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Hilaire Belloc in the Late 1930s:

Prophet Against Revolution


by John P. McCarthy
from the Intercollegiate Review, Spring 1992
published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute
Jeff Nelson, of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, has very kindly granted permission to reprint
the following article. It is undoubtedly one of the most interesting recent treatments of Belloc’s
political views. John P. McCarthy offers fresh insights by drawing heavily on contemporary
journal articles and correspondence.
The major concerns in Hilaire Belloc’s writing about European affairs between
1919 and 1935 had been the rehabilitation and revival of the Prussian-dominated
German threat and the English disinterest in, and misunderstanding of, continental
affairs. But by the late 1930s Belloc had become much more alert to another
reality, the revolutionary threat to Western Civilization, especially to the Catholic
Church, that was inspired and fueled by Moscow. The event which seemed to
focus his awareness to the danger was the outbreak of civil war in Spain in July
1936.1 Belloc’s apprehension about the tendencies developing in Spain had been
expressed five years earlier when, after the Spanish Republic had been proclaimed
in April 1931, followed by a number of church burnings and the expulsion of the
archbishop of Toledo, he saw developing “a battle royal between the anti-Catholic
forces, organized under Masonry in that country, and the Catholic Church.” The
outcome would have a tremendous effect on the struggle between the two main
forces at work in the rest of Europe since the Great War:
...the traditional Catholic culture founded upon a peasantry with its strong
form of continuity and its adherence to the old set of morals, its defense of
private property and the rest, on the one hand, and on the other twin forces
sprung from the same root, that pagan industrial system..., and the equally
pagan and even viler remedy for pagan industrialism which we call in its
timid form, socialism, and in its more straight-forward and more direct
form, Communism.2
The relative indifference, if not outright approval, by journalists and other writers
of the anti-clerical atrocities behind Republican lines in the opening months of the
war seemed to confirm Belloc’s perception of the situation. The virtual unanimity
of pro-Republican sentiment among English literary and intellectual circles no
doubt made him and the few pro-Nationalist writers all the more adamant and
determined in championing the Nationalist cause. Belloc’s friend and intellectual
ally, Douglas Jerrold, editor of the English Review, to which Belloc occasionally
contributed, played a significant role in the actual launching of the Nationalist
uprising that started the Spanish Civil War, as he provided the plane that flew
Franco from the Canaries to Morocco to begin the war. Some of Belloc’s allies
were Arnold Lunn, then a young man greatly influenced by Belloc in his own
career as Catholic apologist, and the poet Roy Campbell, who actually went to
Spain and joined the Nationalist forces.3 The Catholic Church in England, and
probably even more so in Ireland, was strongly pro-Nationalist, although there
were some dissenting voices, including the Dominican publication, New
Blackfrairs.4 Significantly some of the secular press, including the Daily Mail,
supported the Nationalists and emphasized the anti-clerical atrocities. More
importantly, the British government and the foreign office did not support the
established Republican government in Madrid and, indeed, might seemingly have
been neutral in favor of the Nationalists.5
There has been a tendency to forget the enormity of the anti-clerical deeds in the
opening year of the war. One historian, who while a Catholic is scarcely pro-
Nationalist, claims that in numbers and intensity these atrocities were more severe
than any persecution suffered by the Church in modern times, including the
French Revolution and the communization of Eastern Europe. Those killed
included 4,184 secular clergy, 2,365 regular clergy, and 283 nuns, and most from
July to December of 1936.6
The interpretation of the Spanish civil war took a decidedly religious flavor in the
United States, as the official Catholic Church was firmly pro-Nationalist, with
dissent appearing only in a few circles, including Commonweal (even though its
founding editor, Michael Williams, supported the Nationalists), the pacifist
Catholic Worker, and the diocesan press in Chicago, while a virtual united front of
academics, intellectuals, publicists, and Protestant clergy supported the
Republican side. The adherence by the otherwise liberal Roosevelt administration
to a strict non-interventionist policy with regard to Spain was a commentary on
the political strength that American Catholicism had achieved by the late 1930s, at
least in the negative sense of being able to inhibit what it opposed, if not advance
what it championed.7 It is against this background that we must view and
appreciate the significance of Belloc’s last visit to the United States in the earlier
part of 1937.
He came to lecture at Fordham University’s Graduate School for the spring
semester at the request of its president, Rev. Robert I. Gannon, S.J. His lectures
were subsequently published by Fordham University Press and entitled the Crisis
of Civilization. While in New York he participated in the pro-Nationalist
campaign, including being the major speaker at a Carnegie Hall rally on March
19, held under the auspices of the Alumni Association of Fordham University,
attended by more than 3,000 people, and also addressed by Father Gannon.
Belloc’s message was predictable: the conflict was “a war between that which
made our civilization, that by which it still lives—the Christian religion —and
that which would root out and destroy.” In contrast to those who found the
religious component of the war to be either irrelevant or confusing, Belloc
insisted that:
The religious issue in all this affair is not negligible; it is not even
secondary; it is all in all. If the anti-Christian mastery of the movement has
full play it will destroy us; if the Christian spirit counterattacks with
sufficient strength it will recapture our civilization, give to the new
instruments of production a human use and renew the world again as it did
those many centuries ago when it saved Europe from the Mohammedan,
from barbarism and the Pit.8
One week later a letter to the editor of the New York Times questioned the
credibility of Belloc’s identification of the Spanish Nationalists with the cause of
Christianity. In particular, the letter argued that such an identification was
doubtful because of the fact that 70,000 “black Mohammedans” were brought to
fight in Spain at the behest of General Franco, and because civilian targets were
being bombed by the Nationalist air force. 9 This criticism of Belloc paralleled the
criticism of the Nationalists by significant Catholics, especially in France, such as
Jacques Maritain, François Mauriac, and Georges Bernanos. They condemned the
retaliatory executions of Republican prisoners and the bombardment of the very
Catholic, but pro-Republican, Basque territory.10
However, Belloc continued to emphasize the Armageddon-like character of the
war. The struggle was not one between the exploited proletariat and the exploiters,
for he believed the remedying of that situation had begun. Rather, the new danger
was of “a breakdown of all that by which men spiritually live—freedom, the
home, and possession.” Those pillars of civilization had to be saved against the
“modern Revolution” which is driven, not so much by anger or the need of the
oppressed, but by the desire to “destroy the Church of God.” He sought to
reconcile his own life long radicalism and criticism of the industrialist-capitalist
establishment with his present, seemingly conservative, position:
I would say to them, to those who support the revolutionary idea, to those
who abhor the injustice which the poor have suffered and who sympathize,
as I have all my life, with the revolt against the industrial system—I would
say to them: Be as radical as you like in that, be as revolutionary as you
please—some will be with you, others against you; I, for one, shall be
inclined to be with you—but when you mix up with it the much more
important affair of the Catholic Church, when you threaten that (as you do
threaten), when you desire to destroy that—then you are killing Europe;
you are killing our civilization; you are killing us, and we will not have
it.11
Writing for G.K.’s Weekly in October, 1937, Belloc noted that the revolutionary
threat had been curbed momentarily in Italy and Germany, but was fearful that “in
France, the issue is still doubtful, and it is in France that the battle will ultimately
be decided.” He described the revolution as a rejection by the exploited of the
intolerable state of affairs that was industrial capitalism. But that mood of outrage
was exploited by men moved by a sense of justice and pity, but “much more
effectively, a sense of hatred.” This was especially the case “in the unrooted
cosmopolitan revolutionary, who hates the civilization wherein he feels himself an
alien.” Accordingly “the characteristic note of the revolution...is that it is wholly
destructive” and “chiefly concerned with ending once and for all the fruits of our
ancestral religion.”12
Belloc’s concern about the state of affairs in France prompted several articles in
1938 in which he saw the strength and nature of the support for Communism as
“not a vote for Communism but a vote of protest against the conditions of
industrial life.” While the discontent, often violent, was concentrated in the urban
areas, the non-industrialized masses in the countryside were also dissatisfied
because of the disproportionate burden borne in the Great War by the peasantry.
He interpreted the New Deal type reforms of the Popular Front Government in
1937, which regulated the hours of labor and wages and required collective
bargaining, as being “very hasty, unconsidered decrees,” none of which worked
“towards the better distribution of property, which alone could have given
stability.” Instead these reforms disturbed the lives of small shopkeepers, small
artisans and the rest, with the effect being not to make life easier for the
proletarian minority, “but to throw the whole of social life out of gear,” pleasing
“no one but the masters of highly organized labor on a large scale.”13
Contributory to the social disharmony that fed Communism in a France that had a
system of relatively well-divided property was the increasing “impersonal control
of capital by the State” and the ruin of the currency through public indebtedness.
Behind this and the destruction of a proprietary society was “the twin force of
large organized capital and organized theoretical communism” that were served
by “the professional politician who goes by the name of ‘Blum.’”14
France, Belloc believed, needed what most other European nations had turned to,
which was “monarchy.” Monarchy he defined as “the exercise of political power
by an authority too rich to be bribed and too strong to be bullied.” It could be
elective, as was the American presidency, or it could be like the new monarchies
of Germany and Italy, towards each of which Belloc had a strikingly different
attitude:
The new German monarchy proclaims a most extravagant and quite
untraditional social philosophy. It inherits from the madness of Nietzsche.
The new Italian monarchy is not only traditional but deifies its tradition. It
lives on the real memory of Rome while the German monarchy lives on a
fantastic and unreal supposed original Teutonic barbarianism. The new
Italian monarchy evokes the classics: the new German monarchy evokes
Wagnerian actors elderly and bawling in tow colored wigs. The new
Italian monarchy understands rivals, friends, and neutrals; the new
German monarchy understands nothing but itself—a thing not difficult to
understand. But the major and permanent difference between the two is in
their contrasting attitude toward the religion that made Europe. The Italian
monarchy is homogeneous in its religion and respectful of Christian
tradition. Absolute government will always clash with the Church but the
Italian Government knows what the Church is and will maintain it. With
the new German experiment it is exactly the opposite. Those who have
undertaken the German experiment suffer from a common illusion of the
uninstructed—they think the Christian thing has come to an end.15
This perspective explains Belloc’s hoped-for remedy for France—the destruction
of “the whole system of professional politicians for good and all—perhaps at the
expense of fighting, but anyhow destroy it.” Then, “with a patriotic national
government, under a strong central hand,” guilds could be established, usury
scaled down on the large units of debt, and the state “re-established.”16
Needless to say, Belloc found such an ideal monarch in the Spanish Nationalist
leader, General Franco, with whom he had an audience in early 1939 toward the
end of the war. He was quite uninhibited in his enthusiasm, calling Franco “a man
last in succession to those many who on the same general battlefield of Europe
have endured, planned and achieved Europe’s recovery.” Seeing him in the line of
Charlemagne, Roland, and Godfrey of the First Crusade, he sensed in his presence
“the air of what has always been the salvation of Europe—I mean the Spanish
man at arms.”17
In a somewhat more reflective analysis of the Nationalist victory a few months
later he displayed an understanding of both sides of the conflict when he
recognized the “conviction among the factory workers that the Catholic Church is
their enemy.” The Church had been associated with the rich in the minds of
revolutionary town workers, “Hence the desecration of shrines, the burning of
churches...and the wholesale massacre of priests and religious.” But that
experience provoked and “united in opposition those who were devoted to the
ancestral religion and those who held it merely by custom.” 18 In addition, shortly
after he returned from his trip to Spain, Belloc noted in a private letter that:
Already in Spain there are signs of anger interfering with the proper solution. The
anger is justified over the abominable actions of the revolutionaries, though many
of them were inspired with a just exasperation with the old capitalist conditions,
which nearly destroyed Spanish society and traditions; but the danger is that in
chastising the excesses and putting things right again, they may embitter future
relations.19
Belloc’s preoccupation ever since the beginning of the Spanish Civil War with the
revolutionary and, more precisely, Communist threat to Western civilization and
especially to Catholicism, did not blunt his distaste for the Nazi regime in
Germany, but it did color his judgement on major international developments. For
instance, he took a unique position on the settlement made at the Munich
Conference in late September, 1938. He noted that as a result of the settlement,
“The new Bohemian state, called ‘Czechoslovakia’ by its parents, has ceased to
be...It will no longer have defensible frontiers” and “even abandons the right to
defend its existence by alliances.” He also noted that “The highly centralized
despotic Government of Berlin has been saved from what might have been its
destruction,” as “its army was not mature,...and could not have maintained a
campaign on certainly two fronts and possibly three.” On the other hand, he
warned “so long as the present unity of the Third Reich is maintained after its full
military strength has been reached in a few years time, it will be by far the
strongest state under arms in Europe,” and noted that “with the disappearance of
Bohemia the Third Reich will now command South Eastern Europe: that is,
inexhaustible supplies of all its needs: especially oil.” The conference showed
“The French Parliamentary oligarchy...incapable of maintaining the nation it
misgoverns,” and he feared a continual decline “until (if ever) it is replaced by a
strong central form of national government suited to the egalitarian temper of the
French people.” English power “also received a severe blow,” as its class
government “proved unequal to the task of providing an army adequate to its
policy,” and the education of its plutocracy was “equally inadequate to its task in
foreign affairs” as “it had supported the revival of Prussia” and had “no sense of
the nature and structure of Europe.” He saw no sign of change in terms of creating
an adequate army or education system even “after 20 years of accumulating
errors” had reached “this most humiliating climax with the obvious threat of
worse to come.” The only positive consequence of the conference was the
averting, for a time at least, of “that war in the West, the self-destruction of our
civilization, which the international gang at Moscow was aiming at.” This was
“the main result attained by Signor Mussolini” and “it perhaps counterweighs all
the losses and humiliations these days have imposed on us.”20
Travelling on the continent in such places as Spain, Portugal, Italy (where he
attended the coronation of Pius XII), and France, Belloc became more optimistic
about the alertness, especially in the latter country, to the German menace
following the Nazi takeover of the rump of Czechoslovakia in March of 1939.
Writing to Maurice Baring he said:
The effect of the German violent blunder has been to turn the French into
an angry swarm of bees, but their buzzing is of a silent sort, as is often that
of a swarm. They have suddenly stopped quarrelling among themselves,
which as you know with the French, is a portent.21
However, he said the French were disturbed at any thought in England of
approaching Moscow for an alliance against Germany for the reason “that the
Soviet influence in France, though much weaker than it was, is still a danger and
is detested by everybody, outside the now dwindling Communist clique.”22
On the other hand, Belloc believed that “the latest German outrage—the arbitrary
destruction of the Czech state, the loot of its armament and treasure and the single
and blatant repudiation by the head of the German Government of that
Government’s solemn pledges to this country and to all Europe” made difficult
the presentation of the Spanish Nationalist cause since it was “now identified in
the popular mind in England with the interests of Berlin.” While the Communists
had been defeated in Spain:
Unfortunately the evil force which supported them still stands and is still
at work, aiming at the destruction of our civilization. That is the major
issue and that will remain the major issue when all the present violent
acute effects of treasonable blundering in Berlin have passed. The issue
between the international revolutionaries and the Christian traditions of
Europe is and will remain the main issue.23
A month before war actually broke out, Belloc wrote that people in America
should not be hesitant about “travelling in Europe” because “of the false
atmosphere of panic.” While Hitler was a danger “because he is a revivalist, and
unaccountable, like all people who are troubled with lunacy, especially religious
megalomaniacs,” he doubted “whether Hitler or any of his surroundings will run
the risk of a military adventure.” Only the unlikely threat of internal commotion
in Germany, or a bad breakdown in France or Russia, would tempt the Germans to
act. In the same letter he repeated that other misjudgement in which he would
persist, even after war had started, that “Mussolini is a very sane and well-
balanced man, with a clear idea as to his own politics and the nature of other
nations.”24
When war did start as a consequence of the joint German-Soviet aggression on
one of Belloc’s favorite nations—Catholic and, in a Bellocian sense, monarchist
—Poland, it seemed to confirm a vision of Western Christendom being under
assault by the alliance of the revolutionaries and the neo-barbarians, or in the
words of Guy Crouchback, the hero of the Evelyn Waugh war-time trilogy: “The
enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the
Modern Age in arms.”25
Belloc’s writing career ended less than two years later as his health collapsed
under the weight of the defeat of his beloved France in 1940 and the death, while
in the service, of his second son, Peter, in early 1941. But his message of anti-
Communism would persist in the Anglo-American Catholic world throughout the
war and after the defeat of the “Prussian” menace and in spite of the infatuation of
so many others with the Soviet Union that had become an ally of the West after
being invaded by Hitler. No doubt Belloc today would be delighted with the
collapse of Bolshevism, and heartened by the appeal of the Polish-born Pontiff,
John Paul II, for Europeans—East and West—to abandon technocratic
materialism and consumerism and return to their cultural and spiritual heritage.
top of page

ENDNOTES
1. Jay P. Corrin, “Hilaire Belloc and the Spanish Civil War,” The Chesterton Review 12 (May 1986), pp. 201-
8.
2. “To Return to Spain.” America 45 (Oct. 10, 1931), pp. 11-13.
3. Katherine Bail Hoskins, Today the Struggle: Literature and Politics in England During the Spanish Civil
War (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969), pp. 26-7.
4. Jose M. Sanchez, The Spanish Civil War as a Religious Tragedy (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University
Press, 1987), pp. 172-83.
5. Margaret George, The Warped Vision: British Foreign Policy, 1933-9 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 1965), 93-112; K. W. Watkins, Britain The Effect of the Spanish Civil War on British Public Opinion
(London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1963), pp. 71-140.
6. Sanchez, pp. 8-9.
7. George Q. Flynn, Roosevelt and Romanism: Catholics and American Diplomacy, 1937-1945 (Westport,
Ct.: Greenwood, 1976), p.35.
8. New York Times, March 20, 1937.
9. Ibid., March 27, 1937.
10. Sanchez, 157-71; Frederick R. Benson, Writers in Arms: The Literary Impact of the Spanish Civil War
(New York: New York University Press, 1967), 29, pp. 216-9.
11. “The Issue,” Catholic Digest 1 (Sept. 1937), pp. 1-4.
12. “Revolution,” G.K.’s Weekly 26 (Oct. 7, 1937), pp. 76-8.
13. “France Weakens as Communism Grows,” America 58 (Jan. 29, 1938), pp. 393-4.
14. “Notes From France,” The Weekly Review 27 (August 18, 1938), pp.446-7.
15. “The Two Monarchies,” The Weekly Review 27 (August 25, 1938), pp.466-7.
16. “French Chaos,” G.K.’s Weekly 26 (January 20, 1938), pp.328-9.
17. “The Salvation of Spain,” The Tablet 173 (Feb. 25, 1939), pp.245-6.
18. “Commentary on the Spanish Victory,” The Tablet 174 (July 15, 1939), pp.71-2.
19. To J.S. Nickerson, Feb. 6, 1939, Boston College.
20. “The Result,” The Weekly Review (Oct. 6, 1938), pp.78-9.
21. To Maurice Baring, March 21, 1939, Boston College.
22. To Maurice Baring, March 25, 1939, Boston College.
23. To Lord Phillimore, n.d. (probably March 1939), Boston College.
24. To J.S. Nickerson, August 4, 1939, Boston College.
25. Evelyn Waugh, The End of the Battle (New York: Dell, 1961), p. vii. top of page

Article © 1992, Intercollegiate Review


reprinted with permission
Web format © 1997 Matthew M. Anger

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