No French Reformed Protestant influenced and informed French politics in the 19th Century more than François Guizot. Best known as King Louis-Philippe’s last prime minister, Guizot served in some political capacity from Napoleon’s reign to the final overthrow of royal rule in France in the revolutions of 1848. His Protestantism set him apart from the French political class. Guizot’s Protestant political theology included a capacious place for Classical conceptions of virtue. He also never saw public Protestant political and social teaching as having to negotiate the place of Christian-dictated moral law in French politics. [1]
Christianity formed a central part of Guizot’s approach to politics. “I possess these rallying points, and I consider this to be a great happiness; God and the religion of Christ are my guides; Moral Law is the law to which I would refer every question.” Moral law, he believed, proved the most enduring guide to truth and right action. Guizot looked upon “every temptation to step aside as a danger, and I disregard every path which does not lead me back to the right road. I have one quality which is, perhaps, favourable to my principles, although it is often reviled by the world — obstinacy.” I may be wrong, but whenever I think that I am right, the whole universe has no influence upon my opinions; to change them I must be convinced that I am wrong, so that I am always obliged to be in earnest, and I hope that I shall never fail in this respect.[2]
Obstinate reliance on the moral law of Christianity informed how Guizot conceived of philosophy as well as politics. Ever a Calvinist, Guizot honored his confession’s preference for the stoics among all other ancient philosophers, and the Frenchmen did not refuse an opportunity to take a swipe at Epicurus’ perceived effects on French political life in the aftermath of the French Revolution. “As all things diminish and become weaker with time, the man who at twenty professes the doctrines of Epicurus will have neither principles nor vigour left at fifty.” Of the Eighteenth Century which birthed the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, Guizot passed this judgement.
“It was reserved for the century which professed extreme sensibility to set forth as maxims the cowardly and effeminate opinions which destroy morality on pretence of softening manners—and to worship as divine a love without energy; by trying to make virtue wear a perpetual smile all strength has been taken out of it; the age was so amiable that it could not be virtuous; people were so polite that they left off being sincere; women were so much courted that they ceased to be loved; they had been so much flattered that it was necessary to grow like them in order to please them; tenderness was everything, every sentiment that was not tender was banished. The charms of virtue were no longer felt in this sentimental mania; the very name of duty terrified these polite sybarites; independence was their God, yet they themselves hung upon a word or a smile, and were the slaves of their least desires as of their most trifling annoyances.
Guizot loathed France’s Enlightenment, and preferred anything—including, as it turned out, the restoration of Roman Catholic Bourbon monarchy, to the antinomianism of the French Revolutionaries. He could not “help being indignant when I think of the perpetual efforts they made to remove all the thorns from virtue: they could not rise to her level, so they tried to pull her down to their own; they no longer possessed the courage to overcome obstacles, and convenient moralists undertook to smooth over difficulties in order to tranquillize timid consciences.” Guizot preferred to “leave to virtue all her difficulties, and at the same time let us redouble our efforts to conquer them there are many brambles on the road to heaven- the path which leads thither is not strewn with flowers.”[3]
As Guizot aged, he became more convinced of religion’s importance as a near-universal metaphysical foundation for every aspect of human life. “The older I grow the more I feel how essential is religion to give man the energy and love of goodness which he needs.” Guizot believed that “without religion, without the continual help of God, man can never succeed in wiping out the original stain which defiles his nature, nor attain to the holiness and purity which ought to be in him who would worship God in spirit and in truth.” The person of Jesus Christ, for Guizot, provided more than an eternal escape from damnation and perdition. The Faithful could contemplate in Jesus Christ “the model of what God intended man to become. It is delightful to think of this ideal of human perfection; it fills without agitating, humbles without overwhelming, the human heart, and gives us at the same time strength, courage, consolation, and hope.” Guizot echoed the traditional Calvinist reliance on the third use of the law where Christ served as a necessary moral exemplar for Christian sanctification, with both public and private consequences for politics and society.[4]
A reclamation of the union between Christian piety and Christian natural theology prompted Guizot to rediscover his faith at midlife. Grace did not annihilate nature, and being a Christian did not mean he could not embrace the laws of nature. Whereas Deists of the 18th Century insisted that traditional Christianity and natural law were incompatible, Guizot understood they necessarily coexisted. “I have examined, I have doubted, I have believed that the human mind had power enough to solve the problems presented by man and by the universe, and that the human will had force enough to regulate human life according to the dictates of law and morality.” After years “spent in thought and action I became, and I am still, convinced that neither the universe is competent to regulate its own movements, nor man to govern his own destiny, by means only of the permanent laws by which they are ordered.” Guizot came to the conviction “that God, Who created the universe and man, governs, preserves, and modifies them either by the action of general laws, which we call natural, or by special acts which we call supernatural, and which, as well as the general laws, are the emanations of His free and perfect wisdom and His infinite power. Humans, he wrote, “are permitted to discern them in their effects, and forbidden to understand them in their essence and design. I have therefore returned to the faith of my childhood.” That grace did not annihilate nature, and faith and natural law ere compatible, formed the foundation of Guizot’s piety.
[1] The standard modern biography of Guizot in English remains Douglas Johnson, Guizot: Aspects of French History, 1787-1874 (Bloomsbury Academic, 1975).
[2] M.C.M. Simpson trans., Madame de Witt, Monsieur Guizot in Private Life. 1787-1874 (Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1881), 13
[3] John Sellars, Stoicism (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 142; Thomas M. Kavanagh, Enlightened Pleasures: Eighteenth-Century France and the New Epicureanism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 1-8; de Witt, Monsieur Guizot in Private Life, 16..
[4] de Witt, Monsieur Guizot in Private Life, 18.