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today suggests that he was unsuccessful. In any case, it is to be noted that, though
he did not forget the Americans, he included no American constitution.
RELIGION AND REVOLUTION:
CHRISTIANITY AND DEMOCRACYIt was somewhat inconsistently observed by Tocqueville, in his great classic a cen-
tury ago, both that the Revolution became a kind of religion in itself, and that in
the most fundamental sense, despite appearances, it was not directed against the
religion of Christianity. In calling the Revolution a religion Tocqueville did not
mean, like J. F. LaHarpe in 1797, or numerous more recent historians, to stress its
psychology of fanaticism or to see in it a fiercely unreasoning “faith.” That it took
on these qualities Tocqueville was far from doubting, but it was not in such quali-
ties that he saw the distinctive essence of religion. It was the peculiarity of a reli-
gion, he thought, and he was thinking of Christianity, to look upon man in an
abstract light, apart from the incidental peculiarity of race, class, nationality, cul-
ture, environment, or conditioning, apart from every kind of institutional frame-
work, simply as “man” in relation to other men and to the world as a whole, with all
men subject to the same judgment and working out their destiny under the same
higher law. It was in this universality, and the corresponding sense of an underlying
equality of all human beings, that Tocqueville found the French Revolution to be
like a religion, and for that reason to spread rapidly, as Christianity had spread,
beyond the boundaries of any one people or country.
The evidence that Tocqueville was unable to gather confirms his insight. The
religion of revolutionary republicanism spread beyond France, beyond the Sister
Republics, beyond Western Europe. When Rhigas Velestinlis declared Greek and
Turk to be equal in the “natural order,” he echoed not only the eighteenth- century
revolution of Europe but the first- century revolution of St. Paul, who had said that
in Christ is neither Jew nor Greek.
With institutional Christianity in the 1790’s, revolutionary republicanism or
democracy collided violently in all countries. It is true that in France, between
1795 and 1801, church and state were legally “separated,” since the connections
set up earlier in the Revolution had been repealed; and that the new republics in
Italy formally recognized Catholicism as the prevailing religion. Many Catholics
nevertheless opposed the new republics as un- Christian. The new states took the
view that religion was a purely private and individual matter; they generally
forbade church processions and the display of religious images in the streets;
they admitted non- Catholics to office; and they granted the church no powers
of censorship, political representation, or other instruments of social control.
There were many journalists, pamphleteers, writers of books, and speakers in the
clubs who criticized or ridiculed the traditional faith; the authorities in the new
republics might deplore such outbursts as impolitic, but could hardly restrain
them, either in fact, or in accord with the new principles of free expression.
Whatever the law, the actual state of feeling was highly inflamed. The situation
was comparable, if less acute, in Protestant countries, in all of which some form