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Terminology in the study of ideology is itself ideological. A term, after all, can mean different things, depending on time, place, and provenance. What, for instance, is a “liberal”? To today’s American “conservative,” the word describes a softhearted (not to mention softheaded) believer in “social engineering,” if not “socialism”—someone who would be characterized as a social democrat on the other side of the Atlantic. To a continental European, by contrast, a liberal is a true believer in the free market and the minimal state. Without clear definition, confusion reigns unchecked. It thus behooves a scholar writing about ideological conflict in the alien past, and within the intricate French political culture, to clarify his terms. Here, at the moment of definition, there is a temptation to play Humpty Dumpty, and decree meaning. As Humpty instructed Alice, “[W]hen I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean.” This study, however, uses terms that have been defined in relation to each other, and its terminological framework thus needs explication.This ideological frame has been constructed, first, around the definitive “difference” between liberals and Conservatives—the all-important (although often denied) conflict between historical Left and Right.1 “Liberals” and “Conservatives”? These are both conflicted terms, and emphatically in need of definition. First, then, in this book “liberalism” designates the ur-ideology of modernity—the political convictions of those who have fought for “liberty, equality, and fraternity,” for the “rights of man and the citizen,” for the ideal “that all men are created equal” and that all men (and perhaps all women, too) have an equal right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”2 When considering the Third Republic during the belle epoque, one might designate such liberals as “Republicans”—a term that usefully amalgamates defenders of the time’s status quo (the “Opportunists” of the 1880s) with the more radical “Radicals,” who believed that the project initiated in 1789 still had some way to go before its full Republican realization. France, like Wilhelmine Germany, or for that matter Edwardian England and Giolittian Italy, was torn between moderate liberals (why not think of them as “National Liberals,” after their German counterparts?) and radical liberals 179 Appendix A Ideology and Terminology (the self-designation “Radical,” too, recurs across the continent)—although both French factions claimed the Republic as their own. Unfortunately for terminological convenience, “liberal” during the Third Republic did not equal “Republican.” Not all liberals supported the Republic; not all Republicans were liberals. Those among the French who waxed nostalgic for the Orleanist juste milieu maintained their traditional royalism —looking across the channel for their model of the perfect liberal polity, complete with a property suffrage and a constitutional monarchy. At the same time, Maurice Barrès and his protofascist followers were determinedly Republican , but also violently antiliberal. This book perforce uses the term “liberal” to designate those (including Orleanists, Opportunists, and Radicals) who favored a polity where free men (and perhaps free women) strove together within free institutions . . . for free enterprise. “Free enterprise” . . . Marxists, too, were Republicans, but decidedly not liberals, or at least not liberals if liberalism meant supporting “free enterprise” (aka capitalism). Instead, Marxists designated themselves as “socialists” or “collectivists.” More conflicted terms! France had many varieties of “socialism ,” and ideological wars were fought over copyright on the concept. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, a socialist might have been anyone with a vague commitment to “social justice” or an uneasy sense that free markets failed to guarantee the “economic harmonies” worshipped by laissezfaire orthodoxy. Aristocratic Conservatives, Christian Democrats, even Radical liberals all claimed socialist credentials—until the advent of the Parti Ouvrier. Marxism’s ascendancy during the 1890s altered the terminological terrain, as “socialism” came to designate the “socialization of the means of production ”: that revolutionary ideal which French Marxists called “collectivism.” The advent of collectivism constituted the decisive rupture between liberals and socialists, albeit a rupture prefigured many times since Babeuf’s “Conspiracy of Equals.” At that ruptural moment, Marxists arrogated the French Revolution’s legacy—pledging to realize “liberty, equality, and fraternity ,” but assailing the liberal attempt to marry these ideals to capitalism’s economic tyranny, inequality, and exclusion. The promise of 1789, the POF vowed, would soon be realized—but only through another world-historical revolution, this time against “bourgeois liberalism.” French Marxists were thus on the Left, like liberals, and like most liberals embraced the Republic, albeit a “Social Republic.” As “collectivists,” however, Marxists were not scions...

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