FRENCH POLITICAL THOUGHT
equanimity the Papal majesty dragged into the orbit of dynastic
interests (those of the Orleans family) which have already made
So many dupes and victims. But that detestable opinion is
gaining ground, that Rome needs the support^ of governments
and cannot resist their claims, however excessive."
The beginnings of the Second Republic were too closely
associated with methods of violence and revolutionary affirma-
tions for Liberals like Montalembert to see therein—as of
course they should have—the practical applications of their
fundamental principles. Instead of rallying round to the more
moderate elements of the Lamartine school he went out of his
way to declare that " no one in his senses would take into
serious account those new systems which pretended to deduce
democracy,from Catholicism and to make Revolution a com-
mentary on the Gospels." In this he appeared to be a traitor to
his old principles and was subsequently accused by Lamartine
of having ultimately helped to bring about the tyranny of
Napoleon III.1
The Second Republic was not destined indeed to remain
open for long to charges of revolution and violence, at least
from the Left: it soon became captured by an unprogressive
bourgeois conservatism that saw in the Church which had
condemned Lamennais the surest' bulwark of social order. It
is indeed one of the strangest paradoxes of a strange period
that the influence for which the Church vainly yearned in the
days of the Monarchy should have been hers for the asking
in the days of the Republic; and that a so-called democracy
should have provided her with two of the most signal victories
she won in the whole of modern history—the overthrow by
French arms of the Roman Republic and the education settle-
ment which has gone down to posterity under the name of its
sponsor, Falloux.
Many of the details of the Lot Falloux do not concern us here.
Its main feature was to establish freedom of secondary and
1 Lamartine of Montalembert: " ' He is false, malignant, bigoted, un-
scrupulous, unpatriotic,, helped to bring about the tyranny of Napoleon.* His
indignation at the latter's denial of Liberalism was but the expression of
mortified vanity " (Nassau Senior, Conversations with Thitrs, etc*, i., p. 315).
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