Attention to liberal nationalism has obscured the Catholic origins of European nation-building processes. However, Catholic intellectuals forged a fully fledged and influential nationalist discourse of their own from traditional and conservative doctrine. More specifically, Latin European countries led the theoretical development of Catholic nationalism from a transnational construct. They were the kernel of Catholicism and their theological, philosophical, historical, and political theories had a great impact on the general formation of Western nationalism. In this essay, I study how Catholic intellectuals from Spain, France and Italy sought the right zone of compatibility between transnational Catholicism and nationalism, focusing on Spanish Catholic thinker Jaume Balmes (1810–48). Through his example, I claim that an affirmative intellectual engagement with the idea of the nation was at the core of liberal and conservative Catholic thought in the transnational Latin European sphere.
Modern nationalism and the entire nation-state project have been traditionally considered, by modern historians, purely liberal in their origins. Although the topic of this essay is theory rather than nationalist practice, I build on the new tendencies in the literature on nationalism that now stresses the premodern and frequently religious origins of nationalism.Footnote 1 Anthony Marx has demonstrated that the nation-building processes of the modern era cannot be isolated from the premodern idea of nation.Footnote 2 Following a similar tendency, Linda Colley writing on the British case, David Bell on the French, Ricardo García-Cárcel on the the Spanish, and Anne-Marie Thiesse on Europe as a whole have reached parallel conclusions.Footnote 3 Their contributions to the debate on the origins of modern nationalism have been an important revision to much of the literature on this topic. And Colley, Bell and García-Cárcel emphasize the religious features within nationalist narratives. Their rediscovery of the intertwining of religion and nationalism erodes the centrality of what Ernest Gellner called “classical liberal Western nationalism” and the prevailing consensus that screened out religious nationalism.Footnote 4 For in fact, countries that are supposed to have had classic nation-building processes according to Gellner's own model were Catholic nations: Italy, Spain and France. In these countries, nationalism and the nation idea had old, premodern origins. They reflected the influence of religion, notably Catholicism. These three nations formed the core of the Latin European sphere. This transnational space was characterized by the presence of three traditional and powerful political entities: the Spanish Catholic Majesty, the French Most Christian Majesty and the Italian papacy. They shared strong cultural and linguistic ties and a rich tradition of cultural transfer. And, above all, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, they had been the center of dramatic social and political changes.
But the revisionist accounts of nationalism have rarely competed with the standard literature through the nineteenth century, when nationalism surged and liberal and secular forms of it indeed existed. The nineteenth-century European culture wars that followed can be used, I will argue, to build an explanation of how Catholicism created and embraced its own modern language and modern mentality. In fact, Catholicism offers confirmation that transnational processes need not undermine, and sometimes reinforce, national solidarity. David Blackbourn and Christopher Clark have demonstrated that the fierce culture wars in nineteenth-century Europe were more a clash between different modernity projects than a struggle between an old system and a new one.Footnote 5 This new perspective does not deny the intense conflict between Catholics and liberal forces across Europe. Europeans underwent an essential confrontation between two different projects towards the same modernity throughout the century. Every nation experienced those divisions and this social mobilization, but the Catholic Latin European zone tended to a certain unity of action. And the question of national identities remained a central point in the agenda of both modernity projects during the mid- and later nineteenth century.Footnote 6
Assuming the existence of a Catholic modernity requires abandoning previous scholarship that has dominated until now. Catholic modernity was not “reactionary modernity” or “nostalgic absolutism”, because this modernity never envisioned returning to an impossible past.Footnote 7 Instead, the nineteenth century unleashed a broad Catholic effort to reconquer the bourgeois milieu with its own language and network building.Footnote 8 Catholicism adopted modernity and modern times, but in its own way. Like liberal modernity, Catholics aimed for the European predominance of their own project, in direct conflict with secular liberalism.
Two pivotal elements had priority in this project: Latin Europe and nationalism. The aforementioned Latin European countries were the core of European Catholicism, the kernel of the Church, the core of the Latinitas. Latin Europe had been the cradle of the Counter-Reformation, even with the importance of French Protestant dissidence. The Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars triggered the Catholic countermobilization, which was especially important in France, Spain, Belgium and the Italian area. Surprisingly, some of these countries remain incompletely integrated in European studies in Anglo-American discussion. The existing scholarship focuses generally on Germany, the United Kingdom and France. In response, this essay emphasizes that most of the reshaping of the Catholic doctrine in the nineteenth century relied on the intellectual development of Latin European thinkers.Footnote 9
Latin Europe experienced a transformative process led by liberal modernity. Before the French Revolution, Catholicism enjoyed a tremendous power, influence and recognition in Latin European nations, as well as in Austria and some German states. In the post-Revolutionary era, with the Church's power diminished, Latin European nations were marked with an astonishing confessional revival and the revitalization of the Church and the whole of Catholicism.Footnote 10 Through a modernizing Catholic intelligentsia, from both lay and clerical states, Catholicism experienced profound changes. This shaped what Christopher Clark has called “the New Catholicism”.Footnote 11 The creation of this New Catholicism was developed mainly in the Latin European area and irradiated the other European countries from there. It was the result of a new generation of Catholics who embraced new theological, philosophical and intellectual principles in the early nineteenth century. The generation that undertook the creation of a Catholic modernity was split into two major transnational tendencies. On the one hand, there was a liberal, heterodox one, which envisaged the accommodation of Catholicism with liberalism. On the other, there was a traditional-conservative, orthodox one, which supported the making of a distinctive modernity, opposed to the first and based on the restoration of the supposedly purest and most authentic form of Catholic faith. The only characteristic that both tendencies had in common was their intense nationalism.
Catholics had been supportive of their own nations since the beginning of the nation-state project. The nation-building processes across Europe, and notably in Latin Europe, witnessed a discreet Catholic presence in the early nineteenth century. This first period was characterized by the first nationalist stances from Catholic intellectuals in Spain, France and Italy. The first part of the essay is devoted to this period, until the eve of the 1848 Revolutions, when Catholics were able to systematize their discourse on national identity. Jaume Balmes appeared at this moment. He was the first and most important Catholic thinker to build a consistent Catholic nationalistic theory. Balmes shaped his own representation of national history and national values adapted to Catholic doctrine. Generally, the Latin European Catholic intelligentsia started proposing its own modernity project and its own nation-building process, both opposed to the liberal versions of those things.Footnote 12
The second part of the essay turns to the subsequent period, beginning with the long mid-nineteenth-century pontificate of Pius IX. The Apostolic See had taken the leadership of the Catholic revival across Europe. Now the Apostolic See began to be sympathetic to the New Catholicism that was forged by traditional-conservative, or orthodox, Catholic groups and movements. Indeed, these groups and movements tried successfully to transform the Apostolic See into the main center of their renewal. The centralization and strengthening that the chair of Peter experienced during the long pontificate of Pius IX shaped the most visible form of this New Catholicism – for this reason often known as “ultramontanism” at the time and in scholarship. The Holy See and especially Pius IX, under pressure for Italian unification under Piedmontese leadership, backed the movement in order to increase his spiritual power as a replacement for the temporal power lost in central Italy. This papal support brought about an unexpected consequence: not only the “Romanization” of the entire Church, but also the adoption of a nationalistic agenda by the Holy See. The most important contributors to this were Mgr Félix Dupanloup and Cesare Cantù. This second period ended with the death of Pius IX. The conclusions to this essay briefly take up Leo XIII and his conciliatory policies towards liberal regimes, as well as his official acceptance of nationalism as a value compatible with Catholic doctrine.
The appeals to national identity within the Catholic Church were far more than a mere political convenience. The modernizing Catholic intelligentsia asked for a comprehensive accommodation between faith and identity. The intertwining of a Catholic-specific nation-building process with the formation of a global, transnational Catholic modernity formed this nineteenth-century New Catholicism. On the opposite side, the democratic and revolutionary Mazzinean nationalism was formed at the same time as a radical version of liberal nationalism. As Mark Mazower and others have recently emphasized, Giuseppe Mazzini's nationalist thought was itself internationalist in both context and aims.Footnote 13 Both nationalist theories influenced the emerging European societies. By the end of the nineteenth century, Catholicism had become a significant and determining nationalist force which even took over most of the leadership of the nation-building processes in the Latin European area.
THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL AND THE AWAKENING OF CATHOLIC NATIONALISM
The birth of the liberal nation was accompanied by the birth, at the same time, of the Catholic nation. In fact, in Latin European countries, liberalism was not free of some Catholic sources: the sovereignty theory forged in the Hispanic world, for example, had clear and distinctive Thomistic foundations. These liberal scholastic roots had especially startling success in American levantamientos and in the Spanish constituent Cortes of Cadiz during the Napoleonic Wars.Footnote 14 The importance of this liberal Thomism was reflected in Joaquín-Lorenzo Villanueva's work Las angélicas fuentes o el tomista en las Cortes of 1811. Villanueva was one of the main figures in the liberal faction of the constituent Cortes and the precursor of liberal Catholicism in Spain.
Yet even as this peculiar Thomistic liberalism was defining national sovereignty, traditional-conservative Catholic clergy were fighting the French invasion of Spain from the pulpits.Footnote 15 In this combat of “civilization against barbarity”, some of the most remarkable Spanish preachers gave extremely aggressive sermons. In 1808, Fr José María de Jesús warned against those “bloody philosophers” conspiring to destroy “patriotic laws and religious mores”.Footnote 16 Like Fr de Jesús, Fr Diego José de Cádiz exhorted Catholic soldiers to take up arms and “defend Religion, the Holy Church, the Homeland, the Kingdom, the Sovereign and the common weal, according to the [Catholic] doctrine”.Footnote 17
This Catholicism of combat, fully armed against French and liberal principles, connects with the patriotic mobilization of the Spanish population in the American colonies and in the Iberian peninsula. Scott Eastman has demonstrated the promising narrative of Spanish nationalism that burgeoned across the Hispanic Atlantic sphere at that time.Footnote 18 Still, no definite nationalistic doctrine was fully developed as a matter of theory. After the Peninsula War and with the restoration of Fernando VII's absolute powers, clerical intellectuals devoted their apologetic works to transforming the Spanish defense against the French invasion into national history. They linked the Spanish nation of that time with its perennial and essential values found in history. These values were summarized in the later Carlist motto “Dios, Patria y Rey”, fixed and theorized then, along with others like “Religion, Liberty and Sovereignty”.Footnote 19 According to their vision, patriotic struggle and religious fervor united Spaniards against evil – that is, revolutionary France. Monarchy and religion sustained the Spanish nation. “Without their legitimate sovereign”, wrote Fr Manuel Cúndaro OFM in 1818, “the Spaniards’ independence was ruined and they lost their right and use of the national sovereignty”.Footnote 20 The “freedom of the Homeland”, usurped by the French, urged good Spaniards to exact “a just revenge”.Footnote 21 Indeed, those clerics transformed the whole nation into a large Catholic Church, governed by the same principles, rules and doctrine. Nationalistic and religious faiths and works paved the way to salvation. “The Image of Jesus crucified”, rhapsodizes Fr Raymundo Ferrer CO, “was the strength of real Spaniards”.Footnote 22
We find the first more theoretical accounts of Catholic nationalism around 1820. The Catholic Italian intelligentsia developed its nationalistic formulations with Rome and the Pope at their center. This form of Catholic nationalism took the appellation of Neoguelfism, which gathered liberal and conservative Catholic figures. From the conservative camp, Joseph-Marie de Maistre in his Du Pape of 1819 advocated for the right and duty of the popes “to work incessantly for the freedom of the homeland”.Footnote 23 De Maistre highlighted the temporal sovereignty of the popes and their role in history as custodians of the Italian nation and its principles and values. In his Discorso sopra alcuni punti della storia longobardica in Italia of 1822, Romantic poet Alessandro Manzoni, from Catholic liberal circles, defended the unity and independence of Italy through all the ages and the role of the papacy as a symbol of freedom and hope for the awakening of the whole nation against Germanic domination. Manzoni did not intend to support the role of the Pope as the natural sovereign of Italy, although he recognized his leadership within the nation as defender of the national identity and the source of European civilization.Footnote 24 According to Giacomo Martina, these Italian liberal Catholic stances continued through the 1830s in figures such as Gino Capponi and Nicolò Tommaseo.Footnote 25
Throughout Europe this new generation of Romantic and Catholic intellectuals urged a revival of faith through its apologetic and missionary work. France was the main center of this European Catholic revival. The most remarkable Catholic intellectuals in Europe looked to French Catholic ideological developments and they also found a center of discussion of all these new ideas. This does not mean that France had the exclusive primacy in rethinking Catholicism, as Emile Perreau-Saussine recently suggested.Footnote 26 After the French Revolution, an early French Catholic awakening was marked by Chateaubriand's Génie du christianisme of 1802 and its later influences. Chateaubriand's religious experience and apology of the social value of religion characterized French Catholicism in the early nineteenth century.Footnote 27 However, the main debates were developed around philosophical traditionalism and its new understanding of key Catholic doctrinal concepts in politics. Against this Catholic backdrop, the historical French Gallican issue could indeed result in antinationalist stances. The first traditionalist, Felicité de Lamennais, understood any national character as splitting from the universal, Roman, Church and the true faith.Footnote 28 As Perreau-Saussine has demonstrated, French ultramontanists sought the political liberty of the Church from the state.Footnote 29 In opposing Gallicanism and the creation of a French national church, Lamennais and his ultramontanist counterparts denied the nationalization of Catholic interests and in the 1820s stopped any national theoretical development within the orthodox Catholic doctrine.Footnote 30 After the downfall of the monarchy of Charles X, French Catholicism, reunited around ultramontanism, initially embraced altogether more liberal positions.Footnote 31 This resulted in the disengagement of French Catholic intellectuals from monarchical advocacy in the 1830s and 1840s. Furthermore, they tended to avoid the question of the political form of the nation state. This new attitude favored the irruption of a clear nationalist narrative at the transnational level. The Polish uprising of November 1830 remained at the center of the theoretical origins of Catholic nationalism in France, despite initial papal opposition in 1832.Footnote 32 Paradoxically, French Catholics were finding the essences of nationalism and nationhood outside their own nation.
During the years of the July Monarchy after 1830, French Catholicism experienced several realignments.Footnote 33 The condemnation of Catholic newspaper L’avenir of Lamennais, Montalembert, Lacordaire and Gerbet by Pope Gregory XVI in the encyclical Mirari vos in 1832 marked the first inflexion. The second one arrived two years later, with Lamennais's separation from the Church in 1834, after the papal condemnation of his teachings in the encyclical Singulari nos.Footnote 34 Ultramontanism began to change its point of view, strongly linked with the evolution and future splits of the circle of the Catholic newspaper L’univers, founded in 1834 by Fr Jacques-Paul Migne. The French Catholic movement opened up not only to liberal policies, but also to nationalist ones. Liberal Catholic Charles de Montalembert was the first Catholic intellectual to abandon philosophical traditionalist thought and was the figure who best represents this national turn within French Catholicism. In 1836 he passionately defended Polish sovereignty in the Chamber of Peers. According to Montalembert, Catholicism defined Polish nationhood and it was the “national faith”.Footnote 35 The events of the November uprising proved the determining importance of Catholicism and the Polish Catholic Church in this nationalist fight against Russia, despite papal censure and lack of support.Footnote 36 Subsequent statements of Montalembert in the Chamber of Peers showed that his nationalist interest focused only on national independence —or national realization—as one of the most important political freedoms in modern Europe. Greek and Belgian independence, Daniel O’Connell's Irish emancipation and the Polish uprising were the national struggles with which Montalembert had been involved in his political activism, successfully or not, for the advancement of the freedom of those nations.Footnote 37 In this way, Montalembert created his own transnational Catholic nationalism based on these cases. Nonetheless, neither Montalembert nor any other French Catholic intellectual extrapolated their nationalist impulses to their own French nation.
In Spain the Catholic revival was born and developed in the region of Catalonia, the center of Catholic activism and cultural transfer with other European nations during Spanish Romanticism's golden years in the 1830s and 1840s. In fact, the Catholic presence within this Romantic movement was overwhelming. Catholics formed the so-called Catalan apologist school, during the central years of the Spanish Liberal revolution, which lasted until the Catholic conservative government of Bravo Murillo (1851–2).Footnote 38 Strongly linked with French Catholic circles, they rejected liberal and Jansenist regalism which Mgr Félix Torres Amat represented.Footnote 39 Nevertheless, they did not embrace Carlism, which remained the permanent counterrevolutionary and integralist power in Spain during the whole of the nineteenth century.Footnote 40 Some of its most recognizable members were the philosopher Jaume Balmes and the apologist and missionary archbishop Antoni M. Claret. They aimed for a full restoration of the Catholic faith in Spain through the exemplary case of the Catalan region. For a time, nationalism defined the idiosyncrasy of the Spanish Catholic intelligentsia. In 1845 the traditionalist philosopher José M. Quadrado evinced that “nationalism was the idea which defines the life of states”.Footnote 41 In the Spanish case, “Catholicism, Monarchy, Tradition and provincialism” shaped the nation's character; any other character would be considered outside the true Spanish identity.Footnote 42 In these Catholic circles of spiritual renewal, the Irish figure of O’Connell aroused deep admiration. He was praised regularly in La Religion, an important apologist newspaper edited by Joaquim Roca i Cornet in the late 1830s. Quadrado recognized him as the liberator of Catholicism in Ireland and, thus, the champion of the freedom of the Irish nation. Like Spain, the Irish nation would not have existed without the Catholic faith. Indeed, this transnational faith was the raison d’être in the European national awakening, citing the cases of Belgium and Poland.Footnote 43
But it was reserved for Jaume Balmes to offer the first fully fledged theory of Catholic nationalism. He was the most important Catholic theorist in nineteenth-century Spain. His work radiated well beyond Spanish borders and had a tremendous impact throughout Latin Europe, even influencing the policies of the Holy See in Rome towards the emerging ideal of nationhood. Balmes was a philosopher and apologist who developed an eclectic thought between Thomism and the Scottish school of common sense, together with classical Jesuit scholarship. Balmes was in contact with other Catholic intellectuals in Latin European countries, within ultramontanist circles. He maintained several exchanges in 1842 and 1845 with French apologists Albéric de Blanche, Auguste Nicolas and especially Mgr Dupanloup.Footnote 44 In Louvain, during his Belgian trip of 1845, Balmes met the traditionalist philosopher Gérard-Casimir Ubaghs and the papal nuncio Gioacchino Pecci, the future Leo XIII. His network building across the European Catholic milieu was brought to an end by his death in the summer of 1848, just before the Pope's exile to Gaeta on 24 November, which left a dramatic and long-lasting mark on Catholics around the world.
Balmes devoted most of his writings to developing a nationalist theory.Footnote 45 He did much to shape Catholic political thought about the nation-state project, and attempted to make it cohere with orthodox Catholic doctrine. While searching for a respectable compromise and conciliation with modernity, Balmes's political activism and intellectual dedication were highly influenced by his nationalist thought.Footnote 46 His first political actions were directed to the effort of “nationalization” of Spanish politics, which (in his view) were controlled by “liberal factions”.Footnote 47 In 1840 Balmes was employing mature nationalist theory in considering Catholic identity as the only real Spanish identity. His attacks were mainly against liberal revolutionary nationalism. At the same time, he linked Catholicism with the development of the European civilization and, thereby, the European nations.Footnote 48 Against the tumultuous political backdrop of the Spanish liberal revolution, Balmes began systematizing the preceding and eclectic Catholic nationalist thought. By means of the case of the Spanish defense in the Peninsula War, he sought to present his own vision of Catholic nationalism, which would be omnipresent in his thought until his death in 1848. His intense nationalism was developed in his articles written first in the Catholic newspapers La civilización (1841–3) and La sociedad (1843–4), and later in El pensamiento de la nación (1844–8). Balmes offered a theory of the core elements which, he insisted, truly and permanently guided nations in history: “legitimate monarchy”, “national independence” and the civilizing religious project.Footnote 49 He summarized, as other Catholics did, the national ideas in the traditional motto “Dios, Patria y Rey”.Footnote 50
But beyond the immediate Spanish context, Balmes sought a portable nationalist theory that could be applied to every European nation while also comporting with traditional values and religious principles. His accounts of the Spanish identity became the essential understanding of modern nationalism in accordance with conservative, orthodox Catholic doctrine. His model fit extremely well with the typical Catholic nation and it proved interchangeable and fully transnational. Monarchy was to be the incarnation of the national unity and of natural law-based government, free of political bands and conflicts.Footnote 51 The Catholic religion, he insisted, was the guardian of all the national values and principles, which allowed a prosperous future for the national life.Footnote 52 In his last work, Pío IX of December 1847, he argued that nations have the inalienable right to be independent and placed the Church as the only institution that could guarantee this national right in Europe.Footnote 53 By doing so, the Church would have found in the right of national independence and the prevalent right of national unity a place under the sun. Finally, as Balmes had already announced in his article “La religiosidad de la nación española” of 1842, the Church would become the bulwark against “dissolving” political conflicts and the warranty of all crucial national characteristics.Footnote 54 Catholicism was called on to be the regenerating instrument of European nations; but, along with the “strong European nations” of France, Spain, the United Kingdom and Russia, the priest had in mind the “weak nations” of Italy, Poland and Ireland.Footnote 55 In Pío IX, Balmes proposed the Pope as leader of Italian independence. “The Pope has been encouraged by the feeling of the Italian nationhood”, writes Balmes, and the Pope in his “defense of the prerogatives of the Church will also defend the independence of Italy”.Footnote 56
The Balmesian Catholic nation had to be formed in “divine providence”; that is, history. History and historical characters were the basic elements that formed the nation, among all the others. This excluded any liberal definition rooted in the idea of ahistorical citizenship. This historical identity also shaped the Catholic notion of sovereignty, which did not reside strictly in the state, but in conjunction with religion and civilization. That said, Balmes also rejected a pluralistic approach for the sake of a nation united in everything. A mere pluralism of coexisting elements, Balmes averred, formed only a second-class nation. Christian and irreligious nations were included in this group which ran, in order of achievement, from European Protestant and Orthodox nations, to the United States of America, to Revolutionary France, and finally to the Jewish nation.Footnote 57 As for Muslim and Asian states, they were simply absent in this scheme. Therefore Balmes's nationalist theory prioritized the Catholic, monarchical, historical and civilized nation as the first-class and fully developed nation. When a nation tended to its natural, perfect order – that is, Catholic faith, monarchical state, ancient history and civilizational pedigree – this nation finally coalesced. Furthermore, any human society responding to this theoretical model had the natural right to attain its fully potential. This meant national independence, monarchical installment (or restoration), and Catholic conversion. In the end, the Catholic religion stood at the acme of his nationalistic construct. In Balmes's words: “Nothing can form the spirit of nationhood but the [Catholic] religion”.Footnote 58
Balmes's Catholic nationalist theory had a strong influence on the Apostolic See. In January 1848, Balmes received a note from Cardinal Gabriele Ferretti, Vatican Secretary of State, with two simple but important questions: “What should [the Holy See] believe with regard to the right of nationhood and its independence” and “when and how could it be declared”?Footnote 59 Indeed, Cardinal Ferretti personally petitioned the apostolic delegate in Spain, Mgr Brunelli, to send him a copy of Pío IX on 17 January 1848. The work not only was influential in the Apostolic See in Rome, but reached other Italian Catholic nationalist circles.Footnote 60 Through Jesuit Fathers Taparelli and Curci, of the Roman College, Balmes's formulations found within Italian Catholic Neoguelfs their most enthusiastic supporters.Footnote 61 During the 1840s, conservative–moderate and liberal Neoguelfs adopted clear nationalist positions in favor of Italian unification. The Pope himself partook of this national fervor, according to Owen Chadwick.Footnote 62 Peter d’Agostino has pointed out how Catholic conservative and liberal tendencies united in argument for a Papal-led unified Italy.Footnote 63 In 1843 moderate and prominent Neoguelf Fr Vincenzo Gioberti wrote the Italian nationalist manifesto Del primato morale e civile degli Italiani, where he called for the natural rule of the Pope over an Italian confederation.Footnote 64 This work provoked several replies from Cesare Balbo, Giacomo Durando and Leopoldo Galeotti during 1845 and 1846. Generally, these authors endorsed the core ideas of Neoguelfism.Footnote 65 Later, in 1848, Fr Antonio Rosmini-Serbati, in his highly controversial and heterodox work Delle Cinque Piage della Santa Chiesa, stated that only a liberal reform under the Church's auspices could revitalize the Italian nation and pave the way towards unification. The election of Cardinal Mastai as Pope Pius IX in 1846 was seen as extremely positive by Neoguelfs.Footnote 66 But despite their intense nationalism, none of these Neoguelf intellectuals systematized a mature Catholic nationalist theory like Balmes did. They simply focused on the Italian case: the formation of nationhood was more important than the theoretical basis of the Italian nation. Like Montalembert before them, Italian Catholics were nationalist activists instead of nationalist theoreticians.
THE NEW CATHOLICISM AND THE CONSOLIDATION OF A CATHOLIC NATIONALIST DOCTRINE
The long pontificate of Pius IX fashioned modern Catholicism. He broke up the policies of his predecessor Gregory XVI and he stood up for more than a mere Catholic revival all over Europe. Pius IX envisioned his own modernity for the papacy and the whole Catholic Church through Catholic movements in every Catholic and even non-Catholic nation throughout Europe. He aimed at ending the wide prerogatives and freedom of local and national Catholic churches that distinguished the early and even the mid-nineteenth century. The chosen way was a secure and steady doctrine preserved against any contamination from the other: liberal modernity. This policy implied refocusing on Papacy's spiritual role and enforcing a program of tough Roman centralization.Footnote 67 Inevitably, Pius IX favored alternative Catholic (and equally modern) tendencies of mid-nineteenth century Europe—specifically, ones incubated in Latin European nations, which were leading the social and intellectual development of Catholicism. In fact, this program was well detailed in Mastai's first encyclical Qui pluribus of 1846, which defined the framework of this New Catholicism: Thomist order and justice rather than liberal freedom. Order and justice became central values of Pius's pontificate after the 1848 Revolution. This applied to Catholic nationalism. A new generation of intellectuals began to be influential in the European Catholic movements and reshaped their foundations. Ultramontanism—which remained the best instrument for orthodox Catholicism and the Pope's doctrinal crusade in the mid- and late nineteenth century—found in Pius IX its best promoter and advocate. Indeed, the ultramontanist momentum was the finest expression of the conservative turn carried out by the New Catholicism.Footnote 68 Catholic liberalism was definitively expelled from Catholic modernity as one of its concurrent and legitimate tendencies. Nationalism nonetheless remained an essential characteristic of this New Catholicism. If in the early nineteenth century ultramontanism forestalled Catholic nationalism, now the two tendencies interpenetrated.
France continued to be the center which reunited European Catholics. French Catholicism underwent its conservative turn shortly after the 1848 Revolution. Catholic liberals began fading within the French Catholic milieu. These New Catholics had been reunited around l’univers since 1850 and included Mgr Félix Dupanloup and Louis Veuillot. Nonetheless, prominent Catholic liberal figures survived, like Montalembert. He was faithful to his own discourse, based in the exercise of freedom at all levels of social life. In his Des intérêts catholiques au XIXe siècle of 1852 he asserted that the regeneration, renewal and revival of Catholic faith in Europe extended freedom all over the continent where there were Catholics. This “internal movement” achieved freedom both inside and outside the Church; it was the “immense progress of the Catholic spirit”.Footnote 69 He envisioned the death of Gallicanism and the rise of ultramontanism as the biggest “sense of Christian fraternity”, which could bring harmony between all the European nations, with freedom and religious spirit.Footnote 70 For the first time, Montalembert theorized his views on this transnational Catholic nationalism. Indeed, his new writings brought to the surface a previously implicit nationalist theory, especially applied to his favorite case: Polish nationhood. Between 1861 and 1864 Montalembert devoted several works to the Polish case.Footnote 71 In his last study of the Polish uprising of 1863, Le Pape et la Pologne (1864), he summarized his national doctrine of 1852 in a practical case. In Montalembert's view, Pope Pius IX incarnated the transnational Catholic fraternity towards Polish Catholics who fought for his right to freedom. According to Pius IX, it was “a Catholic nation . . . which exercised reasonable [human] right and freedom”.Footnote 72 The Polish case, Montalembert maintained, was just another consequence of the religious spirit of that century which was leading to the culmination of freedom in Europe. And the Pope was leading this struggle for liberty – indeed, this nationalistic struggle of a Catholic nationalist policy.Footnote 73
The Catholic nation-building doctrine experienced further development with new Catholics responding to the 1848 Revolution under the French Second Empire. A good example is Antoine Blanc de Saint-Bonnet, who in De la restauration française (1851) identified the origin of European nations. He compared them to God-created souls, governed by biological mechanisms, together with divine providence. Like any other soul, every nation could attain sanctity through virtuosity and perfection progress.Footnote 74 The national “spirit of religion” cited by Balmes and Montalembert figures in this theory. But the most prominent and influential figure among French ultramontanes was Mgr Félix Dupanloup (1802–78), bishop of Orléans. He represented a moderate voice positioned between liberal prelates like Mgr Sibour, archbishop of Paris, or Mgr Henri Maret, and the integralist ones like Mgr Pie, bishop of Poitiers.Footnote 75 In his La convention du 15 septembre et l’encyclique du 8 décembre of 1865, Dupanloup assumed the normal existence of nationalism as a natural right and a just and reasonable idea with which nations could form their own regimes, beyond traditional Catholic monarchy. Justice, in a Thomistic sense, replaced freedom as supreme sovereign act. Thus the Church would stress its neutrality towards countries’ forms of government, if they were just. Therefore the Catholic Church “cannot forbid patriotism”.Footnote 76 This disassociation from Balmes's more exclusive support of the monarchical state, which Dupanloup had directly in mind, widened the compatibility of the Thomistic notion of natural order with modern nationhood.
If the struggle for religious freedom that the Church and its representatives conducted implied constraints on national sovereignty, natural justice nevertheless had important implications for national sovereignty. In fact, Dupanlouop himself stated that the political fate of Italy in the era of unification reflected only an usurpation of Papal rights over the nation, as its natural sovereign, through an evil state.Footnote 77 The defense of Catholic orthodox doctrine and the Pope became the new finest expressions of Catholic nationalism. This was one of his most important implications that Dupanloup drew from the notorious 1864 papal encyclical Quanta cura and its annexed syllabus of errors.Footnote 78 Justice was now the most important Catholic value, linked with order, not with freedom; but far from implying the decline of earlier Catholic nationalism, this conclusion hastened its transformation in the crucible of the new Catholic conservatism. This represented an evolution, not a rejection, of Balmes's nationalist theory. The Belgian case provided the best practical example of this Catholic national conservative turn. As Jan de Maeyer and Emiel Lamberts have shown, the construction of the Belgian nation was rooted in Catholic identity and its ultramontanist character.Footnote 79 This allowed a strong Catholic Belgian nation-building process with the full Romanization of the Belgian Catholic Church and, thereby, of the Belgian nation. Belgium accommodated Catholic freedom and justice into the same national sovereignty.
Dupanloup's nationalist theory was much simpler than Balmes's previous traditional-conservative, orthodox Catholic nationalism, which nonetheless incorporated some liberal elements. Dupanloup, omitting these, thought that order and justice, restyled through canonical Thomism, sufficed. However, Dupanloup's doctrine did not emphasize national history, which was very common in Balmes's national narrative. But later French Catholics like Emile Keller or Louis Veuillot reincorporated this emphasis on collective historical experience. In fact, it was still Spanish Catholicism that offered the most advanced theory of New Catholicism in Latin Europe in this era. After the early demise of Juan Donoso Cortés, Balmes's initial intellectual heir, it was Antonio Aparisi who extended the latter's nationalism within the Spanish New Catholicism.Footnote 80 In accordance with Spanish tradition, he wielded the motto “Dios, Patria y Rey” as primary foundation of his Catholic nationalism. In his apologetic articles published in Spanish Catholic newspapers, he advocated the Catholic principle that, he insisted, shaped the Spanish nationhood through divine providence. Hence Spain represented not only the model of a real, Catholic, nation, but the chosen nation with the mission to preserve the purest and most genuine European civilization.Footnote 81 Any attempt to form a nation required the Balmesian spirit of religion and its values—by which he meant, of course, the Catholic ones. Aparisi applied this principle to Italian unification, which, like Dupanloup, he saw as only possible under the papal sovereignty.Footnote 82
Spanish New Catholicism was thus the most advanced European movement in the universe of Catholic nationalism, sponsoring a conquest of an ultramontanist ideology that had initially been allergic to nationhood. Spanish Catholic intellectuals expanded their influence throughout European ultramontanist circles and the highest ecclesiastical authorities in Italy and France.Footnote 83 The conservative and orthodox vision which Spanish Catholics had of their own nation tended to be a generalized version of a genuine model applicable to any Catholic European nation. The nation imagined by Montalembert, rooted in freedom, gradually disappeared under the impetus of the ultramontanist conservative turn predominant in France and elsewhere.Footnote 84 Despite Dupanloup's early formulations, the real nation, many held, ought to be based on the natural order as well as nurtured by a historically Catholic past, with both the natural and historical foundations of the nation sustainable only by the Church. “The Church for the homeland, the homeland for the Church”, asserted Louis Veuillot, the editor of L’univers and renowned ultramontanist polemicist, in 1871.Footnote 85 According to French Catholic historian Jacques Crétineau-Joly, the events of the nineteenth century tried to dissolve the union of religion, history and nation, but only at the price of a “dissolution of patriotism” and the “filial piety of nations” towards the Church.Footnote 86 The remedy, he propsed, was the restoration of true faith which would allow “invincible patriotism”. For Veuillot, such a nationalism would be invincible due to its “Catholic roots”.Footnote 87 Catholicism would be the salvation of the nation in the nineteenth century against any danger, internal or external. French historian and apologist Emile Keller had arrived at the same idea some years before, in 1866: the separation of the nation from the Catholic Church would lead to its ruin. The preservation of natural order and justice was the warranty of national freedom and its accomplished independence. For Keller, this was only possible through the submission of the nation under the power of God and His Church.Footnote 88 Like Crétineau-Joly, in his Histoire de France Keller desired “the restoration of the heritage of our ancestors” for a flourishing present and the bright future of the French nation.Footnote 89
Initially uncertain in its place in Catholic nationalism, history now became central to it—much as in the rival liberal nationalism which Catholicism itself now influenced. Spanish historians contributed greatly to the development of Catholic historical nationalism, which shows how influential it was on the entire nationalist universe. Indeed, it became the only model for the history of the Spanish nation. Two canonical national histories written in the nineteenth century offered the purest version of this new Catholic nationalist doctrine. The most famous was Modesto Lafuente's Historia general de España (1850–66). It was the first general history of Spain since the work of Spanish Jesuit Juan de Mariana in 1601. In principle, Lafuente's work was the liberal flagship of Spanish historiography. However, his theoretical background was rooted in Bossuet, Pascal and Vico, according to the historian himself.Footnote 90 In fact, Balmes's pervasive legacy and the influence of Cesare Cantù's Storia Universale were present in Lafuente's historical ontology.Footnote 91 Divine providence was presented as determining humanity and nations. According to the Creator, the Spanish nation is predestined to be united, independent, monarchical and Catholic. The Spanish character is immutable and permanent, and follows its way of the perfection and progress of its soul through history.Footnote 92 Lafuente's liberal historical discourse was very similar to that of Blanc de Saint-Bonnet and his biological nation. Both narratives were far from civic, liberal revolutionary nationalism. On both sides of the political spectrum, Spanish nationalism was deeply Catholic, with its liberal version far closer to European moderate and conservative milieus than elsewhere. However, the “official” historian of the Spanish New Catholicism was Victor Gebhardt and his Historia general de España y de sus Indias (1864–7), who put Balmes's historical discourse into practice in unalloyed form, notably through his fascination for the Peninsula War and the Spanish struggle for national independence. Gebhardt focuses on the birth of the Spanish nation after the conversion of King Recaredo in 587. Neither monarchy nor unity were the core of Spanish nationhood, Gebhardt argued, but its independence and defense of the Catholic faith.Footnote 93 Gebhardt used a slightly different motto: “Dios y Patria”, without the king, the third element of the traditional, Carlist slogan. The Spanish historian was another example of how European New Catholics began to abandon monarchical militancy and legitimism in the 1860s. Indeed, both Lafuente and Gebhardt were the finest manifestation of moderate conservatism of the Spanish liberal regime of Isabel II. Their works’ influence lasted in Spain until the mid-twentieth century.
Italian Catholicism experienced a very different evolution. There was no Italian counterpart of the New Catholicism. Italian Catholics were still organized within Neoguelfism, which had predominated amongst Italian Catholics before 1848.Footnote 94 After the Revolution, it is true that Neoguelfism lost its momentum with the rise of Piedmont. The image and prestige of Pope Pius IX as the natural, and liberal, leader and ruler of Italians was severely damaged after his exile to Gaeta.Footnote 95 Nonetheless, this state of affairs did not bring Neoguelfism to an end: it had Pier Silvestro Leopardi or Raffaello Lambruschini among its supporters throughout Italy. The Italian liberal priest Gioacchino Ventura di Raulica showed especially vividly how the Neoguelfs dealt with this new situation. In 1849 he wrote several letters in defense of the Pope and Catholicism as essential foundations of Italian identity. Catholicism asserted “human dignity, national sentiment, freedom, equality and fraternity” for the Italian nation.Footnote 96 Ventura represented Montalembert's counterpart in Italy. And, like Montalembert, his influence gradually waned within the Catholic movement in Italy. In this combat for the leadership of the Italian nation, Neoguelfism found its new voice in the historian Cesare Cantù, but with a more conservative tone and, like his European counterparts, much less willing to seek novel syntheses of Catholic orthodoxy with liberal positions.
Cantù emerged in the late 1850s as a clear supporter of Neoguelfism, which he defended even after the creation of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861. Through his historical works he argued for the superior and inalienable right of the Pope's leadership over the Italian nation. He characterized the denial of this right as “removing civilization from Italy”, by which he meant Catholicism as the embodiment of the nation.Footnote 97 Cantù maintained the same pre-1848 Neoguelf discourse: an Italian confederation presided over by its natural leader, the Pope. The new political regime, he argued, should be formed in justice; otherwise the nation would be alienated from itself. This excluded the unified state, which he portrayed as “unnatural”.Footnote 98 Indeed, Cantù considered the self-realization of the Italian nation less important than the final political form of the nation; an illegitimate state would frustrate rather than embody the nation. Accordingly, Piedmontese leadership was considered illegal, aberrant and contrary to nationhood and the natural order.Footnote 99 The Pope, Cantù insisted, was the only guarantee for a prosperous, just and fully developed nation-state project in Italy.Footnote 100 Cantù's nationalist discourse was slightly different from that of his European counterparts. He reproduced most of Balmes's nationalist narrative, without the inclusion into his Catholic doctrine of a national past so crucial elsewhere. He successfully made the conservative turn and completed the transnational circulation of a definite nationalist theory among Latin European Catholics. In 1870 he arrived at a peculiar but clear and almost definitive conclusion in his national theory: a nation was a soul with “one language, one faith” and expressed its sovereignty through natural order to which the people acceded. This “people's accession”, as he called it, was the definition of patriotism. This “natural love” should be ordered aright and subordinated to the Catholic Church and God, which were entitled by “supernatural love”, according to the traditional Thomist doctrine.Footnote 101 In 1870 Cantù summarized the Latin European Catholic nationalist doctrine for the nation-building process of any European nation. The historian surpassed his Neoguelfist stances only very late in life, when it was clear that the Pope would never attain the real leadership of unified Italy. However, his nationalist doctrine culminated in the theoretical development that Spanish and French Catholics had forged in the last thirty years under the crucial influence of Balmes.
CONCLUSION: CATHOLIC NATIONALISM IN THE CONTEMPORARY AGE
Three Catholic figures forged much of the transnational Catholic nationalism which remained at the end of Piux IX's long pontificate: Balmes, Dupanloup and Cantù. Catholic nationalism now had its theoretical foundations, rooted in a genuine transnational character and based on a very active Latin European cultural transfer and shared cultural space. The Holy See gradually adopted some ideas from the intellectual discussions of Latin European New Catholics: Romanization, liturgical renewal, papal centralization, the new dogmas of the Immaculate Conception (1854) and papal infallibility (1870), material progress, Thomism and nationalism. While it is true that Pope Pius IX maintained more discretion with respect to nationalism, he also laid the framework for its future, full acceptance, which proved so crucial to twentieth-century history. With Pius IX's death in 1878, Gioacchino Pecci, Pope Leo XIII, took up the chair of Peter. He had a new style and an assumed and accepted nationalism. Pecci transformed most of the theological and philosophical developments of New Catholicism into official Church doctrine and applied them, not least those concerned with the national question. In his first encyclical, Æterni Patris of 1879, he achieved the long-awaited restoration of Thomism to the center of Catholic theology, which guided the rest of his teachings.Footnote 102 This permitted the implementation of a vast papal magisterium which consolidated the conservative, orthodox, Catholic modernity.
With the political theory of “accidentalism” he offered, notably in his encyclicals Immortale Dei (1885) and Libertas, præstantissimum (1888), the Pope envisioned a peaceful coexistence with liberal regimes and nation-state projects, allowing Catholics to actively participate in their politics and government. This policy did not prevent the objection of Catholics to unfair or anti-Catholic legislation. With this new doctrine, Leo XIII assumed the ultramontanist and New Catholic discourses which now transcended legitimist or monarchical causes. The times of the so-called “Black International” opposed to any reformulation of the old alliance of throne and altar were over.Footnote 103 Integralists and intransigeants were put outside the Leonine conciliation and Catholic mainstream doctrine. They continued to take an active part in Catholicism, issued from fundamentalist, orthodox Catholic modernity, but as external critics.Footnote 104 Along with accidentalism, the encyclical Sapientiæ Christianæ of 1890 presented the official position on Catholic nationalism. Thomism shaped much of this doctrine. It was the culmination of its previous background theorized by Balmes, Dupanloup and Cantù. In this judgment of the Church, as the Pope now announced it, “the supernatural love for the Church and the natural love of our own country proceed from the same eternal principle,” and, consequently, “between the duties they respectively enjoin, neither can come into collision with the other.”Footnote 105
The Papal statement epitomized all the past transnational Catholic intellectual development on nationalism. Notwithstanding the brevity of Leo XIII's statement, every Latin European nation had contributed to forging the representation of a canonical Catholic nation. Pope Leo XIII allowed the owl of Minerva to fly at dusk, with a Thomist-based model focused on the natural order of sovereignty, consistent with the teachings of Catholic nationalist theorists of transnational New Catholicism incubated through the nineteenth century. The nationalist dynamics of Catholics throughout Europe had generally followed parallel paths towards the same national idea. The Latin European kernel forged the model that other nationalisms, with a minor or major Catholic presence, imitated. Urs Altermatt has defined four models of Catholic nationalism for the nineteenth century, but all were built upon a sole typology created by new Catholics in the Latin European kernel and later adopted by the Holy See and the rest of the European nations, Catholic or not.Footnote 106
The definition of the dogma of papal infallibility during the First Vatican Council (1868–70) discharged the Pope of having duties towards any nation and focused on his spiritual role. Conciliar Fathers coined a dogma that strengthened the spiritual power of the Pope at the expense of temporal power. Even with the debate about papal sovereignty in Rome alive until the Lateran Pact of 1929, Catholics were now free to approach any kind of nationalism. According to Vincent Viaene, Catholic masses were now internationalized and nationalized at the same time.Footnote 107 The result was the globalization of Catholic nationalism. The Catholic Church offered a double model for the Catholic faithful, which was not exempt of several frictions.
Until the Second Vatican Council, the twentieth century followed the theoretical development of nationalism that the New Catholicism had initiated. The Apostolic Constitution Gaudium et Spes of 1965 made only one short mention of patriotism and in a tone of contempt. The text urged Catholics to “cultivate a generous and loyal spirit of patriotism, but without being narrow-minded.”Footnote 108 The experience of totalitarianism left a bitter mark on European nationalism, including a hitherto triumphant Catholic nationalism. During the twentieth century, the theoretical origins of Catholic nationalism in the nineteenth century proved to be a successful part of the Catholic modernity: it allowed for an orthodox, doctrinally friendly, historical and popular reconciliation of faith and nation.
All things considered, Catholic nationalism was the reformulation of a prerevolutionary identity in the language and mentality of modernity. In this modern adaption, Catholicism's religious spirit played a major role in European nation building. It became one of the most important elements that defined the modern nation in Latin Europe and beyond. Catholicism undermined the monopoly of civic and liberal nationalism and shaped the flagship model of a transnational conservative nationalism. As I have shown, Catholic nation-building processes were marked by their transnational dimension—transnational both in the sharing of ideas and in the reconciliation of patriotism and universalism. Catholic intellectuals laid the theoretical foundations of Catholic nationalism in a transnational context, with an intense cultural transfer. Latin Europe became a shared cultural space in which similar concerns can emerge simultaneously, with different nuances in particular national cases. Against the backdrop of this Latin Europe, I have highlighted the crucial importance of Spanish Catholics in this theoretical formation, evolution and consolidation of Catholic nationalism. The nation-state project of the nineteenth century was greatly affected with the irruption of the New Catholicism and its reshaping of the entire Catholic Church. This movement brought forth modernity within Catholicism. And one of the most representative elements of this modernity was nationalism.
