Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought

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Cheryl B. Welch

unacceptably quietist implications that they lacked in England. And dur-

ing the early years of the Third Republic, working-class politics in France

had to come to terms with the traumatic legacy of the Commune and its

suppression. Comte himself eventually gave up his hope for conversions

among the working men of the revolutionary party (Lenzer 1975, p. xlv).

And one might argue that there was more general resonance among the

French middle classes for Taine’s pessimistic portrait of the working classes

as a breeding ground for degenerate ‘beasts of prey’ than for Comte’s picture

of them as the potential saviours of humanity (Taine 1962, iii,p.113).

It was not in discussions of religion, ethics or even social organisation,

then, that Comte had the greatest impact in his own country. Indeed the

most intriguing twist to the story of positivism in France – given Comte’s

authoritarianism, anti-parliamentarianism and support of Louis-Napol

eon –

is his pervasive inﬂuence on the development of the hybrid political language

that came to legitimise the Third Republic, a graft of certain aspects of

liberalism onto the stalk of French republicanism. In the ﬁnal years of the

Second Empire there were a number of political ﬁgures, including L

eon

Gambetta and Jules Ferry, who were engaged in a fundamental examination

of the bankruptcy of the imperial system. They would soon emerge among

the important fondateurs of a new political regime. ‘The inﬂuence of Comte

on all of these men, mediated in general by his disciples and above all

by Littr

e, has been formally attested to; moreover, it is easily discernible’

(Nicolet 1982,p.156). What was it that attracted these political thinkers to

Comtean positivism and how did they draw on this current to legitimise

the new regime?

Comte’s obsession with the problem of assuring order and progress was

itself a response to France’s particular post-revolutionary political history.

Like that of Hegel and Marx, his account of modern history gave pride

of place to the French Revolution, a shatteringly destructive and mysteri-

ously portentous event to contemporaries. For positivists, the Revolution

was the climax of the transitional metaphysical age; it ushered in a new

form of social organisation not only founded on science, but eventually

organised by a new spiritual consciousness of unity. Comte believed that

only positive philosophy, science and true politics – as opposed to the

preceding metaphysical versions – could bring order out of chaos. The

disorder and anarchy in French political life were rooted in the anachronis-

tic persistence of outmoded ideas: on the one hand revolutionary dogmas

about popular sovereignty, on the other theological abstractions about divine

right. Positivism alone could set realisable goals for action because it alone

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recognised the force of evidence and experience as against sterile metaphys-

ical argument.

Comte himself was agnostic about the transitional regime that would

usher in the new positivist order. It might be a republic or a dictator-

ship, whichever would best diffuse the scientiﬁc knowledge that was to

become the basis of the new regime. He consistently disdained, however,

the parliamentary model as mired in peculiar metaphysics like ‘the British

constitution’ or the ‘rights of the people’, and he envisioned the eventual

establishment of an oligarchic republic ruled by a newly moralised elite on

the basis of scientiﬁc opinion and the religion of humanity. This political

utopia str uck Mill as an appalling endorsement of intellectual subjugation

and slavery (Mill 1865,p.168). The dissonance between Comte’s personal

political vision and a theory of liberal democracy, however, turns out to

be beside the historical point. Comte’s most important followers in France,

who clustered around the respected scholar and political ﬁgure

Emile Littr

neglected not only his religious prescriptions but also many of his specif-

ically political ones.

They found in Comte’s writings other inspirations

for tackling three essential tasks: taming the unruly historical messianism

inherent in the French republican tradition (to which many of them, unlike

Comte himself, were already attached); infusing the notion of compromise –

so distasteful to generations of republicans – with the aroma of principle;

and, ﬁnally, envisioning a system of lay education that could be bent to the

purposes of citizenship.

For most of the nineteenth century la R

epublique had been the unful-

ﬁlled trajectory of the French Revolution, but it was an ideal suffused with

competing and contradictory longings. The successive failures of republican

political experiments had in many ways intensiﬁed the air of unreality sur-

rounding republicanism as a political ideology. Comte’s followers helped to

transform this pattern of utopian failure and to make the republic thinkable

by their conviction that the republic was immanent in history and by their

conﬁdence that it could be fashioned out of existing political conditions.

The particular achievement of the Comteans was to invest the political

15 Besides contributing to major journals,

Emile Littr

e also founded and edited the Revue de Philosophie

Positive (1867–83), which was particularly important for the positivist republicans. See Simon 1963,

pp. 15–39. Comte’s followers in France were split into an orthodox group led by Pierre Laﬁtte, and

a dissident group around Littr

e. The latter group broke with Comte in 1852 for political reasons

and included the biologists Charles Robin and L. A. Second. It was Littr

e, eminent philologist

and historian, author of the magisterial Dictionnaire de la Langue Franc¸aise (1863–78), and important

political ﬁgure (as deputy and then senator) after 1870, who did most to popularise Comte’s doctrines

in France. For the fullest analysis of this role see Hazareesingh 2001,pp.23–83.

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Cheryl B. Welch

practices of tolerance and compromise with the prestige and authority of

science.

Littr

e, who fell out with Comte over the latter’s support of Louis-

Napol

eon’s coup, came to reject Comte’s view that the period of transition

to positivism might be organised as a dictatorship. The liberties of speech,

association and press that Comte recognised as necessary for progress could

be effective only when combined with representative government (Littr

1864,pp.601–3). Although, like Comte, he was opposed to the ‘metaphys-

ical’ notions of the sacrosanct principles of 1789, he saw this legacy in an

altogether more ‘positive’ light. He argued that the idea of the sovereignty

of the people could be interpreted in a useful way; that its proponents were

important allies; and that experience would wear the metaphysical, negative

edge off such doctrines. Indeed, the certainty of vindication by history led

to a re-evaluation of past republican regimes as imperfect approximations

and learning experiences, rather than as disastrous metaphysically inspired

mistakes.

A related innovation in political language was to seize on the positivist

slogan of ‘order and progress’ to legitimise tainted political processes of

mediation and compromise. The phrases ‘politics of opportunity’, ‘step by

step politics’ and ‘politics of results’ were above all associated with the pos-

itivist republicans, who borrowed the experimental language of science to

legitimise political experimentation. Again, Littr

e had early separated him-

self from many of Comte’s political conclusions by stressing that positivism

was above all a method of enquiry. In the 1870s, he drew on the pres-

tigious notion of scientiﬁc method to rehabilitate the notion of political

expediency. Comte had encouraged social experimentation and discour-

aged revolutionary adventurism. Because the institutions of modern soci-

ety would necessarily evolve, Comte argued, ‘the positive spirit will abate

unreasonable expectations from them’ (1853, ii,p.44). Littr

e and the pos-

itivist republicans transposed this element of stoic patience into the realm

of politics, where they advocated a spirit of tolerance and moderation. The

French Republic would always be both the deﬁnitive and provisional form

of social life. It was deﬁnitive in the sense that its institutions, including

universal suffrage, provided the experimental arena for resolving conﬂicts

and conciliating interests. It was provisional in the sense that its institutions

were subject to the laws of positivist political evolution. Existing social and

political forces such as dynastic groups, the Church, the Jacobins and the

socialists would gradually be transformed into the more rational open mer-

itocracy characteristic of the positivist polity. In the meantime, one should

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not have unreasonably purist expectations of the political accommodations

that were necessary in liberal politics.

According to positivist republicans (as well as important others), the

primary organ of transformation would be a system of national educa-

tion that would eventually wean the French public from the Church and

from revolutionary socialism. Despite Comte’s deep admiration for medieval

Catholicism, he had come to believe that France’s political troubles were

exacerbated by the deplorable confusion between the spiritual and temporal

powers. His followers for the most part rallied under the banner of laicisation.

Unlike England, where positivism had almost no impact on the organisation

of formal education, in France it helped to shape the fundamental debate

over secularisation. The claim here is not that positivism directly inﬂuenced

pedagogy or curriculum – though it clearly had some impact (Simon 1963,

pp. 84–93). Rather the claim is that the politically created need for a new

civic education gave the views of Comte and his disciples an intellectual

marketplace in which to circulate. Jules Ferry, the long-time minister of

education who exempliﬁed the regime’s focus on education, was himself

steeped in Comtist language. His promotion of ‘positive science’, laicit

‘political tolerance’ and ‘moral virtue’ illustrate a new idiom that fused the

aims of education, social science and politics into a distinctively French civic

language.

Comte’s followers, then, used elements of his positivism in a selective and

creative way to shape the ideological foundations of the Third Republic.

The conventional view that the Third Republic represented the triumph of

‘positivism’ is surely too crude a characterisation of the complex emergence

of a relatively stable republican regime in the 1870sand1880s. Yet the adop-

tion of elements of Comte’s social physics to reinforce a liberal republican

political identity was certainly a factor in the regime’s success. Given the

16 There are ongoing debates in France about the ‘liberal’ vs. the ‘republican’ character of the Third

Republic, about its debts to previous regimes, and about its legacy to the present. Yet, even in

the current revival of interest in liberalism in France, there is a tendency to view the categories of

liberalism and republicanism as oppositional ideal-types, and also to view them exclusively through

the prism of the French intellectual tradition. Thus Mona Ozouf uses as evidence of the Third

Republic’s illiberalism that its founders were closer to Comte than to the Enlightenment. See ‘Entre

l’esprit des Lumi

eres et la lettre positiviste: Les r

epublicains sous l’Empire’, in Furet and Ozouf eds.

1993. My account, on the other hand, suggests the mutual inﬂuence of new legitimating languages

and new political practices. For an important account of the origin of liberal political practices

under the Second Empire, especially around the notions of local freedom and tolerance of debate,

see Hazareesingh 1998. Hazareesingh’s work on the political culture of the Second Empire stresses

the importance of increasing municipal political identiﬁcation, and successful liberal struggles to

instantiate the principles of reasoned public discussion at the local level (1998,pp.306–21).

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Cheryl B. Welch

divisiveness of other political languages in France and the widespread yearn-

ing for ‘social’ unity, the eventual emergence of a political representation of

a science of the ‘social’ is unsurprising.

5 Conclusion

For many nineteenth-century thinkers social science replaced natural law

or traditional understandings as the lodestar of political thought. I have

suggested only some of the complex twists and divergent turns attendant

on this replacement in France and England.

But enough has been said

to underline the power of political languages, political memor y and polit-

ical contingency in eliciting and shaping the interaction of social science

and political practice. In France political economy emerged quite naturally

from the political crucible of the Revolution as a ‘scientiﬁc’ and hence non-

inﬂammatory alternative to the authority of natural rights among political

moderates. The claim of political economy to be the queen of the social

sciences was almost immediately challenged, however, by various pretenders

who touted privileged access to ‘the social’ and who more successfully dis-

tanced themselves from the tainted dynamic of revolutionary discourse. The

continued absence of consensus on principles of political legitimacy drove

thinkers in France to seek an alternative language for settling differences

outside the divisive political arena. In England the prestige of scientiﬁc

sociology was to come later and to have a less pervasive effect both on

the status of political economy within social science, and on the traditional

languages of political life.

Paradoxically, it is the English embrace of Comte – perhaps the most

arrogant and dogmatic of those who claimed to have found the scientiﬁc

‘key to all [political and social] mythologies’ – that best illuminates the nature

of English resistance to the lure of social science. English Victorians drew on

Comte for moral therapy rather than for a political cure; liberal democratic

17 In a longer essay, one would want to weave into these contrasting sketches the fate of Darwinism. (For

a subtle discussion of the ‘conversations’ surrounding evolution in Germany, England and France,

see Burrow 2000,pp.31–108.) On the one hand largely appropriated to individualist and non-

interventionist ends, on the other pressed into service to prove the superiority of the co-operative

ends of solidarit

e and the need for governmental action, the scientiﬁc theory of natural selection

clearly had more than one political trajectory. In France the language of Darwinism – in particular

the notions of competitive str uggle and natural selection – were widely diffused in the 1880sand

1890s. The extreme right used these ideas to legitimise racism and to combat rationalist republicans

on their own ‘scientiﬁc’ terrain. Liberal republicans, on the other hand, argued that natural selection

operated also on the level of social organisms, and favoured a co-operative society t hat took care of

the weak (women, children and workers).

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Social science from the Revolution to positivism

institutions were largely left to heal themselves. In France, however, the

attraction of social science was intensiﬁed, as it had been in 1789,bya

widespread crisis of political legitimacy. Partly via the creative variations on

Comte and positivism played by republican politicians, a new political idiom

was born. Increasingly contested and interrogated today, this positivist-

inﬂected republicanism nevertheless remains deeply entrenched in French

self-understandings of what it means to be a citizen of the Republic.

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Radicalism, republicanism and

revolutionism

From the principles of ’89 to the origins of

modern terrorism

g re gory c la eys and c hri sti ne lat te k

1 Introduction

Modernity has been quintessentially deﬁned by the revolutionary impulse,

and our judgement, whether laudatory or critical, of the French Revolution

of 1789. In the nineteenth century it would be associated with virtually all

radical, republican and revolutionary movements, and, by the end of the

First World War, the overthrow of many of the leading crowns of Europe.

Yet the course of events which produced the overthrow of Louis XVI was

not at its outset inevitably anti-monarchical, and would indeed culminate

in imperial dictatorship. In association with American independence, how-

ever, the idea of revolution came to be identiﬁed with the principle of

popular sovereignty as such. It was also linked to the explosion of nation-

alist aspirations which became deﬁnitive of the period, as well as to the

causes of reaction and the creation of modern conservatism in the works

of Burke, Bonald and others.

If the British model of limited, constitu-

tional monarchy resting on the principle of the rule of law was central

to eighteenth-century reformers elsewhere, thus, it was increasingly sup-

planted during the nineteenth century by the ideals which emerged from

the revolutions of 1776, 1789 and 1848. ‘Revolution’ itself, which had once

meant a restoration or rotational return to previous conditions, came to

mean the violent overthrow of established regimes in the name of popular

sovereignty, ethnic and national self-assertion, or both; and the conscious

framing according to the principles of reason of an ediﬁce hitherto regarded

1 The literature on the legacy of the Revolution is considerable. A starting point is Baker 1987 and

Hayward 1991. We would like to thank Pamela Pilbeam in particular for comments on this essay, and

the Minnesota State Historical Society, St. Paul, for supplying one reference.

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Radicalism, republicanism and revolutionism

largely as a natural, organically derived and divinely inspired order.

To i t s

opponents it was also often linked to an obsessive demand for individual

autonomy, the growth of commercial and societal individualism, and the

wish to break from traditional forms of authority, particularly paternalism

and religion.

In the ﬁrst half of the century the revolutionary ideal was invoked by

liberals against autocrats; in the second half, increasingly, it was by socialists,

anarchists and other democrats against both autocracy, monarchy in prin-

ciple, aristocratic oligarchy, and eventually, as consideration of the ‘social

question’ gained ascendancy, liberalism in principle. Made initially largely in

the name of liberty – the principle which continued to deﬁne its develop-

ment in the United States – it came elsewhere to give increasing preference

to equality, justice and the relief of poverty, though these too could be seen

in terms of restoration as well as novelty and innovation. Driven under-

ground, often excoriated by liberals and conservatives alike, reformers who

sought a wide extension of manhood suffrage – the ﬁrst and principal aim

of most democrats in this period – came increasingly to link their demands

to ‘social’ issues such as a fair wage and improved working conditions.

From 1848, these were often viewed in a ‘socialist’ light, and the end of

revolution construed not as ‘freedom’ or ‘democracy’ as such, negatively

deﬁned against despotic political rule, but as some variation of the principle

of ‘association’, as opposed to individual economic competition (Proudhon

1923a, pp. 75–99).

Originally conceived as a sharply deﬁned and delimited act of rebellion,

revolution came to be construed as a state of mind, a continuing process to

maintain a sense of virtue and self-sacriﬁce en permanence. (Negatively this

would be come to be seen as an Orwellian orgy of constant agitation aimed

at securing conformity by a constant threat of crisis, thus justifying dictator-

ship by the constant fear of threat from without.) Inspired by a Rousseauist

conception of the General Will, revolutionaries would claim that that will

could be represented by an elite party of committed revolutionaries rul-

ing in the name of the majority. For some that party could in turn be

represented by a charismatic or quasi-millenarian leader. Invoking histor-

ical, constitutional or moral rights of resistance to tyranny, democrats also

came, often by necessity, to embrace conspiratorial approaches to political

2 Most modern accounts of the idea of revolution commence with Arendt 1963. For examples of

varying uses of the language of revolution, see Kumar 1970.

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Gregory Claeys and Christine Lattek

change, and sometimes the use of individual violence, ‘terror’ and assassina-

tion to achieve this. The pressure for democracy, as well as increasing social

equality, were thus inexorable in nineteenth-century Europe, and eventu-

ally elsewhere. The Restoration of 1815 brought only a temporary lull in

this pressure from below for political democracy. Reaction thus became, as

it was described in the most classic statement of contemporary revolution-

ism, itself the further cause of still further revolutions (Proudhon 1923a, pp.

13–39).

This chapter examines the evolution of the main European radical and

republican traditions in this period; their involvement in revolutionary

underground movements; and the emergence of the strategy of individ-

ual violence or ‘terrorism’ as a means of fulﬁlling revolutionary ends, and

thus the mutation of the idea of collective struggle into that of individual

violence. While the focus here is principally on the major European and

North American traditions, some consideration is also given to their bearing

on imperial and anti-imperial developments elsewhere, and on the origins

of parallel, and particularly anti-imperial, non-European movements and

strands of thought.

2 Radical and republican traditions

Despite the American and French revolutions, and earlier examples like

Switzerland, republicanism failed to become established in most of Europe

throughout the nineteenth century. Indeed on the eve of the First World

War it had made little progress since 1870, France being the only major

European republic. After the Restoration of 1815 the Holy Alliance of

Russia, Austria and Prussia wedded the ideals of throne and altar and aimed

to suppress all anti-autocratic movements. Kingship also proved popular in

a number of newly formed states, such as Belgium. Nonetheless there were

powerful republican currents in several European nations throughout the

period, and distinctive if less vibrant movements in others. Republican-

ism throughout the period was initially often associated with the creation

of a constitutional or limited monarchy, and rule by law as opposed to

arbitrary will, where the republican component was thus the reposing of

ultimate sovereignty in the people, though often with a limited suffrage

based on property ownership. Opposition to aristocratic privilege, though

not necessarily elite guidance, and support for formal legal equality of all cit-

izens, were also prominent republican themes. Resistance to increasing eco-

nomic specialisation as threatening intellectual capacity and moral integrity,

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Radicalism, republicanism and revolutionism

a prominent theme for eighteenth-century republicans like Adam Fergu-

son, declined thereafter, though it reappeared in socialism. Throughout the

nineteenth century, republicanism came increasingly to mean democracy,

with an elected executive, and an increasingly extensive suffrage. But while

the American model thus gained in importance throughout the century,

that model itself underwent substantial alteration. Based initially on the

ideal of a society of independent small farmers and freeholders, coexisting

with slavery in the South, it evolved into an agglomeration of mass, urban,

party-based political machines in which corruption was widespread, plu-

tocracy increasingly evident, and liberty threatened by the stiﬂing power

of what Tocqueville described as the ‘tyranny of the majority’ (Tocqueville

1835–40; for the later period see Bryce 1899). Unlike European republi-

canism, American republicanism was rarely anti-clerical, and gave a marked

preference to liberty over equality and fraternity, except where diluted by

immigrant radicalism (Higonnet 1988). Most forms of republicanism dwelt

upon the virtue of patriotism and the importance of giving precedence to

the public over the private interest, though this did not exclude interna-

tionalist sympathies. Yet monarchs could also claim to embody the same

virtues in kingship, and many newly created states in this period – Greece,

Belgium, Serbia, Romania – chose the monarchical form when achieving

independence. Monarchies could also extend their shelf-life by becoming

empires, enhancing national glory and personal prestige, providing oppor-

tunities for employment and emigration while displacing growing social

pressures at home. Here nationalism and the growth of empire were thus

often closely wedded.

Radicalism was consequently not always republican, nor republicanism

radical or democratic. Even socialists, such as Robert Blatchford in Britain,

were not necessarily anti-monarchical, considering ‘a very limited monar-

chy...safer and in many ways better than a republic...there is less risk

of intrigue and corruption, and that personal ambition has less scope and

power in a monarchy than in a republic’ (Clarion, 3 July 1897,p.212).

Radicals throughout the nineteenth century indeed generally wished to

extend the franchise in the direction of greater democracy, and to restrict

aristocratic rule, but not necessarily to abolish kingship. Their philosophical

ﬁrst principles often rested on social contract and natural rights theories, but

could also be utilitarian, notably in the case of the Benthamite ‘philosophic

radicals’. Radicals tended to be more individualist, to give greater stress

to liberty as a central value, and to emphasise rights; republicans tended to

give preference to community, to relative social equality, and to the virtuous

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