Reading French Catholic authors like Msgr. Delassus, American readers, (or any non-French ones), may wonder why the French seemed to be obsessed with their defunct kings and defunct monarchy. It is an ever-present theme in antimodern Catholic writings of the 19th and the early 20th century, and Catholics of these time tend to put defense of the religion and defense of the monarchy almost at the same level, indeed, they thought that the latter (restoring the monarchy) would be a condition for the former (restoring a Catholic society).
What non-French Catholics could find even more intriguing is the fact that the non-Catholic monarchist party Action Française was able to gather such a strong support from the French Catholics, to the point that many Catholic theologians and intellectuals, including Cardinal Billot, Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange, and Fr. Le Floch (mentor of Abp. Lefebvre) voiced their support for the party, before it was condemned in 1926 by Pope Pius XI.
Americans obviously have a different history when it comes to monarchy: you may wonder why a society would take the risk of granting absolute power to a single person, much so to the offspring of that person from generation to generation, without a “balance of powers” and without a guarantee that the descendants of this king would be good quality rulers. Isn’t it a strange thing? How could that be better than a “modern democracy,” touted as the greatest of all governments that have ever been (and will ever be)?
To the perplexed readers, we will try to explain what was the spirit of the French monarchy, what kind of value the French Catholics were finding in it, and why they used to be so passionate about it.
1- The King is the Lieutenant of God
The king was never supposed to be listened to and followed blindly, doing whatever he wanted while nobody could say anything about it. He had in fact a much superior law and a much superior will to obey: that of God almighty.
The six-hours long religious ceremony of coronation, the sacre taking place in the cathedral of Reims, is centered around that very idea: that the king receives his authority from God directly, that he has a special duty to make the law of God respected all across his kingdom and in every possible circumstance, that he has a special duty to protect the Church of God and to fight against heresy and unbelief.
The fact that the king is not elected, but is designated by male primogeniture, is, among other things, a way of giving a more sacred aspect to the monarchy: the king is not designated by the whimsical and arbitrary will of men (even though he still needs de facto the consent of the people), but by destiny, by the providence of God. He has not chosen to be the king, nor was he chosen to be, by anyone but God. Being raised in the royal family, the heir to the throne is trained from an early age in view of his sacred mission of government.
There was a truly supernatural aspect in the mission of the French king. Since the Baptism of Clovis, which was the creation of a new Catholic political power, in a decadent world filled with heretical rulers, the Frankish/French kings were believed to hold a special place in Christendom as temporal protectors of the Church, and were called “Elder Sons” by the Pope (an expression which would later be extended to their whole nation, the “Elder Daughter of the Church”). Various miracles surrounding the French monarchy, such as the sainte ampoule or the toucher des écrouelles (the fact that the king could touch and heal people suffering from scrofula), would express a particular blessing from God. At least in the instance of Saint Joan of Arc’s mission, God Almighty intervened directly to free France from her enemies, allow her to keep existing as an independent and free nation, and keep being ruled by her traditional rulers of the Capetian dynasty.
This glorious history have led to nationalistic exaggerations on the part of the French (presenting France as some kind of “New Israel,” a chosen nation among all others), to abuses of power from some French kings (who would present themselves as some sort of priestly persons, analogous to the Pope, and able to rule on religious matters), and religious exaggerations (Gallicanism directly draws inspiration from the idea that “France is special,” and that the French king is a sacred person). But one does not need these exaggerations to admire the Christian and supernatural mission of the French monarchy. Ultramontane French Catholics would also typically be monarchists.
To say that the French kings all fulfilled their sacred oath perfectly would be false. But it would be just as false to pretend that the sacre was a farce, a cynical attempt to legitimize one’s tyrannical power. In fact, even the worst kings tried to appease the Church and the people by trying to show themselves faithful to their sacred oath. This sacred mission of the French monarchy is probably what prevented the most-Gallican Louis XIV from committing definitive schism, and what led the most-debauched Henri IV to finally give up on Protestantism and embrace the Catholic cause. By law and tradition, it was impossible to be the French king and not to be united to the Catholic Church.
2- The King is the Father of the People
According to eyewitnesses, and especially to foreigners visiting France during the times of the monarchy, it was a distinctive characteristic of the French monarchy, ever since the depth of the middle ages, that the French loved their king as if he was their own father. One understands nothing of the French monarchy, its strength and its glory, if he does not understand the kind of affection and familiarity that existed between the king and his subjects.
The king could literally be seen, heard, and talked to by the most humble of his subjects; in fact, he had to be approached in such a way, to let people come to him, to hold the hands or the shoulders of his subjects, as if they were his own sons or nephews. It was a key element of the strength of the French monarchy. Since the 11th century, the king’s permanent residence has been in Paris. Back in those days, the door of the king’s palace was open to anyone. People would come in simply to greet the king and to get some news about his health or his family. Random people would dine at the king’s table, without any kind of formal invitation, every single day that the king was staying in Paris. People from all across the kingdom knew that they could personally meet the king and talk to him if they were to travel to Paris.
People would come in to expose to the king the pettiest issues imaginable. Nowadays, it sounds ridiculous to reach out to a head of state to settle your quarrel with a troublesome neighbor. But it was not back in those days: it was seen as the most essential function of the king to render justice to all his subjects, in all kinds of matters and in this kind of paternal and informal way. The king would famously sit under an oak tree, at certain times of the week, and let people come to him and expose their requests and disagreements. He would then render justice immediately, without any kind of bureaucratic procedure, and make peace between his subjects. Witnesses say that people coming to have their disagreements settled in such a way were always happy to hear the king, and came out satisfied about his counsels and his decisions.
This simplicity and familiarity had diminished since the Renaissance, and the times of Louis XIV were quite different from those of Saint Louis rendering justice under the oak tree; but it never entirely disappeared, until the end of the monarchy. Even at the times of Louis XIV’s strict etiquette, anybody was allowed to enter Versailles and to personally greet the king, or eat at his table on some occasions. On Louis XIV’s last public appearance before his death, during a meal shared with common people, an old man offered the king a bouquet of flowers, which he received with much gratitude.
When Marie-Antoinette came to Paris after his marriage with the Dauphin (the future Louis XVI, heir to the French throne), she was overwhelmed with emotion and cried when she saw the immense joy and love the French people were showing at the sight of the young royal couple. The royal family was, to the French, no different from their own family. A baby born in the royal family would plunge the whole kingdom in ecstatic joy for an entire week: people would feast, sing, praise God and ask Him to keep blessing France. Strangers would greet each other and hug each other, for such was the joy of the whole French people.
3- The King Keeps the Elites Under Control
Every society has elites and needs elites, people who concentrate a significant amount of the national wealth, and hold offices of power in society, whether as businessmen, executives, administrators, generals, governors, etc…but in almost every case, there is a tendency for the elite to care mostly about the interests of their class, the class of the wealthiest and the most powerful, or, even worse, about their personal interest or the particular interest of their family, instead of caring about the common people, common good, and national interest.
This “oligarchic” tendency is such a law of nature that it exists everywhere, even (or especially) in the so-called democratic regimes. Monarchies had their nobility, Merchant republics had their patricians, communist countries had their nomenklatura, democracies have their informal business & political super-elite. In all instances, this elite caused problems and often harmed the nation as a whole because of their particular interests.
To function properly, a society has to find a way to deal with this “problem of the elites.” Society needs elites, but it also needs a way to keep them under control, to have them obey the law and respect some basic moral principles, so that their rule does not degenerate into something disconnected from reality, and detrimental to the population. The French monarchy proved itself to be, in many circumstances, a credible way of dealing with this problem.
Giving supreme power to a single person and a single family, establishing some sort of supreme arbiter of all conflicts and particular interests, created unity and respect for the law, and diminished the power of factions. The elites would always fear being punished by the king if they were to abuse their political and financial power. The king indeed presented himself as the protector of the people against the abuses of the powerful. And it is safe to say he truly was considered this way by the people.
When the people were angry at some policy coming from the royal government, they would much rather accuse the bad ministers and the bad counselors than the king himself, and assume that the king would listen to their complaints and respond to them in a fatherly way. That is showing the extent to which the royal function was perceived as being protective of the people.
In 1792, the revolutionaries refused to let the people vote on the death of the king, because they knew the people would have never agreed to such a thing. The Revolution, in its most radical aspects, was the revolt of an elite (the “enlightened” and corrupt bourgeoisie, joined by the most corrupt elements of nobility) against the king, against the very principles of authority and Christianity, not a revolt of the French people against its natural protector.
4- The King is the Keeper of Laws and Traditions
One of the biggest misconceptions about traditional monarchies such as that of France, which comes from Liberal propaganda, is that the king was doing whatever he wanted, changing the laws of the country on a whim without anybody being allowed to say anything, or trespassing the law without any consequence. This could not be further from the truth.
It would surprise our modern minds to realise how little power an “absolute king” had when compared to modern democratic officials, who make laws on all aspects of the life of the constituents, regulate everything to an absurd degree, crush the population under an exceedingly complex tax system, introduce red tape in every step of their lives.
In the ancient days of the French monarchy, there was a general idea that the law of God and of His Church was the moral law of the kingdom, that there were some tradition specific to the French monarchy that had to be kept (such as male primogeniture), and, aside from that, law was mostly local and traditional: it would depend on each location, and lawyers and attorneys would have to be specialized in some specific local laws to deal with matters such as taxation, inheritance, or criminal penalties. Traditional Western societies were indeed ruled according to the principle of subsidiarity, to such an extent that every province, every city, or every town, had its own set of governing rules and traditions, and the king had almost no say in all of that: he only had business intervening when something went wrong and people complained about abuses. It was considered the duty of the king to respect and safeguards these local customs, instead of making up his own arbitrary rules.
The extent to which a French medieval city or fiefdom was free to organize itself according to its traditions and to its specific local needs is truly mind-boggling to our modern frame of reference. Many cities had their own laws and regulations written in their local dialect, instead of regular French, up to the moment of the Revolution. According to our modern standards, monarchical France would be some sort of confederation of autonomous states, which would pay minimum taxes to the central power, and only call such central power when something goes wrong and needs external intervention. They would gather to fight for the defense of the kingdom in times of war, but aside from these times of peril, each province would live separated from one another, applying tariffs when they were trading between each other, as if they were separate countries.
"The laws and customs of Béarn," written in the Occitan/Gascon dialect specific to that province. They stayed in force until 1789.
In essence, the king was not really a lawmaker. You have to think about such a traditional king as an arbiter, someone who is placed at the top of society to settle conflicts and bring peace and unity to the kingdom, and as a protector, when bad days come and the country is in peril. The traditional king leads armies to war and renders justice to his subjects, especially when someone powerful is doing harm to someone of lower status.
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In short, French traditional Catholics admire the French monarchy as being strongly connected to Catholicism, as being a just and temperate rule, very benevolent to the people, as being strongly connected to the most ancient national and local customs, as being the very heart of their history together with the Catholic Church. We used to see the king as our father, whose life and honor is worth dying for, as it has been for our ancestors in Vendée, Brittany or Anjou, who bravely fought “for God and for the king” during the unfortunate events of the Revolution. Their memory and their feelings stayed present to the next generations of French Catholics.
Annex. The Oaths of the Sacre Ceremony
Here are the two oaths pronounced (in Latin) by the French king during the sacre ceremony.
The Archbishop of Reims, main celebrant and representative of the Catholic Church in the ceremony, asks the king to preserve and defend the privileges of the Church:
“We ask you to grant each of us [the bishops], and the churches entrusted to us, the preservation of canonical privileges, equitable law, and justice, and to take charge of our defense, as a king owes to each bishop and to the Church entrusted to him.”
The king answers:
“I promise to preserve for each of you, and for the churches entrusted to you, canonical privileges, equitable law, and justice, and to protect and defend you as much as I can, with God's help, as a king is obliged to do in his kingdom, for each bishop and the church entrusted to him.”
He then proceeds to the “Oath of the Kingdom:”
“I promise in the name of Jesus Christ to the Christian people who are subject to me:
— First, to preserve at all times the peace of the Church of God through the Christian people.
— To prevent all robbery and iniquity of any kind.
— To observe justice and mercy in judgments, so that God, who is the source of clemency and mercy, may deign to pour it out upon me and upon you also.
— To expel entirely from my states all heretics condemned by the Church; all this I confirm by oath; may God and the Holy Gospels help me.”
Source: https://viveleroy.net/les-serments-du-sacre-des-rois-de-france-par-jean-de-viguerie/