J. C. D. CLARK The Re-Enchantment of the World? Religion and Monarchy in Eighteenth-Century Europe in MICHAEL SCHAICH (ed.), Monarchy and Religion: The Transformation of Royal Culture in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) pp. 41–75 ISBN: 978 0 19 921472 3 The following PDF is published under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND licence. Anyone may freely read, download, distribute, and make the work available to the public in printed or electronic form provided that appropriate credit is given. However, no commercial use is allowed and the work may not be altered or transformed, or serve as the basis for a derivative work. The publication rights for this volume have formally reverted from Oxford University Press to the German Historical Institute London. All reasonable effort has been made to contact any further copyright holders in this volume. Any objections to this material being published online under open access should be addressed to the German Historical Institute London. DOI: 2 The Re-Enchantment of the World? Religion and Monarchy in Eighteenth-Century Europe J.C. D. CLARK The present volume, deriving from a conference held at the British Academy under the auspices of the German Historical Institute, will surely have one unnoticed result: the conjuncture of monarchy and religion as subjects for historical study will quickly be taken for granted. Yet even thirty years ago, such an outcome would have been inconceivable. So much is evident from a preceding conference, organized by the German Historical Institute in 1987 and devoted to the period c.1450-1650: even at that late date its proceedings disclose different priorities from the papers assembled here. From today's perspective the previous conference showed the same willingness to compare courts across Europe, but was notable for the substantial omission of religion. 1 To understand how the historical study of monarchy and religion has developed, and now converged, we need to trace the develop- ment of scholarship since the early 1970s. The eighteenth century was then seen with formidable unanimity as the site of modernization and secularization, the starting point for the domino effect of transformative populist revolutions that were held to have created the world as then understood; permissible topics for discussion included industrial- ization, urbanization, the rise of democracy, and soon the spread of consumer society and the growth of the fiscal-military state. We were aware that courts survived: political historians could hardly avoid that fact. We knew that churches survived: several distinguished chairs were devoted to ecclesiastical history. But 1 Ronald G. Asch and AdolfM. Birke (eds.), Princes, Patronage, and the .No/Jili!y: The Court at the Beginning eftlze Modern Age c.1450-1650 (Oxford, 1991). Asch's 'Introduction' (1--s8) is an important overview of the state of court studies to that date. J.C. D. CLARK these two things hardly intruded into mainstream historical consciousness. They were unrelated in respect of substance, or by any explanatory methodology. Monarchy and religion were instead understood separately from each other, as 'survivals' from a 'traditional' world, doomed by the iron historical laws of modernism to long-term decline. It was known that Louis XVI (1774-93) had summed up 14July 1789, the day the Bastille fell, with a diary entry of a single word: rien. This laconic dismissal was taken to symbolize monarchy's irrelevance in the world of revolution and popular sovereignty that was to follow. It was not widely known that, within the world of the court, this term was merely shorthand for the absence of public engagements. The king remained at work, with his ministers, in his private apart- ments. He did not do, or perceive, 'nothing'. 2 I Behind this set of assumptions and priorities, taken as self-evident in the historical vision of c.1970, lay the analysis of earlier, but no less programmatic, generations. Two especially influential figures gave shape to that historiography: Walter Bagehot (1826-77) and Max Weber (1864-1920), the second given a peculiar currency in the USA thanks to Americanizing translations by a Congregationalist and sociologist, Talcott Parsons.3 The distorting influence of these figures on discussions of monarchy and religion will become apparent later in this essay. The tardy acceptance of sociology in England gave a special prominence to a remarkable economist and social commentator. 2 Philip Mansel, The Court of France 1789-1830 (Cambridge, 1988), 2. 3 '[T]he original Whig interpretation, adapted by Weber for polemical reasons, was reimported by Parsons and others into the Anglo-American realm and helped reinforce the American orthodox understanding of an inherent connection between Protestantism and liberal democracy.' Guenther Roth, 'Introduction', in Hartmut Lehmann and Guenther Roth (eds.), Weber's Protestant Ethic: Origins, Evidence, Contexts (Cambridge, 1995), 1-24, at 3; Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the 'Spirit' of Capitalism and other Writings, ed. Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells (Harmondsworth, 2002), pp. xxv-xxxii; Gisela Hinkle, 'The Americanization of Max Weber', Current Perspectives mSocial Theory, 7 (1986), 87-104 For an argument about the process by which a pre-1914 German Social Democratic polemic was exported to the USA, magnified by US sociology, political science, and history, and re-exported to Europe, seej. C. D. Clark, Our Shadowed Present· Modernism, Postmodernism and History (London, 2003), eh. 7. The Re-Enchantment of the World 43 Despite his secular image, Walter Bagehot's theological interests and motivations were profound and lasting, although he displayed almost no concern for the institutional expression of religion. Born to an Anglican mother, his father was a piously Unitarian banker who conducted Sunday services in his drawing room. 'Oxford and Cambridge were debarred owing to Mr. Bagehot [the father] objecting on principle to all doctrinal tests which were then required of the undergraduates at the older Universities,' and Walter was educated instead at University College London, lodging with 'a certain Dr. Hoppus, a Unitarian'. Bagehot wrote in 1858: 'From my father and mother being of different-I am afraid I might say-opposite sentiments on many points, I was never taught any scheme of doctrine as an absolute certainty in the way most people are. '4 His college and lifelong friend, the Unitarian R. H. Hutton, recorded that Bagehot had begun by sharing 'his mother's ortho- doxy' but moved away from it; 'however doubtful he may have become on some of the cardinal issues of historical Christianity', he never 'accepted the Unitarian position', but this was evidently because of a greater scepticism than Hutton's. 'Certainly he became much more doubtful concerning the force of the historical evidence of Christianity than I ever was', added Hutton. 'Possibly his mind may have been latterly in suspense as to miracle alto- gether.' Thus Bagehot maintained, according to Hutton, both a 'profound belief in God' and a 'partial sympathy with the agnostic view that we are, in great measure, incapable of apprehending, more than very dimly, His mind or purposes'. Without openly rejecting formal religion, Bagehot posited an intuitive moral sense that united all men of goodwill, however diverse. Naturally, Bagehot 'condemned and dreaded' the Roman Catholic Church for 'her tendency to use her power over the multitude for purposes of a low ambition'.5 It followed that Bagehot 'did not like the m 111 any unreal 4 Mrs Russell Barrington, life of Walter Bagehot (London, 1914), 61, 78, 101, 109, u1, 226-8, 264, 366, 455-6. Bagehot has been overlooked by most recent studies of Victorian religious doubt, though see A. 0. J. Cockshut, Th Unbeluvers: English Agnostic Thought 1840-1890 (London, 1964), 172-80; Harry R. Sullivan, Walter Bagehot (Boston, 1975), 1u-29; and Norman Stjohn-Stevas, 'Bagehot's Religious Views', in id. (ed.), Th Collect£d Works of Walter Bagehot, 15 vols. (London, 1965-86), xv. 245-so2. 5 R.H. Hutton, Memoir, in Stjohn-Stevas (ed.), Collect,ed Works of Walter Bagehot, xv. 8g, 97, 101-2; Bagehot, 'Bishop Butler', ibid. i. 217-61, at 242, citing Butler, Kant, and Plato. 44 J.C. D.CLARK fictions of constitutional monarchy, nor did he esteem highly the prepossessions in which national fidelity to a hereditary dynasty is rooted'.6 Given his intellectual antecedents, it is understand- able but important that Walter Bagehot's The English Constitution (1867) ignored the Church of England and sought to disenchant the monarchy by using nascent social science. The program- matic jurisprudential, anthropological, and sociological assump- tions on which that book rested were made explicit in his articles that immediately followed, collected as Physics and Politics (1872), indebted especially to Henry Maine, Sir John Lubbock, and Edward Tylor. 7 Physics and Politics was not an explicit critique of established religion; rather it bypassed religion. For Bagehot, anthropology and Darwinian ideas of evolution succeeded eccle- siastical history as the source of what would today be called the 'grand narrative' of mankind's development. In The English Constitution Bagehot set up his target in claiming that not the church but the monarchy 'consecrates our whole state'; his account of how this consecration occurred was wholly in terms of superstition, mystery, and custom. He therefore pointed the way to the rational disenchantment of a world so described with his