“Into the tempests of the nineteenth century, Juan Donoso Cortes rode as knight-errant, prophet, and Man of the West.” Such is the picture that historian Christopher Olaf Blum paints of one of the most important thinkers of the past two hundred years. Yet the romantic image of Donoso Cortes as a latter-day Don Quixote will be lost on most people, especially in the English-speaking world, who will have no idea of his importance or his place as an indefatigable defender of Christendom. Indeed, for most people, he will be entirely unknown.
Cortes was born in Spain in 1809, a descendant of the conquistador Hernán Cortes. Having flirted with the ideas of the Enlightenment, he became increasingly critical of the liberal political ideas that were sweeping across Europe in the wake of the secularist tyranny of the French Revolution. Such tyranny was even worse, he argued, than the absolutist rule of monarchs who had abused their authority by invoking the alleged “divine right of kings”: “Kings oppress and lie; demagogues oppress, lie, and deceive…. Royal tyranny is less deadly in its horrific nakedness than demagogic tyranny clothed in deceptive finery.”
In 1848, as liberal secularist revolutions raged across Europe, Cortes was unequivocal in his condemnation of the new irreligious ideologies and the havoc and upheaval they were causing:
Demagogy is going through Europe like the ancient furies, crowned with serpents, leaving everywhere behind it red and bloody blotches. In Paris it has trampled on all the treasures of civilization; in Vienna, on all the majesty of the Empire; in Berlin, on the highest levels of philosophy. Striving to attain its ambitions on an even more important stage, it has set up its throne and placed its yoke on Rome, the holy, the imperial, the pontifical, the eternal city.
There where the Vicar of Jesus Christ blesses the city and the world, a senseless and ferocious democracy rises up: arrogant, impious, rancorous, frenzied, as if possessed by an episode of insanity and drunk with wine, without God and without law, to oppress the city and disturb the world.
Although speaking of the revolutions of his own time, his words resonate with the power of prophecy, warning and forewarning a heedless world of the worse that will come if such madness is not curtailed:
Only demagogy does not respect virtue. The glory of heaven, the virtue of nations; a demagogy which, attacking all religious dogmas, has placed itself outside of all religions. Attacking all human and divine laws, it has placed itself outside of all law. Attacking simultaneously all nations, it has no homeland. Attacking the moral instincts of man, it has placed itself outside the human race.
Almost two centuries after these words were written, how relevant they remain. The same could be said of a speech that he gave to the Spanish Parliament in January 1849 in which he illustrated how the decline of religious influence in any society went hand in glove with the rise of the power of an increasingly centralized and tyrannical secular state. Employing the metaphor of a thermometer, he showed how the political thermometer rose as a direct consequence of the fall in the religious thermometer. As the influence of religion fell, the power of the secular state rose. This was shown in the formation of national armies and national police forces, which he defined as the arms and the eyes of the state.
Should we need reminding of the prophetic nature of these words of warning, we need only remember that they were spoken exactly a century before the publication, in 1949, of George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell had the benefit of the wisdom of hindsight, writing his novel in the wake of the Nazi tyranny so recently defeated and in the presence of a Stalinist tyranny very much still in place. Cortes, by contrast, was speaking almost 70 years before the Russian Revolution would unleash the power of the irreligious state upon an unsuspecting world.
Cortes’ uncanny prowess as a prophet was also evident in the same speech, in which he perceived and warned that technology would be employed as a tool by the tyrants of the future:
The way is prepared for a gigantic tyrant: colossal, universal, immense. Everything is preparing the way…. There is no longer any defense, either physical or moral. There are no physical defenses, because with steamships and railways there are no frontiers; because with the electric telegraph, there are no distances; and there are no moral defenses, because spirits are divided and patriotism is dead.
Oh, how steamships and railways seem so harmless in the face of the new forces of technological power that are now let loose upon a hapless humanity!
Cortes insisted that the only way of avoiding such tyranny would be “a healthy religious reaction.” Who can argue that this is needed at least as much now as then?
In a letter to Cardinal Fornari, the papal nuncio to France, written in 1852, Cortes described the cataclysmic consequences of the public rejection of religion, when “everything supernatural is discarded and religion turned into a vague deism”:
Then man, who has no need for the Church, which is hidden in the sanctuary, nor God, chained to His heaven like Prometheus to his rock, turns his eyes earthwards and dedicates himself exclusively to the cult of material interests. This is the age of utilitarian systems, of the great expanse of commerce, of feverish industry, of the insolence of the rich and the impatience of the poor. This state of material wealth and religious indigence is always followed by one of those gigantic catastrophes which tradition and history etch permanently on the memory of man. The wise and the talented meet in council in order to ward it off, but the hurricane which comes suddenly scatters their deliberations and carries them off together with their pleas.
We think, perhaps, of the cataclysm of the communist revolution; of the killing fields of World War I and World War II; of the rise of the Nazis; of the Fall of Man. Such is the recklessness of man. Such is the wrath of God.
The only alternative to this cataclysmic future is the restoration of true liberty through the restoration of true religion. This was made clear by Cortes in the same letter to Cardinal Fornari. Catholicism, he insisted, was
the only religion in the world which has taught people that no man has right over another because all authority comes from God; that no one who would not be small in his own eyes will be great; that power is instituted for the benefit of the good; that to command is to serve; that primacy is a mystery and therefore a sacrifice.
He continued with an unequivocal defense of the Church as the only tried, true, and tested bastion of genuine freedom:
These principles, revealed by God and maintained in all their integrity by His most holy Church, constitute the public law of Christian nations, the perpetual condemnation, of both the right of the people to disobey through rebellion and the right of princes to transform their power into tyranny. Liberty consists in the negation of those rights, so that with it liberty is inevitable and without it liberty is impossible. The affirmation of liberty and the negation of those rights are, if examined carefully, the same thing expressed in different terms. Hence it follows that Catholicism is not the friend of tyrannies or revolutions, as it alone has opposed them. Not only is it not the enemy of liberty, but it alone has discovered in opposition the disposition proper to true liberty.
Cortes’ insistence that rights can be wrong will be controversial to many moderns and modernists, as will his insistence that responsibility precedes political rights because it is the necessary prerequisite to political liberty. Those obsessed with the “rights of man” are uncomfortable with such rhetoric, which is why Donoso Cortes remains a controversial figure.
He was, however, greatly admired by the pope at the time, Pius IX, who was influenced by him, adopting Cortes’ wisdom into his encyclical Quanta Cura, which condemned the errors of the modern age and itemized them in the Syllabus of Errors.
As a man who had always taught that sanity and sanctity were essentially synonymous, it is hardly surprising that he sought the latter with diligence, especially in the final years of his life. He went on pilgrimage, wore a hair shirt, volunteered to serve the poor with the St. Vincent de Paul Society, visited slums and prisons, and donated much of his wealth to those in need. He died in 1853, three days before his 44th birthday.
Returning to the words with which we began, we can truly say that “Juan Donoso Cortes rode as knight-errant, prophet, and Man of the West.” Like a latter-day Don Quixote, he rode forth to defend goodness, truth, and beauty. Unlike Don Quixote, he did not merely tilt at imaginary windmills but at the very real “dark, satanic mills” of modernity. He deserves to be better known. His wisdom needs to be heeded. He deserves to be celebrated. He is truly a hero of Christendom.
Republished with gracious permission from Crisis Magazine (May 2025).
This essay is part of a series, Unsung Heroes of Christendom.
The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.
The featured image is a portrait of Federico de Madrazo y Kuntz: Español: Juan Donoso Cortés , and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.