Gustave de Beaumont's Ireland and the Anxieties about Corruption and Forms of Empire

In the last few years there has been a surge of interest in early nineteenth century views on empire, including those of Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont.¹ Yet despite this important development, I believe there is a significant gap in the historiography of liberal conceptions of empire. This lacuna results from a neglect of the connection between democracy, moral corruption, and empire. In this essay I will contend that Beaumont's liberalism harbours a deep anxiety about how modern democracy brought about what might be described as a form of moral corruption. I will argue that this disquiet must be understood against the larger backdrop of liberal anxieties about how democracy corrupted both self and society, worries articulated especially clearly by the French Doctrinaires. It was this disquiet that marked Beaumont's analysis of what he, Tocqueville, and many other Frenchmen considered to be an 'aristocratical' tyranny in Ireland.

Political theorists and historians of political thought have commonly seen the problem of corruption as something that preoccupied political thinkers up to about the end of the eighteenth century. Sankar Muthu and Jennifer Pitts, for instance, have shown that corruption was at the centre of an intellectual and moral challenge to eighteenth century European empire.² The works of Diderot, Condorcet, Kant, Herder, and Fichte, are commonly seen as central to this critique of empire. But the force of that critique, they argue, declined in the nineteenth century. In the words of Pitts, there was a 'sea change in liberal opinions on empire during the short period from 1780 to 1840', with France offering 'a particularly stark example of anti-imperialism's retreat to the margins of political debate.'³ This new orthodoxy about the ubiquity of liberal imperialism passes over without comment on how nineteenth century thinkers reflected on corruption; rather Pitts and Muthu point to an inarticulate unease about empire within strands of nineteenth century French liberal thought, exemplified in the work of Tocqueville.

The disquiet was highlighted by Cheryl Welch in her insightful and illuminating article 'Colonial Violence and the Rhetoric of Evasion: Tocqueville on Algeria',⁴ which showed how French liberals, like Tocqueville, resorted to 'rhetorical evasions' 'when [their] deepest apprehensions' about colonialism were aroused. These 'apologias', Welch continued, illustrated 'a particular kind of liberal failure and a peculiar liberal temptation.'⁵ I think this claim is correct, but it captures only part of what liberals like Beaumont and Tocqueville thought and felt when their deepest apprehensions about colonial undertakings were awakened. The malaise Welch identified reveals something else as well. This was a deep anxiety about how moral corruption threatened the conditions for establishing a new kind of imperial project that was distinct from the brutalising system of conquest and usurpation that liberals and romantic socialists believed characterised both the ancien régime and Napoleon's empire. It is my contention that a fuller account of Beaumont's and Tocqueville's support for empire must take account of these fears about moral corruption, for only by understanding these fears can we fully make sense of the malaise about empire that Beaumont and Tocqueville expressed.

It is beyond dispute that Beaumont and Tocqueville defended imperialism. They accommodated French imperialist enterprises on three grounds. First, they lessened the Bonapartist threat to the July Monarchy. Second, they contributed to enhancing national grandeur and thereby corrected the democratic tendency toward insularity and mundaneness. And third, they were integral to an historically determined mission to elevate 'archaic' peoples to a higher plane of human wisdom and dignity. This accommodation, however, was premised on what they envisaged as a form of empire whose social condition was radically different from the ancien régime, being marked by equality of condition. At the same time as this form of empire was marked by a social condition that was roughly the same as the imperialism of Napoleonic France, its intellectual, moral, and political trajectories were fundamentally different. For Beaumont and Tocqueville, the fundamental altering of France's social condition from aristocratical to democratical, had profound implications for the nature...