On July 2, 2024, the X account for Bishop Robert Barron of Winona-Rochester posted a clip from a longer interview he had conducted with University of Notre Dame professor Patrick J. Deneen. Barron is famous for his incredible Catholic ministry, Word on Fire. In the clip, Deneen referred to three French counter-revolutionary figures—Louis de Bonald, ex-Cardinal Louis Billot, and Juan Donoso Cortés—that he believed provided cogent critiques of liberalism.

　　He referenced these figures with very little context. Viewers were led to believe that they were simply insightful men who recognized early on many of the defects of liberal governance. Though these thinkers were indeed critical of liberalism, it was imprudent to recommend them to a general audience without first providing caveats about the serious defects in their work, especially the antisemitism of Bonald, the conspiracy theorizing of Billot, and the authoritarianism of Cortés. If he was unwilling to supply this background, Deneen, in my view, should not have recommended these thinkers. If he insisted on raising them anyway, Bishop Barron should not have included this part of the interview.

　　When I raised these concerns on X, Deneen accused me of trying to “cancel” him as an antisemite like, he believed, Yasha Mounk had attempted to do in the past. One could reasonably suspect that Deneen made this accusation to deflect attention from his dubious recommendations, and in a sense, it worked: what followed was a heated debate about antisemitism and cancel culture. However, Deneen neglected to address my core concerns. Was he aware of how deeply problematic these thinkers were? Does he have a reason to recommend them to Bishop Barron over, say, Edmund Burke? He did not say. To my knowledge, he still has not (though I cannot investigate the matter for myself, since Deneen blocked me on social media).

　　If Deneen is unwilling to give important background on the writers he recommends, someone ought to do so. This article, accordingly, will review the three figures in question. Bonald was one of the architects of modern French antisemitism. He condemned the French Revolution not only for its tremendous violence and waste but also for the emancipation of the Jews, who he thought should remain in ghettos until their conversion to Catholicism. Billot belonged to the antisemitic monarchist party Action Française, and was a major opponent of the Modernist Heresy in France. His strident opposition to Modernism eventually overwhelmed his sense of ecclesial responsibility, leading him to defy the pope he once called on others to obey. Finally, Cortés advocated dictatorship as a solution to parliamentary disagreements and the formation of political parties opposed to the Spanish monarchy. This recommendation was deeply troubling, and it also did not work, as the Spanish went through strong man after strong man until Francisco Franco died in 1975. To highlight one of these figures would be an honest mistake. Three looks more deliberate.

　　Bonald and “Sur les Juifs”

　　Louis de Bonald (1754-1840) was a French anti-revolutionary thinker. His most famous works in English are compiled in The True and Only Wealth of Nations. In the titular essay and others, he argues that true wealth comes from an established hierarchical order rooted in land ownership of the aristocracy, the indirect role of the Church in French lawmaking, and the preservation of the family. The Industrial Revolution had changed this order for the worse. Put simply, Bonald viewed the Industrial Revolution and its consequences as a disaster for the human race. He approaches the subject with a characteristically reactionary frame of mind. Back in the old days of agricultural estates, there was peace, but the industrial order had ushered in a new age of social unrest.

　　The cause for this unrest, according to Bonald, was the emphasis on production and efficiency over the higher things in life. Economists like Adam Smith, he believed, treated productivity as superior to virtue, and nations adopting the Smithian frame would rapidly achieve productivity at the expense of virtue. Vice would then climb, giving rise to conflict. The old aristocracy was powerless to stop this because it had been unseated by a new class of merchants who exemplified what he called the “triumph of the small mind,” preferring administrative rules to personal relations.

　　Bonald seemed to blame Smith for the collapse and partial dissolution of the aristocratic classes during the French Revolution. He never quite established the connection between the two, however. Moreover, there is little in Bonald to account for the incredible good Smith had observed in Scotland. The emergence of trade and markets had improved dramatically the quality of life among ordinary Scots, although aristocrats, like Bonald, had reason to lament the decline of monopolies that had once sustained them. It is no wonder, then, that he would see the rise of “new men” as an encroachment on his position.

　　This is not the most unsavory of Bonald’s views. His “Sur les Juifs,” as yet untranslated into English, is an antisemitic conspiracy theory published in 1806 in the Mercurie de France, in which he ties the principles of the Revolution to the emancipation of the Jews, saying, “The Assembly provisionally declared the Jews to be active citizens of the French Empire, a title that—in consideration of the newly decreed rights of man—was then regarded as the highest honor and blessedness to which a human creature could aspire.” The original cause for its publication was a controversy over the economic position of Jews in Alsace. Responding to the Revolutionary emancipation of French Jews from harsh antisemitic laws, Bonald declared it to be not just a scandal but a threat to the survival of the French nation. Like the emancipated Black French slaves, Jews, for Bonald, were parasites on the French way of life and an alien class of people. As he said:

　　If the Jews had been spread throughout France, united among themselves like all who suffer for a common cause, and on good terms with foreign Jews, they would have made use of their wealth to acquire vast influence in popular elections and then used their influence to acquire greater wealth. I believe that up to now, more focused on wealth than on power, they have partially carried out such a scheme by employing their capital in large acquisitions.

　　The Revolution, according to Bonald, was “always friendly to the Jews” and allowed them to engage in usury that had despoiled much of the French gentry. Their emancipation was “the enormous and willful fault … in contradiction to laws and morals.” He viewed the Jews as the ultimate expression of Smithian commercial society, noting wistfully how, under the ancien regime, they had rightly remained in ghettoes until their conversion. Under emancipation, using industrial, commercial society as their source of power, they instead flourished while the aristocracy crumbled. Bonald believed that French Jews would use commercial success to establish themselves as a new kind of feudal overlord, as he believed they had undone Alsace:

　　We would have seen the same legislators, at the same time they were suppressing a feudal nobility that had become irrelevant and harmless, extending all their protection to this new feudalism of the Jews, the real high and mighty lords of Alsace, where they receive as much as a tenth of income as well as seigniorial dues. And indeed, if in philosophical terms feudal is a synonym for oppressive and odious, I know of nothing more feudal for a province than eleven million in mortgages owed to usurers!

　　According to Michele Battini,

　　Bonald began the propaganda campaign against the Jews of the French Empire and the Kingdom of Italy, which soon led to grave limitations on the legal equality and citizenship rights of the Jews. This was the new paradigm that arose in those years: the old enemies of Christianity had become equal to all other citizens and in fact constituted a hostile power within the national Christian community; thanks to the democratic guarantees they had obtained, the Jews could now with impunity conspire to use their economic power to conquer political power. As a consequence, the fight against “Jewish” capitalism should have been directed against its main protectors, namely, liberal institutions and the constitutional state.

　　In short, Bonald’s article in Mercure de France was not a fluke position that one can bracket out of his broader oeuvre. Rather, it formed the core of the conspiracy theory he attributed to figures like Adam Smith, Voltaire, and the Jews; moreover, this conspiracy theory, later known as the “Judeo-Masonic” conspiracy theory, dominated reactionary political narratives ever after.

　　Billot, Maurras, and the Judeo-Masonic Conspiracy

　　Ex-Cardinal Louis Billot argued against liberalism in his 1921 pamphlet Liberalism: A Criticism of Its Basic Principles and Divers Forms, in which he extensively cites vehement antisemites Louis Veuillot and Charles Maurras (a personal friend). Billot was a Catholic integralist, theologian, a chief opponent of the Modernist Heresy, and a member of the French proto-fascist and antisemitic party Action Française. On a first reading, his pamphlet against liberalism seems relatively free of the antisemitism one would expect from a member of Action Française, but it is visible if one knows what to look for and where to find it.

　　A hint is in the English language introduction by Fr. G. B. O’Toole of St. Vincent Seminary (now St. Vincent College). O’Toole introduced Billot’s book with a discussion of the liberty preached by the Church and “Masonic liberty, equality, and fraternity” which were “the veriest caricatures of those sublime ideals to which Catholic Christianity applies the terms.” The mention of Freemasonry might strike the reader as merely odd, since most Americans are not preoccupied with a men’s secret fraternal association best known for raising money for hospitals and being the subject of the National Treasure movie franchise. However, among a subset of especially traditional Catholics, the Freemasons were taken to be part of an international cabal, together with the Jews, to undermine Catholic confessional states.

　　Bonald did not just happen to be an antisemite in his personal opinions; rather, he integrated that antisemitism into an apocalyptic vision anticipating the final triumph of liberalism.

　　Since Bonald’s writing, figures of the French reactionary ideology like Louis Veuillot, Henri Roger Gougenot des Mousseaux, and Édouard Drumont had espoused this theory as an explanation for why the throne and altar were blameless for the start of the French Revolution. Billot uses the same pastoral mythology to explain himself: prior to the Revolution, there was a proper order to French affairs, and the conspiracy that Bonald feared had begun in Jewish cooperation with the Enlightenment liberals, who were later grouped together by Veuillot, Mousseaux, and Drumont into the Masonic Lodge. The public face of the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy was, according to these conspiracy theorists, liberalism itself. Liberals promised a life unconstrained by tradition and therefore empowered by personal expression, but these were empty promises meant to conceal the real point of liberalism, which was to set the groundwork for establishing a vast, oppressive state intended to annihilate the Catholic Church. The mirage of liberty was a ruse to trick the people into establishing such a state.

　　Billot’s book on liberalism falls squarely within this broader tradition. The term “liberalism” itself refers to the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy in its public efforts to undermine the position of the Church in France.

　　The style of Billot’s writing illustrates as much. He speaks of “Liberalism” as a united force with its architects’ true intentions unstated but observable nevertheless in their political ambitions. Liberals may speak of liberty, equality, and fraternity, but what they really want is the power to destroy the traditional Christian way of life, in France and all over the world:

　　It was not until the first part of the eighteenth century that infidelity became a real power. Thereupon it is seen to spread with incredible rapidity to every quarter. From the palace to the cabin, it insinuates itself everywhere, it infests everything; it has invisible channels, an action secret but infallible, such that the most attentive observer, witnessing the effect, is sometimes at a loss to discover the means. Through an incomprehensible sort of prestige it manages to make itself beloved by the very ones of whom it is the deadly enemy, and the very authority which it is about to immolate, stupidly embraces it just before the blow. Soon a simple system becomes a formal association, which by rapid transition changes itself into a plot, and finally a grand conspiracy which covers the whole of Europe. …

　　Liberty is the pretext, liberty is the idol to seduce nations; the idol which has hands and feels not, which has feet and walks not; an inanimate god behind which Satan prepares to reduce the nations to a servitude far worse than that which he had bound the world by means of the material idols of paganism. …

　　This, then, is the final conclusion of the present article that Liberalism seeks the overthrow of religion, when under the lying name of liberty, it enters the domestic, the economic or political order.

　　The careful reader will note that the timing of Billot’s “spreading infidelity”—early eighteenth century—coincides with the founding of the Masonic Lodge in 1717, when it came to France by way of the Stuart exile from England, from the palace to the cabins of ordinary Frenchmen unaware of what was to befall them. As this snippet illustrates, Billot does not substantially engage with liberal ideas but rather seeks to expose them as a grand satanic conspiracy against the Church. To that end, he constantly ascribes to “Liberalism” a conspiratorial agency, treating it as an infernal entity coordinating a host of shadowy actors over a vast number of nations. This is not a serious work, either of cultural criticism or political theory. It is yet another example of reactionary narrative building.

　　Billot was an influential member of Action Française, as one of its most highly placed and committed allies in the French Catholic hierarchy. He was close friends with Maurras, the founder of the party, who carved out the party’s defining position during and in response to the Dreyfus Affair, a deeply antisemitic effort of the French government to convict an Alsatian Jew and French military officer of treason. (Note that Alfred Dreyfus, the falsely accused Jewish officer, was from precisely the same region of France that gave Bonald fits over French Jews).

　　Given the party’s origins and Maurras’ own views, it is no surprise to learn that Action Française opposed what Maurras called the “four confederated estates” of Protestants, Freemasons, foreigners, and Jews. When rumors circulated about Pope St. Pius X condemning Maurras and his writing in 1914, Billot intervened with a personal audience with the pope, where he presented a specially bound copy of L’Action française et la religion catholique, to persuade the pope to change his mind. The response of Pius X was that Maurras was “a good defender of the Holy See and of the Church.”

　　What did Maurras say in the book that Billot gave the pope? He explained how:

　　Alas! Liberal, radical, and Masonic Jewish anticlericalism has made enough advances … from the tempters of Louis XVI to certain shady agents during the royalist crisis of 1910—so that it is no longer said that fidelity to Catholicism, that raises certain immediate obstacles to the royalist design, simplifies or facilitates it.

　　Like Billot, Maurras sees a “spreading infidelity” that moves from palace to cabin under the nefarious direction of shadowy agents. When describing what Action Française had done to thwart the liberals in the Third Republic, Maurras boasts, “Alongside the attacks given to the Freemason [Amédée] Thalamas or the Jew [Henry] Bernstein, who are protected by all the forces of the state, there is a series of campaigns led by Maurice Pujo” against a series of enemies of French Catholicism. Here, Maurras was boasting about the exploits of the Camelots du Roi, a French integralist gang led by Pujo who used violence to intimidate Maurras’ opponents during the Thalamas Affair of 1904. This was the book that Billot chose to give the Holy Father. It is sad that it moved him to spare Maurras rather than condemn him even more emphatically. As Fr. Martin Rhonheimer has written, the popes of this period were not immune to these ideas either.

　　However, the pope’s successor, Pope Pius XI, was unmoved and condemned Action Française in 1926, four years after Billot’s antiliberal pamphlet appeared in English. The condemnation required all Catholics to leave the party. Many in Action Française, at least initially, resisted. In response, Billot sent a message to Léon Daudet, an Action Française politician, antisemite, and then-future Nazi collaborator, commending them for their refusal. The message was subsequently leaked. Pius XI was furious and demanded Billot rescind his statement. Billot refused.

　　In a compromise with the pope, Billot decided to step down as cardinal and retired to private life at an Italian novitiate. So committed was he to the political vision of Action Française that he surrendered his own position in the Church in a kind of misguided martyrdom to right-wing authoritarianism and antisemitism. It was a tragic outcome in light of Billot’s tremendous work in dogmatic theology, but he brought it on himself.

　　Cortés and Dictatorship

　　Deneen’s third thinker, Juan Donoso Cortés, was an important politician and diplomat in mid-nineteenth-century Spain. A descendent of the explorer Hernán Cortés, Cortés was a liberal monarchist early in his life, but the anti-clerical nature of the Spanish republicanism drove him further and further right, ultimately pushing him into reactionary political positions after the Revolution of 1848. Cortés was friends with Veuillot, who encouraged him to publish his essays against liberalism and socialism. He also corresponded with Pope Pius IX, and according to R. A. Herrera, the substance of Cortés arguments found their way into the 1864 papal encyclical Quanta cura and the Syllabus of Errors.

　　In his essays, Cortés defended dictatorship as the solution to the threat Spanish liberals posed to the preservation of the Spanish monarchy. Drawing from figures like Joseph de Maistre, he staked out a negative view of human liberty. Once emancipated, Cortés predicted, the people would engage in tremendous vice like the kind found during prior nineteenth-century revolutions. The result would be a liberal dictatorship. If one had to choose between dictatorships, Cortés reasoned, the Catholic one was clearly preferable. Out of the three recommended authors, Cortés seems to have the least to say about either Jews or Freemasons. In the case of the Jews, that might be because they had been expelled from Spain in 1492, something that Cortés lamented in a letter to his friend Count Raczynski.

　　Cortés adopts a more generic discussion of the French Revolution and its subsequent revolutions. Returning to a now-familiar theme, he details how Spain was once a great, unified nation before the Revolution destroyed everything. Cortés pronounced on December 30, 1850:

　　Spain was constituted a nation by the Church, formed by the Church for the poor; the poor have been kings in Spain. Those who were tenant farmers held lands perpetually with the lowest rent, in reality, were proprietors. All the religious foundations in Spain were for the poor. The laborers had enough to give bread to their children with the wages they earned working on the glorious and splendid monuments of which Spain is full. And what beggar did not have a piece of bread as long as there was a convent open?

　　Well, Gentlemen, the revolution has come to change everything.

　　The pastoral imaginary he describes is simply fiction. Spain experienced instability and war before any modern revolution, as seen during the Reconquista, the Thirty Years War, or the War of the Spanish Succession. The last example is particularly telling. From 1701 until 1714, tens of thousands of Spaniards died or were wounded, while the poor not serving in the armies and navies suffered from limited access to necessities because of low productivity and the cessations of trade. This revolution was hardly the fruit of pernicious modern political ideologies, having been fought over the question of who should succeed to the throne after the last Habsburg king of Spain died from health issues caused by generations of inbreeding. No one was disputing at this point whether Spain should ever have had inbred kings. 

　　During a speech on January 30, 1850, Cortés claimed that he wanted Spain to have liberty, but that liberty was impossible because of political corruption and popular impiety. Oddly, Cortés insisted that the decline he lamented so colorfully had started as early as Constantine, and that the moral conditions of religion were already quite bad by the time the Church had laid Spain’s foundations. Consistency was not one of Cortés’ strongest suits.

　　He was reasonably clear on his preferred solution, however. The only real choices he saw were among types of dictatorship. Cortés insisted “that dictatorship in certain circumstances … is as legitimate a government, as good a government, as beneficial a government, as any other. It is a rational government, which can be defended in theory as well as in practice.” He even went so far as to argue that miracles could be understood as a kind of divine approval for dictatorship, to wit, “he manifests His will directly, clearly and explicitly breaking those laws which He imposed on Himself, changing the natural course of events. And when He acts this way, Gentlemen, could He not be said … to act dictatorially?” He concluded with one of his most famous declarations (if anything by Cortés could truly be called “famous”):

　　But the question is this: is it a matter of choosing between the dictatorship of insurrection and the dictatorship of government? In this case, I choose the dictatorship of government, as less oppressive and shameful.

　　It is a matter of choosing between a dictatorship which comes from below and a dictatorship which comes from above. I choose that which comes from above because it comes from pure and serene regions. It is a matter of choosing the dictatorship of the dagger and the dictatorship of the saber because it is the more noble.

　　Why would Deneen recommend such a political thinker to Bishop Barron? Does he favor the installation of a Catholic dictatorship? The history of such efforts is replete with failure, and has also prompted the disaffiliation of untold numbers of Catholics from the Church; the effects are still visible in Europe and Latin America today. It is worth noting, too, that Cortés served as a major influence on Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, who adopted Cortés’ view of dictatorship as his own and expanded it in a decidedly antisemitic direction. Schmitt’s decisions are clearly not Cortés’ fault, but the ease of application should at least give a person pause before recommending Cortés, especially since all recent work on Cortés now bundles him with Schmitt.

　　Separating the Wheat from the Chaff?

　　Deneen recommended deeply flawed critiques of liberalism to Bishop Barron, and he did so without caveats, asides, or any other warning about the unfortunate commitments at the heart of these critiques. Yet, some, including Deneen, have responded to my queries and critiques by calling me “anti-intellectual,” suggesting that I prefer to “cancel” thinkers for having bad arguments instead of salvaging the good ones. Aristotle, after all, is a foundational figure in philosophy, but he also held views on slavery and women that offend contemporary readers. Even the greatest philosophers are wrong from time to time.

　　Where are these good arguments, though? The “sifting” in the case of these three thinkers badly undermines the very critiques of liberalism that Deneen wishes to recommend. Bonald did not just happen to be an antisemite in his personal opinions; rather, he integrated that antisemitism into an apocalyptic vision anticipating the final triumph of liberalism. To “sift” here means to leave Bonald’s criticism in the dust heap of history where it belongs. Billot was not just a casual friend of Maurras’s but a committed member of Action Française whose commitment to antisemitic conspiracy theories framed his political views, and ultimately destroyed his clerical career. Cortés saw dictatorships as the necessary and inevitable response to liberalism, so his advocacy of dictatorship was central to his critique.

　　The question one must raise at this point is, “Why these three?” What is it about them that Deneen found so appealing? I cannot answer this question, but I can at least raise it. There is much to critique in contemporary liberalism, but Jewish emancipation from repressive laws is surely one of the pieces we should keep. Some historical traditions are worth recovering, but not organized antisemitic parties. Liberals can make mistakes, but they are right to call for a free government of equal citizens.

　　Deneen has attempted in the past to avoid the antisemitic, conspiratorial angle by “structuralizing” liberalism as a social force rather than an instrument for nefarious conspirators. With this foray into reactionary European thought, Deneen seems to be undoing his own work. For the sake of his own arguments, he should recommend better critics than these three.

　　Hence, my opposition stands. Deneen should not have recommended Bonald, Billot, or Cortés, but at the very least he should explain more clearly why, despite everything I have outlined, he thought them worthwhile. It is abundantly clear that these thinkers are ill-suited to critique contemporary American political problems or those facing liberal theory. It is up to Deneen to show that antisemitic conspiracy theorists and defenders of dictatorship are worth reading.