulates not only how we deal with others and the world around us, but sets the definitions for all of our thinking. He saw the forces of the Revolution perverting this tool to use in the pursuit of their ends which, Bonald believed, would ultimately be the death of all western civilization. The revolutionary mastery of this tactic allowed them to make formerly absolute and objective truths relative; simply matters of opinion, something which would ultimately unravel society and civilization as a whole.

Monarchist Profile: Lev Tikhomirov

The Good Book says that God loves a sinner come to his senses and this aptly describes the life of the Russian monarchist and author Lev Alexandrovich Tikhomirov, an ardent revolutionary who later became one of the most zealous defenders of the Russian Orthodox monarchy. He was born in Gelendzhik on the Black Sea on January 19, 1852 to an officer in the Russian army medical corps and his high-born wife. His family was conservative and traditional for the time but not overly political. However, like so many unfortunate youths, his mind was corrupted by the fashionable left-wing radicalism that was sweeping through those chattering classes who considered themselves the “educated elite” of the time. He became one of the so-called Narodniks, a group of puffed-up middle class dissidents that arose after the emancipation of the serfs and who envisioned using the peasants to overthrow the monarchy, stamp out any creeping capitalism and establish a new socialist Russia free of monarchy, aristocracy and other elements they deemed as remnants of “feudalism”.

Tikhomirov’s dissident activities did not go unnoticed and in 1873 he was arrested for advocating subversive activity and sentenced to four years in Sts Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg. His confinement and eventual release had little effect on him, if anything it was viewed as something of a right of passage in revolutionary circles and he climbed all the higher in the dissident hierarchy because of that. He became one of the leaders of “Land and Liberty” (part of the Narodniki) and in 1879 joined the terrorist group “The People’s Will”. During this time, the Narodniki had become increasingly radical and inclined toward violence. Their efforts to inspire the peasants to rise up and overthrow the monarchy had failed miserably. They blamed “superstition” on the part of their supposedly imbecilic countrymen. The truth was that the Russian peasants were deeply religious people who, according to the dictates of the Orthodox faith, viewed their Tsar as occupying a sacred place and they were devoutly loyal to their monarch who they lovingly referred to as “The Little Father”.

To combat this, which, again, the Narodniki viewed as mindless superstition, Tikhomirov and his fellow revolutionaries decided they would have to assassinate the Tsar in order to “prove” to the peasants that their “Little Father” was a mere mortal and this, they assumed, would break the faith of the peasantry and cause them to come flocking to their revolutionary banner. In this, these highly educated people displayed their own ignorance. The peasants were not well educated of course, but they were not stupid enough to actually believe the Tsar was immortal or impervious to harm. Yet, the revolutionaries convinced themselves that this was the case and so in 1882 carried out the brutal and gruesome assassination of Tsar Alexander II, the “Tsar Liberator”. Needless to say, the peasants did not rise up en masse in rebellion and Tsar Alexander III succeeded to the Russian throne, determined to rule with a much firmer hand than his more moderate father had. He brought down a world of hurt on the secret societies, terrorist gangs and assorted revolutionaries and Lev Tikhomirov, like many others, was forced to flee Russia.

The radical escaped to Switzerland and then moved on to France where he stayed for a number of years. Perhaps what he saw around him had some impact as well as the low place to which he had fallen. While many of his old comrades mindless stuck to their conspiracies, Tikhomirov actually stopped to think. He engaged in a little self-reflection and, the more he thought about what he had done and what his opinions were, the more he began to realize that he had made a terrible mistake. In 1886 he wrote, “From henceforth our only hope is Russia and the Russian people. We have nothing to gain from the revolutionaries…In light of this, I have begun to reconsider my life. I must now build it in such a way so as to serve Russia according to the dictates of my conscience, independent of all parties”.

Tikhomirov did reconsider and by 1888 he formally and publicly renounced his revolutionary activities. This is nothing to shrug off, he was putting his life in real danger by doing this; making himself a traitor to his former revolutionary comrades. However, he actually publishes a book explaining his change of heart called, “Why I Am No Longer a Revolutionary”. He also applied to return to the Russian Empire. Believe it or not, Tsar Alexander III, the man upheld by the revolutionaries as the archetype of the merciless, autocratic tyrant, accepts Tikhomirov’s change of heart as genuine and allows him to come home. Welcomed back with open in arms in fact and soon rising to become one of the leading conservative writers in the Russian Empire. His past was forgiven and forgotten and his contrition was heartfelt. As he later wrote in his memoirs, “I do not like my youth. It is full of the passioned desires of a corrupt heart, full of impurity, full of a stupid pride, a pride of someone who, while realizing his potential, has not yet matured to analytical thinking or independence of thought. I only begin to like my life from that point (in my last years in Paris) when I matured and was liberated…began to understand the meaning of life, began to seek God”.

Yes, as usual, along with becoming a monarchist came a conversion (or more accurately reversion) to his Orthodox Christian faith. In his writings he was able to put the wealth of his life experiences (much of it bad) to good use. He had seen the other side and he knew that where the revolutionary path would take his people and his country was no place anyone would want to be. From his years in France he had gained firsthand experience with democracy and republicanism, how political parties dominated the people and how the parties were manipulated by self-seeking elitists be they politicians or wealthy private citizens. He was certain that, while Russia had problems, democracy was most certainly not the answer. He wrote, “We must seek other ways, understanding that great truth, which is now apparent given the negative experiences of the “new era”: that organizing a society is only possible by keeping the spiritual balance in every man. And this spiritual balance comes from a living religious ideology”. He had come to grasp the heart of monarchism and the core of what is known as “traditional authority”.

Now an ardent monarchist, in 1905 Tikhomirov wrote a massive four-volume masterpiece that became the literary guide to Russian monarchists for years to come entitled, “On Monarchist Statehood”. In it he defended traditional authority as an absolutely essential part of any well ordered society in order to maintain that balance he spoke often of, but realizing that as the best “constitutions” (for lack of a better word) grow up naturally, also admitted that such a traditional authority would not be identical for every people in the world. In this work he wrote, “If a powerful moral ideal exists in a society, an ideal calling all to voluntary obedience to, and service of, one another, then it brings about monarchy because the existence of this ideal negates the need for physical force (democracy) or the rule of an elite (aristocracy). All that is necessary is the continual expression of this moral ideal. The most capable vehicle for this expression is one individual placed in a position of complete independence from all external political forces”.

By 1909 Tikhomirov had become editor of a state-owned monarchist newspaper, the “Moscow Gazette” though in 1913 government funding was cut and Tikhomirov resigned. He moved to Sergiev Posad and began writing “On the Religious and Philosophical Fundamentals of History” which would be his second-largest work. In this he went into detail about how he came to view the world, which he saw as being dominated by dualistic and monistic visions. The dualistic vision saw God and all that God created while the monistic vision saw only the material world and nothing more. He classified every epoch of history as the story of the struggle between these two competing visions and stated that it would go on until a final, apocalyptic clash between the forces of religion and the forces of revolution. Possibly by 1917?

Perhaps he was expecting it, but Lev Tikhomirov retired from addressing politics in 1917 and after the revolution and the establishment of the provisional government he took a job as a school secretary. He died still in Sergiev Posad on October 10, 1923.

Monarchist Profile: Konstantin Pobedonostsev

In Eastern Europe, prior to the arrival of the Bolsheviks, monarchism was so accepted, so bound up with the Orthodox faith and simply seen as so self-evident in its status as the best basis for government, that relatively fewer, compared to the west, saw it necessary to defend or explain in a comprehensive way. However, one man who did just that was the great Russian monarchist Konstantin Pobedonostsev. He was born on May 21, 1827 into an educated family and when still barely a teenager his literary professor father sent him to a school in St Petersburg to prepare him for the civil service. He quickly proved himself to have a brilliant legal mind and he earned rapid promotion. This gave him an intricate working knowledge of both the Imperial Russian legal system and the rather complex Russian bureaucracy. He soon became so renowned for his firm grasp of the law and the workings of government that he was being asked to lecture at Moscow State University.

A renowned lecturer while still working for the civil service, in 1860 he was formally made a law professor at the university. However, he was unable to hold that position for too long as his reputation had become so great that Tsar Alexander II appointed him tutor to his son and heir on the subjects of law and statecraft. Even after the death of the heir-to-the-throne, Pobedonostsev was retained by the Tsar to instruct his second son, the future Tsar Alexander III, in these same subjects. Pobedonostsev moved to St Petersburg because of this work and became a very familiar face among the Russian Imperial Family and had a very close relationship with his pupil and future Tsar who held his teacher in high esteem and great respect. His guidance was undoubtedly an influence on Tsar Alexander III and his strong, paternal leadership of Russia during his reign. Pobedonostsev continued to rise in important positions, in 1868 he was appointed to the Russian Senate (mostly a judicial body) and in 1874 was given a place on the Council of the Empire which served to advise the Tsar on important legal or legislative matters and included representatives from across Russian society. In 1880 he was given his highest position, that of Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church.

It is hard to imagine anyone being more prefect for the job of Chief Procurator than Konstantin Pobedonostsev. He was a devout Orthodox Christian and had a clear understanding of the essential cooperation between the Church and the monarchy and the vital, central place of the Church in the Russian Empire, on every level of society. His contribution to the Russian legal system was extensive but he is best remembered for his views on the monarchy and, most importantly, the emphasis on Russia as an Orthodox monarchy. This is partly due, it must be said, because his thoughts and writings on political matters drew much more attention and condemnation from leftists and revolutionaries than did his extensive work on legal matters. For anyone fond of the idea of faith-based, Christian absolute monarchy, the works of Pobedonostsev are hard to beat. In fact, he was probably the most brilliant theoretician to defend absolute monarchy to have lived into the Twentieth Century. Many in the west may not be aware of him or his work, but he is a find and well worth reading given how few other people there were, at the time, standing up and making the case that he did.

As a word of warning to western readers I will say that Pobedonostsev did not have a very favorable view of the west and was not bashful about saying so. However, before anyone gets too upset, just consider things from the Russian point of view. Think about the things that even many western monarchists cringe at such as the “Enlightenment” (so-called), the French Revolution, the spread of liberal democracy, constitutional government, the separation of Church and State and so on and so forth. All of these things did originate in the west and all of them had or led to things that had disastrous results for Russia (and, many would argue, the west as well). Pobedonostsev was an authentic statesman, not a blindly Slavophile nationalist, but a man who put the interests of his country, that being his Tsar and his people, first; which is as it should be. He also recognized, and famously impressed on Alexander III, that Russia was not a “European” country, certainly not a western one, and even things that might work in the west would not work in Russia. Surely in this most can agree that subsequent history has proven Pobedonostsev absolutely correct.

Faith was the foundation of the political views and the general world view of Pobedonostsev. He despised any sort of democracy, not out of any contempt for ‘the common man’ but because of the nature of man. He reasoned that, due to original sin, man is inherently sinful and inclined to do wrong. Therefore, it would be absurd to vest political power in every individual based on the whims of popularity. He viewed, quite correctly, the liberal political innovations of the west as being man-focused instead of God-focused. True authority came from God, preserved by the Orthodox Church and enacted by the Tsar. Therefore, as he once told Alexander III, it would be unthinkable for the Tsar to give up power or share that power with others in a system of representative government as this would be shirking the duty God entrusted to him. It was also because of his deep Orthodox convictions that he opposed anything other than religious education. A Christian state would recognize that Christ is “the Truth” and would, therefore, necessarily want to make “the Truth” the heart and center of the educational system. Anything less would be to deny the truth of Christianity or, at the very least, betray a fundamental loss of faith.

It was also for this reason that Pobedonostsev was very much in accord with what had been the motto, so to speak, of Tsar Nicholas I: Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality. This is nothing that should be seen as radical, even though few contemporaries were making the same argument elsewhere. Russia was an absolute, Orthodox monarchy and it seemed not at all unreasonable but perfectly natural for Pobedonostsev to emphasis Russia being Russian, being strongly Orthodox and maintaining the autocracy. This has, however, been used, and was at the time, as tool with which to criticize Pobedonostsev for encouraging religious intolerance. However, religious tolerance was simply not what he was about. His views were firm and strongly held. The Orthodox faith was true and therefore anything else was necessarily in error, therefore harmful and therefore, frankly, something which should not be tolerated or at least certainly not encouraged.

Pobedonostsev, by his ardent support for the Church and the autocracy and opposition to a constitution or any sort of democracy or representative government managed to make himself fairly unpopular toward the end of his life but, in this, he was at least in good company. The socialists and revolutionaries rightly saw him as their arch-enemy and tried on at least one occasion to assassinate him. His influence also declined with the accession of Tsar Nicholas II who, despite what many think of him, was much less willing to take as great a ‘hard-line’ approach as Pobedonostsev. The great statesman retired after the disastrous war with Japan and died on March 23, 1907. Had he lived longer he would have seen Russia enact many of the changes he had warned against and then finally fall prey to exactly the fate he had predicted in such an event. Few men of so relatively recent a time managed to make themselves more despised by all the right sort of people a loyal monarchist should wished to be despised by than Pobedonostsev. However, despite how unpopular his positions may be today, he was proven correct too often to simply ignore and his writings, particularly his “Reflections of a Russian Statesman” should be required reading for all monarchists and Orthodox monarchists particularly. He was, from first to last, a most gifted and eloquent defender of “unshakable autocracy”.

Monarchist Profile: Juan Donoso Cortés

Amongst almost any listing of the giants of counterrevolutionary, monarchist thinking will be the name of Don Juan Donoso Cortés, marqués de Valdegamas, something of a convert to the movement and a descendant of the great Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortés. He was born in Valle de la Serena, Extremadura, in the Kingdom of Spain on May 6, 1809. Something of a child prodigy he was more learned than most adults at the age of ten and was studying law at the University of Salamanca when he was only twelve. He graduated from the University of Seville at sixteen and was a professor of literature at the College of Carceres by the time he was eighteen. However, like many young men experiencing the world through university he became something of a political liberal, embracing the tenets of the so-called Enlightenment. The French had invaded Spain by this time and this may have been a factor in his embracing of certain ideas from beyond the Pyrenees. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the philosopher he admired most.

Eventually, he entered the world of politics under the wing of the noted liberal Manuel Jose Quintana. However, his faith in liberalism was somewhat shattered when real life began to intrude when a liberal uprising threatened the monarchy and even the very life of King Fernando VII at La Granja. If this was the fruit of the political beliefs he had held then he would hold them no more. Cortés became more and more counter-revolutionary and certainly a more ardent monarchist after being appointed private secretary to Queen Maria Cristina, regent of Spain for her daughter Queen Isabella II after the death of the King. He began to write extensively on both politics and religion (which were indelibly linked as he saw it) and was spurred on by Louis Veuillot to write probably his most famous book, Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism and Socialism by the revulsion he felt for the 1848 Revolution in France. The book was published in 1851 and made Cortés famous as a religious as well as political conservative.

The book still holds up today as one of the great Catholic, monarchist denunciations of socialism. Cortés took a rather unique approach by condemning socialism, not as a political ideology that was flawed, but rather as a sort of religion, with a theology all its own, and an inherently Satanic and poisonous religion at that. He became quite famous in his time for his writings and his fiery speeches denouncing the creeping spread of socialism and revolutionary republicanism. In fact, he was often quite prophetic, correctly predicting that socialist revolution would bring down the Russian Empire first at a time when the Romanov dynasty seemed as powerful and permanent as the stars in the sky. In fact, he was rather pessimistic and even in his own time felt it was most likely too late to stop western civilization from rushing headlong to its own destruction. Absolute, legitimate authority was essential, in his view, and in his time, he complained that there were no monarchs left who dared to rule without the permission and approval of the masses.

It was a style of absolute monarchy that Cortés advocated, just as in the spiritual realm he was an early advocate of Papal infallibility. Without absolute authority, he warned, the monarch, the sovereign, would lose his sovereignty and the people, filled with the promise of the wealth of others by socialist agitators, would overwhelm the legitimate monarchs and set up popular tyrants who would be totally under the thumb of Satan himself. To stop this, no measures could be off-limits and if it took a Crown dictator to maintain order and keep the revolutionaries in check, so be it according to Donoso. He held out hope that at least one of the more authoritarian constitutional monarchies might save the situation if only the ruling monarch would dare to be so bold. However, after the Revolutions of 1848, most of the monarchs across Europe had adopted a firmly defensive posture and had no taste to take risks if immediate peace and security could be gained by compromise.

Donoso was a very gifted writer, aside from his political brilliance and foresight, and he was admired even by many of his political and philosophical enemies during his time. Yet, after his death his memory seems to have faded rather quickly and today is little known outside of monarchist and counter-revolutionary circles. His death came on May 3, 1853 in Paris where he was serving as ambassador, just short of his 44th birthday. He had previously served as ambassador to Berlin. He certainly deserves to be more well known than he is today. He was a deeply religious man, as staunch a Catholic as one could ever hope to find, an ardent defender of Papal supremacy and infallibility and a man of gifted foresight. He predicted that Prussia would be the power to unite Germany, that the morale decline in France after the fall of the monarchy would result in the loss of Alsace-Lorraine and that Imperial Russia would fall victim to Marxist revolutionaries. Few men have ever seen the world more clearly than he did or better understand the dangers of revolutionary liberalism which he called the, “sterile and disastrous ideas in which are comprehended all the errors of the past three centuries, intended to disturb and disrupt human society”. How very right he was.

Monarchist Profile: Sir Robert Filmer

One of the most well known literary defenders of the British monarchy during the time of the English Civil Wars was Sir Robert Filmer, although some have since argued that he is more known by those who endeavored to refute him than he was on his own merits. Nonetheless, he put forward what is now one of the better known arguments in favor of paternalistic absolute monarchy, based on the Divine Right of Kings and in opposition to the liberal supporters of Parliament. I will admit that he is probably my favorite political theorist of his time and place and one I would certainly be more in agreement with than someone like Thomas Hobbes (whom Filmer actually criticized). Little Bobby Filmer was the son of Sir Edward Filmer, a native of Kent, and was born sometime in 1588. He studied at Cambridge and was knighted by King Charles I. An ardent royalist, he supported the King in his disputes with Parliament and Filmer suffered dearly for it. He was captured and thrown in the dungeon at Leeds Castle in 1643 and had his home vandalized by the Parliamentarians no less than ten times. Obviously, not the sort of experiences that would be inclined to endear him to the cause of liberalism.

Filmer wrote extensively in support of the monarchy on the battleground of political theory and also occasionally wrote criticisms of other theorists, philosophers and religions (he did not like Calvinists -not monarchist enough, and he did not like Catholics who were sufficiently monarchist but their loyalty to the Pope made them suspect). Although not the sort of total authoritarian that Hobbes was, Filmer was definitely an advocate of absolute monarchy, no doubt about it. In fact, were he alive today, Filmer would hardly recognize any western monarchy as being a monarchy at all as he was totally opposed to limited, mixed or what would later be known as constitutional monarchy. Royal authority had to be absolute and unfettered according to Filmer for several basic reasons; because justice can only be imposed, it cannot be self-administered; because all power is absolute according to natural law and because monarchs have inherited a divine right that no one on earth has authority to take from them. According to Filmer, democracy was chaos; at best only one step away from anarchy and even mixed government was trending in the wrong direction because it implied that Parliament had at least some power over the King or that there were powers they had which the King could not revoke.

One of the things I like about Filmer is that he challenged problems and hypocrisies in the liberal democratic/republican model that are seemingly obvious but rarely addressed. For example; why does everyone assume democracy to be an absolute good when virtually everyone also agrees that democracy is dangerous, inefficient and inevitably fails? Why is it wrong for the King to have power instead of ‘the people’ but it is okay for some people to have power and not others. After all, at least at that time, even the most radical liberals who championed the cause of “the people” never for a minute considered “the people” to include women, children, criminals, slaves or the retarded for that matter. In short, if it was “unfair” for the King to have power but not “the people”, why was it “fair” for men to have power and not women? Was it “unfair” that adults should have more power than children? One cannot help but be reminded of how, during the period of the American Revolutionary War, Samuel Johnson wondered why the loudest yelps for liberty came from slave owners like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

As a basis for his support of absolute monarchy, Filmer went back to the origins of humanity and the Old Testament of the Bible. He noted, in his most famous work, that the very first governments in the Bible were patriarchies. This was the rule of a father over his family and, given how long Biblical figures lived, they could come to rule quite a large group of families. Filmer reasoned that there was no real difference between a family patriarch and a royal monarch. A family, expanded to a clan, expanded to a tribe, expanded to a nation and patriarchs inevitably became lords, chieftains and kings. So, the rule of a king over his subjects was no different than the rule of a father over his family. He noted that, in the Bible, fathers had absolute power, even of life and death, over their families and yet, because of the paternalistic nature of the relationship, this was not oppressive or negative.

Filmer writes that the original patriarch was Adam, the first man and the one given dominion over the whole world by God. This authority passed eventually from Adam to Noah. Filmer, taking the Biblical story of the flood literally (I add only because believing that the Bible actually means what it says is so novel a concept today) he also held to the theory that Noah sailed with the ark through the Mediterranean and passed his authority over the world to his three sons by granting each dominion over one of the three continents of the ancient world. It was from these three patriarchs, Filmer argued, that all others descend and their descendants eventually becoming the lords, chieftains, princes and finally kings of the nations. Thus, Filmer believed in absolute monarchy as the system established by God, starting with Adam and the commandment for children to obey their parents. It should be noted however that not all royalists were in agreement with Filmer on this point, he was certainly on the side favoring an absolute monarch and rejecting limited monarchy as well as democracy.

Filmer died on May 26, 1653 and many of his most famous works were not widely published until after his death, in part so that they could be refuted by liberal writers of the time. What is interesting is that this coincided with the 1688 revolution and the downfall of the House of Stuart. The works of Filmer were dug up and passed around as examples of royalist villainy; the frightening absolutism of those who believed in the Divine Right of Kings. That is, of course, what King James II believed and those supporting the preeminence of Parliament seized on the writings of Filmer to justify their own position; that the King answers to Parliament rather than Parliament answering to the King. One can only guess what Filmer himself would have thought about his work being used in this way, especially since the monarch who held to the Divine Right of Kings that Filmer so defended also belonged to a Church that Filmer most adamantly opposed.

Monarchist Profile: Bishop Jacques Bossuet

One of the most known religious defenders of monarchy, certainly in the Catholic Church, was the French bishop Jacques-Benigne Bossuet. Although he has to a large extent fallen out of favor today, mostly because of his staunch defense of absolute monarchy, he is still known for that which he was best known in his own time; as one of the greatest Christian orators of his era. He was born in Dijon on September 27, 1627 to a family of lawyers and judges. Given a proper Jesuit education he soon became fluent in Latin and Greek and developed a great love for Homer and Virgil as well as becoming a noted Biblical scholar. He entered the Church at a fairly early age and was guided toward the priesthood by none other than St Vincent de Paul and was ordained on March 18, 1652.

While living seven years in Metz he became known for his powerful sermons, his extensive study of the Bible and Church Fathers as well as holding fiery debates with Protestants. St Vincent de Paul finally prevailed upon him to move to Paris and devote himself to preaching as his oratory was considered his greatest gift. He was first consecrated as a bishop in 1670 but resigned from the post within a year and was elected to the French Academy and appointed preceptor to the Dauphin. Unlike other clerics at court he did not neglect his diocese or his numerous other duties while still tutoring the Dauphin, writing a number of works to prepare him to be a proper Christian monarch. He wrote the textbooks the Dauphin would on everything from kingship to philosophy to handwriting and held lessons three times a day.

Upon completion of this assignment he was appointed Bishop of Meaux in 1681. He took great care of his diocese and the people and religious communities there while never failing to give his usual powerful sermons, write and cross swords with the Jansenists and others. After 1700 his health began to fail but even as he lay on his deathbed he continued to teach, preach and argue by dictation until he finally passed away on April 12, 1704 in Paris. As Saint-Simon said, “he died fighting”. HM King Louis XIV had not originally favored bringing Bossuet to court but the oration he gave at the funeral of the Duchess of Orleans (as he had at the funeral of her mother Henrietta of France) the King summoned him without question.

Today he is often criticized as a Gallican (that is one who supported the King as the primary authority over the Church in France rather than the Pope). However, Bossuet was never a true Gallican, though he could at times sound like one. At the end of the day he was always adamant that the Catholic Church was universal, not divided along national lines, and under the ultimate earthly authority of the Pope alone. Though he is best known for stressing the divinely ordained nature of monarchy and the absolute power of kings, he was at times out of favor with Louis XIV as he did not hesitate to criticize the moral failings of the monarch. In the end the King would always have Bossuet back, typical of his overall relationship with the Church, pushing the limits as far as possible but never going so far as to break with Rome as King Henry VIII did in England.

Today Bishop Bossuet is still often regarded as one of, if not the, greatest preachers of all time. Yet, his stressing of the sacred nature of monarchy has caused him to be regarded as an embarrassment by many these days, particularly by that segment of the Catholic community which holds that the “Divine Right of Kings” was a totally Protestant innovation. However, as we have discussed here before, Bossuet stressed the difference between “absolute” and “arbitrary” power; it was all about the rule of law with Bossuet and his writings on this subject were all geared toward preparing the Dauphin to be the best Christian monarch he could be. Both the Church and society in general would be better off if they would take a second look at men like Bishop Bossuet and the things he taught.

Monarchy Is Not Tyranny

There are many who, ignorantly or otherwise, equate monarchy with tyranny. Unfortunately, some ill-informed monarchists also push this point-of-view as a positive (since such people view totalitarianism as a good thing). This has been a plague for monarchism and I see it time and time again. It is engrained in the minds of so many people that a monarch is either a tyrant or a totally ceremonial waste of money. At one time the common model of the constitutional monarch could be used to counter this belief but even that model, which worked well for a time and became fairly widespread, has been reduced today because constitutional monarchy is today equated with a totally ceremonial monarchy since monarchs are threatened with extinction if they dare use those powers that are legally their own.

I know it confuses many people when I state that my ideal is a monarchy that is absolute but not arbitrary. This inevitably leads to confused looks and it can be rather difficult to explain. To get around that difficulty I point to the words of the French monarchist Bishop Jacques Bossuet who wrote extensively on the powers, the obedience owed to and the responsibilities of princes. After explaining in detail the absolute, sacred and inviolable nature of monarchy Bossuet addressed what he termed arbitrary power to which he attributed four things. These four attributes of arbitrary government were (I) that subjects are born slaves and none are free, (II) no one possesses private property, the prince controls all sources of wealth and there is no inheritance, (III) the prince can dispose of the property and the lives of all in his realm at his whim and finally (IV) there is no law but the will of the ruler.

For those who would advocate such a system so long as there is a monarch in charge rather than a republican leader one could be forced to split some minute hairs over what exactly constitutes a monarch. For example, the communist government of North Korea would fit every one of the above criteria for an arbitrary state and they are ruled by a hereditary leader chosen from a single family. Would this be considered a true monarchy? Would putting a crown on Stalin make him a Tsar? Monarchists must ask themselves if there is really anything more to their beliefs than titles and decorations. Once again, Bishop Bossuet explains it quite well:

“It is one thing for a government to be absolute, and another for it to be arbitrary. It is absolute with respect to constraint - there being no power capable of forcing the sovereign, who in this sense is independent of all human authority. But it does not follow from this that the government is arbitrary, for besides the fact that everything is subject to the judgment of God (which is also true of those governments we have just called arbitrary), there are also [constitutional] laws in empires, so that whatever is done against them is null in a legal sense [nul de droit]: and there is always an opportunity for redress, either on other occasions or in other times. Such that each person remains the legitimate possessor of his goods: no one being able to believe that he can possess anything with security to the prejudice of the laws - whose vigilance and action against injustices and acts of violence is deathless, as we have explained more fully elsewhere. This is what is called legitimate government, by its very nature the opposite of arbitrary government.”

We can see another explanation of this in the supposed trial of King Charles I of Britain, who was certainly held (by himself and his royalists) to be absolute, holding a sacred and inviolable position, but who stated at his trial that his use of absolute power was to defend his people against the arbitrary power of the parliamentary military forces of Cromwell. After being condemned Charles I addressed his enemies one last time saying, “I must tell you that the liberty and freedom [of the people] consists in having of Government, those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own. It is not for having a share in Government, Sir, that is nothing pertaining to them. A subject and a sovereign are clean different things. If I would have given way to an arbitrary way, for to have all laws changed according to the Power of the Sword, I needed not to have come here, and therefore I tell you…that I am the martyr of the people”.

Taken as a whole, it can be seen then a monarch, to fulfill their own obligations and duties before the Almighty, must not be constrained by the whims and fancies of passing majorities. As the martyred Tsar Nicholas II saw it, his absolute power was a divine imposition that he could not shirk by passing his responsibilities to others. At the same time however, such power cannot be arbitrary and holding all people as mere cattle for the ruler but must be exercised in upholding, as the Stuart king said, “those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own”. The ruler of a state in which all property and the entire public is in every way “owned” by that state is no true monarchy but is the very definition of the communist state whether the ruler wear a workers cap, a top hat or a crown. The true monarch, like many who have gone to their martyrdom for this principle, fight for their absolute power (or divine right if you like) not out of personal ambition but because in so doing they are fighting for the absolute right of every one of their people to all that is justly their own.

Monarchist Profile: Joseph Comte d'Maistre

A personal favorite and surely one of the greatest scholarly monarchists of all time was Joseph Comte d'Maistre, a native of the Kingdom of Sardinia who became one of the great champions of counterrevolutionary thought. Seldom has there ever been so thoughtful and eloquent an advocate of religion and traditional authority. Born in 1753 his ethnic background was French but he served the King of Sardinia being a native of the Duchy of Savoy. His most prominent posts were as a minister to his own King and as an ambassador to the Imperial Russian court at St Petersburg. A product of Jesuit education, he seems to have toyed with some "enlightenment" ideas in his youth but quickly saw their folly and became one of the most outspoken intellectuals in Europe against the ideals of the so-called "Enlightenment" and all that it represented.

He did some of his best work on the French Revolution (which at one point forced him to flee his country) and he described the Reign of Terror (which swallowed revolutionaries as well as it progressed) as a sort of divine retribution for the crimes of the Revolution and the Enlightenment which he saw as the seed-bed of it all. For de Maistre it was the Enlightenment which was to blame, it was this movement which had turned people away from God and traditional authority and left them weak and open to the vague, utopian idealism of the revolutionaries. He advocated a strong aristocracy, a strong monarchy and a strong Church. He was a big believer in the goodness and the necessity of hierarchy and wrote what was, possibly, his masterpiece on the subject of the power and authority of the Pope. One could say that de Maistre was an ultramontane before ultramontanism was "cool". He described the Church as a monarchy with the Pope as its sovereign and that the absolute and infallible authority of the Pope was essential to maintaining the proper order in Christendom as a whole. He was unashamedly what one today might call a Catholic triumphalist.

De Maistre, however, was not simply a religious mystic. He argued for divinely-based monarchy on the grounds of practicality as well, though not to the extent that some others did. He has often been criticized for what might seem like an uncaring attitude toward evil and war and the like. However, this attitude was, in reality, d'Maistre being realistic. Knowing that this side of Heaven evil and war will never be eliminated he tried to show what higher purposes could be served by them. Evil existed in the world to create a sharp contrast with the goodness of God, making it somewhat easier for mankind to discern the narrow path to salvation. War was often a means of punishing the wicked and a sort of earth-bound purgatory as d'Maistre saw things. He had a huge impact on what was to be the future of counterrevolutionary conservatism across Europe and even stretching to other parts of the world.

If one wants to truly appreciate the greatness of the Comte d'Maistre one need only look at the quality of those enemies of his who he worked into an absolute frenzy. A prime example is that of Emile Faguet who called de Maistre, "a fierce absolutist, a furious theocrat, an intransigent legitimist, apostle of a monstrous trinity composed of Pope, King and Hangman, always and everywhere the champion of the hardest, narrowest and most inflexible dogmatism, a dark figure out of the Middle Ages, part learned doctor, part inquisitor, part executioner". Were I the count, I would take that as the greatest compliment.