In the 19^th century Anglo-American historians—almost inevitably devotees of what Herbert Butterfield called the Whig or Protestant theory of history—inevitably viewed Anglo-American political developments in the 17^th and 18^th century as the primary foundations for the development of liberal government in the Modern Era. Moreover, they held the particular belief that parliamentary government, or in the United States congressional supremacy, provided the best defense against totalitarianism. Butterfield called these men “Protestant, progressive, and whig, the very model of the 19^th century gentleman.” Long after these Whig historians  became determinists, wrote Butterfield, they retained their “godly role as the dispenser of moral judgements, and like the disciples of Calvin,” Whig historians gave up none of his right to moral indignation.”[1]

Butterfield offers a still comprehensive and indeed venerable account of the development of Whig history, but its limited scope and reliance on Anglophone interpretative traditions and sources keeps it from providing a healthy understanding of the relationship between Calvinism and Whig theory. Continental Protestants, particularly French and Swiss Reformed thinkers of the 19^th century, offered alternate histories of the development anti-totalitarian politics. Whereas Whig historians in Britain and North America focused on representative assemblies as the chief obstacle to totalitarianism, French Protestants in particular developed a throaty anti-totalitarian politics after their long experience with Roman Catholic and then revolutionary secular oppression.

Beginning in the 16^th century, French Protestant political theory retained a comfort with monarchy and kingship that English and later British Protestants did not. The 1579 Huguenot political theology A Defence of Liberty Against Tyrants, or Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, posited that the truest enemies of tyranny were kings. Natural reason infused into good kings “as much hatred against tyrants as nature imprints in dogs against wolves, for as one lives by rapine and spoil, so the other is born or bred to redress and prevent all such outrages.” Franco-Protestant protestations about democracy formed a fundamental polemic in anti-totalitarian arguments. The whole people were a “beast of many heads,” running in “mutinous disorder,” and an “unruly and unbridled multitude.” Revolution could only be led by aristocratic classes, but French Protestants rejected the idea that a society could long exist without a monarchical—although not necessarily hereditary—executive. Kings and people existed in a natural and necessary symbiosis. Unlike absolute monarchy, wherein the king was the state, Protestant Frenchmen believed that “kings were at first constituted by the people.” Moreover, Kingship and not the power of the people, remained the final weapon against tyranny in French Protestant political theology. “If a prince tyrannize over the people, a neighbour prince ought to yield succour as freely and willingly to the people, as he would do to the prince his brother if the people mutinied against him.”  

“If Porsenna brought Tarquinius Superbus back to Rome, much more justly might Constantine, requested by the senate, and Roman people, expel Maxentius the tyrant from Rome…In like manner Constantine, called by the Romans against Maxentius, had God Almighty for the leader of his army. And the whole church does with exceeding commendations celebrate his enterprise, although that Maxentius had the same authority in the West, as Constantine had in the East.”

The anonymous author of Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos localized the principle for the French by noting that “Charlemagne undertook war against the Lombards, being requested to assist the nobility of Italy although the kingdom of the Lombards had been of a long continuance, and he had no just pretense of right over them.” History testified that there had been “neighboring princes to oppose tyranny, and maintain the people in their right. The princes of these times by imitating so worthy examples, should suppress the tyrants both of bodies and souls, and restrain the oppressors both of the commonwealth, and of the church of Christ: otherwise, they themselves may most deservedly be branded with that infamous title of tyrant.” Kings, not the people, remained the last resort to fight tyranny. [2]

19^th century French Protestants accommodated monarchy more comprehensively than their British and American co-religionists. In the aftermath of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, French Reformed politicians made their peace with monarchy. After the July Revolution of 1830, when Louis-Phillipe came to the throne, they turned into outright devotees of monarchy. French Reformed historian and statesman François Guizot served as the last prime minister of the French kingdom before its overthrow in 1848. He turned to writing, and his opus, History of the Origin of Representative Government in Europe, is still in print. One of Guizot’s most important observations was that the British parliament was not the only, or even the primary, institution that led to representative government in Europe. While Protestant regimes in Europe during the 16^th century worked to stall Catholic papal and/or monarchical absolutism via representative aristocracies—Geneva and the Swiss states—and activist princes in Germany, Britain lagged. “More than a century,” Guizot noted, was “requisite to enable the English Commons re-invigorated and strengthened, in a material point of view, by long years of order and prosperity, and in a moral point of view, by the reformation of religion-to acquire sufficient social importance and intellectual elevation to place themselves, in their turn, at the head of the resistance against despotism, and to draw the ancient aristocracy in their train.” Britain’s turn against totalitarian government would not come until “the reign of Charles I., and determined that political revolution, which, after fifty years of conflict, finally established representative government in England.” [3]

[1] Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1965), 3-4.

[2] Junius Brutus, A Defence of Liberty Against Tyrants (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1924), 96-97, 228

[3] François Guizot, History of the Origin of Representative Government in Europe (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1852), 521.