The last-mentioned error is a relatively recent one, and since I came for the first time to the United States at the tail end of the New Deal, I was a witness to the beginning of this deplorable perversion. Resisting the Napoleonic invasion, Spain proclaimed in the liberated South, in Cadiz, a liberal constitution whose supporters were called los liberales.
Liberals thus stand for freedom rightly understood.
Oddly enough, it was the liberal Chateaubriand who called his paper Le conservateur , a word he invented, but in that early period liberals and conservatives were not so far from each other. Its outstanding representatives were Alexis de Tocqueville, Count Montalembert, and Lord Acton, three Catholic aristocrats. De Tocqueville was born in 1805, and Acton died in 1902. These early liberals were believing Catholic Christians, Montalembert and Acton throughout their lives, de Tocqueville in later age. Their love for freedom was rooted in Christianity.