Heresy Hunting: The Monk and the French Revolution

Previous studies have connected The Monk and the French Revolution as well as that novel and anti-Catholic polemics. Pursued separately, these connections are unsatisfying: in 1794 (when Lewis commenced The Monk , the Revolution was topical, but obvious correlations between it and the book seem slight; instances in The Monk of anti-Catholic prejudice are massive, but apparently far from topical. Actually, the two connections were interrelated. Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) maintains, "We know, and what is better we feel inwardly, that religion is the basis of civil society, and the source of all good and of all comfort." His "Thoughts on French Affairs" (1791) insists "It is a Revolution of doctrine and theoretick dogma . It has a much greater resemblance to those changes which have been made upon religious grounds, in which a spirit of proselytism makes an essential part." The rhetoric of the day mixed sacred and secular, most obviously with the execution of Louis XVI, a political and religious symbol. An even greater source of metaphysical horror was the de-Christianizing (1793): the old calendar of religious holidays replaced with an Enlightenment one; its new festivals sometimes celebrated with "goddesses" on altars; campaigns of desecration headed by former monks; many ecclesiastical buildings destroyed leaving "naked dancers and drunken children in the ruined churches and among the gravestones "; and all but the most compromising priests persecuted, exiled, or killed. In 1794, Robespierre was executed, largely for having introduced a cult of the Supreme Being, which, despite being far from Christianity, was still too theistic for the extremists. By 1795, Christianity seemed to have been eradicated. Very plausible at the time was the notion that the whole revolution had been a plot against Christianity. The most massive documentation of that charge appears in the first volume of Abbé Augustin Barruel's 1797 essay Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire du jacobinisme. Much of his argument, however, had been anticipated by other works, including Abbé Jacques François Lefranc's diatribe of 1791, Le voile levé pour les curieux ou les secrets de la Révolution révelés à l'aide de la francmaçonnerie and his 1792 sequel, Conjuration contre la religion catholique . The cast of characters of this conspiracy varied from author to author, including at one point or another the Illuminati of Bavaria, the masons, the Jesuits, and the devil himself. What, though, was the real driving force behind this conspiracy? Catholics tended to assume that it was Protestantism. Conversely, Protestants blamed the Catholics. "Popery was no longer [to Britain] the enemy as such, but it was frequently cited as the influence that had created the despotic state of affairs from which the Revolution had emerged. Protestant England had made 1688 possible; Catholic France had made 1789 and 1792 inevitable." Furthermore, philosophes had Catholic (primarily Jesuit) educations, obtaining habits of thought that they retained even while rejecting Christianity. Thus, for instance, Helvétius writes "[in formulating an excellent system, o]ne must look upon oneself as the founder of a religious order who, in dictating his monastic rule, has no regard whatsoever for the conventions and prejudices of his future subjects". Aware of such Catholic notions among anti-clericists, Burke writes, "These Atheistical fathers have a bigotry of their own; and they have learnt to talk against monks with the spirit of a monk." Generally, Protestants lumped any deviation from their own sect with Catholicism. Cartoons, for instance, showed Methodist ministers as secret Jesuits. Despite Burke's Reflections 's emphasizing his "zeal" as a Protestant, both Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft, in their replies to it, imply that his conservatism is ultimately …