In my post on Friday (True Democrats are Not Democrats), I mentioned that I would aim to say a little more about the Chesterbelloc’s misguided support for the French Revolution. For the time being, though much more could be said, I’d like to restrict my comments to my brief discussion of it in my forthcoming book, “Race With the Devil: A Journey from Racial Hatred to Rational Love”, which I finished writing yesterday and which should be published in August.
Here’s the paragraph about Chesterton, Belloc and the French Revolution:
Another important and beneficent influence that the reading of Chesterton and Belloc had upon me was a weakening of the Prussophilia that I had inherited at my father’s knee. Through my sympathy with Strasser’s Bavarian perspective, I had already begun to distinguish between Prussia and Germany, the former of which was now perceived to represent a belligerent and destructive imperialism. Now, in reading Belloc and Chesterton, I came to see European history through their anti-Prussian eyes and with their Francophile perspective. My sympathies swung from Germany to France, freeing me further from my previous ideological bondage to the Teutonic and Norse fetish. In Belloc’s view, which was adopted and echoed by Chesterton, France had always been at the heart of Christendom whereas the Germanic spirit had always been on the heretical hinterlands and barbaric fringes, threatening European civilization with its uncivilized presence. I have since come to see that Belloc’s own Francophile perspective suffers from patriotic bias and that his and Chesterton’s sympathy for the French Revolution and the secular Republic that followed in its wake is untenable and indefensible from an orthodox Christian perspective. At the time, however, the psychologically seismic shift from Germany to France was a vital move in the right direction, leading me away from all that is indubitably evil in the pride of Prussia and in its genocidal legacy.
Dear Joseph,
I always trust Chesterton. I think he is right on everything.
I don’t know much history-but I FEEL he is right.
He ‘writes on the inside of history’
There’s something wrong the more Northern you go.
I was going to say the colder you get (in philiosophy)
As for the French Revolution. They both celebrate it because its ideals were initially really democratic.
They celebrate the liberating ideas not the bloodshed.
One refrain to keep note of in Belloc’s writing is his ceaseless insistence that we of the West derive all the principal fabric of our civilization from Rome, and that our common civilization is still to be found at its purest within the confines of the former boundaries of the Caesars. In his view, France represents and will forever maintain the best things of Rome in their purest form. The intended meaning behind his most famous adage might have shone forth more clearly, (albeit at the expense of its pithiness) had he said “The Faith is Southern Europe and Southern Europe is the Faith, with Ireland and Poland thrown into the bargain.” His allegiance to the Catholic Church was not exclusively religious; to him, the Catholic Thing stood for the best civic and cultural values as well the ultimate truths.
there’s a little line I remember reading in Waugh’s diaries- when he was on a visit to Goa
‘Europe is the faith my foot’
Dear Joseph,
There was a time in which my opinions were vaguely similar. I, however, was more sympathetic to the House of Hohenzollern during the time in which they ruled as Kaisers of Germany. Whenever I read about the First World War, I would desperately wish that, just this once, it would end with Wilhelm II not being deposed.
However, about eight years ago, I first read the Bogle’s biography of Blessed Emperor Karl of Austria-Hungary and was deeply moved. I also read Wilhelm Stieber’s memoir “The Chancellor’s Spy”, in which Otto von Bismarck’s many dirty tricks campaigns left me disgusted.
From that moment, I date a change in my loyalties from the Protestant Hohenzollerns to the Catholic Hapsburgs. I am deeply grateful for this, as it is far more in keeping with the Faith.
Brendan King.
from the ProtestantHohenzollerns
ouse of Hohenzollern to the Catholic Hpuse of Hapsburg.