What Is a Counter-Revolutionary?

CHAPTER IV

What is a counter-revolutionary? One may answer the question in two ways:

1. In Actuality

The actual counter-revolutionary is one who:

— knows the Revolution, order, and the Counter-Revolution in their respective spirits, doctrines, and methods;
— loves the Counter-Revolution and Christian order, and hates the Revolution and “anti-order”;
— makes of this love and this hatred the axis around which revolve all his ideals, preferences, and activities.

Of course this attitude of soul does not require higher education. Saint Joan of Arc was no theologian but astounded her judges by the theological profundity of her thoughts. So also, animated by an admirable understanding of the Revolution’s spirit and aims, simple peasants of Navarre, for instance, or of Vendee or Tyrol, have often been the best soldiers of the Counter-Revolution.

2. In Potentiality

Potential counter-revolutionaries are those who have one or another of the opinions and ways of feeling of revolutionaries, either because of inadvertence or some other occasional reason, but without the very depth of their personalities being affected by the spirit of the Revolution.

Alerted, enlightened, and oriented, these persons easily embrace a counter-revolutionary position. And in this they are different from the “semi-counterrevolutionaries” mentioned earlier.¹

^{1. See Part I, Chapter 9.}

Chapter V

The Counter-Revolution’s Tactics

The tactics of the Counter-Revolution can be looked at in the light of persons, groups, or currents of opinion in terms of three types of minds: the actual counter-revolutionary, the potential counter-revolutionary, and the revolutionary.

1. In Relation To The Actual Counter-Revolutionary

The actual counter-revolutionary is not as rare as one might think at first. He has a clear vision of things, a fundamental love for coherence, and a strong soul. For this reason he has a lucid notion of the disorders of the contemporary world and of the catastrophes looming on the horizon. But his very lucidity makes him perceive the full extent of the isolation in which he so frequently finds himself in a chaos that to him appears to have no solution. Thus, many times, the counter-revolutionary keeps a disheartened silence – a sad condition: Vae Soli (“Woe to him that is alone”), the Scriptures say.¹

A counter-revolutionary action must seek, above all, to detect such persons, acquaint them with each other, and lead them to support each other in the public profession of their convictions. This can be done in two different ways:

A. Individual Action

This action must be carried out first of all at the individual level. Nothing is more effective than the frank and proud counter-revolutionary stand taken by a young college student, an officer, a teacher, a priest especially, an aristocrat, or a blue-collar worker who is influential within his circle. The first reaction will sometimes be one of indignation. But if he perseveres, after a period that will vary depending on circumstances, gradually others will join him.

B. Combined Action

These individual contacts naturally tend to raise up in the different milieus several counter-revolutionaries who unite in a family of souls whose strength is multiplied by the very fact of their union.

2. In Relation To The Potential Counter-Revolutionary

Counter-revolutionaries should present the Revolution and the Counter-Revolution in all their aspects: religious, political, social, economic, cultural, artistic, and so on. This is necessary because potential counter-revolutionaries generally see the Revolution and the Counter-Revolution through only one particular facet. Through it they can and should be attracted to the total vision of the Revolution and the Counter-Revolution. A counter-revolutionary who argues in only one sphere — for example, politics — limits his field of attraction greatly, exposing his action to sterility and thereby to decay and death.

3. In Relation To The Revolutionary

A. The Counter-Revolutionary Initiative

There are no neutrals in face of the Revolution and the Counter-Revolution. There may indeed be noncombatants, whose will or velleities are in one of the two camps, whether consciously or not. By revolutionaries we mean, then, not only the integral and declared partisans of the Revolution but also the “semi-counterrevolutionaries.”

The Revolution has progressed, as we have seen, by hiding its complete face, its true spirit, and its ultimate aims.

The best way to refute it among revolutionaries is to show it in its entirety, whether as regards its spirit and the general outline of its action, or as regards each of its apparently innocent and insignificant manifestations or maneuvers. To thus snatch away its veils is to deal it the harshest of blows.

For this reason, the counter-revolutionary effort must dedicate itself to this task with the greatest diligence.

Secondarily, of course, other resources of well-conducted dialectics are indispensable for the success of a counter-revolutionary action.

There are certain possibilities of working together with the “semi-counterrevolutionary” as well as with the revolutionary who has counter-revolutionary “clots.” This collaboration creates a special problem: Up to what point is it prudent? As we see it, the struggle against the Revolution can only be properly developed by uniting persons who are radically and entirely free of the virus of the Revolution. It is very conceivable that counter-revolutionary groups may be able to work with the aforesaid elements for some concrete objectives. But to admit a total and continuous collaboration with persons infected with any influence of the Revolution is the most flagrant of imprudences and the cause of perhaps most counter-revolutionary failures.

B. The Revolutionary Counteroffensive

As a rule, the revolutionary is petulant, verbose, and strutting when he has no or only weak adversaries to face him. However, if someone proudly and daringly confronts him, he grows quiet and organizes a campaign of silence. One perceives amid the silence, however, the discreet buzz of calumny or some murmuring against the “excessive logic” of his adversary. But it is a confused and shamed silence that is never broken by any worthwhile rejoinder. In face of this silence of confusion and defeat, we could say to the victorious counter-revolutionary the spirited words written by Veuillot on a certain occasion: “Question the silence, and no answer will it make.”¹

4. Elites and Masses in the Counter-Revolutionary Tactics

To the extent possible, the Counter-Revolution should try to win over the multitudes. However, it should not make this its chief goal in the short run. The counter-revolutionary has no reason to be discouraged because of the fact that the great majority of men are not presently on his side. Indeed, an exact study of history shows us that it was not the masses who made the Revolution. They moved in a revolutionary direction because they had revolutionary elites behind them.

If they had had elites of the opposite orientation behind them, they likely would have moved in the opposite direction. An objective view of history shows that the factor of mass is secondary; the principal factor is the formation of elites. For this formation, the counter-revolutionary can always use the resources of his individual action, and can therefore obtain good results in spite of the shortage of material and technical means with which, at times, he may contend.

1. Eccles. 4:10.
2. Louis Veuillot, Oeuvres Completes (Paris: Lethielleux Librairie Editeur, n.d.), vol. 33, p. 349.

CHAPTER VI

The Counter-Revolution’s Means of Action

1. A Preference For Great Means Of Action

Of course, in principle, counter-revolutionary action deserves to have at its disposal the best means: television, radio, major press, and a rational, efficient, and brilliant publicity. The true counter-revolutionary should always tend to use these means, overcoming the defeatist attitude of some of his companions who immediately surrender all hope of using them because they constantly see them in the hands of the children of darkness.

However, we must recognize that, in point of fact, counter-revolutionary action will often have to be undertaken without these resources.

2. The Use Of Modest Means: Their Efficacy

Even so, and with the humblest of means, counter-revolutionary action can obtain very appreciable results if such means are utilized with uprightness of spirit and intelligence. As we have seen, a counter-revolutionary action is conceivable even if reduced to mere individual activity. But it is inconceivable without individual action, which, if well accomplished, opens the way for every progress.

Small journals of counter-revolutionary inspiration, if their standard is good, are surprisingly effective, especially in the foremost task of acquainting counter-revolutionaries with one another.

Equally effective, or more so, are books, a speakers’ platform, or a professorship at the service of the Counter-Revolution.

CHAPTER VII

Obstacles to the Counter-Revolution

1. Pitfalls To Be Avoided Among Counter-Revolutionaries

The pitfalls to be avoided among counter-revolutionaries very often consist of certain bad habits of agents of the Counter-Revolution.

The themes of counter-revolutionary meetings or publications should be carefully chosen. The Counter-Revolution should always be ideological in its approach, even when dealing with matters fraught with detail and incidentals. To go over questions of current or recent party politics may be useful, for example. But to overemphasize small personal questions, to make a struggle with local ideological adversaries the main objective of the counter-revolutionary action, to portray the Counter-Revolution as if it were a mere nostalgia (even though this nostalgia is, of course, legitimate) or a mere obligation of personal loyalty, however holy and just, is to depict the particular as if it were the general, the part as if it were the whole. It is to mutilate the cause one desires to serve.

2. Slogans of the Revolution

At other times, these obstacles consist of revolutionary slogans that are frequently regarded as dogma even in the best circles.

A. “The Counter-Revolution Is Out of Date”

The most prevalent and harmful of these slogans claims that the Counter-Revolution cannot flourish in our day because it is contrary to the spirit of the times. History, it is said, does not turn back.

If this peculiar principle were true the Catholic religion would not exist, for it cannot be denied that the Gospel was radically contrary to the milieu in which Our Lord Jesus Christ and the Apostles preached. Also, Germano-Romanic Catholic Spain would not have existed, for nothing is more like a resurrection, and hence in a certain way like a return to the past, than the full reconstitution of the Christian grandeur of Spain after the eight centuries from Covadonga to the fall of Granada. The Renaissance, so dear to revolutionaries, was itself, from various points of view at least, a return to a cultural and artistic naturalism that had been petrified for over a millennium.

History, then, contains comings and goings along the paths of good and the paths of evil.

Incidentally, whenever the Revolution considers something to be consistent with the spirit of the times, caution has to be exercised, for all too often it is rubbish from some pagan time that it wishes to restore. What is new, for example, about divorce, nudism, tyranny, or demagoguery, all of which were so widespread in the ancient world? And why is the advocate of divorce regarded as modem while the defender of indissoluble marriage is considered outdated? The Revolution’s concept of modern amounts to everything that gives free rein to pride and egalitarianism as well as to pleasure-seeking and liberalism.

B. “The Counter-Revolution Is Negativistic”

According to another slogan of the Revolution, the Counter-Revolution, by its very name, defines itself as something negative and therefore sterile. This is a mere play on words, for, based on the fact that the negation of a negation corresponds to an affirmation, the human spirit expresses many of its most positive concepts in a negative form: infallibility, independence, innocence, and others.

Would it be negativism to fight for any of these values just because of their negative formulation? Did the First Vatican Council perform a negativistic work when it defined papal infallibility? Is the Immaculate Conception a negativistic prerogative of the Mother of God?

If insistence on negating, attacking, and continuously watching the adversary is termed “negativistic” in current speech, then perforce the Counter-Revolution, without being merely a negation, has in its essence something fundamentally and wholesomely negativistic.

It is, as we have said, a movement directed against another movement, and it is unthinkable for one adversary in a fight not to have his eyes fixed on the other, maintaining an attitude of polemics, attack, and counterattack.

C. “The Counter-Revolutionary Is Argumentative”

A third catch phrase criticizes the intellectual works of counter-revolutionaries for their negativistic and polemical character, whereby they overemphasize the refutation of error instead of simply explaining the truth in a clear manner indifferent to the correction of error. These works are deemed counterproductive, for they irritate the adversary and drive him away. Save for possible excesses, this seemingly negativistic approach is profoundly justified.

As previously stated, the doctrine of the Revolution was contained in the denials of Luther and the early revolutionaries, but it was only made explicit very gradually over centuries. Accordingly, counter-revolutionary authors sensed from the very beginning—and legitimately so—that in all revolutionary formulations there was something which transcended the formulations themselves. Within each stage of the revolutionary process it is much more important to consider the mentality of the Revolution than simply the ideology enunciated in that particular stage. If such work is to be profound, efficient, and entirely objective, the progress of the Revolution’s march must be followed step by step in a painstaking effort to make explicit what is implicit in the revolutionary process. Only in this way is it possible to attack the Revolution as it should be attacked. All this has obliged counter-revolutionaries to keep their eyes fixed on the Revolution, while elaborating and affirming their theses in terms of its errors. In this arduous intellectual labor, the doctrines of truth and order that exist in the sacred deposit of the Magisterium of the Church constitute the treasury from which the counter-revolutionary draws things new and old¹ to refute the Revolution as he sees deeper and deeper into its tenebrous abysses.

Thus, in several of its most important aspects, counter-revolutionary work is wholesomely negativistic and polemical. For analogous reasons, the ecclesiastical Magisterium more often than not defines truths in relation to the heresies arising in the course of history, and it formulates these truths as a condemnation of the opposing errors. The Church has never feared that she would harm souls by acting in this way.

3. Wrong Attitudes In Face Of The Revolution’s Slogans

A. Ignoring Revolutionary Slogans

The counter-revolutionary effort must not be bookish. In other words, it cannot content itself with dialectics against the Revolution at a purely scientific, academic level. While recognizing the great, even very great, importance of this level, the Counter-Revolution must habitually keep its sights trained on the Revolution as thought, felt, and lived by public opinion as a whole. In this sense, counter-revolutionaries ought to give very special importance to the refutation of revolutionary catch phrases.

B. Eliminating the Polemical Aspects of Counter-Revolutionary Action

Sadly, the idea of presenting the Counter-Revolution in a more “sympathetic” and “positive” light by preventing it from attacking the Revolution is the most efficient way to impoverish its content and dynamism.²

Anyone who employs this lamentable tactic displays the same lack of sense as a chief of state who, in face of enemy troops crossing his border, were to halt all armed resistance in the hope of neutralizing the invader by gaining his sympathy. In reality, he would destroy the impetus of the reaction without stopping the enemy. In other words, he would surrender his homeland.

This does not mean that the language of the counter-revolutionary should not show nuances befitting the circumstances.

The Divine Master, when preaching in Judea, which was under the proximate influence of the perfidious Pharisees, used strong language. On the contrary, in Galilee, where the simple-hearted people predominated and the influence of the Pharisees was smaller, His language was more tutorial and less polemical.

1. Cf. Matt. 13:52.
2. See Part II, Chapter 8, 3, B.

CHAPTER VIII

The Processive Character of the Counter-Revolution, and the Counter-Revolutionary “Shock”

1. There Is a Counter-Revolutionary Process

It is evident that, like the Revolution, the Counter-Revolution is a process, and therefore its progressive and methodical march toward order can be studied.

Nevertheless, there are some characteristics that profoundly differentiate this march from the movement of the Revolution toward complete disorder. This results from the fact that the dynamism of good is radically different from the dynamism of evil.

2. Typical Aspects Of The Revolutionary Process

A. In the Rapid March

When discussing the two speeds of the Revolution, we saw that some souls arc gripped by its maxims in a single moment and at once draw all the consequences of error.¹

B. In the Slow March

We saw also that others accept the revolutionary doctrine slowly, step by step. In many cases, this process develops continuously down through generations. A “semi-counterrevolutionary” who is strongly opposed to the paroxysms of the Revolution has a son who is less opposed to them, a grandson who is indifferent to them, and a great grandson who is fully integrated in the revolutionary flux.

The reason for this, as we have said, is that certain families have in their mentality, subconscious, and ways of feeling a remnant of counter-revolutionary habits and leaven that holds them partly bound to order. In such families the revolutionary corruption is not as dynamic, and therefore error can only advance in their spirits step by step, as it were, disguising itself.

This same slowness of rhythm explains how many people change their opinions enormously in the course of their lives. For example, as adolescents, they have a severe opinion about indecent fashions, according to the environment in which they live. Later, as customs “evolve” in a more dissolute direction, these persons adapt themselves to the successive fashions. As they grow old, they applaud styles of dress that in their youth they would have strongly condemned. They reached this point because they have passed slowly and imperceptibly through the nuanced stages of the Revolution. They had neither the perspicacity nor the energy required to perceive where they were being led by the Revolution, which was acting within and around them. Gradually, they ended up going perhaps even as far as a revolutionary of their own age who in his adolescence had opted for the first speed. Truth and goodness lie defeated in these souls, but not so defeated that, in face of a grave error and a grave evil, they might not suffer a start that at times, in a victorious and salvific way, will make them perceive the perverse depth of the Revolution and lead them to take a categorical and systematic attitude of opposition to all its manifestations. To avoid these wholesome shocks of the soul and these counter-revolutionary crystallizations, the Revolution moves step by step.

3. How To Destroy The Revolutionary Process

If this is bow the Revolution leads the immense majority of its victims, by what means can one of them separate himself from this process? Is this means different from that by which persons dragged by the high-speed revolutionary march convert to the Counter-Revolution?

A. The Many Ways of the Holy Ghost

No one can set limits to the inexhaustible variety of God’s ways within souls. It would be absurd to attempt to reduce such a complex matter to schemata. One cannot, then, in this matter, go beyond indicating some errors to be avoided and some prudent attitudes to be proposed.

Every conversion is a fruit of the action of the Holy Ghost, Who speaks to each one according to his necessities, sometimes with majestic severity and at other times with maternal suavity, yet never lying.

B. Nothing Should Be Hidden

Thus, in the journey from error to truth, the soul does not have to contend with the crafty silences of the Revolution nor with its fraudulent metamorphoses. Nothing it ought to know is hidden from it. Truth and goodness are thoroughly taught to it by the Church. Progress in goodness is not secured by systematically hiding from men the ultimate goal of their formation, but by showing it and rendering it ever more desirable.

The Counter-Revolution must not, then, disguise its whole breadth. It must adopt the eminently wise rules laid down by Saint Pius X as the normative code of behavior for the true apostle: “It is neither loyal nor worthy to hide Catholic status, disguising it with some equivocal banner, as if such status were damaged or smuggled goods.”² Catholics should not “veil the more important precepts of the Gospel out of fear of being perhaps less heeded or even completely abandoned.”³To this the Holy Pontiff judiciously added:

No doubt it will not be alien to prudence, when proposing the truth, to make use of a certain temporization when it is a matter of enlightening men who are hostile to our institutions and entirely removed from God. Wounds that have to be cut into, as Saint Gregory said, should first be touched with a delicate hand. But such skill would take on the aspect of carnal prudence if made a constant and common norm of conduct. This is all the more so since in this way one would seem to have very little regard for Divine grace, which is conferred not only upon the priesthood and its ministers but upon all the faithful of Christ, so that our words and acts might move the souls of these men.⁴

C. The “Shock” of the Great Conversions

Though we have decried the attempt to reduce this matter to simple schemata, it nevertheless seems to us that complete and conscious adherence to the Revolution as it concretely presents itself is an immense sin, a radical apostasy, from which one can only return by means of an equally radical conversion.

Now, according to history, it seems that the great conversions usually occur by a fulminating thrust of the soul caused by grace on the occasion of a given internal or external fact. This thrust is different in each case but often has certain similar features. In fact, when a revolutionary converts to the Counter-Revolution, this thrust not infrequently takes place along the following general lines:

a. In the soul of the hardened sinner who, in the rapid march of the process, went immediately to the extreme of the Revolution, there are always resources of intelligence and common sense and tendencies toward good that are more or less defined. Although God never deprives these souls of sufficient grace, He frequently waits until they have reached the very depths of misery, wherein He suddenly brings home to them the enormity of their errors and sins as if in a fulgurant flash. Only when he had fallen into the state where he would fain have filled his belly with the husks of the swine did the prodigal son really see himself as he actually was and return to his father’s house.⁵

b. In the lukewarm and shortsighted soul, which is slowly slipping down the ramp of the Revolution, there still act certain supernatural leavens not entirely refused; values of tradition, order, and religion still glow like embers under the ash. Such souls, by a wholesome shock in a moment of extreme disgrace, may also open their eyes and instantly revive everything that was pining and wasting away within them; it is the rekindling of the smoking wick.⁶

D. The Likelihood of This Shock in Our Days

Now, since all humanity finds itself in the imminence of a catastrophe, this seems to be precisely the great moment prepared by the mercy of God. Both high — and low — speed revolutionaries can open their eyes in the terrible twilight in which we live and be converted to God.

Without demagoguery, without exaggeration, but at the same time without weakness, the counter-revolutionary must zealously take advantage of the tremendous spectacle of this darkness to bring the facts home to the children of the Revolution, and thus produce in them the saving “flash.” To boldly point out the perils that beset us is an essential feature of an authentically counter-revolutionary action.

E. Showing the Whole Face of the Revolution

It is not sufficient to point out the risk that our civilization may disappear altogether. We must know how to reveal amid the chaos that envelops us the whole face of the Revolution in its immense hideousness. Whenever this face is revealed, outbursts of vigorous reaction appear.

For this reason, during the French Revolution and throughout the nineteenth century, the counter-revolutionary movement in France was stronger than ever before. Never had the face of the Revolution been seen so well. The immensity of the maelstrom in which the old order of things had been shipwrecked had suddenly opened the eyes of many people to a host of truths silenced or denied by the Revolution down through the centuries. Above all, the spirit of the Revolution had become clear to them in all its malice and in all its profound connections with ideas and habits long considered innocent by most people.

Thus, the counter-revolutionary must frequently unmask the whole face of the Revolution in order to exorcise the spell it casts upon its victims.

F. Pointing Out the Metaphysical Aspects of the Counter-Revolution

The quintessence of the revolutionary spirit consists, as we have seen, in hating, in principle and on the metaphysical plane, all inequality and all law, especially Moral Law. Moreover, pride, rebelliousness, and impurity are precisely the factors that most impel mankind along the way of the Revolution.⁷

Therefore, one of the very important parts of counter-revolutionary work is to teach a love for inequality considered on the metaphysical plane, for the principle of authority, and for Moral Law and purity.

G. The Two Stages of the Counter-Revolution

a. With the radical change of the revolutionary into a counter-revolutionary, the first stage of the Counter-Revolution ends in him.

b. The second stage may take quite a long time. In it, the soul proceeds to adjust all his ideas and ways of feeling to the position taken in the act of conversion.

These two great and quite distinct stages delineating the counter-revolutionary process are presented here as they occur in a soul considered by itself. Mutatis mutandis, they may occur in large groups and even in whole peoples as well.

1. See Part I, Chapter 6, 4.
2. Saint Pius X, letter to Count Medolago Albani, President of the Socioeconomic Union of Italy, November 22, 1909, Bonne Press, Paris, vol. 5, p. 76.
3. Saint Pius X, encyclical Jucunda sane, March 12, 1904, Bonne Presse, Paris, vol. 1, p. 158.
4. Ibid.
5. Cf. Luke 15: 16-19.
6. Cf. Matt. 12:20.
7. See Part I, Chapter 7, 3.

 

Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira,  Revolution and Counter-Revolution (York, Penn.: The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property, 1993), Part II, Ch. IV – Ch. VIII, Pgs. 81-102.