Helena Rosenblatt

It has to do with, you know, the revolution, and we don't want that.

You know, all of this getting rid of noble privileges, creating what we would call civil equality.

Isn't that a great thing?

They would say, no, that's removing...

The privileges that they had had for such a long time.

So that's being selfish.

That's not being magnanimous.

And so the Catholics mainly, Catholic counter-revolutionaries immediately started denouncing liberals for being selfish because they were taking away their privileges.

I mean, they had a whole slew of insulting terms that they used as synonyms for liberals, anarchists, they're against the family, they're sexually deviant, all of this because it seemed like they wanted to free up all the, in some ways rightly so, the constraints of the old regime.

Throughout the 19th century, the Catholic Church was probably the most powerful enemy of liberalism.

The popes, one after the other, just spewed, you know, the most vile kind of, if I may say, rhetoric about liberals, about how very bad and sinful the world.

Liberalism is sin.

I mean, there were works that came out like that.

And I think actually, you know, interestingly enough, today's criticisms, for example, by post-liberals and so on,

Which many of them, men are the Catholic are actually reviving some of that language and using very old arguments.

Absolutely.

Many key liberals were actually Protestant.

This founding group that I talk about in France, Madame de Stael and Benjamin Constant were actually Protestants and Protestants were way overrepresented in terms of numbers in liberal movements throughout French history.

The reason here is, you know, Protestants in France wanted to be tolerated, to be actually recognized as citizens, which they weren't.

So this is a key, one of the key sort of developments in the history of liberalism when it moves from being just what we were talking about, the virtues of a like a Roman citizen or a Christian nobleman who should give to the poor and be liberal and magnanimous.