"Radical": The Age of Revolution's Atlantic Context and the Genesis of a Political Concept in France

Introduction

The Radical Party (Parti radical), the oldest extant political party in France, was founded in Paris at its first Congress in Rue Tiquetonne in June 1901. The original factors behind the decision to create the Radical Party were largely concerns about increasing nationalist agitation with the Dreyfus Affair, Ultramontane Catholicism, and the alarm of a monarchist coup d'état that could topple the republican regime. In their declaration, founding presidents Léon Bourgeois and Camille Pelletan indicated their motivation as "to bring together all the sons of French Revolution, whatever their differences are, against the danger of Counterrevolution."¹ The Radical Party laid a milestone in the history of the separation of church and state in France and the conceptual history of "laïcité" in the country.² Today, despite the debates on the precision of the time period, there is something of a consensus among historians that the Radical Party lived its golden age during the Third Republic (1870–1940), which even led many of these historians to name the Third Republic itself the "Radical Republic."³

Although they transformed themselves into a political party in 1901, French radicals had long been a decisive political force both in the form of a parliamentary movement and a syncretic nonparliamentary tradition with electoral committees, press, and a gradually transforming distinct radical body of thought. In terms of periodization, although its first phases are depicted as "nebulous," the existence of French radicalism prior to the Radical Party has been traced back either to 1869 and Léon Gambetta's Republican Program of Belleville at the closing years of the Second Empire or to Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, who was the first to call himself "ultra-radical" and his comrades "ultra-radicaux" in the Second Republic (1848–1852).⁴ Of course, these analyses leave aside the invented traditions or more literary descriptions, which anachronistically traced the concept's origins back to Voltaire, Diderot, Erasmus, Rabelais, and Molière or even to Prometheus.⁵

Although this periodization gives us a sense of how radicalism might have evolved throughout the turbulent nineteenth-century history of France, it does not explain how the "radical" as a concept emerged in France. In this article, therefore, I show that although radicalism did not become a serious political manifestation in France until the Second Republic or the last days of the Second Empire, there nevertheless already were French radicals, who were heavily inspired by the English example. We risk overlooking this transnational aspect of the tradition if we only focus on Alexandre Ledru-Rollin in 1848 or Léon Gambetta in 1869. Such investigation is paramount given the fact that when it comes to radicals' eighteenth-century roots, historians still tend to associate Radicals exclusively with the legacies of the Enlightenment (Diderot, Voltaire, and Condorcet, in particular) and the French Revolution but offer no mention of the British radicalism.⁶

This article shows that British radicalism constituted a cornerstone for the formation of French radicalism although historians mention it less frequently and this aspect is outperformed constantly by the references to the Encyclopedists and the French revolutionaries. In fact, the word "radical" itself came from Britain. Although British radicalism did not predict the birth of French radicalism, which was nevertheless conscious of this legacy, more than a century later, Benjamin (Jammy) Schmidt, the quasi-official historiographer of the Radical Party of France sketchily mentioned a certain Radical Party in eighteenth-century England, which was assembled in 1776 by Major John Cartwright, advocating the "universal suffrage" and by the Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham who had been their theoretician."⁷

This article aims to bridge the existing gaps in the historiography on French radicalism. In order to do that, I consult the primary source materials, recent research on transatlantic revolutionary entanglements, and bring them together with the conventional historiography on French radicalism. This will enable investigation of the origin of the concept and give a more systematic and coherent explanation regarding the genesis of the radicalism in France. In recent years, historical scholarship witnessed...