Roberto de Mattei
Corrispondenza Romana
January 8, 2020
Roberto de Mattei, Augusto Del Noce, Jean de Viguerie
The
French historian, Jean de Viguerie departed this life on December 15th
2019. Two weeks later, on December 30th , there was the 30th
anniversary of the death of the Italian philosopher Augusto del Noce. What did
these two figures of 20th century Catholic culture have in common?
Jean de Viguerie, born in Rome
in 1935, followed a brilliant academic career, becoming Professor emeritus at
the University of Lille-III, without ever making compromises to the dominant
culture. «La foi irriguait
toute la vie de Jean de Viguerie et nourrissait sa vie de professeur» wrote his disciple, Philippe Pichot Bravard.
Viguerie had a thorough, deep knowledge of the
20th century. In my opinion, his fundamental work is Christianisme et Révolution. Cinq leçons d’Histoire de la Révolution française (Nouvelles
Editions Latines, 1986). The reading of this book, alongside La Révolution française by Pierre Gaxotte (Edition by Jean
Tulard, Complexe, 1988) offers us a synthetic, but illuminating picture of what
happened in France between 1789 and 1795. His most original work though, is Les deux patries. Essai historique sur
l’idée de patrie en France (Dominique Martin Morin, 1998). The French
historian demonstrates how in the 19th century, a new concept of
« patria » superimposed itself on the traditional one, rooted in a
concrete place and a precise historical memory. It was in the name of this
ideology that France went into the First World War. The Union Sacrée of 1914, between nationalists of the left and the
right, was a continuation of the call to arms launched in 1792, when the
National Assembly declared “La Patrie en
danger!” [The Homeland is in danger!].
The French Revolution invented the slogan “annihilate
the enemy”, both internal and external, as happened with the “Infernal Columns”
which wiped out the insurgents at the Vendee between 1793 and 1794. The First World
War cost France one million, three-hundred thousand dead. The attack alone between
Soissons and Compiègne on April 16th 1917 - Viguerie points out - counted one-hundred
and sixteen dead, to gain five kilometers; three hundred and seventy thousand
were the victims in the first battle attack at Verdun in October 1916. These
victims were offered to the Revolutionary Moloch as the price for the destruction
of the Austria-Hungarian Empire, the last Catholic bastion against the work of
the French Revolution’s political and cultural destruction.
.
Viguerie was the biographer of Louis XVI and
his sister Elizabeth of France, to whom he dedicated the study Le sacrifice du soir (Cerf, 2010), which will certainly benefit the
process for the French princess’s beatification. He is also author of many
other works, some autobiographic, like the ’Itinéraire d’un historien (Dominique Martin Morin, 2000) and Le passé ne meurt pas (Via Romana 2016), rich in episodes and
anecdotes which help us understand not only his private life, but also 20th
century France.
Augusto del Noce, of a Piedmont family, was
born in Pistoia in 1910, but studied in Turin after the First World War. His
intellectual production can be considered speculatively opposed to the progressive
trend of thought which evolved in Turin itself, and which had among its most
well-known exponents, Norberto Bobbio and Umberto Eco.
When the 1968 Revolution erupted, Augusto Del
Noce, Professor at the University of Trieste, had to his credit, impressive
works of history and philosophy, like the volumes Il problema dell’ateismo (Il
Mulino, 1964) and Riforma cattolica e filosofia moderna (Il Mulino, 1965,
but his attention as a philosopher turned from then onwards to the
philosophical understanding of contemporary life.
Books published between the end of the 1960s and
the beginning of the 1970s were: Il
problema politico dei cattolici (Unione Italiana per il Progresso della
Cultura, 1967), L’epoca della secolarizzazione (Giuffrè, 1970) and Tramonto
o eclissi dei valori tradizionali (Rusconi, 1972) Il suicidio della
Rivoluzione (Rusconi, 1978) and, posthumous , Giovanni
Gentile. Per una interpretazione
filosofica della storia contemporanea
(Il Mulino, 1990).
In these books, Del Noce shows the cultural
continuity that exists in the diverse political regimes following one another
in Italy over the space of a century: Liberalism, Fascism and Anti-Fascism. The
thought of Francesco de Sanctis, Minister of Culture of the Italian
Risorgimento, the thought of Giovanni Gentile, Minister of Culture, ideologue
of Fascism and the thought of Antonio Gramsci, principal theorist of
Anti-Fascism in Italian Democracy after the Second World War, are fostered by Hegel’s Immanentism and follow a
path of progressive abandonment of traditional values. The
age of Revolution for Del Noce, is the age of rejecting these values in the
name of secularization, presented as a positive and necessary historical
process.
Del Noce identified the evil of contemporary Italian
culture under the category of “progressivism”, a vision of history based on the
idea whereby Fascism and not Communism represented the root evil of the
century. This implied as a consequence, the
necessary decline of Fascism and any ideal that in some way could be
related to it, starting with the traditional values upon which Western
Christian Civilization had been founded for centuries.
Against the idea of Revolution and the “spirit
of modernity”, based on the primacy of ‘becoming’ and thus the myth of the
irreversibility of progress, Del Noce pits
the idea of Tradition based on the philosophy of the primacy of Being or contemplation,
inevitably aimed, in his opinion, at rediscovering Plato, just like the
revolutionary philosophy of the primacy of ‘becoming’ has its most coherent
conclusion in Marx.
Unlike Jean de Viguerie, who belongs to the
counter-revolutionary school, Augusto Del Noce did not align himself with the
great thinkers of the French Restoration, but with the Italian School of
Rosmini and di Vico, the thinker he had wanted to dedicate his last book to,
but death prevented him from writing it. Nonetheless, like Viguerie, also Del
Noce saw in the French Revolution a cultural watershed which had marked the
political and cultural decline of the Christian West (cfr. R. de Mattei, La critica alla Rivoluzione nel pensiero
di Augusto Del Noce, Le Lettere 2019).
Cardinal Maria Martini, in his last interview given
a few days before he died, said “The Church is 200 years behind the times.” With
this quotation, Pope Francis on December 21st 2019, concluded his Christmas discourse to the
Roman Curia. Cardinal Martini’s idea is that the Church is two centuries behind
the times because it has not had its French Revolution. Pope Francis, Cardinal Martini’s heir, aims to
bridge this distance by bringing the Second Vatican Council to fulfillment.
Both the French historian and the Italian philosopher, were instead, convinced
that the embracing of the modern world proclaimed by Vatican II was the main
cause of the Church’s process of self-demolition.
On May 13th 1989, at the Palazzo Pallavicini in
Rome, an important conference on the French Revolution was held. It was on that
occasion Augusto Del Noce and Jean de Viguerie met. What united them was the
rejection of the revolutionary utopia, love for Tradition and a concern for the
crisis in the Church, of which they recognized the magnitude.
Augusto Del Noce died a few months later, while
the Berlin Wall was crumbling. Jean de Viguerie outlived him 30 years,
witnessing the crumbling and collapse of the West and the Church itself. They
belong to our historical memory, that which Viguerie called “the past that
never dies”.
Translation: Contributor Francesca Romana
