Chateaubriand’s War

Abstract

Immediately upon Montmorency’s return to Paris, November 30, the contest between him and Villèle was joined. The Paris ambassadors’ conference, meanwhile, pressed the French cabinet to concert with the eastern courts, a policy opposed by some of the ultra-Royalist journals which emphasized the imperative duty of France to declare war on Spain.² The Quotidienne, which expressed the views of Joseph François Michaud, the historian and publicist, was as hostile to the Alliance as to the premier. The indecisive and temporizing policy of the Congress of Verona, it declared, would never triumph at Paris, for war was inevitable. The Drapeau blanc, the organ of Alphonse Dieudonné Martainville and Félicité Robert de Lamennais, then an ultramontane priest, also urged an independent, national posture, a position close to that of Chateaubriand. Martainville attacked the vacillation of the ministry and called upon France to take up arms, not against Spain, but for Spain. It was not sufficient just to overthrow the Spanish revolution, for it still remained to reestablish in Europe a social order based on the union of political principles with religious faith.³ On this point, the Drapeau blanc critized the Alliance, alleging that it had been founded upon a fallacy. Lamennais inquired:

What is the Christianity on which the Holy Alliance rests? The reunion of several sects which have neither the same faith nor the same leader. Therefore, either the Holy Alliance has no base, or it supposes that all sects profess Christianity equally. In the first case, there is no alliance at all; in the second, it rests on indifference to all religions.⁴

The great affair of the Congress of Verona was the war with Spain. It has been said, and is still repeated, that this war was forced upon France: this is precisely the reverse of the truth. If anyone is to blame for that memorable enterprise, it is the author of this history; M. de Villèle was opposed to hostilities…. On that subject, [he] agreed with three-fourths of the Alliance…. — Chateaubriand (1838)¹