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Updated: June 12, 2025
On page 110 of Lamennais' Affaires de Rome, will be seen the following admirable scathing of Rome by the most truly evangelical spirit of our age: "So long as the issue of the conflict between Poland and her oppressors remained in the balances, the papal official organ contained not one word to offend the so long victorious nation; but hardly had she gone down under the Czar's atrocious vengeance, and the long torture of a whole land doomed to rack, and exile, and servitude began, than this same journal found no language black enough to stain those whom fortune had fled.
When M. Edgar Quinet declares that France suffers and declines because there is an ANTAGONISM of men and of interests, he declares an entite; for the problem is to discover the cause of this antagonism. When M. Lamennais, in thunder tones, preaches self-sacrifice and love, he proclaims two entites; for we need to know on what conditions self-sacrifice and love can spring up and exist.
Liberal Catholicism had lost its charm; his sympathetic interest in Montalembert, Lacordaire, Lamennais, had to be quickened, pumped up again as it were, by great efforts, which were constantly relaxed within him as he sped westward by the recurrent memory of that miserable room, the group of men, the bleeding hand, the white dying face.
The journals of the Right lamented this inaction. "If the ministerial revolution," said the Quotidienne, "reduces itself to this, we shall retire to some profound solitude where the sound of the falling monarchy cannot reach us." Then, more royalist than the King, M. de Lamennais wrote on the subject of the new ministers: "It is stupidity to which fear counsels silence."
Lamennais even surpasses Rousseau in the profundity of his pathos; his pictures of the life of hut and hovel are as sincere and as touching; and there is in them, instead of the anger and bitterness of the older author, righteous as that was, a certain heroism of pity and devoted sublimity of complaint, which lift the soul up from resentment into divine moods of compassion and resolve, and stir us like a tale of noble action.
Our venerable colleague, Lamennais, did not come, but he remained three days without going to bed, buttoned up in his old frock coat, his thick boots on his feet, ready to march. He wrote to the author these three lines, which it is impossible not to quote: "You are heroes without me. This pains me greatly. I await your orders. Try, then, to find me something to do, be it but to die."
The material for the radical program, economic, political, and religious, which, like a spiritual ancestor of H. G. Wells, she eagerly sought to popularize by the novels of her middle years, was supplied mainly by Saint-Simon, Lamennais, and Leroux. Her new "religion of humanity," a kind of theosophical socialism, is too fantastically garbed to charm the sober spirits of our age.
To explain this problem, one of the profoundest in philosophy, M. Lamennais at one time denies evil, at another makes God the author of evil, and at still another seeks outside of God a first cause which is not God, an amalgam of entites more or less incoherent, borrowed from Plato, Proclus, Spinoza, I might say even from all philosophers.
Phrasemaker for phrasemaker, we prefer the poet to the politician; Victor Hugo to Léon Faucher; Lamartine to Odilon Barrot; Lamennais to Baroche.
M. Lamennais seems to be only the tool of a quasi-radical party, which flatters him in order to use him, without respect for a glorious, but hence forth powerless, old age. What means this profession of faith? From the first number of "L'Avenir" to "L'Esquisse d'une Philosophie," M. Lamennais always favors equality, association, and even a sort of vague and indefinite communism.
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