While Edmund Burke published his Reflections on the Revolution in France as early as November 1790, it would be some time before his fellow conservatives on the continent began to construct a coherent response to a movement whose unexpected course took them by surprise.

In the case of the three most eminent thinkers who eventually formulated that response – François-René de Chateaubriand, Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald – the upheaval severely dislocated their lives, displacing all three from their homes and, in the instances of Chateaubriand and Bonald, impelling them to take up arms against the Revolution. As actors in the violent events that transpired, they did not enjoy the leisure or peaceful conditions that enabled Burke to pen his polemic from the stance of an appalled spectator.

Eventually, in a European context, the trio of Chateaubriand, Maistre and Bonald constituted the leading intellectual phalanx deconstructing the illusions of the Enlightenment and denouncing its ultimate outcome: the Revolution. By the time a serious literary rebuttal was constructed, the Terror was over, leaving the Directory and the Consulate, as the heirs of the Convention, to become the targets of reactionary writers.

François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand, was the only one of the three who would probably have become eminent in letters even if the Revolution had never happened. Born into an old Breton noble family in 1768, he entered the French army at the age of 17. Since the French officer corps had become, to a degree, radicalised by the service of many of its members in the American Revolution, when France’s own revolution began to unfold Chateaubriand was at first sympathetic. By 1791, to escape the turbulence of life in France, he travelled to America on a visit that would have a profound effect on his life.

As an intuitive adherent of the emerging movement that would become Romanticism, Chateaubriand gave full rein to his imagination, so that we cannot be sure if he really lived with a tribe of Native Americans or met George Washington during his stay in America, but that brief sojourn subsequently supplied him with the material for three novels. On his return to a France convulsed by revolution, he resolved to take ‘le chemin d’honneur’ by emigrating. Like nearly all noble émigrés he did so for the purpose of fighting the Revolution.

Chateaubriand joined one of the two counter-revolutionary armies raised beyond the frontier, the Armée des Princes, serving Louis XVI’s brothers, the comte de Provence (later Louis XVIII) and the comte d’Artois (later Charles X). The Army of the Princes, though poorly treated by its Austrian allies, fought bravely but unsuccessfully against the revolutionary forces. Wounded at the siege of Thionville, Chateaubriand contracted smallpox. By the time, as a fugitive invalid, he reached the sanctuary of his uncle’s household on Jersey he was delirious.

Recovering, he went to England where he lived in poverty, doing translation work. In 1797 he published his first book, Essay on Revolutions, which went largely unnoticed. Thereafter, he became fascinated by English literature, especially Milton’s Paradise Lost, which he later translated into French. In exile, he learned of his mother’s death and how grieved she had been by the religiously sceptical tone of his essay on revolutions. This was followed by the death of his sister. Seized by remorse, Chateaubriand became reconciled to the Catholic Church and resolved to make amends.

‘Those two voices from the tomb,’ he wrote, ‘that death which acted as death’s interpreter impressed me. I became a Christian. I did not yield, I admit, to great supernatural enlightenment: my conviction came from the heart; I wept and I believed.’

That frank acknowledgement was reflected in the great work he composed over the next four years. Le génie du Christianisme was a new kind of Catholic apologetics: it appealed to aestheticism as much as to theology. In the course of writing it, Chateaubriand returned to France in 1800, taking advantage of the amnesty for émigrés promulgated by Napoleon Bonaparte, now ruling France as First Consul. That same year, while still working on his religious opus, Chateaubriand gained literary recognition by publishing his novel Atala, set in the wilds of North America, which became a popular success, its romantic style appealing to the post-revolutionary mood in Paris.

Napoleon was anxious to put revolutionary disorder behind him and in 1801 signed a Concordat with the Pope, leaving Chateaubriand free to publish a Catholic work. The mood in France was now hostile to the Pseudo-Enlightenment, seen as the source of the horrors of the Revolution. The timing could not have been more propitious for the publication, in 1802, of The Genius of Christianity or, The spirit and beauty of the Christian religion.

Le Génie took France by storm. The book was divided into four parts: Dogmas and Tenets; The Poetic of Christianity; The Fine Arts and Literature; and Worship. Its mixture of theology and aesthetics perfectly met the needs of post-revolutionary society. The sensibilities it expressed conquered the Parisian salons, where hostesses had once swooned over the sentimentalities of Rousseau. Its exaltation of the Middle Ages, of gothic architecture and of human feeling brought it into harmony with the divine heralded by the new conservative Romanticism that Walter Scott would further popularise. There were numerous conversions to Catholicism resulting from the book.

Chateaubriand accepted diplomatic positions under Bonaparte until, in 1804, the First Consul’s kidnapping and judicial murder of a Bourbon prince, the duc d’Enghien, prompted him to resign and retire to his country estate, where he remained in relative obscurity for the next decade. That caesura in Chateaubriand’s career affords an opportunity to consider the second member of the triumvirate, Joseph de Maistre.

Despite his mastery of the French language making him a significant prose stylist in the Gallic tongue, Joseph, comte de Maistre was a Savoyard. He was born in 1753 at Chambéry, in the kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia. Unlike Chateaubriand and Bonald, who both belonged to the noblesse d’épée, or military nobility, Maistre’s family was a newly minted noblesse de robe, his father being a senior magistrate, created the first comte de Maistre. He was educated by the Jesuits and at the University of Turin, graduating in 1774 and becoming a senator in the court of which his father was president in 1787.

Nothing in his early life presaged his later Counter-Enlightenment views. Despite the Church’s condemnation of Freemasonry, he joined a masonic lodge and remained a member until 1790. Like his two future reactionary confrères, he approved of the early ideas of the revolutionary movement. Maistre, however, demonstrated his capacity for forensic analysis by recognising, with pinpoint accuracy, the precise moment at which the revolutionary movement forfeited legitimacy: five days before the attack on the Bastille, on 9 July 1789, when the three-chamber Estates General merged itself into a unicameral National Constituent Assembly, against the wishes of the king, who was bullied into compliance. From that date, Maistre was opposed to the Revolution.

That stance is instructive. Most of the revolution’s early supporters became disenchanted after 14 July, revolted by the savagery that accompanied the fall of the Bastille; but Maistre, the lawyer, recognised the violence done to France’s historical, unwritten constitution by the usurpation of power by the self-constituted National Assembly as the point at which the reforming movement lost legitimacy.

In 1792 the French revolutionary armies invaded Savoy, and the following year Maistre left for Switzerland. He was the first of the triumvirate to take up his pen, at Lausanne in 1793, when he published Letters of a Savoyard royalist. The book that brought him fame, however, was Considerations on France, in 1797. In 1800 he repaired to the displaced Sardinian royal court at Cagliari, where Charles-Emmanuel IV received him cordially; but the controversy surrounding his counter-revolutionary writings made him an embarrassment, so in 1802 he was sent as the king’s minister plenipotentiary to the court of Tsar Alexander I at St Petersburg.

Maistre, separated from his family, was to represent the interests of the Sardinian monarchy in Russia for 15 years. Maistre’s principal works published in his lifetime, besides Considerations on France, which gained him celebrity, were his Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions (written around 1808, but published in 1814) and On the Pope, published in 1819. Two works were published after his death: The St Petersburg Dialogues (1821) and On the Sovereignty of the People, written in 1795, but not published until 1870.

Maistre’s impact on Europe was phenomenal. His style – aggressive, caustic and polemical – devastated the Enlightenment’s dwindling apologists, as he forced them to take ownership of the horrors of the Revolution. Implacably, he assigned responsibility for the deaths of five million people in the Revolution and Napoleonic Wars to Enlightenment dilettantes. Free thinking, rampant individualism, covert but militant atheism, the dissemination of contempt for all institutions of legitimate authority, all had sapped the fabric of society and facilitated anarchy. Maistre’s prose and contempt were irresistible: reaction had found its anti-Voltaire.

Enlightenment ideas of a social contract or of natural rights belied the true nature of society, which was not an artificial construct, but an instinctive community based on ideas handed down from the past. In these and a hundred other precepts, Maistre lashed the Pseudo-Enlightenment mercilessly. When he added to his existing canon his dissertation On the Pope, which exalted the Ultramontane cause at the expense of Gallicanism, prominent among the causes of the Revolution in Maistre’s view, and prepared the way for the definition of Papal Infallibility by the First Vatican Council in 1870, he was hailed as the great Catholic traditionalist philosopher.

It is a questionable claim. Although Maistre was a devout Catholic and led a blameless life – even in his masonic days he had also been a member of a penitential religious brotherhood that spent the night before their execution with condemned criminals – on close analysis his writing is distinctly un-Catholic. Notably absent from his texts are references to natural law and the common good, cornerstones of Thomist philosophy; in their place, Maistre argues from sovereignty, as understood by Rousseau, whose influence on his works is heavy and overt.

One critic wrote: ‘One suspects that Maistre spent many more hours pondering Rousseau than St Thomas.’ Others have gone further and suggested that Maistre may have been ignorant of traditional Catholic philosophy. While he set out to denounce and discredit the philosophes, his whole canon is steeped in their thought and dialectic. There are innumerable references to Enlightenment philosophers – in fairness, an inevitably in order to refute them – but scant citation of the fathers of the Church (with the exception of Origen) from whom Maistre’s thesis notably deviates.

In his assault on the apostles of the Age of Reason, who had sought to redesign human existence through their undisciplined individual imaginations and had falsely termed that exercise in egotism ‘reason’, Maistre ended up by demonising reason and exalting irrationality, in contradiction of St Thomas Aquinas’ insistence upon the compatibility of faith and reason. His denunciation of the philosophes for their ‘natural rights’ ideas is not counterbalanced by arguments from natural law, so fundamental to Aquinas’ thought, though it is true he was writing before the Thomist revival.

The opening sentence of Considerations on France, marking Maistre’s entry into the gladiatorial arena of counter-revolutionary polemic, stated: ‘We are all bound to the throne of the Supreme Being by a flexible chain which restrains without enslaving us.’ The argument is fully Catholic, but the term ‘Supreme Being’, though not incompatible with Catholic theology, had an unmistakable flavour of the Enlightenment ‘deists’, the American constitution and the vocabulary of the school of thought Maistre had set himself the task of demolishing.

The third member of the Counter-Enlightenment triumvirate was more conventional in his polemic. Louis, vicomte de Bonald was born in 1754 near Millau, in the south of France. Educated by the Oratorians, he entered the army and from 1773 to 1776 served in that most romantic French corps, the King’s Musketeers. After the unit’s disbandment, Bonald returned to his estate at Millau, where he became the mayor, and dedicated himself to opposing what he most hated: the centralised government of France.

Bonald’s first enemy was not Robespierre, but Cardinal Richelieu, whose legacy of centralised administration had reduced the status of the nobility. Imbued with a distrust of royal absolutism (in ancien régime France, more a myth than a reality), Bonald remained untroubled by the initial stages of the Revolution for a longer time than Maistre, only going into opposition in reaction to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in July 1790. In 1791 he emigrated and joined the other military corps that had been established to fight the Revolution, the Armée de Condé, commanded by the Bourbon prince de Condé, more professional and longer lasting than the Army of the Princes.

After the victory of the revolutionary forces he settled in Heidelberg, where, in 1796, he wrote his first major work: Theory of Political and Religious Power in Civil Society Demonstrated by Reason and History. That title incorporated two of Bonald’s chief preoccupations: the importance of reason, on which his views were radically different from Maistre, and his concept of history as a process of establishing the truth of principles that are of divine origin, but empirically demonstrated by the experience of successive generations.

Bonald, like Burke, embraced empiricism. His method was scientific, as opposed to Maistre, who detested science. Of the three Counter-Enlightenment champions, Bonald was the most modern-minded. Indeed, it is astonishing how modern a man he was in some respects. He has been credited with inventing the science of sociology: if not actually the father of that discipline, he was at least the grandfather. Auguste Comte and Emile Durkheim both acknowledged the debt their discipline owed to Bonald’s early analysis of ‘social facts’ – a system of pre-sociology.

Bonald’s preoccupation with data – intensified during his later time as a government minister – was a startlingly modern aspect of his thinking. So, too, was his interest in language, prefiguring later generations’ interest in semantics and, eventually, semiotics.

‘There was geometry in the world before Newton, and philosophy before Descartes, but before language there was absolutely nothing but bodies and their images, because language is the necessary instrument of every intellectual operation – nay, the means of every moral existence.’ Thus Bonald expressed his belief that language was evidence of a divine creation and the origin of articulate intelligence. He reversed the Cartesian ‘Cogito ergo sum’ in a new formulation: ‘Man thinks his word before he speaks his thought, or, in other words, man cannot speak his thought without thinking his word.’

In 1801, Bonald wrote his work On Divorce, attacking the permissive divorce laws of the revolutionary regime as corrosive of family life. Bonaparte, who was trying to restore social cohesion to French society, liked this idea (despite his later treatment of Josephine) and amnestied Bonald as a former émigré in 1802. In opposition to Enlightenment (and, later, Romantic) individualism, Bonald insisted on man’s essential identity as a social animal.

The opening sentence of On Divorce read: ‘It is a fertile source of error, when treating a question relative to society, to consider it by itself, with no relationship to other questions, because society itself is only a group of relationships.’ He went on to ask: ‘How, indeed, can one treat divorce, which disunites the father, mother, and child, without speaking of society, which unites them?’

By 1806, Bonald was collaborating with Chateaubriand in editing the Mercure de France, a collaboration that would be repeated a decade later, on a rather different periodical. It was the Restoration, in 1814, that galvanised the Counter-Enlightenment triumvirate into both literary and political action.

Chateaubriand struck first. On 30 March 1814, as the Allies closed in on Paris – with the Austrians prepared to replace Napoleon with his son as ‘Napoleon II’, since his mother was an Austrian archduchess – a thick pamphlet composed by Chateaubriand and entitled De Buonaparte et des Bourbons hit the streets of Paris. It was an eloquent plea for the restoration of the Bourbons to the French throne.

It placed Chateaubriand in some danger, as he recalled how the pamphlet ‘was sent to the printer hand-written while the fighting was still going on in Montmartre and Bonaparte was still in Fontainebleau with 50-60,000 men: nothing had been decided about the fate of the House of Bourbon. In the event of a setback, there was only the quickest flight that could save me from death.’

His gamble paid off. Parisian opinion was won over and the Allied sovereigns were presented with a fait accompli: France had opted for Louis XVIII, who later said that Chateaubriand’s pamphlet had been worth 50,000 men to him. This was a dramatic illustration of how influential the Counter-Enlightenment writers were, at least on occasion.

Under the Restoration, Bonald became a deputy in the ultra-royalist ‘chambre introuvable’ elected in 1815. He steered legislation through the chamber that abolished divorce in 1816. With the ‘ultras’ more royalist than the cautious Louis XVIII, they frequently found themselves in opposition to the government. From 1818 to 1820, Bonald renewed his collaboration with Chateaubriand in editing the journal Le Conservateur. This term ‘conservative’, coined by Chateaubriand, was imported into England by John Wilson Croker in 1830.

In 1822 Bonald became a government minister and found scope for his interest in statistics as a guide to informed governance. Chateaubriand had been raised to the newly created Chamber of Peers (on the English model) in 1815 and Bonald was similarly elevated in 1823. Chateaubriand occupied a number of ambassadorial posts, including to Prussia and England, and was briefly France’s foreign minister. In 1827 his friendship with Bonald ended over the issue of censorship: Chateaubriand was opposed to almost all censorship, Bonald thought it should apply to books, but only lightly to the public press.

Bonald, despite his name being linked with Maistre, almost analagously to those of Marx and Engels, never met Maistre, who only visited France once in his life, though they corresponded for years. Maistre returned to Savoy from Russia in 1817 and resumed office as a magistrate, dying in 1821. Two of his works were published posthumously and one of his principal causes achieved apotheosis with the Ultramontane settlement of 1870, when the First Vatican Council defined the infallibility of the Pope.

Chateaubriand retired from public life at the revolution of 1830, refusing to take the oath to the usurper Louis-Philippe, a Legitimist to the last. He lived until 1848, dying during the revolution of that year, as France returned to turmoil, but leaving behind the posthumously published work that would seal his place in French literature: Memoirs from Beyond the Grave.

Louis de Bonald similarly resigned from the Chamber of Peers and died in 1840. One of his sons became a cardinal. Despite their interpretations of religion sometimes being conditioned by the times in which they lived, all three men were sincere and devout Catholics. Yet, despite their unchallenged position as the destroyers of Enlightenment illusions, their beliefs were strikingly different.

Bonald was scientifically minded, Maistre implacably hostile to science, and Chateaubriand surprisingly liberal in certain respects. He accepted the Charter, France’s Restoration constitution; Bonald did not. Bonald bitterly opposed the constitutional separation of powers, while both Maistre (surprisingly) and Chateaubriand idealised the British constitution.

Chateaubriand would accept very little censorship, Bonald rather more and Maistre the maximum. Chateaubriand, independently of politics, was a literary giant: the youthful Victor Hugo wrote in a notebook: ‘To be Chateaubriand or nothing.’ Bonald’s style has been compared unfavourably to Maistre’s, but much criticism is unfair; in particular, he successfully employed paradoxes in a manner that would later characterise GK Chesterton. His aphorisms include: ‘All that is to last is slow to grow’; ‘The deist is a man who in his short existence has not had time to become an atheist’; and ‘Absolute liberty of the press is a tax upon those who read. It is demanded only by those who write.’

Bonald, though the least celebrated of the three, is beginning to attract fresh interest because of his precocious preoccupation with issues that are again topical: family, society, data and language. Out of all the works and words generated by the Counter-Enlightenment triumvirate, it fell to Louis de Bonald most expressively and succinctly to write the epitaph of the Pseudo-Enlightenment and its offspring the French Revolution: ‘The cry “Liberty, equality, fraternity or death!” was much in vogue during the Revolution. Liberty ended by covering France with prisons, equality by multiplying titles and decorations, and fraternity by dividing us. Death alone prevailed.’