Reimagining Politics after the Terror: The Republican Origins of French Liberalism

Epilogue: The Fate of French Liberal Republicanism

Epilogue The Fate of French Liberal Republicanism Liberalism, in a now familiar story, suffered a tragic fate in modern France, never gaining intellectual or political hegemony as it did in the Anglophone world. Following the demise of the First Republic, French history was marked by a series of nonliberal political regimes ranging from the Restoration monarchy to the radical republicanism of the Second Republic to the Bonapartist regime of the Second Empire to the cautious republicanism of the Third Republic. This story of liberalism’s failure, however, was punctuated by towering intellectual achievement, especially during the first half of the nineteenth century.1 Benjamin Constant, PierrePaul Royer-Collard, François Guizot, and Alexis de Tocqueville, to cite just the most prominent names, articulated a rich array of liberal political principles during these years. Liberal republicanism in particular reached its peak in Constant’s “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That 1. On liberalism in nineteenth-century France, see in particular Lucien Jaume, L’individu ef­ facé ou le paradoxe du libéralisme français (Paris, 1997). 288 Reimagining Politics after the Terror of the Moderns” (1819) and, shortly after the Restoration, in Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835 and 1840). The respective efforts of Constant and Tocqueville constituted the culmination of French liberal republicanism as well as two of the most profound and celebrated attempts in the history of political philosophy to articulate liberal political principles. Liberalism’s crowning moment in nineteenth-century France came during the Bourbon Restoration, when a loosely united liberal school published a series of brilliant treatises, took up seats in the Chamber of Deputies, and even helped to lead the July Revolution of 1830. Restoration liberals, in both parliament and in the press, fought the resurgent ultraroyalists on the key issues of the day, such as the status of the Church, freedom of the press, suffrage, trial by jury, and the very nature of the Constitutional Charter.2 Between 1817 and 1820, they even managed to implement important aspects of their legislative agenda. In fact, not one but two competing liberal traditions emerged in Restoration France, paralleling the two competing strands of liberalism that had materialized at the end of the Directory. Post-Terror liberal republicanism enjoyed a second life in the writings of Constant, Daunou, and Lanjuinais , while the liberal authoritarianism of Roederer and Sieyès, and of the Physiocrats before them, issued in the rationalist liberalism of Guizot, Royer-Collard, and the Doctrinaires. The liberal republicans continued to articulate a liberalism deeply marked by classical republican values as they feared a renewed evisceration of politics of the sort that had happened under Napoleon. Guizot and the Doctrinaires, conversely, valorized “the sovereignty of reason” over and above politics.3 The two schools could agree on a number of specific issues, but their most basic political values 2. Promulgated by Louis XVIII upon his return to the throne in 1814, the Charte constitution­ nelle established full civil equality and a division of powers among the king, a hereditary Chamber of Peers, and a Chamber of Deputies elected by France’s upper echelon of property holders (strict tax thresholds both to hold a seat and to vote meant that only ten thousand French citizens qualified to sit in the chamber and but one hundred thousand to vote). However, the charter assigned to the king full executive power, the right to dissolve the Chamber of Deputies, and the dominant share of legislative power as the monarch alone could propose laws, the two chambers subsequently voted on the proposed legislation, and then the king ratified the law in question. 3. On Guizot and the Doctrinaires, see Pierre Rosanvallon, Le moment Guizot (Paris, 1985); and Aurelian Craiutu, Liberalism under Siege: The Political Thought of the French Doctrinaires (Lanham, Md., 2003). Epilogue: The Fate of French Liberal Republicanism 289 diverged substantially. The two competing strands of early nineteenthcentury French liberalism thus had direct roots, both personal and intellectual , in the post-Terror years. In some ways, the divide between the two schools was generational. The “new” liberals of the nineteenth century, those who had not experienced the Revolution at first hand, gravitated toward Guizot and the Doctrinaires. The veterans of the Revolution, specifically of the post-Terror years, for the most part remained committed to a liberalism inflected by republican themes. Having lived through or witnessed the liberal Revolution of 1789–91, the crisis years...